And here in lies one of the biggest problems for Yu and the team. Shenmue means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, meaning that when you commit to making a Shenmue game you risk upsetting some of the fans by omitting anything that could be considered to be a part of the 'Shenmue' experience.
I think it's pretty safe to say that he can hope to do better than S3. I certainly hope so.
Axing the English dub would be a terrible idea considering the bulk of the game's sales come in the west. If anything, axing the Japanese dub (which given the caliber of some of the voice actors used is likely the more expensive of the two) would make a lot more sense.
I don't think Shenmue needs full voice acting at all (I'm perfectly fine with text only, but I think at
maximum, it should only be during the cutscenes if money is as tight as it appears to be).
This is something that's been present in the series since Shenmue 1. They didn't fix it for Shenmue 2, they didn't fix it for Shenmue 2X, they didn't fix it for the HD ports and they didn't fix it in any of the subsequent patches either - which would suggest to me that it's not such an easy fix (which is saying a lot considering some of the talent that worked on the first two games).
It might look a bit more skillful, but I assure you that anybody could do this (unless perhaps they had arthritis in their hands - but this could be easily remedied with a turbo pad).
Or it's just not something they were concerned with. S1 and 2 are hardly designed for "teh hardcore" audience, just because I think something needs to be improved, doesn't mean it needs to be improved.
You seem to be forgetting that in Shenmue 2, several of the move scrolls were locked behind pachinko (fwir, you had to land three shots in a row across three increasingly difficult boards multiple times) whilst many others had to be purchased for a fairly significant combined price, which again meant tedious minigame grinding unless you exploited the game's save feature. The minigames found in Shenmue 3 were more or less the same as the ones found in 2 (if anything, I'd say 3 offers a lot more variety in this regard), so I don't see how they can be tedious in one and not the other - and please don't come back with 'But I can save scum in S2', because the ability to do so does is not something that was intended to be used while the game was being designed.
Almost everything that's bad about Shenmue 2 revolves around earning money, something that S3, like,
quintuples down on. For the umpteenth time, Shenmue 3 does not get an automatic pass for stepping on the same rakes as the first two games. Anyone who
enjoys that part of S2 is free to argue why it's amazing design. I would be more than happy without it (which is why I save scum through it). There are 20 years worth of game design to draw on that handle these things better. To be clear, without save scumming, Shenmue 2 is a notably less enjoyable game. I somewhat forgive the emphasis on earning money because it's justified in the story (something S3 never bothers to do) BUT, in the original design of Shenmue, save games were meant to continue, so I don't see how anyone could think that earning money was ever supposed to be a huge part of the series, especially as Ryo ventures into
rural China in the 1980s.
The issue here is not that one move is broken, but that by binding dodge and parry to the same button, they effectively make it impossible for themselves to punish a mistimed parry attempt which allows the player to spam it at will without any consequences and never take a hit throughout their entire playthrough provided they hit the button fast enough.
Given that blocking/parrying/dodging plays such a pivotal role in the game's combat, I'd say that it's a fairly fundamental flaw if you subscribe to the idea that the ability to cheese a fight is a sign of poor design (which you seem to).
That is indeed a flaw (among many) with the combat design of S1 and 2, though I wouldn't necessarily say that it's with the input layout, but rather the fact that they didn't design around it (the Dead or Alive series, for example, similarly only uses one input for both).
I think that things are going in circles at this point and arguing point by point is going nowhere. I'm not saying that cheap tactics in high-level fights is the only thing that makes a system bad (my only real point is that S1 and 2 have better combat than S3, something I don't think anyone is even arguing against), nor am I saying that S1 and 2 are perfect systems.
I think that the combat in Shenmue, like many things about the game, suffers from the fact that they had so few limitations during the shift from VFRPG. S1 has like 50+ moves even though there are only around a dozen fights. The combat is never properly tutorialized, the system offers depth if you want to experiment/get good at the game but nowhere to actually face difficult opponents, and there isn't enough variety in the enemy design to make the player consider tactics (I beat both games by essentially button mashing my first time out). S2 addresses some of these issues by adding the gambling fights and the ranked matches (but those are a
very basic extra feature) as well as more/more frequent fights in general, and more variety to enemy types, as well as ring outs. The block/parry is, as you and
@Rydeen have mentioned, basically a push to win button, the fast moves are way more useful than moves with a slower wind up time (unless you just want the fight to be flashy), and all of this suffers from the main flaw which I alluded to earlier, which is that these games are essentially trying to be fighting games (primarily designed around being multiplayer games), instead of having proper single-player oriented combat. The system scales well to accommodate new players who want to button mash as well as more skilled players who want to be flashy (SEPW goes over this in detail) but, imo, fails to properly incentivize high level play.
S1 and 2 are old, they were released before the time where games figured a lot of things out, and they were instrumental in the process of figuring those things out. If they were released today, combat system unchanged, they would not be considered to have well designed combat. Good combat systems keep the player engaged, where you're constantly in the process of reacting to enemy behavior and thinking about your next moves. A game like Dark Souls forces you to react to and learn enemy move-sets (it's basically just Punch-Out), a game like DMC incentivizes stylish play and using a variety of moves, a game like Doom Eternal essentially
forces you to engage with every aspect of the combat system, the Arkham games combined simple inputs with flashy contextual animations; there was a lot for S3 to learn from other games depending on what they wanted to do.
That being said, even though combat
seems super important to Shenmue, maybe it isn't. Maybe it was always just supposed to give the
feeling of technical fighting game mechanics. In that case, I really think moving forward Shenmue needs to decide what it is and what it wants the player to get out of it. Is Shenmue combat essentially a fighting game solo mode? Is it closer to a beat-em-up? A character action game? Not necessarily in terms of the mechanics (I think we're stuck with the system that we have), but in terms of how everything is designed
around those mechanics. Imagine if Ryo had to learn counter play to all of Mr. Muscles' different animal styles (he'll block certain moves when he uses certain stances or whatever), then during the fight, you'd have to pay attention to his stance to figure out which style he was using and vary up your attacks accordingly--because remember, a
big part of Shenmue is learning new moves/styles from NPCs, something missing almost entirely from S3.
Also just as an aside, yes I consider any exploit in the combat system a flaw and you should too (
especially if you're going to comment about save scumming) and I think that if games are going to have high-level play, the system should scale up and hold its own accordingly otherwise, don't even bother including it. I hate games that have "ultra hardcore mode" and it's just enemies with more health and more damage.