Spoilers Shenmue The Animation: Episode 1 - Thunderclap - Thread

Hiki said:
Where do you all think it will end the first season?

I thought 3 options for this...

1. The season will end in Kowloon after the encounter and maybe fight with Lan Di, Ryo saying goodbye to his friends.

2. Ryo arriving in Guilin and meeting Shenhua.

3. The season will end in the cave like in Shenmue II, we can even see the cave scene in the first episode.
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I'm hoping it ends right before Kowloon. Oddly, I wonder if we're going to get some flash forwards to Guilin with Ryo & Shenhua now that the show started with the cave.

Which leads to a good segue. I think it was a very smart move to start the show with the events in the cave. Right out of the gate it establishes that there will be mystical elements to the show. I remember way back in the day, the deal with the sword and the mirror in the cave was pretty divisive because many of us didn't expect "magic' since the series had been very grounded in reality before that point.
 
One of the little details I thought was great was the ice cream scene. It's setup like a typical Yakuza hustle where the members are (very transparently) pretending to be upset or injured as a threat to extort something from their target... and then it pans to the delinquent, and he's legitimately upset / tearing-up over his lost ice cream. :ROFLMAO: I love that kind of idiotic humor.
 
Hiki said:
Where do you all think it will end the first season?

I thought 3 options for this...

1. The season will end in Kowloon after the encounter and maybe fight with Lan Di, Ryo saying goodbye to his friends.

2. Ryo arriving in Guilin and meeting Shenhua.

3. The season will end in the cave like in Shenmue II, we can even see the cave scene in the first episode.
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Would love for it to end with viewers wanting more Shenmue. So for me at least I hope it ends at…
Ren’s hideout just after the epic fight at the top of the Yellow Head Building. But I have a feeling it’ll end earlier. Maybe after Ryo and Ren escape from Dou Niu.
 
I was reflecting more about the first episode today, specifically about Ryo.

In the episode Ryo didn't said a single time..."I want revenge, i will have my revenge" nothing like that.

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In the anime Ryo question more things about his father, Ryo even wants to know if his father was really the man he thought he was, it is really interesing Ryo question this things in my opinion.


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Maybe some people will say that Ryo's entire arc is over with just one episode, that looks like Ryo do not want revenge and things like that, but it is important to remember that we only saw the first episode, only the first episode so i think is really early to say a lot of things.

Maybe in the second episode we will see Ryo having nightmares with Lan Di, this happened in the game, maybe in the anime after these nightmares Ryo will start to feel confused, sad and angry and will even say... "Lan Di killed my father, i want revenge" it is not impossible for this to happen, i need to say again... we only saw the first episode, just the beginning of the story in anime form, a lot of things can happen, Ryo's mini arc about accepting his lack of strength and that he is not the strongest is over, probably in the second episode will start a new arc for Ryo.
 
Hiki said:
Also it was nice to see the police involved, i don't think the Police will help Ryo in the future episodes, one of the reasons is that after the Chai fight Ryo says for Ine-san and Fuku-san to not call the police and Ine-san understood that faster in the anime, but for the first episode was nice to see this in my opinion.

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I thought it was smart to address this. It's a little odd in the game that there's no sign at all of a police investigation, or any police at all. It can easily be explained away, of course, but this was a better approach.
 
Everyone's already given their thoughts, this thread is 18 pages (at time of posting) long already but I'll add mine anyway.

