In its fourth episode, the Shenmue anime pushes the fast forward button to advance the series’ plot at an astonishingly quick pace, however, in doing so not only does Yu Suzuki serve his game great justice but also manages to expand and improve on the story he wished to tell 23 years ago.
How does Shenmue achieve all of this? Well, while the obvious answer might be discarding all the mind-numbing tasks and errands Ryo has to attend to on his Dreamcast life, the fact of the matter is that the anime prioritizes its characters over anything else. So despite the third episode reaching halfway through the game’s runtime, this week’s outing leaves Ryo almost on the verge of leaving for Hong Kong and sets up an exciting and action-packed fifth episode.
Things start off with a dream sequence featuring Shenhua, which might just be teasing that the jump to Shenmue 2 is just around the corner but besides that, Ryo starts looking for the cheapest trips to Hong Kong so that he can continue his quest for vengeance. This leads him leads to encounter a Mandarin-speaking travel agent, whose dialogue implies that Ryo understands this Chinese dialect, which might be important later on when he’s in Hong Kong (Cantonese language) and mainland China.
Even though these types of details were easy to overlook in 1999, the Shenmue anime has already featured Lan Di speaking Mandarin, so while the anime might stick to standard Japanese voiceovers (or English) even for Shenhua, these snippets improve the overall sense of immersion.
Speaking of which, what “Shackles” episode does best is convincing viewers that all the Shenmue NPCs are real characters that are part of the story, for example, when Ryo sees Ine-san visibly worried about the Hazuki dojo’s finances. Conversely, although Fuku-san giving Ryo his savings does not feel as impactful as it does in the game, it does send Ryo straight to docks.
Before all that forklifting action takes place, another NPC rises to the occasion as it’s the bumbling Goro Mihashi that helps Ryo land the gig, with him his own personal motivation helps Ryo as part of the characters he is here. Goro and Mai work as a link between the events unfolding in Ryo’s life and Nozomi Harasaki, who deservedly continues to grow in her role thanks to a couple of personal scenes with her grandmother.
Regardless of all of that, Shenmue means forklifts and while there aren’t any high-speed races to be seen here, Ryo’s is treated at least the way fans would expect. Again, what’s important here is the story, and in this case, Mark Kimberly’s rapid formed bond with Ryo makes it easier to forgive that audiences perhaps won’t get to hear what happened to his brother, see Tom bid farewell to Ryo, or learn a few moves from the homeless Shozo.
That’s because this sped-up way of telling the Shenmue story requires the series to pick its battles and if there is some hand-to-hand action taking place, it’s better to save room for Ryo and Guizang’s fights. The two have a couple of encounters here, one where Ryo learns the “Swallow Dive” move and another towards the end, however, these two and the other couple of times Ryo fights make the series’ action look surprisingly good and rescue its place as one of the best anime on Crunchyroll right now.
The climax for this episode is when Nozomi gets kidnapped because, unlike the game, her character gets more buildup and instead of being a simple damsel in distress it’s her efforts to help him that get her in trouble. Ryo’s rescue mission is robbed of some of its tension due to the absolutely badass way he gets his motorcycle, but this is yet another example of the series taking a shortcut that still serves the story properly.
And just like that, Shenmue the anime enters what are technically the final few hours in the game as Ryo faces Terry Ryan. The meeting doesn’t go drastically different, but there are some differences between what Ryo and Guizhang’s fight looks like here and the epic double knockdown in the games; make no mistake, the fight looks spectacular here too, it’s just that like many other aspects in this video game to anime conversion it turned out different.
Shenmue will probably wrap up the first game in the next episode, with a maximum of two more in case the anime wants to dedicate extra time for Ryo to say his goodbyes, and the two big fights still remaining. In any case, Suzuki is doing an admirable job at adjusting the pacing of the game in the animated series, not everything takes as long but contrary to Dreamcast Ryo, his personal affiliations are given the relevance they deserve since the first episode and it all should make for a more emotional sendoff once he heads to Hong Kong.