Unreleased Shenmue II US Dreamcast Prototype

bcdcdude

Dude with tweed :)
Joined
Aug 20, 2018
Location
United Kingdom
Favourite title
Shenmue
Currently playing
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
PSN
bcdcdude
Steam
bcdcdude
Wow!!



Half way reading this, but what a find!
 
Shenmue ll Dreamcast version not releasing in North America did it hurt the sales of the game if so by how much?
 
Shenmue ll Dreamcast version not releasing in North America did it hurt the sales of the game if so by how much?
Nobody really knows for sure, but I believe the original Shenmue sold the best in North America, and it probably would have been the same story if the sequel released as intended as the Dreamcast's swan song in all territories.

Those who really wanted to play imported, and those who didn't either waited for the Xbox release or forgot about it. So I can only really conclude that it probably did harm sales on the whole by making the biggest market wait a year and placing it on new and *expensive* hardware.
 
For years, I was wondering whether or not Shenmue II had "gone gold" (as in, it was printed on discs) within less than a month of its intended launch date in North America.
 
Nobody really knows for sure, but I believe the original Shenmue sold the best in North America, and it probably would have been the same story if the sequel released as intended as the Dreamcast's swan song in all territories.

Those who really wanted to play imported, and those who didn't either waited for the Xbox release or forgot about it. So I can only really conclude that it probably did harm sales on the whole by making the biggest market wait a year and placing it on new and *expensive* hardware.
If you had to guess the percentage or the amount it could be sold how much? Also do you think it would of been enough to get Shenmue lll in 2003.
 
If you had to guess the percentage or the amount it could be sold how much? Also do you think it would of been enough to get Shenmue lll in 2003.
As a side point to this, you also have to consider people who dropped off following the first Shenmue game. Shenmue 1 did around 1.2 million sales, damn good numbers on a console with around 10m users.

How many of those didn't buy the second game because Shenmue wasn't for them? That also has to factor in I think.
 
As a side point to this, you also have to consider people who dropped off following the first Shenmue game. Shenmue 1 did around 1.2 million sales, damn good numbers on a console with around 10m users.

How many of those didn't buy the second game because Shenmue wasn't for them? That also has to factor in I think.
Yeah ofc but if you had to guess what would you think would be the turnout how many percentage did it hurt or amount it could have sold & would've we gotten Shenmue lll in 2003 cause lots of people were pissed we they got the news.
 
Yeah ofc but if you had to guess what would you think would be the turnout how many percentage did it hurt or amount it could have sold & would've we gotten Shenmue lll in 2003 cause lots of people were pissed we they got the news.
I'm using this as a very low base here but the only sales figures they have is 123k in Japan for the DC. https://web.archive.org/web/20040714181811/http://www5e.biglobe.ne.jp/~hokora/dcrank_d.html

There's I'd imgaine in EU it would have sold a similar amount, maybe more. So I'd think there's 300k sales and you would think 50k people would have imported it to USA as it was one of the most imported games ever at the time.

According to a post on our old forums Shenmue II did 174,293 sales on Xbox. https://www.shenmuedojo.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=27233&start=30

In short you'd be hitting around the 500k mark allowing for some room for error/lack of accurate statistics.

So you've lost over half the sales of the first game, roughly speaking, from my poor attempts above. So that would have been bound sure to have impacted a Shenmue 3.

Also factor in the original dev cost as well and it makes that conversation difficult. But then around 2004 with Shenmue Online they threw $25m at that: https://www.ign.com/articles/2004/08/03/shenmue-goes-online and make zero profit back. Thats around $36m in today's money, $16m more than Shenmue 3 had for a budget.

That also comes into play in all the failed attempts to bring the series back until the Shenmue 3 kickstarter.
 
Great find! Anything juicy yet? Curious if there is any more Bailu Village textures or content not seen...
 
Thanks a lot for sharing. I am also interested in that early versions.
 
I went to the yellow head building via debug, I made the time go to 11 pm and it forced Ryo to go to bed (just curious what does happen when it reaches 11 pm in the yellow head building by normal means I always wanted to know). What happened is it showed the option to sleep or use the other options as usual, but it was also playing the cutscene when you first enter Ren's hideout. I hit the sleep button and this happened.

Screenshot_20211123-200746_redream.jpg
It seems Ryo is using Ren sitting animation or it's an unused sleeping animation. I believe it's the first one though. Ryo got one strong leg to balance himself like that though.
 
Anyone know if it's possible to import saves from the US version of Shenmue 1 into this?

I was thinking it'd be pretty neat if a patch could add in the finished translation to give us the closest thing to a retail US Dreamcast version of Shenmue 2! That way if someone plays the NTSC version of Shenmue 1 on Dreamcast instead of the PAL one they don't have to mess around with any save conversion.
 
I was thinking it'd be pretty neat if a patch could add in the finished translation to give us the closest thing to a retail US Dreamcast version of Shenmue 2! That way if someone plays the NTSC version of Shenmue 1 on Dreamcast instead of the PAL one they don't have to mess around with any save conversion.
I did effectively that 6 years ago by patching the EU version to remove the region check on save files:
 
Back
Top