Quite frankly, no. It's alarming to me how frequently in this day and age people seem to be ready to throw the baby out with the bath water. Shenmue III was a victim of people, who have always hated the series and its fandom, controlling the narrative, and after release, taking advantage of disappointment in a segment of the fans. I don't mean to be too blunt, but part of what 'haters' tend to hate about the property is what they see as delusion. In some ways it's accurate. A few months ago I was even noticing that pre-release media had some people involved with the project (not the development team) speculating that Shenmue III might turn the fortunes of the series around, and be the smash hit that the first two games were meant to be.
Shenmue III had an insurmountable amount of pressure on it to be the best game in the series, break sales records, prove all the doubters wrong, and actually change all of their opinions about the series. It was as unrealistic as thinking the game would conclude the story.
I've personally seen (outside of Youtube, which is a trash-pit as far as discourse goes) just as many people react positively to Shenmue III, as those who react negatively. Opinions tend to follow a normal distribution ('bell curve'), with people who occupy positions at the extremes generally voicing their opinions the most. Most people don't hold a strong enough opinion on the game, which suggests that people who were just fine with Shenmue III are the majority. We have a bunch of sample means where people anonymously rate it, and they put the game at a 7/10 or better, even when talking about press reviews which had scores that didn't even attempt to veil their goal to trash the metascore.
Unless you actually hate the games, don't fall into this trap. Seriously.
Combat could be better yes, but It didn't bother me as much as many and the end battle was pretty much spot on - just which the time frame was a bit longer.
Yeah, I do wish you had to struggle against Lan Di for another few minutes (or even to the point where Ryo is in critical health) but I guess there's also the question of how long is it realistic that Lan Di would have been toying with Ryo.
I often hear many people say "Shenmue 3 Sold poorly" is this taking into account all the backers copies or just profit from sales from retail and digital beyond that? I've just always been puzzled to when people claim it sold poorly because considering the results we did get a solid-ish game! Which being pushed from a Kickstarter is an achievement which many overlook. I haven't seen any other KickStarter games come close to the quality Shenmue 3 Offers - There is BloodStained, but being a Sidecrolling action game does it really compete with scale of Shenmue 3 in comparison?
Yeah, this is a pretty important point. The fact that it was a Kickstarter game is only remembered in the context of the controversies surrounding the crowdfunding campaign. It's not really taken into consideration at all in terms of what kind of game was delivered, and how it's the most impressive game project to successfully come out of the platform. This really speaks to the vast disparity in people's expectations (AAA, blow everything else out of the water), compared to what it really was (Indie, crowdfunded game with a modest budget, and newly formed dev team that actually managed to keep all the bells and whistles associated with the series in tact).
