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:
"Recently-discovered Character & Location Renders by AM2 developer Hideki Kawabata"
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| Some of the many newly-found renders |
Recently, an astonishing discovery was made: an extensive online archive containing over 120 3D-rendered images from the development of the first two Shenmue games has surfaced. These images were posted on a personal webpage belonging to Hideki Kawabata, a senior graphical artist credited as one of the two "3D Character Main Designers" for the original titles.
The webpage was first archived by the Wayback Machine in February 2022, which suggests that access may have changed from private to public around that time.
The collection includes a wide range of 3D renders featuring main characters, NPCs, and a small number of locations. While many of these designs appear in the first two released games, others do not. This hints that some may have been cut during development - or potentially they may even provide glimpses of content planned for Shenmue IV and beyond.
In this blog post, or more likely a series of posts, we will browse through the collection and take a closer look at some of its most interesting and surprising items.
Coming soon to the blog!
Excited for this post!!
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