Shenmue: The Animation Will Premiere February 5

It’s 1986, and Ryo Hazuki’s father has been murdered. It’s up to Ryo to find out why, and he sets off on a long journey of investigation. That’s how the cult video game Shenmue begins, but it’s also how the anime adaption will play out — which was finally given a release date yesterday.

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.

Though the Shenmue story is a classic revenge tale, the video game was far more relaxed than that. Creator Yu Suzuki sought to create the most realistic game technology would allow at the time, so Ryo’s average day involved walking around and talking to random people to gather clues, and when he wasn’t doing that, he was performing odd jobs and buying gacha figures with the money, or blowing away time at the local arcade (with authentic games from Sega’s arcade past!) There were moments of action, but they were spare.

As the trailer implies, the anime version of Shenmue will have considerably more fisticuffs and karate kicks — though clips also promise a forklift, gacha machine and arcade game will enter the picture at some point.

Shenmue: The Animation premieres February 5 at midnight on Adult Swim’s Toonami block, and will be available to stream on Crunchyroll at the same time.