You'll take control of Ryo as he steps off the ship. Shenmue II picks up where the first game ended, with the opening sequence showing Ryo's freighter pulling into a Hong Kong harbor. At the end of the original Shenmue, Ryo's search had led him to set off for China, hot on the trail of Lan Di and in search of the truth behind his father's murder and its tie to the phoenix mirror. Ryo's investigation into his father's death has involved him in a greater mystery revolving around two ancient artifacts (the phoenix and dragon mirrors) and an old prophecy.

In Shenmue II, Ryo's quest to track down his father's murderer, a mysterious man called Lan Di, serves as the story's driving force. Shenmue II for the Xbox is clearly a port from a less powerful gaming platform.

And while Shenmue II for the Xbox is a solid game that offers some improvements on the Dreamcast version, it will mostly appeal to die-hard fans of the original. However, the end result doesn't quite live up to those expectations-for one thing, it's easy to tell that Shenmue II was originally a Dreamcast game, since its technical aspects aren't nearly as impressive now as Shenmue's were in 2000. Given the promise of a marriage between Sega's most ambitious franchise and the most powerful console on the market, the expectations for this game have been running very high. That is, until now, as Microsoft has secured the exclusive North American rights to the game and ported it to the Xbox. A subsequent sequel continued the story and addressed some of the original game's shortcomings, but unfortunately, Shenmue II, which was released a year later in Japan and Europe, never found its way to the US. Shenmue wasn't a commercial success in this country, and its unusual design met with a mixed response, but the game was certainly a showcase for the Dreamcast's technical abilities. Set in Hong Kong during the '80s, Shenmue told the story of a Japanese man named Ryo who journeys abroad to avenge his father's murder. The brainchild of Yu Suzuki (best known for creating the Virtua Fighter series), the game set out to provide an entirely new type of gaming experience by combining elements of fighting games and adventure role-playing games in a realistic, clockwork world. Released in 2000, Sega's Shenmue was arguably the company's most ambitious project at the time.

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