I'm going to make this very simple, and try to avoid a lot of the headier discussions around this game. Did you like Shenmue I and II? Yes? Good, now can you stomach a version of those made on a shoestring budget, that's much rougher around the edges? No. Okay, cool, you probably won't like this then. We can sit and talk all day about the rough edges this game has (and hoo boy, there are A LOT of them; most annoying to me is how the FREE dialogue is structured, more on that in a second), but at the end of the day, it well and truly is Shenmue, for better or for worse. The story doesn't really move forward as much, it more or less fleshes out what we already knew. From interviews around those in the know, and screenshots in the background during development interviews, it seems the budget was really the issue, and a lot got cut and we ultimately got about half the Shenmue III that Yu Suzuki wanted to make, and it really REALLY shows. One of the biggest rough spots where this shows is the FREE dialogue, when you're walking around trying to get information from random people, the dialogue is often jarring and doesn't quite make sense, an entire section of the game was cut, and because of that, the dialogue had to rapidly be reworked, and is called in gameplay in much more of a "grab bag" fashion, so the flow doesn't work quite as well. These are the things you have to be aware of when playing this game; but it's very clear underneath it all that this is still Shenmue, and Yu Suzuki DOES have a vision forward.
