Ren is an interesting match for Ryo – he’s just as brash and tough, but much more street smart and quite a bit louder. When Ryo first steps into Kowloon, suddenly the pace hits high gear, especially when he meets up with Ren. Once again, you spend most of this segment wandering around, getting clues, and eventually learning than Lan Di is on the Kowloon Peninsula, somewhere inside the Walled City.
After days of searching, Ryo eventually meets up with Xuiying (Lishao Tao’s real name), and takes a job at the Man Mo Temple. Since you’ve been robbed of your cash, you need to take up random jobs – there’s no forklifting this time, but Ryo can move crates at the harbor for money, gamble, arm wrestle, or run Lucky Hit stands, all while trying to locate Lishao Tao. Hong Kong is also far more economically diverse than the middle class Yokosuka, and there are quarters filled with dingy street markets and decrepit apartments. (In the early stages of design, Shenmue II was supposed to be dubbed entirely in Cantonese, the Chinese dialect spoken in Hong Kong, but this was probably a little bit too ambitious.) While there are plenty of friendly people, Ryo gets his bag stolen right as he gets off the boat, then he’s attacked by gang members. It goes to great lengths to drive in the point that you’re in foreign territory, although it just glosses over the established fact of the first Shenmue that Ryo doesn’t speak one bit of Chinese. You’ll run past European style brick buildings before coming across an Asian style bridge. The city is an odd mixture of Western and Asian architecture, since it’s a British colony populated by Chinese people. Hong Kong is a very different place than Yokosuka. The controls also feel less stiff than in the first game, although the scheme hasn’t changed at all, and Ryo still tends to get stuck in corners. At the beginning of each day, you’re also given the option to automatically jump to important areas, which cuts down on the random running around. When asking for directions, many people will also guide you there personally, making it much easier to find different locations, but their slow walking speed really puts your patience to the test. You can also buy maps for most of the areas, which are shown onscreen in the corner and drastically help navigation. If Ryo arrives for an event too early, he can choose to pass time automatically, so you don’t need to sit around doing nothing. On the surface, it seems as if only the setting has changed, but there are some minor improvements to the gameplay.
Shenmue II doesn’t waste a second recapping the events of the original – within the first few minutes, Ryo steps off the boat and onto the foreign land of Hong Kong, searching for a martial arts master named Lishao Tao, as guided by Master Chen.
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