If they wanted to drive traffic from their site, I doubt they'd rely on Shenmue III of all the games out there.
In fact, RPG Site is already on Metacritic so yeah... They didn't waited for Shenmue 3's review to get traffic. And people are entitled to their opinions. Berating an entire publication because "it'll drop the score on metacritic" is rather lame.
I really couldn’t care less bout the Metacritic rating at this point, nor do I think that many people will be going to a niche site that probably has less traffic than my dog’s instagram page for their view on a game that’s nearly two months old. I don’t much care if people criticize the game as long as it’s fair and the reviewer is able to adequately articulate and justify why they scored the game the way they did, but to this end, the reviewer failed miserably.
One of their main criticisms was that the game didn’t have a map that told them where to go. Iirc correctly, the site was set up based on a mutual love of Final Fantasy games. These games have traditionally not held the players hand with waypoints telling them where to go and what to do nor do I expect the FFVII remake to add this in (nor should it). It seems very much like they are jumping on the ‘Shenmue hasn’t learned from the last 20 years bandwagon’ and are using something trivial to justify doing so.
Anybody with even a basic understanding of the history of the series would know that exploration and finding what to do next is a big part of what makes Shenmue what it is. Criticizing the game for not completing the story when YS said from the start that that was never his intention also seems pretty unfair and something that most people would applaud rather than use to dunk on a crowdfunded project.
Then there’s this section:
You need to find what happened to Yuan and the other stonemasons, but you also need to work at the local market to earn money. There’s a woman clearly in danger from some thugs, but you need to go and pick that cinnamon in the field over there.
At no point does Ryo ‘work at the local market’ (especially not the market place on Vender Avenue as the accompanying picture suggests) nor is there ever a point when the game forces you to go and pick cinnamon while women are in danger (ignoring the fact that all side quests are optional, I can only assume that the part of the game they’re talking about is the first time that you encounter the 2 thugs, at which point in the game neither of the two Bailu herb quests are even close to available).
This (especially the latter) goes far beyond exaggeration and to me is either blatant lies to make the game sound bad or the writing of somebody who played five minutes and got bored.
Even if there was a point in the game where one of the side quests overlapped with such an event, bashing the game for it would be akin to shitting on FFVII for letting the player explore the world before going to the final battle with Sephiroth. I mean, that’s literally the whole point of sidequests and with this critique, the ‘reviewer’ is basically saying that sidequests are bad and Shenmue 3 is bad because it has them (of course it would also be bad if it didn’t have sidequests).
There are plenty of valid criticisms of the game. I could probably write a few pages and yet the reviewer instead makes stuff up. This, the fact that the only stuff she talks about can be gleaned from the first ten minutes of play time and the complete lack of screenshots really suggests that she didn’t bother to play the game (or anywhere close to all of it).
The score being 3 (literally the lowest score given to the game by any publication) and the reviews failure to justify the low score suggests to me that it was intentionally the lowest and she made up some criticisms and threw them together with some found in other reviews because she was too lazy to play the game and find them for herself. I could be wrong, but I call em how I see em.
Edit: I can’t not comment on how bad the writing is. It’s like commas were 90% off in the January sales and she bought up every one they had in stock. This review is embarrassing and not because it’s critical of the game, but because it’s absolutely atrocious in almost every possible way.