Debatable. Progress is heavily gated and there's no way to explore every area until the story dictates. But then it's debatable whether the first 2 games should be considered "open world" in the modern sense.
Well the term open world is so vague now, but it still has the 'do as you see fit' philosophy of the originals.
Shenmue 1 and 2 were the most expensive productions at the time, obviously games of a similar size and scope can be made much cheaper today.
To a degree, but very few feature the amount of features Shenmue III does. I'm loathe to bring up the comparison, but even Yakuza Zero doesn't feature voiced NPCs. It's just text boxes. And let's not get into the continual reuse of Kamurocho. Bailu and Niaowu are great locations by comparison.
Many of us consider this to be a step backward from Shenmue 2 due to the changes they made to the design (stamina, leveling, grinding for money etc.) so to us it's not a "miracle", but rather the victim of baffling design decisions.
I can't see how doing things like one-inch punch, rooster step and horse stance are any different from punching and kicking in an empty car lot. Just like real life martial arts, repetition is the key to success. I'm a blue belt at my kickboxing academy and i've lost count at the amount of times I've had to throw the same kick just to get the flexibility to perform it with any degree of success, never mind master it :) .Shenmue II makes you grind money to meet Ren and start the scout fights in Kowloon. With the herb system in III, something I thought I'd hate, I could make enough money to never run out in a couple of hours. The 5000 Yuan part was simply a case of walking to the clinic at the junction of the rainbow basin, hitting a few menu buttons and walking out loaded. I didn't have to save scum roll it on top or move boxes with Delin's brother for hours.
The stamina i'll give you, it's a pain in the arse, especially early on, but by the time I finished Bailu, I could run from one end of the village to the other and use up about 3 blocks.
Agreed, which is why the ability to fight pretty much whenever you want in S2 is such an improvement.
How? There's no one you can just walk up to and fight until you get to Kowloon! I don't think the beast guy at the wharf really counts. You can't even practice moves in the car lot anymore, just train against Jianmin and the like who counter slap all your combos away, so you can't see how they would look or master the timing anyway. Shenmue II is brilliant but the martial arts progression of the game is pretty thin.
The exact same sentence could be written as a criticism simply by changing "brilliant" to "boring".
Well, one man's brilliant is another man's boring etc
This is because S1 and 2 were originally supposed to be 1 game and the two were split causing them to dramatically pad the length of S1, something similar appears to have happened with S3. Certain fans prefer this, and other do not; hence the split. Generally speaking, fans who prefer S2 are much harsher on S3 than fans who prefer S1.
I vastly prefer Shenmue II to the first game but still loved III.
Mass Effect 3 was still a good game in nearly every other way, the only reason the ending is such a disappointment is because it was the actual ending. S3 doesn't even attempt to resolve anything or really advance the plot in any meaningful way.
I would rather have another cliffhanger ending than one like ME3 had that through away 100's of hours of hard work on a red green or blue binary choice. Choices like saving a species in the first game being replaced by a ...robotic version of said species in the 3rd game...absolute fucking guff
You mean like the expectations that S3 would be "bigger than Shenmue 2" and "contain the most chapters of any Shenmue game" and would explain "the meaning of the poem" and all the other stuff that Yu Suzuki promised? The things that people dislike about S3 have very little to do with unrealistic expectations and very much to do with what Yu Suzuki said would be in the game.
Well in terms of hours played I think most people would agree that Shenmue III is bigger than either of the first two games.
The game changed so much during development due to funding streams etc I don't think it's fair to really give too much of a hard time about it.
At the end of the day I kept my expectations in check - it's a crowdfunded game after all - and was not dissapointed.
