I knew I probably won’t like it based on all I’ve seen but I checked it out finally. Despite a lot of amateur hour presentation (loading screens, texts, Ryo’s basic walk and run cycle, stuff like that) once you’re in-game it seems to get the Shenmue feel down pretty well as far as Ryo’s actions go. It’s a tad too guided early on (if you stall Ryo runs to catch up) but it makes sense I guess with every day having the time limit and that particular story beat having to play out.
It does seem like much of it is just to stall you and pad out the days though (ie how slow you open all the drawers and cupboards, yeah that’s nice and just like Shenmue but come on, make it faster and more organic like modern games with that time limit, Ryo’s so slow he can’t even check all the cupboards in the house before having to go to bed, lol, there are way too many for a two people household as well, they just put empty cupboards everywhere). I'm glad you can no longer pick up and examine every object because it'd take me a week to get out of the house.
Other than that basic gameplay feel, I don’t really like the design of the first area. It’s a remote village that gets few visitors but apparently everybody runs some kind of game attraction to play just to show you it has stuff like Lucky Hit to remind you of the old games? What?
I’ll probably just hate this more the more it shows its bad design and the more it stalls the story (I mean, don’t you expect the end of Shenmue 2 to lead to some crazy revelation, well, it doesn’t, lol, at least not right now, they just basically check the place out and go “cool, I bet this took a lot of effort to make” and then off to find the guy they’re looking for). I’ll probably play more but right now Yakuza 7 is an actually good game occupying my time. And I’m no stranger to indie games and jank, love em actually, but they have to be actually good underneath all that stuff.
The game is a flop....20 years in the making
It's not 20 but ~4 years in the making, don't be a super idiot. Being a "flop" has nothing to do with quality, the first games were too and they were great. You can't even run in SOR4. it's a passable beat em up with weird graphics at best, there have been way better indies since SOR3. Come on.