The Good
  • I can't believe I'm watching the Shenmue anime
  • No really, this is surreal, it's actually happening
  • the art direction and overall presentation
  • they showed some of Ryo's life prior to his fathers death, i.e. showed he was a great martial artist, showed his friends, how he was planning to go to university etc.
  • They introduced Tom and Nozomi and his relationship to them naturally before his father died
  • They showed the police come by and a more natural progression of what would happen (although no funeral) in this situation. The characters acted more believably
  • I like how it felt like a natural progression of the plot when he was eating ramen with Nozomi at Ajiichi and he found out about the Chinese mafia connection hopefully more of this to come in his investigations in the next episodes
The Bad
  • the pacing - while a lot of it felt really natural, it did feel a bit too fast paced at times. While I appreciate the show being punchy to cover a lot of ground, each individual scene felt a little rushed. I think it was more the editing but it felt really, really brisk in an almost attention deficit way. Also, it was weird to cut to Bailu after the opening scene to see Shenhua pet a goat and cut back to Ryo. I think their intent is to do that all season but it felt out of place at that moment
  • On that note, I would have personally appreciated spending a bit more time with the characters before his father died to establish the core cast and set the tone for the shift to come.
  • The opening cutscene scene was too brief. This is probably coming from a fan perspective but it was near perfect in the game and they should have tried to emulate it almost exactly. I kind of understand cutting the fight due to budget (too bad since the game's choreography was on point) but there were many little changes to the scene editing, music and pace of the scene that made it worse than the game for me. e.g. Lan Di is still in the room while Ryo is talking to his dying father. Also, they omitted any mention of Meng Cun and the Chi You Men tattoo
  • I knew this was an anime but I felt like it was a little too "animey" so to speak at times. I would have liked it to be a little more reigned in at times but nothing to really cry about I guess.
The Different
  • Ryo's character: I liked pretty much everything about it in this episode except his reaction/motivation to his father's death. he seems way more concerned with clearing his father name in his mind than getting revenge. We'll see how this plays out but it could be a fundamental tonal shift for the character
  • Fighting Chai in the dojo: I'm glad they introduced him in ep1 but I would have rather the ep had a little more breathing room with the other scenes and left the ending with his father dying and him vowing revenge. It's a big enough hook imo to continue watching and the episode had 3 fight scenes already.
  • Showing Shenhua/S2 ending: I have a feeling this is going to be intercut throughout the season. it could be interesting to see what happens there but it does ruin the mysterious nature around the mirrors/dream allusions to come.
  • Lan Di: it seems he may play a bigger role in the anime in terms of screen presence. If that's the case, I'm hopeful they'll expand on his motivations earlier
Overall I liked the episode and the anime shows potential, excited to see what comes next. I'm curious to know if anyone knows what the opinions of someone who never played the games thought of it?
 
So I finally watched it with the English Dub (belated thank you to those who answered my question from earlier about how to watch the English dub)

I got to say, it's kind of weird hearing Shenmue with a competent English Dub for a change :LOL:
:LOL: I'm just so used to the amateur hour original English dubs that it was kind of weird to hear Shenmue be brought to life by actors with actual experience.

I didn't mind it. Personally, my heart still lies with the Japanese dub. For me, I really can't play Shenmue any more without the Japanese dub. Masaya is MY Ryo and I stand by that. But I quite liked what I heard in the English dub just now. It sounded fairly okay to me. At least better than the original dubs.

It'd be really interesting to see how a newcomer would fare going from Austin Tindle to Corey Marshall if they ever did play the games...that's not a diss at Corey...I like Corey but I think it would be weird for a newcomer.
 
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orient said:
I thought it was smart to address this. It's a little odd in the game that there's no sign at all of a police investigation, or any police at all. It can easily be explained away, of course, but this was a better approach.
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I remember that in the game we can choose to try to call the police, when we try Ryo says this...

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If we try again Ryo says that he don't want to involve the police in this, something like this.

I really enjoyed seeing the police involved in the first episode, in the next episodes i think the police will not help Ryo, i think Ryo wil find the clues/informations in another way, but for the first episode i love this detail about the police.
 
I suppose I should do full thoughts. Since I've now watched it like 5 or 6 times :D

The Good:
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- The English Dub; gotta say I thought it was actually pretty decent. Kind of weird to hear Shenmue with a competent English dub for a change. Yeah, I kind of miss Corey, but I thought the dub was fine and very welcoming to newcomers.

- The Japanese Dub; my preferred way of watching it. Masaya is MY Ryo. I really can't hear him voiced by anyone else anymore. He is my Ryo through and through and I thought Masaya was right on game here.

- I welcome the fact that we're not gonna be so locked into Ryo's perspective. As much as I love the games and even kind of appreciate just how far they go in making you feel like you are role playing as Ryo I have to say that I kind of welcome the chance to see other character perspectives. The anime allows us to finally learn a little more about Lan Di as we finally have access to him as a character. That's potentially very interesting.

- The look of the show is quite nice. I really love what we've seen of Yokosuka so far.

- The soundtrack. The new arrangements I've heard so far are really nice and I can't wait to hear more.

- The pacing. Yeah, it's much faster than the game, but I feel it kind of needs to be. The game and its leisurely pace will always be there. But this is an anime and you want to get people hooked in from the get-go. That and we only have 13 episodes. Not to mention we have a LOT to cover. Namely Shenmue II and everything it covers. So I'm okay with the pacing. It was jarring at first, but when you consider the fact that we only have 13 episodes it kind of has to get going and move along.

