Ryo performing Victory Pose from Virtua Fighter

It's well-known among Shenmue fans that Ryo's character derives from the character of Akira in Virtua Fighter. But digging among Ryo's move animations in What's Shenmue reveals just how close that relationship really is.

Virtua Fighter 2 characters, ready for action

Ryo's Animations

Ryo's general animations for walking, turning, crouching and so on are stored in their own motion files in the Shenmue games. While most of these are used, there are also animations that are never used in the main game. With some small change to values in memory while the game is running (in an emulator), these hidden animations can be revealed.

One motion contained in What's Shenmue is named "AKI_WIN_312" and proved worthy of investigation.

Victory Pose

In Virtua Fighter, each character performs one of a few victory poses after winning a round. For example, this is one of Akira's poses:

"Ora, ora, ora!" - Akira gloats over his fallen opponent

In What's Shenmue, Ryo normally kneels down on pressing the action button. Upon linking the AKI_WIN_312 animation instead, Ryo performed Akira's victory pose right before my very eyes.

Ryo pays tribute to his Virtua Fighter roots

It would seem that a number of Virtua Fighter animations may have been imported directly into the animation set for Ryo perhaps for initial testing, with some like this one being left unused in the game data.

(Ideally I would like to get Ryo to fully face the camera - I know some great hacks have been found for doing things like freezing the camera in Shenmue I but if anyone knows of something similar for What's Shenmue please comment below).

Here's a video comparing the two animations.

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