Reprise wrote: I don't understand the sense in not zooming in and cropping the black bars off Shenmue 2's cutscenes. It's going to be incredibly jarring.
I saw someone else make a good point - while cutscenes in general in Shenmue II are in 16:9, in some instances the black bars pull away for a QTE in "full" 4:3.
While you could have the left/right bars slide in for the QTE, you're also going to have to zoom the image out to match, which'll look a little awkward, or otherwise face all the same problems you have by not having the bars.
The only options really are do the letterboxing as they did, or rework QTEs to run at 16:9 (which is more effort than they're willing to go through for this port).