I’m sorry, but the title of the video is the very definition of clickbait.
Aside from being bummed out that someone I know to have been a big fan of the series hated the game so much, I take no issues with him disliking the game and share many of his opinions when it comes to some of the more poorly crafted areas of it, but there were times where his critique seemed incredibly disingenuous.
Take for example his explanation of leaving Shenhua’s house every morning. His video strongly implies that walking into the raised area of the house which triggers the cutscene of Ryo taking off his shoes is something that is very easy to do by mistake and yet in three playthroughs, I don’t recall ever walking up there by mistake (nor do I recall anybody else ever mentioning this).
I can see how somebody might do it once by mistake, but unless somebody has hooves for hands, it would be a very difficult mistake to make twice.
Furthermore, as a big Shenmue fan who played through the game twice, I’d be very surprised if he didn’t engage in conversation with Shenhua enough to have altered the morning routine and yet he chooses to replay the same clip repeatedly so as to suggest there is no variation whatsoever.
I do think that the team could have added a bit more variety in this regard, but hiding what little variety there was from viewers seemed like a deliberate attempt to make the game look worse than it is.
Then there’s his critique of cutscenes, which implies that the weird dips to black are present throughout the entire game rather than something which occurs only in the first five minutes.
I really could go on a lot longer, because pretty much all of his criticisms, whilst grounded in some truth, ended up being exaggerated or misleadingly presented.
As I said, there’s plenty to criticize when it comes to Shenmue 3 and I’m not going to argue with anybody for doing so (as I probably agree with them), but this video felt like a very deliberate attempt to make the game appear worse than it is for the sake of getting a few extra clicks and suiting his ‘Yu Suzuki done a bad game’ narrative.