Shenmue Dojo

Interesting tidbit time. Did you know there was an unused scene in Shenmue II in which Lan Di finds Yuanda Zhu? I found this a long time ago but most of you probably haven't heard of it. Oddly, I only found all this data in the Xbox version. In the voice/sub data AFS for the scene where Ryo is looking for the elevator keys in the Yellow Head Bldg 18th floor, and you only have six minutes to do so before the guards make their rounds, Lan Di has an unused line of dialogue. "So you are Yuanda Zhu." There's no audio clip, but as you can see in the attached image, there's subtitles for it. SRY is Lan Di's abbreviated model name in Shenmue II.

My guess is that originally, if Ryo failed to find those keys in the six minute limit, a scene would be triggered where Lan Di gets to Zhu before Ryo does. Unfortunately, full sequence data is not available, however I did notice something interesting in the motion data for these scenes. There's a motion for TGY (Dou Niu) that reads "TGY_0266A_MANEKU_KOK_0459" Maneku meaning "invite", KOK being Lan Di's abbreviated model name in Shenmue I. So apparently in this scene, Dou Niu would be leading Lan Di into the room where Zhu is being held.

So yeah, there you have it. Only fragments scattered about, but very cool nonetheless. Why was it taken out? Your guess is as good as mine.