- Ryo having a bit of a personality doesn't bother me as much as it seems to bother some others. I liked seeing a more human side to Ryo in Shenmue III and I welcome him having a bit more of a human side in general.

- Tom and Nozomi. I welcome the new take on Nozomi. I've always said I wasn't much of a Nozomi fan so I welcome her having a bit more life and personality. Tom was spot on though! Absolutely spot on perfect.

- That scene with Ryo reflecting on his father in Sakuragaoka Park was beautiful. Loved it.

- I really loved the small touch of having Iwao talking to Yamagishi-san at home. Nice little touches like that were greatly appreciated.

- I kind of loved how 90's anime this felt!

- I like the idea of Lan Di giving Ryo his scar. That's something I kind of wish we had back in the game. That's a cool little touch to me. Serves as Ryo's mental and physical scarring at the hands of Lan Di.

The "I'm Not So Sure":
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- The Chai fight being that early and having Ryo overcome him so quickly was a bit jarring. Granted, we will see how this plays out but yeah, it was just jarring to see him that early on. I didn't expect that fight to come until after Ryo met Master Chen. But we will see how that plays out.

- The action itself got a bit of a mixed reaction from me. Some of it looked okay, other bits of it looked a bit cheap and rushed.

- The Iwao/Lan Di scene. For my money, it was just a bit too rushed. I really love the opening scene of the original game and feel its perfectly timed out in the way it plays out. The anime's take on that scene felt a bit rushed to me. A bit too cliff notes. It just lacked that same impact I get whenever I see the original game and its take on that same scene. It was okay for the most part but just a bit too rushed.
 
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I feel that i need to share my thoughts about something in this thread as well.

Regardless of whether people like the anime or not it's time to celebrate that the Shenmue franchise is alive, it is time for the community to be even more united in my opinion, Shenmue needs our support, Yu Suzuki needs our support.

When i say celebrate i'm not saying people have to like the anime, when i say Shenmue/Yu Suzuki needs our support I'm not saying people have to like the anime, people can dislike the anime, I'm just saying it's time for good moments in the Shenmue community, the Shenmue community to be even more united.

This is a beautiful moment for the Shenmue community, the Shenmue franchise is alive and this is beautiful,

LetsGetShenmueIV.

I saw this image in Shenmue Forever social media.

Beautiful. ❤️


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Demon's Triangle said:
I prefer it ends at the cave so it comes full circle with the intro. If they can't make a second series, at least they would have adapted the original classic dreamcast games.
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This needs to happen so the new fans can understand our pain!

Some other thoughts after the initial hype died down:

I agree with @danielmann861 in that I would've liked the Iwao/Lan Di fight to breathe a little more. This could partially be because we've seen the opening to the game so many times that we expect the music to swell with "or else your son...". I do like that the scene from Ryo arriving home to going into the Dojo was a bit shorter, though.

We'll have to see how the whole season shakes out but in general I'm looking forward to the faster pace. Besides the issue above, like others have mentioned, learning about Lan Di in Ajiichi was a bit convenient but I didn't feel like it was egregious. I do think the story of S1 can be covered pretty quickly in the grand scheme.

I'm also open to new interpretations of characters personalities and looks (within reason), so I won't be too nitpicky there. Same with some story beats getting cut or slotted into a different order.

I'm definitely excited to watch this whole series. I thought at the very least I would tolerate it but the first episode was a lot of fun.

@Dietsoap called her "Naomi" and no one said anything.
 
I think the first episode is fine, though a bit way too fast going through scene to scene... losing some sense of tension like the already mentioned Iwao and Lan Di scene, not leaving much breathing room for characters to let their emotions linger. Positives from me go to the quite detailed background and character art design, use of somber colors and overall characterization beyond the games. Though the highlight to me is the main intro theme, which in this case the ending theme, as it's quite catchy and the animation in that sequence is well done. So that's the negative as well, as I feel there's not much animation going on for the episode. Most scenes are characters in still shots and not moving much. There is not even that much animation when characters are walking around. My thought at first was that they were saving the budget for the action sequences, but even those are bare bones with one bad instance in the Chai fight sequence, with both Ryo and Chai having their torsos almost standing still while only their limbs being animated. I would not think much of it if it was some other genre, but this is supposed be a martial arts themed anime, specially after the creators apparently wanting to ditch the investigative part of the story, like how Ryo is already aware about the second mirror and the port section of the city having dealings with the Chinese Triad from the get go just by having characters talk about it at leisure.

