In the original Japanese version of Shenmue II, Yuan was a cross-dressing man. However, Sega of Europe did not find this suitable, so they re-recorded his lines with a female Japanese voice actress and swapped his gender.

Additional lines from other characters were also changed from the Japanese release. Dou Nin originally says "What the hell did you do to my cute love thing?", while in the European release this was changed to "What the hell did you do to my partner?"

Yuan's gender change was kept in the English version of the Xbox release.