That's the first time I've actually seen Shenmue, and I'm kind of boggled that it cost $47 million. It's not massively long for that era, the gameworld isn't particularly huge, I don't really know where the money went. I guess they spent it all on 300 unique NPC models, unique voice actors and interiors for places that weren't plot relevant, like the pizza parlour? A really long development time period? A really big marketing campaign?
It's rather flawed. Ryo has very little agency in investigating his fathers death, instead NPCs provide all the exposition on what to do and when.
They clearly wanted something more story focused for the time, but what story is there is spread far too thin - a whole game of the first 45 minutes of the Hobbit where you're waiting for them to go on an adventure; and most of your objectives are obvious padding. This'd be more acceptable if it were wide, with social links and optional missions, but that's not really the case either.
They clearly wanted something less combat focused, but the removal of combat gameplay isn't really replaced with any non-combat gameplay other than the vehicle sections. If you were to do it from scratch today, adding stuff like dialogue choices, interrogations or detective style investigation sections would solve the issues of agency and lack of gameplay.
