Technophilz wrote: Shenmue and Shenmue 2 are two of the most innovative games ever made, and they still have extra special place in the hearts of almost everyone who played them. That alone makes them eligible to way better treatment than the one they recently have had so far.
I am aware of the low-price tag, the limited development budget, and the joy and excitement of walking into a game store to buy a brand-new Shenmue game off the display shelf. But allow me to ask you this simple question: what are you going out of that game store with? It isn’t a remake, not a remaster and not even a direct port. It indeed has, first and foremost, an identity crisis. so I’d simply call it: a lazy port.
When I take a look at recent (and even last-gen) HD remasters, I feel how lazy and probably rushed this port really is. I can understand and forgive the 30fps, but everything else is totally unforgiven: compressed audio, a mix of 4:3 and 16:9, no reworked models, poor looking textures, missing Passport/VMU content, saves not compatible with Shenmue 3, Denuvo etc …
When I started to read your post I fully expected to disagree with you, but I don't think you're being irrational. I just don't believe that it was realistic to expect Sega to fund a top-down remaster to make all of those extra things possible. I don't think anyone (including the people that frequent this site) would've anticipated the re-release completely taking off the way that it has. I don't think Sega was being lazy per se, I just think they simply dedicated the amount of resources that they believed were warranted for the project.
It's hard for us to be objective about something that we're all so passionate about, but based strictly off past sales figures, Shenmue probably didn't warrant the kind of remaster you were looking for (even with the success of the KS for Shenmue III). If Sega had known how crazy the hype would actually end up being, perhaps they would've devoted more resources to it, but for me, I'm just happy that it exists! I think that the re-release will definitely captivate a new audience of gamers despite the issues that it may have. There's a much more diverse and patient audience of gamers than there was back in '99, and Shenmue's pace isn't as radical in the year 2018 as it might have seemed back then.