This is a good story. Even with the score bumped up to 7.8 and higher than what he intended to give the game, he still got hate mail from crazy people. Rounding up from the 6.8 he originally gave, I think a 7/10 is a fair score to the first Shenmue.
It's an interesting story, I'll give it that, though I think it just kinda exemplifies just how divisive the game was and continues to be:
Published by Sega for the Dreamcast, Shenmue was an audio-visual feast that haphazardly combined a number of genres into what I found to be a plodding, tedious mess that failed to satisfy the #1 rule of video games: they have to be fun, or captivate. To me, Shenmue wasn't fun, and it sure as heck didn't captivate.
See I felt then, and still feel just the opposite. Shenmue captivated me, and clearly loads of others from the second I popped it in to my console. It wasn't the graphics, or at least it wasn't just the graphics, it was the ambition, the living world, the fact that you were basically living another life in a game. It forces you to be patient by its nature, and tells its character journey by making you LIVE the character. In many ways it's similar to what games like Paper's Please tried to do many years later. The mundane is important, the pace is deliberate, and the world doesn't go out of its way to accommodate the player.
Other stuff from the article:
My take on Shenmue was that it emphasized style over substance, which is fine for a "pick up and play" type of game, but not for a game that takes hours to complete and forces players to wait around for time-triggered events to happen. Granted, the game was jaw-droppingly gorgeous, to the extent that sometimes I'd pass the time just staring at some of the garden and temple areas on the outskirts of the city.
This seems weird to me, and I have heard it elsewhere, the STYLE of Shenmue was in many ways rather bland, it takes place in a Japanese town going through an economic downturn, where the only vibrant part of the economy is sailors and foreigners hitting the bars when they are off work. The whole game is a drab melancholy grey, and that is deliberate, especially when you contrast it to Shenmue 2.
It wasn't the end. Nasty e-mails started appearing in my own personal mailbox. On AIM, Jeff and Ryan were telling me that Sega's PR people were absolutely livid at the tone of the review and the score. Half of the in-house editors felt I came down overly harsh. The other half told me I wasn't harsh enough.
I thought this line was especially pertinent. Even then there was a split in what the editors thought. Chances are, Jeff wanted him to be even more harsh. I love the GB guys but it's clear that none of them really got the game. Which I find odd, because they will praise the shit out of odd boring indie titles at times for doing cool stuff... but I digress.
As for an HD remaster. Honestly all that needs to be done is to insert the mini-map from Shenmue 2 into Shenmue 1, add analog movement into Shenmue 1, add a wait feature into Shenmue 1, add analog camera control and movement, and finally, add a timer for QTEs so you know how long you have. Those QoL features would be huge, and not really compromise the games at all.
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