I don't watch much anime, but with a little research I found some really outstanding action combat focused anime series and in the ideal world I was hoping the Shenmue The Animation's creators were working with the Chinese team behind this:


Or something of this level if they really had the budget to spare:

But realistically and hopefully, the remaining episodes will have some quality action scenes like this anime (the "realistic" part), as I feel the animation style and swoosh attack effects are similar to what Shenmue is doing:

Maybe not even having as many frames of animation or being even longer than 30 seconds per episode, but if Shenmue had that kind of quality action sequence for most of the episodes like the examples above, I guarantee the series would stand as a classic anime regardless to what happens to the games. Fingers crossed that this is the case.
 
danielmann861 said:
So I finally watched it with the English Dub (belated thank you to those who answered my question from earlier about how to watch the English dub)

I got to say, it's kind of weird hearing Shenmue with a competent English Dub for a change :LOL:
:LOL: I'm just so used to the amateur hour original English dubs that it was kind of weird to hear Shenmue be brought to life by actors with actual experience.

I didn't mind it. Personally, my heart still lies with the Japanese dub. For me, I really can't play Shenmue any more without the Japanese dub. Masaya is MY Ryo and I stand by that. But I quite liked what I heard in the English dub just now. It sounded fairly okay to me. At least better than the original dubs.

It'd be really interesting to see how a newcomer would fare going from Austin Tindle to Corey Marshall if they ever did play the games...that's not a diss at Corey...I like Corey but I think it would be weird for a newcomer.
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Starting to wonder whether I watched a different dub to everybody else as “competent” really isn’t a word that I would ever choose to describe what I heard. Nozomi did grow on me as the episode went on and I actually preferred Shenhua’s English VA to the Japanese one, who I think sounds a little too old. That’s also an issue that I have with Tindle, who, despite his solid delivery, sounds like somebody in their mid thirties rather than somebody in their late teens.

As for the rest of the English cast, I thought that their performances ranged from average to downright bad. The worst offenders were Fuku-san (who sounded like he was shouting most of his lines), Iwao (who for whatever reason just didn’t sound right), and Ine-san (who sounded way too young and had some really strange pauses and unnatural intonation going on). I wasn’t a massive fan of Lan Di either, but that was more a case of me preferring the original English VA than the new one being bad.

Going into the anime I’d planned on watching the English dub as that’s usually how I play the games, but after the first episode I’ll definitely be making the switch to Japanese.
 
Hiki said:
Where do you all think it will end the first season?

I thought 3 options for this...

1. The season will end in Kowloon after the encounter and maybe fight with Lan Di, Ryo saying goodbye to his friends.

2. Ryo arriving in Guilin and meeting Shenhua.

3. The season will end in the cave like in Shenmue II, we can even see the cave scene in the first episode.
Click to expand...
I would have guessed after finding Zhu OR the assault on Yellow Head if they could cram it in. but since it started with the cave, it would be weird to not end it there.
 
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In one post i reflected about Ryo in the games and in the anime, about if Ryo in the anime will want revenge or not, things like that.

Look at what i found in the official Shenmue anime site.

Shenmue Anime official site about Ryo: A high school boy who was raised in Yokosuka at the Hazuki Dojo. Losing his Mother at a young age, Ryo trained to master the Hazuki style martial arts under his strict Father. However, one day his father is murdered by a mysterious man named Lan Di. To unveil the mystery behind his Father’s death, Ryo begins his journey. Ryo is reckless and prone to getting into fights but has a strong will. No matter how long the journey may take his determination to avenge his Father will never fade. Along with his personality and his determination, he often acts without thinking through and gets into many fights during his journey. On the other hand, he meets many who help him and at times scold him. Ryo’s experiences in his journey lead to him growing as a person.

Like i said in another post, we only saw the first episode, it is really early to say a lot of things, many things can happen. I will not be surprised if Ryo have nightmares with Lan Di or something like this and Ryo will start to feel confused, sad and angry. Ryo will probably go through so many difficult situations and learn many things in the journey in the anime as well.

I'm looking forward for the second episode.

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