Have You Seen Me? Possibly Missing NPC in Shenmue II

I previously posted on this blog about a project I ended up spending some years (on and off) working on, the Shenmue II Character Database, with the aim of cataloguing all 700+ characters in the game, using the official Japanese strategy guidebooks for Shenmue II as sources (two of these books between them have names and short profiles for each and every character).

However – it turns out one of the characters listed doesn’t actually seem to appear anywhere in the final game at all! Frustratingly, this realisation came long after I completed the project and already included them (10 years later in fact!!) Read on to find out how I only very recently discovered this, and about the assumed role of this NPC before they were (seemingly) inexplicably removed at some point in development!