I agree with orient. In my opinion Shenmue III have many design choices similar to Shenmue I and II.
In the first game we are forced to work in the forklift job, like orient said we can see the Mad Angels hideout since the first day in the harbor, i don't see a lot of Shenmue fans complaining about these type of things in the first game, many Shenmue Fans think the first game is a masterpiece.
In Shenmue II we have many paywalls, 500HK dollars that Ryo need to give Ren because of Yuanda Zhu, and the other paywalls is 500HK dollars to enter in the 3 main street fighting, to fight with Rod, Greg and Chunyan. In the case of these fights if we win the fight we get a lot of money, but if we lose the fights we lose a lot of money, it is important to save before this fights, to prepare about these things.
I had to do this to not lose money, as far as i remember in the Dreamcast version is harder to prepare for these fights, i say that because in the Dreamcast version you can't save anywhere like in the PS4 version, i don't see many Shenmue fans complaining about these things.
In Shenmue III we have 2 paywalls, i see some Shenmue fans hating these 2 paywalls, but i don't see people hating the paywalls in Shenmue II.
People can dislike Shenmue III as much as they want, I just don't agree with this type of criticism, because as I said at the beginning of my post, Shenmue III has a lot of design choices similar to Shenmue I and II, i love Shenmue I and II so i didn't mind to see similar design choices in Shenmue III, these design choices don't bother me in a extreme way,
One of the reasons i love Shenmue III is because Shenmue III is similar to the first game in many ways, i love the Shenmue style.