Hi, everybody!
I never thought that I'd be posting here again after all these years, as I had already accepted that Shenmue 3 would simply never happen and I tried to move on (though I never really managed to forget about Shenmue.)
And yet, here we are, Shenmue 3 is coming out and this is all pretty exciting. In fact, this is probably the most exciting time in videogames in my life and I'm on my way to being 30 already and I never really get that excited about videogames anymore. Or so I thought!
Anyway, I noticed the artwork for Baisha village.
http://operationrainfall.com/wp-content ... -goals.png
Now, those round buildings are quite famous in China, they're called "tulou (土楼)", which literally means "earth building". They're communal residences, which, as far as I know, are only found in Fujian Province, in Southeast China. They're communal residences, which, nowadays, are more and more of a tourist attraction, really.
I doubt that Shenmue 3 will take Ryo to Fujian Province, but rather will be entirely (or mostly) set in Guangxi, which is where Guilin is situated. So I'm guessing that Yu Suzuki knew about tulou, maybe he visited them when he went to China, and he really wanted to incorporate them in Shenmue, even if that meant that accuracy would have to be thrown out of the window, in this case (which is fine by me. Fun should always come first in a videogame). Unless I'm wrong and tulou can also be found in Guangxi, but I've never heard about it and a quick Baidu search came up empty too.
Check out the Wikipedia article about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujian_Tulou
Pretty cool, huh? I'm looking forward to seeing them in Shenmue 3's Baisha.