Tuesday 5 September 2017

Lost Man Mo Store

I'm sure you all noticed this worn out and unreadable sign when stepping out of the Yan Tin Apartments at the start of the quest to find a store that has Man Mo in its name.


But did you know that there is a readable version of the sign, pointing to a lost Man Mo store?


First of all, there is another one of those Man Mo signs just down the street to the right. It's in the same sorry state and sadly also unreadable.


This could just be another thing to add detail to the living and breathing world of Shenmue II.
The Shenmue games are known to have stuff that's not accessible, out of order or simply doesn't have a purpose. After all this adds realism. Not everything is of use or importance to every person in real life, right? There are also some Man Mo Stores that are completely closed to further aid this feeling.

But this here is clearly a case where the developers scrapped a Man Mo store and hid the evidence by making the signs pointing towards it unreadable. A clever approach as it likely took less work to edit the texture the way they did it, compared to making a replacement from scratch. It also has the benefit of creating that little bit of mystique.

(Un)fortunately they weren't thorough enough in replacing this texture everywhere and accidentially left one instance of it in the game. And it's not too much out of the way to find it. While inside the Yan Tin Apartments and looking through the glass door or while exiting you may have already caught a glimpse of it on the fence on the other side of the road. 

What you are looking at out there is actually not the real South Carmain Qr. but a little piece of it, that's attached to the 3D map of the Yan Tin Apartments. The game has this kind of thing at the ends of almost every area so you don't walk into a black void when you reach a loading zone. This and the fact that you can't get a good look was probably enough for the devs to not think about it twice.

But I did want a good look at it. So I glitched a bit, left the barriers behind and got up close to it.

  

And that is the clear result. The sign is perfectly readable and points towards a Travel Agency. Also note that the herb shop has a slightly different English name aswell. Sadly the small copy of the South Carmain Qr. doesn't extend to the spot with the other signs mentioned earlier. 

This makes me believe that there is indeed a lost Man Mo store, something that had to be cut. It's always bad when this sort of thing happens in video games but I think this is a greater loss than the average one. Shenmue had not just one but two travel agencies in Dobuita. So it would make sense that there would be at least one in Shenmue II somewhere, given that the game is so much larger than it's predecessor.

 

I think a travel agency would've definaltly been a great addition to the Wan Chai area and maybe even extra ones for Aberdeen and Kowloon. It's definately something that is missing among the vast selection of available stores in the game.

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