The convenience is not something to be understated - it's absolutely the biggest draw of the re-release. It was the main reason I wanted a re-release in the first place - I'm starting to run out of Dreamcasts! It's absolutely great that we have a version of Shenmue on modern consoles, and if I only want to play the game (e.g. experimenting with things, speedrunning) then I'll pick this version out of convenience.
The biggest improvement of the re-release comes with massively reduced load times, especially when it comes to saving/loading files. That along with being able to save anywhere in Shenmue (I mean a proper save) makes it great for doing things like grinding the raffle. The new collection screen is pretty cool too.
Every other "improvement" comes with caveats, though.
An increased resolution means next to nothing when very few of the assets have been retouched to compensate. It wouldn't matter that the game's running in 8640p if you still have trees made up of four polygons and a 64x64 texture.
The game's in widescreen, except when it isn't because they wanted to preserve the original art (fair)... but then there are some cutscenes which are still in 16:9 and are broken because of it; there are times when the game is letterboxed despite no cutscene taking place; and there are some cutscenes which have complete changes in camera position, most notably those involving the kitten. Every time the camera changes position there's this strange fading effect where it starts dark and then grows brighter over the course of about a second, which can be incredibly off-putting.
It's nice to be able to choose between English and Japanese, but unfortunately you're stuck with the English dialogue timings either way, so it's a choice between bad voice acting or awkward pauses between different parts of sentences; meanwhile, the audio quality itself is significantly reduced for no reason whatsoever, things like footsteps no longer work, and there are still problems with the music (although it has come a long way since the first patch), especially the Shenmue II notebook mus??????wns everything else out.
The promised "modern" control scheme turned out to be literally the equivalent of pressing the ANALOG button on a PS1 DualShock with a game that doesn't support analogue controls, and as such is outdated by even the Xbox version of Shenmue II. The controls of the arcade games, particularly Space Harrier, are broken to the point of being near-unplayable, with D-pad movement having artificial elasticity where none existed before.
The re-release is missing features of the original games, like the passport disc and the promo movies; there are numerous additional bugs that still remain despite being known about and reported from before Day 1 (many of which should be easy fixes, like the Space Harrier controls or the timer in the motorbike section); and of course, it wouldn't be a DigitalDuck post without mentioning the many crashes.
There is absolutely no way I could recommend the re-release over the original. It's not terrible, but it's definitely inferior.
