Welcome to the fourth and final part of our review of the art renders shared by AM2 developer Hideki Kawabata (previous parts: Part One, Part Two, Part Three). This final post in the series will touch on some of the location renders and promotional CG art that was included in the collection.
The Original Karate Tournament Location: Yokohama Bunka Taiikukan
The first location we'll look at is one that once lived only in the imagination of fans: the stadium in which Ryo's high school karate tournament took place prior to the start of the first game, as revealed by Yu Suzuki in 2015:
Q: Where did Ryo get his band-aid?
Yu Suzuki: It didn't appear in Chapter 1, but there was a martial arts event. The scar is from the final match.
This response is from a Twitter event called "#YouAskYu" in 2015 - a transcript is archived on the old Shenmue Dojo forums.
This took on a concrete form in recent years, when a scene from this tournament was included in the first episode of Shenmue The Animation in 2022. For the anime, the tournament location was directly based on the real-life sporting venue, the Yokosuka Arena:
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| The location of the karate tournament in Shenmue The Animation: Yokosuka Arena |
However, with Kawabata's collection of renders, another piece can now be added to the puzzle: a fully-rendered model of a stadium had been prepared back in the early days of the project, in April of 1996.
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| Yokohama Cultural Gymnasium: 30 April 1996 |