Following the release of Shenmue II on the Dreamcast in 2001, a number of intriguing screenshots (a selection of which is shown above) were revealed on the Shenmue.com website by AM2, Yu Suzuki's development team at Sega, showing content that had been cut from the game before release.
Several of these screenshots showed an unfamiliar village and a temple setting, with some even containing subtitles of dialogue between Ryo and a character who was unused in the released game.
Fans later also managed to uncover unused loading screens, one of these showing the name "Miao Village" - and so it is by this name that the location of these screenshots has come to be known by the community.
Various theories have been put forward and discussed over the years, although even today, these screenshots still hold a great sense of mystery. In this series of posts, we will gather together as much as we can find about them, as well as carrying out some digging of our own, and see what conclusions can be drawn as to their true nature.
There is a lot to talk about, so the planned post topics for this post series will be as follows:
Models and other data were extracted from the game discs with the excellent Wudecon converter tool created by LemonHaze. The comprehensive Shenmue II Character Database by Stuart of the Shenmusings blog, was a fantastic resource for checking character names and usage.
Let's get started!
Screenshots Analysis
The screenshots first appeared in
issue #29 (June 2002) of Muecas, the name of AM2's online Shenmue fan club. They were grouped into three sections: Ryo on a bicycle with Xiaoqin (which we have talked about in
this post); Ryo in a village setting; and Ryo in a temple setting - this series will focus on these last two sections. At the time they were presented as content that had been cut from the released game, but no further explanation was provided.
We'll start by examining the three screen shots that show Ryo exploring the village, and highlight any features and small details:
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| Village screenshots |
After that, we will move on to the four screenshots of a temple setting which include subtitled dialogue.
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