
UPDATE 6/11/18 – She’s in the game after all!
Well now, don’t I feel a little silly after initially making this post…
So as it turns out, this character is in fact in the final version of Shenmue II after all – however you’d be forgiven for missing her as she only appears at one, very specific point in the game, where you aren’t supposed to be wasting time walking to her shop to talk to her.
But first; to recap – and the TL:DR version of the original post (but please do read the original post below as well – there are other interesting tidbits about the official strategy guides for SII)-
- In both the Shenmue II Perfect Guidebook and the Shenmue II Complete Guide, there is a profile for a character named ‘Wen Hua Chun’, both books claiming she can be found at the Luck and Virtue Teahouse (in the Tea Break Bldg. in Kowloon)
- However, if you go to this shop in any version of the game (that is, the JP Dreamcast version, the EU Dreamcast version, the US Xbox version, the EU Xbox version, as well as the recent re-released version for PS4, Xbox One and PC), she is simply not there – there is no shopkeeper to be found at the teahouse at all, in fact.
- Therefore, this led me to determine her as an ‘unused character’, and I therefore did not include her while working on my ‘Shenmue II Character Database’ project. I also made the below post to talk about this, as well as other outdated/inaccurate information found in the guidebooks.
However – after my recent playthrough through the PS4 update/re-release, I discovered something strange while playing through the ‘Following Yuan’ scenario -(that is, when Ryo and Ren are following the flamboyant Yellow Head member home to rescue Zhu Yuan Da’s man that has been kidnapped)- Hua Chun was at the shop!!
Confused and slightly bewildered, I quickly captured video from the PS4 – and you can see the (admittedly quick and dirty) video below: (the preceding cutscene is to set context and show the exact point in the game where you can find her – you can skip to 1:13 to see Hua Chun)
She doesn’t have too much to say when you talk to her – she’s disappointed that Ryo isn’t stopping to eat, as apparently he would have been ‘the first customer for a while’ (but you can clearly see people sitting at the tables, so perhaps she’s becoming confused in her old age…). She also says it’s one of the oldest shops in the building – an interesting little tidbit.

You can’t ask her any of the ‘Money’ related questions, as it is impossible to do so during the ‘Following Yuan’ scenario. However, as you’ll see from reading the original post below, one of the guidebooks claims she can direct you to the pawnshops in Kowloon – but obviously this is not possible here.
So while she technically is still in the game, it would appear to be an error/oversight that she only appears during this part of the game – you can not see her here before or after this point in the game.
So why is this the case? Is it an error in the game’s coding, or something that’s gone wrong with the way NPC’s are generated? I can’t claim to understand the technical side and inner workings of these games, but if anyone familiar with the game’s files etc was able to find a reason and possibly restore her in normal gameplay…
In any case, its an interesting find – something I stumbled upon nearly by accident, as I thought I’d just check the shop during that point in my playthrough as I’d never done so before – and there she was! Proving once again there are still new things to discover in these games, even after playing for the umpteenth time.
Also to clarify – I’ve only witnessed this on the remastered PS4 version so far – but I assume her appearing at this specific point occurs in the Dreamcast and Xbox versions as well (I also switched to English voices to check that she has a dubbed voice, and she does – suggesting she’d be there on the Xbox version too). When I get the chance I will confirm this for sure, unless someone else wants to beat me to it, of course 🙂
I’ve also updated the Shenmue II Character Database with her profile – the download link can be found within this post.
SEE BELOW FOR THE ORIGINAL POST – which also contains some interesting details about Baihu, the lost Tiger Gate Building and another character I initially thought was unused.
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So today we will be looking into an unused/seemingly removed character from Shenmue II. This is a particularly strange case, as there doesn’t seem to be any apparent reason for the character’s removal, and her existence is only known due to her inclusion in Japanese guidebooks for the game…