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!

The Phantom Teahouse Lady: Redux

NOTE: This is a follow-up to a post I originally wrote back in 2018 – there has now been some further light shed on the oddities surrounding this NPC following the discovery of the Shenmue II Game Jam prototype in 2022!

I also created a separate site covering the differences/oddities seen in this prototype – you can access that here

This article has therefore also been linked to in the ‘NPC Placement Changes/Oddities’ section of that page.

You may recall my post back in 2018 that went into the mysterious circumstances surrounding a particular NPC in Shenmue II – namely, Wen Huachun – who (supposedly) can be found as the owner of the Luck and Virtue Teahouse in Kowloon’s Tea Break Building. This post will recap a lot of what was already discussed, but adds some crucial information that was recently uncovered thanks to the recent discovery of a prototype of Shenmue II – which has been coined the ‘Game Jam’ prototype, the build compiled a few months before the Japanese release of the final game. You can find out more about the various other differences and oddities of this prototype by checking out my dedicated site here. As this is one of a few NPC anomalies in Shenmue II that requires a more in-depth explanation, I have opted to write a whole article regarding it, and you can expect more to come soon. So without further ado, let us delve into the mysterious tale of the NPC I like to call, ‘The Phantom Teahouse Lady’…