Its certainly not bad. Japanese are a master of their voice acting craft essentially they do take it somewhat more seriously over there. There's less of a 'mannered' way of speaking unless they are intentionally going for a hokey stereotyped performance like say "genki girl" or whatever. I know Miyazaki and Gundam's creator Tomino specifically hate that and they prefer more natural way of speaking; quite often they'd get an actress or actor who has been trained or groomed to speak in that overly flowery way of speaking and they purposely tell them not to do that for their roles and its hard sometimes for said actors to dial that back to be more natural because theyre so used to it. (for a Western equivalent of 'mannered' speaking; just look at the actor in the tv show the Flash that plays all the Harrison Wells characters; he always talks in this overly dramatic whispy voice lol. No one talks like that on the rest of the show but him. OR, go back to 30's through 50's acting with its "hey sonny boy!" manner of speaking. Though sometimes the Japanese do this too to this day; I call it 'theatrical acting'. As in, back in the day, in theater, you had to project your voice louder on purpose so the people in the back seats could hear you since no microphones were invented yet. Acting became more naturalized once cameras and close quarter mics were used.
In Shenmue, the dialogue, particularly the Japanese dialogue (ignore the subtitles; those are specifically done for the English voice acting so they do not match). is generally....flat. There's not much to it really. Characters repeat the same lines over and over. There's a lack of personality and charisma in this stoic way of speaking. The vocabulary used is very minimal.
When Cory Marshall says "I see" all the time in Shenmue games, thats because he is literally translating what the Japanese script always called for in saying. "soka'. etc
Thats why people who dont understand why that is, make fun of the dialogue in Shenmue. But that is how often Japanese speak. They dont mix around a lot of words. Everything is matter of fact. For the most part. There's a very limited range of vocabulary used. There are exceptions like Yakuza series where they go further in depth with actual dialects and accents "Kansai accent" for example and they even talk about it in the game "oh I see you have a Kansai accent. you must be from so and so" etc.
So this is something to take into consideration when you say you like the Japanese version more. Sure thats fine. But understand a lot of it just stems from the fact its more direct and straight forward with less variation of words being used and doesnt try to be colorful with the script to envoke more character personality. Because Yu Suzuki wanted the characters to be more straight forward and stoic like that especially Ryo. But with the Eng VA, he realize the importance of not doing 100% literal translation because of varying cultural differences.
