Shenmue: The Animation Now Running On Adult Swim
Shenmue: The Animation was announced in 2020 as one of the “partner” shows between Crunchyroll and Adult Swim. At the time both companies were owned by telecom AT&T. The phone giant has already sold off one and is in the process of unloading the other onto Discovery, so no one knows how long the partnership will actually last. But it got us a Shenmue anime.
So far, Adult Swim hasn’t had very good luck with producing original anime, even with Crunchyroll assisting. The continuation of FLCL was a major disappointment, and though Fena: Pirate Princess originally gained critical interest, they changed their minds once they saw the weird direction the story was going. I didn’t mind Blade Runner: Black Lotus very much, but some people couldn’t get over how plastic the cheap CGI looked.
In a separate industry, Yu Suzuki hasn’t been lucky either. He spent years trying to get Shenmue III made, and when he was finally able to scrape together enough cash, the end result displeased a lot of people (okay, this was his own fault). Now that AS and Suzuki are working together on something, can they reverse their bad fortunes?
It remains to be seen if Shenmue will be the show to break the bad streak — the debut got good reviews, but so did Fena at first. Here’s AS’s official description for Episode 2, premiering tomorrow evening:
Don’t miss a new episode of Shenmue the Animation, based on the classic Sega video game! In “Daybreak,” Hazuki Family’s maid Ine hands a letter to Ryo, who is restless from his Father’s death. The letter was sent from a person named “Yuanda Zhu” to his father which contained characters he cannot read.
New episodes of Shenmue: The Animation will premiere weekly Saturday nights on Toonami.
panjitoto
February 12, 2022 @ 6:31 pm
Hope this Anime will have a proper ending because the videogame series always ends up cliff hanger and waiting for a decade per sequel has been frustrating.
HomeyLander
February 25, 2022 @ 12:17 pm
Shenmue is such an influential game that it is the reason why we have games with open sandboxes, real-time settings and Quick time events. Critics destroyed this game franchise, but I believe Anime is the best medium to run this story.
EileenCruz
February 25, 2022 @ 5:57 pm
I loved the first two games. Still haven’t gotten to play the third. I’m really looking forward to the Anime.
Madeline Everleigh
March 2, 2022 @ 12:58 am
[QUOTE=”HomeyLander, post: 1515210, member: 64608″]
Shenmue is such an influential game that it is the reason why we have games with open sandboxes, real-time settings and Quick time events. Critics destroyed this game franchise, but I believe Anime is the best medium to run this story.
[/QUOTE]
We won’t have Resident Evil 4 and GTA without it.
vanillamallow
March 24, 2022 @ 7:33 pm
Are we finally going to have an ending because the games barely have endings. They always have cliffhangers and I have to wait for forever because I can see the next game.