Just finished Shenmue 1. It did some interesting things for it's time, but I thought it was going to be a big game. But it's surprisingly short in a negative way.
There is barely anything going on in terms of story, gameplay and progression. Also controls are sluggish at best.
No way Shenmue 1 had a recipe for success. It feels like The Order 1886 in terms of how the game progresses. It is too linear and too scripted.
Technically it does some stunning things, like weather conditions, NPCs that have behaviors according to the time of day, an in game date that affects weather, day night transitions, shadows that shift angles according to the time of day etc.
But the geometry is extremely low. And lighting is very flat. The sky is low res.
The sound is horrible. Low sampled and voice acting is very bad. Very short repetitive bad sound samples represent environment effects.
The project looks like it was hastily transfered from Saturn to Dreamcast as and to meet a release deadline, many elements were kept the way they were on the 32 bit console, and cut the first portion of the game and turned it into Shenmue 1.
The whole game takes place basically in Ryo's neighbourhood and the harbor which are tiny in size and predominantly involves talking with people and working on a forklift, barely much in terms of "puzzles", scarce fights scenes, some QTE's, and some optional arcade games. Nothing else. You are just trying to find info about the main bad guy and where he is heading and take the boat to Hong Kong.
Back in the day they were showing scenes in the trailer that I thought were part of 1. Including in the leaked Sega Saturn version. But most of these scenes were actually transfered to 2.
Shenmue 1 is like a glorified introduction. The cost of the game must have included both 1 and 2. No way the first game costed as much as they said.
At this point I believe that the meat of the first 2 games is in Shenmue 2.
