Has anyone here thought of creating a mod that uncensors Shenmue II (re-release) on PC?

Billy Sastard

Billy Sastard

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Aug 1, 2018
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Shenmue II
Has anyone here thought about creating a mod that uncensors Shenmue II (re-release) on PC to match the original Japanese Dreamcast release? I have no experience with modding unfortunately and I am unable to do it due to that.

The censorship consists of a few things:
  • The Baseball guy you can challenge to a game of Darts in Wan Chai had a Deathball 666 shirt in the original Japanese Dreamcast release but was changed to a Baseball shirt in the Western releases.
  • The statue in the Thousand White Convent in Kowloon shows Mary holding baby Jesus in the original Japanese Dreamcast release but was changed to show only Mary with her arms crossed over her chest in the Western releases.
  • The bookie who runs the Lucky Hit Museum in Kowloon originally wore a Muslim headdress, was of Middle Eastern descent and had a different name (Najim Hassan) in the original Japanese Dreamcast release but the headdress was removed, the ethnicity was changed to be of Chinese descent and the name was changed (Haoyi Ping) in the Western releases.
  • The QTE with Yuan and the chainsaw in the Yellow Head building faded to Red when failed in the original Japanese Dreamcast release but was changed to instead fade to White in the Western releases.
Part of the game was uncensored by D3T, such as the original Japanese Male voice actor being used in the Japanese dub and all instances of being referred to as "She" were changed to match the original Japanese Dreamcast release.
Another change by D3T was the inclusion of another recording from the cassettes Ryo found in Huang's Room in Kowloon, which depicts a seemingly lewd conversation between a Man and a Woman. I won't spoil it but it's quite funny to listen to.

I'm glad D3T managed to uncensor a few things with the re-release but I only wish they also uncensored these things too, although SEGA might have not been okay with these things being uncensored, who knows?


Edit: The awesome AltGr has modified his current Redreamcasted mod for Shenmue II to feature the uncensorship of the name of the Bookie of the Lucky Hit Museum in Kowloon from Haoyi Ping to Najim Hassan. Thanks to his great work, we are one step closer to uncensoring Shenmue II.
Link to mod: https://www.shenmuedojo.com/forum/i...d-japanese-audio-restored-redreamcasted.3248/
 
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indask8 said:
Biggest offender to me are the union jack flags replaced by white "Resort" flags.
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You can revert to the original textures used on the Xbox version of Shenmue II by using a mod on Shenmue I Nexus. It's called "Original Dreamcast Textures" and it works with both Shenmue I & II.
It not only brings back the UK flags on the hotel in the Golden Qr. but also all the branding in both games like Timex, Sumitomo Bank, Zippo, Sapporo vending machines, etc.

I hope this helps. 🙂
 
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I wish they had truly released a "definitive" version...options to turn on and off all of the censored things, adding the branding back in, choosing Yuan's Japanese voice track, etc. Sucks that some of this stuff is stuck (officially, at least) on the Dreamcast versions.
 
24Nathan said:
I wish they had truly released a "definitive" version...options to turn on and off all of the censored things, adding the branding back in, choosing Yuan's Japanese voice track, etc. Sucks that some of this stuff is stuck (officially, at least) on the Dreamcast versions.
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Definitely, that would have been so cool but it's understandable, at least with the branding because there's a lot of extra work to do to renew the licenses for that. Companies could decline to have it featured now, even though they allowed it in the past.

Things like the censoring could have easily been done just by taking the assets from the Japanese release of Shenmue II and adding it into this version. Unfortunately, most companies just want a quickly released remaster that won't take much work to run on newer hardware and while D3T did a great job on bringing this game into the modern age, it does have a lot of issues. One of them is the audio quality being sub par to say the least and another issue is the many bugs and glitches that have been introduced that weren't in the original releases. There's a myriad of other issues that I won't mention but those were the few examples that came to mind.

I wouldn't have ever played the remaster if it wasn't for the PC release and it's awesome community mods by people on this great forum and other sites. This made this version the best and easiest one to get running for me, espeically after the multiple issues I've had with my Dreamcast over the past few years. I'm glad it exists for this reason.
 
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