Shenmue: The Animation: my thoughts

 I was able to watch the first episode in English. I won't go on why Shenmue is important to me. Point is that Shenmue is a dear to me franchise from my early adulthood and now it's making a comeback as an anime.

Since there will be spoilers. I WILL HIDE THEM UNDERNEATH THE CHERRY TREE

The anime is an OK adaptation of Shenmue. It's a decent anime and a decent retelling of Shenmue but I hated MOST of the changes.

The episode is basically this:

With some new stuff added in. I liked seeing the Karate tournament and Ryo kicking ass. Nozomi was super cute... Yu Suzuki even gave the anime team stuff that was left on the cutting room floor in order to expand the series... now what I hated:

Voice acting was actually good, which clashes with Shenmue. They purposely avoided getting Corey Marshall and the rest of the game cast to go with Funimation or funimation adjacent people... the english dub people obviously have no respect for the games, since they didn't bother getting voices that sound LIKE the games. Ryo sounds like a generic shonen protagonist from the mid 00s. Nozomi sounds generic as well... almost like her Shenmue 3 version. Tom doesn't sound like a Jamaican Tommy Wiseau. They also massacred my Beachcomber Smeagol. Yes, Chai makes an appearance on this episode.

His iconic theme does not. Also, it's far too early to have Chai around. This diminishes his first game appearance by a lot.

I kinda understand WHY they went with "standard voice acting" my issue isn't that they aren't mimicking the games. My issue is that they didn't bother to have actors whose voices sounded similar to the characters. 

This was the scariest thing of all Shenmue the Animation... laughing Hazuki is just wrong...

Now we wait and see if Shenmue is successful. So far Rule34 has been disappointing. Using erotic fan art to gauge an anime or videogame success is not an orthodox way, but it's functional... 22 years and there's less Shenmue erotic art than there is for Duolingo. Hopefully this will change and by April 15th we will have a lot more Shenmue rule 34 art.