I've sometimes seen people complain about the game for having bad grammar, particularly in the early on case of Maria's "What do you here?" and in this part, "Think you I would forget such a thing?", in both parts the Bombadeers have had a negative reaction, as well as other folk I have seen/ talked to about the game.
While mostly archaic today, this style of forming questions used to be rather common. Consider phrases like, "What have we here?" and "What say you?" (perhaps a bit rarer). Or, going back a bit to find an authentic example, "Whom think ye that I am?" - Acts 13:25 in the KJV. If, however, the issue is with not adhering to this speech, and going all the way with it, that I understand.
All in all, I enjoyed VinnyVania Symphony of the Night.
I applaud the effort, but for me, it's more an issue of how they deliver those lines than the lines themselves.
Though I don't think I could ever get tired of Dracula's "what is a man?" spiel at the start of the game. That's just bad voice acting at its finest.
And it's something that would have impressed people at the time as well. That kind of attention to detail felt like the future at the time. All of the manually dialling phones, or looking in drawers, or waiting for shops to open would have made that world feel more believable. This was at a time before everyone realized that all those little things were choking the games pacing.
It's up to you to decide whether all the details of the game "choking the pace" is a bad thing or not. Feel free to think that slow-paced things are bad, that's your personal taste, but for better or worse Shenmue is 100% deliberate about it. You can't say that Suzuki is unaware. There's too much evidence to the contrary. The manual of Shenmue 1 has a whole page lecturing the player to take it slow, and Shenmue 2 doubles down on it by actually putting a character at the start of the game reiterating that you should take your time.
Acting like this is a mistake that we've grown past, just because it's not to your liking, is condescending. There are no mistakes in creative media, there are deliberate choices that might not be to your taste. Those who are expecting Suzuki to speed things up in Shenmue 3 are going to be disappointed, I think. He has explicitly stated that he's resisting the urge to pick up the pace in case there is no 4, because it just wouldn't be Shenmue anymore.
Calm down dude.
I'm not trying to suggest that the pacing was a mistake, or even a bad thing, but that it was a potential direction that open world gaming could have, but ultimately didn't, follow. In a world where we've had roughly 15 years of open world games copying the GTA III mould, it can be hard to appreciate that there was a time when that mould didn't exist, and the future of open world games hadn't been decided yet.
The gaming world is littered with ideas that we sneer and laugh at now, but a lot of times, it's that hindsight isn't kind to them in the face of trends swerving in a different direction. So the trend in open world games is to sacrifice verisimilitude in favour of convenience. Again, I'm not saying this is bad or good or right or wrong or whatever, but it is the direction things have gone in for the mostpart. And when something catches on, people have a tendency to assume that it was only natural that it caught on. And since a game like Shenmue is at odds with this trend, that makes a lot of its design decisions appear to be mistakes in hindsight.
The important thing to remember is that there's a difference between appreciating the context of when this game came out, and nostalgia. People need to keep in mind that this game really was released during a transitional period in gaming, and that appreciating the context of when it came out doesn't mean "lowering your standards," it means remembering that a lot of the design decisions we take for granted nowadays were not set in stone.
I don't like Shenmue, but I admire and respect the hell out of it. Even if I don't share the same love for this series as other people, I think it's completely unfair to dismiss their passion as being solely the result of nostalgia, because there's so much more to it than that.
I never played it back in the day, but it seems like it wasn't so much "good for its time" as it was important for its time.
We live in an age where people have generally solved the major design issues involved in making open world games. It can be hard to think back to a time before that was the case. Prior to GTA III, the rules of how you make a 3D open world game were not quite as well-defined, and making a small, obsessively detailed world that recreates all the boring mundanities of real life seemed just as viable a future for video games as anything else.
And it's something that would have impressed people at the time as well. That kind of attention to detail felt like the future at the time. All of the manually dialling phones, or looking in drawers, or waiting for shops to open would have made that world feel more believable. This was at a time before everyone realized that all those little things were choking the games pacing.
I don't think Shenmue is a game to be enjoyed nowadays, so much as a game to be appreciated and respected for what it tried to do.
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