Every month Phantom River Stone holds a poll among our patrons to choose a topic for the blog in the coming month. After tallying the votes (including accumulated votes from previous months), the winning topic that has been voted this time is:
"More tweeted anecdotes from former Shenmue developer Morio Ashizuka""Morio Ashizuka" is the pseudonym used on Twitter by a former developer who was deeply involved with development of the first two Shenmue games, in particular character animations and motion capture. He tweets prolifically about video games, SEGA and other topics - along with occasional fascinating insights and anecdotes from the day.
Last time, these were the topics we included in our original post:
- Revelation #1: Dyeing Yuan's Hair for Muecas
- Revelation #2: NPC Recycling in Shenmue II's Opening Scene
- Revelation #3: Ryo Hazuki The Walking Legend
- Revelation #4: Shenmue I's Opening Scene Polish
- Revelation #5: Character Skeleton Changes from Shenmue I to II
- Revelation #6: Round-the-Clock Debugging
- Revelation #7: Reuse of Ryo Hazuki's Bowing Motion
- Revelation #8: Shenmue I's Bad Ending Created In One Night
- Revelation #9: Ryo's "Cola Face"
- Revelation #10: Joy's Original Costume Design & Motorcycle Branding
- Revelation #11: Fuku-san Avoided a Kidnapping
- Revelation #12: A Comedic Version of What's Shenmue
- Bonus Revelation: Yu's Favorite Character in Shenmue I
 |
| Hiroshi Fujioka (voice and motion capture actor for Iwao Hazuki in the Japanese version) at the SEGA motion capture studio (Tweet source) |
To be published in an up-coming post on the blog. Early preview available on Patreon!
switch - couldn't think of a more relevant post to ask, so i'm asking on your most recent post (i.e. this one). xia-san says that the characters on the chinese letter are special/old/rare (i forget what she says to describe them). i recognize your specialty is japanese, not chinese, but thought maybe you might know anyway: are the characters on the letter actually special??? i can tell they're reversed, but i never learned enough chinese to be able to distinguish if they were "standard" chinese vs "special" chinese (plus i learned simplified, not traditional, anyway).
ReplyDeleteThat's a great point to investigate, and in fact is closely related to a topic that was recently suggested on the topic poll on Patreon, namely a translation comparing Iwao's letter to Ryo with Yuanda Zhu's letter to Iwao. So I'll definitely look into the characters themselves at the same time for a verdict on how special or disguised they actually are!
Delete