Right. Before I go into my views, I just want to thank Matt, James, Switch, Titch and everyone here for a fantastic 13 weeks of Shenmue fun. To think there has been almost 24 hours of YouTube discussion on a 13 episode series. Amazing stuff and your hard work has been greatly appreciated.
And what a journey it's been. Waking up first thing on a Sunday morning to watch a new episode has been such a treat.
So does the last episode stick the landing? Yes and no. Yes in that it successfully got many of the thematic beats done correctly, but no in that it breaks my heart a little that disc 4 was crammed into essentially 8-9 minutes. But i'll get to that in a bit.
The episode started off a little on the wrong foot as the flashbacks felt more powerpoint presentation than episode. I wasn't sure what to think of the Ryo vs Lan Di battle, but I found it worked quite well; clearly nothing like the Baihu fight in the last episode and the graceful moves of Lan Di work well. The Dou Niu fight was cool and i'm glad that the iconic finish move was done. And who knew a dance remix of the Shenmue theme could work!?
My favourite part was all the fan service of Ryo saying goodbye to everyone (suddenly my criticism of Ryo not saying goodbye to Xiuying etc has disappated). So all in all the first 3 discs of Shenmue II was done pretty damn well.
However, i'm not sure how I feel about Guilin. I can almost understand fast fowarding the rescue of Shenhua to go to her house, but it still feels a bit jarring. My favourite part of Shenmue II (and by extension one of my favourite gaming bits of all time) is the hours you spend learning about Shenhua on the way to her house. To be fair, I can't imagine it's something easily adaptable without slowing things down to a crawl, but I still think an episode should've been dedicated to it. It cheapens things somewhat.
Still - all in all - we have had a fantastic show and my criticisms are relatively minor in all. I think it works in a way, because if new fans play the games, they'll appreciate the depth of the games so much more. It's a show for new fans as well as us and I truly believe that the tightrope balance between placating old fans like me and making things easily understandable for new fans has been well and truly been done.
I tip my hat to the staff for bringing a little joy to the world. Now let's get Shenmue The Animation Season 2 and Shenmue IV.
I await whilst praying