haven't found any posts on this topic so i apologize if this has been discussed before but i was always curious about the image of the patch on the front of Ryo's jacket especially since it varies in different artworks. i think in both games its the horse (unicorn) image that is depicted but its difficult to see it since its all creased and in low resolution.
anyone got any idea's as to the symbolism of these images?
if it doesn't mean anything then why bother changing it for the final game?
it could be that the image changed during the course of development so some of the artworks might be very early.
if anyone has high quality in-game images of the patch from both games then that would be interesting.
here are some links to pics
does anyone think that the shenmue 2x artwork is very early concept art? thats why its different...
image from shenmue 1 - definitely not the unicorn but resolution is bad - but doesn't really look like the flags either.
shenmue 2 ending image depicts Ryo with the unicorn patch:
in the shenmue 1 cover art you can just see vaguely that its the black unicorn..
edit - shenmue 1 cover art this time in poster form and for some reason it changes back to the flags! weird!
shenmue 2 in-game pic- looks definitly like the horse..
judging from these pics, it seems that it was changed from shenmue 1 to shenmue 2... interesting... why do that?
edit - another shenmue 2 image but this time with the flags.. must be different textures in different contexts...maybe its all a continuity mistake
looks completly different again in the 'whats shenmue' demo:
the whats shenmue version looks the same as this image from edge magazine (you'll need to zoom):
that 3 different versions...
posting all this as i find it...i'll stop here.
edit - H S could be an acronym for High School... is this a high school badge? i wouldn't have thought you would put your school badge on a cool leather jacket?
i know in japan they wear naval like clothing for school uniform..this might explain the nautical symbols...?
early (i'm assuming) concept art with neither patch on the front or US flag on left arm. so adding these elements to the jacket was a later design choice?
tiger on the back was an early decision as shown here, but the design is different (prefer the final design - so cool) - also interesting to notice the plaster on the underside of lower jaw instead of being on the left cheeck bone (same as lan di which has been mentioned before)