I will try to put them in order of importance:
The Good Elements Of Shenmue 3
- Existing (getting out of that damn cave
)
- Gorgeous environments
- Great amounts of wonderful music
- Sense of "presence" and travelling through some "alive" places
- Great character models (for main characters)
- Being based in China (super interesting setting not explored in many games/media)
- The night conversations with Shenhua
- The phone calls to previous characters
- Pretty good controls
- The herb collecting system
- Chobu-chan (and Bailu-chan DLC)
- The training minigames and sparring
- Street tournaments
- Whack-a-mole and Smart Ball
- The integration of Kickstarter references (with some exceptions)
The Bad Elements Of Shenmue 3
- Bad writing (the ideas are good but their execution is lacking)
- Scarce dialogue in the key events (Ren encounter, Ren and Shenhua meeting, Yuan conversation, etc.)
- Heavy underdevelopment of secondary characters
- Repetition of the same exact story pattern in both locations
- Out of tone elements and events in the ending scenario (pawnshop sidequest, comedic scenes, Kickstarter content)
- Out of place elements in Bailu (arcade, pawnshop, gambling, Lucky Hit)
- The stamina system goes against exploring
- QTE time windows are nearly impossible
- The first person focus and interacting controls (drawers and such) being too slow and requiring too many button presses.
- The UI for shopping/selling and inventory management is impractical.
- Scarcity of people in Niaowu streets.
- Weird fades to black
- Lack of tutorial for combat
- Ugly UI and main menu
- Reuse of some music tracks that were too attached to previous games key moments (Shenmue II intro, Fangmei theme).
- Inconsistency because of not reusing some other obvious music tracks (Chawan sign, Lucky hit, main menu)
- Bad implementation of music (no looping, random silent moments, some places having night variations while others don't).
Improvements You'd Make
- Correct most of the bad things I mentioned in the above section
- Drop the English language track, or even drop the full voicing of the game if that means getting a richer and denser script.
- HDR support to make those gorgeous scenarios even more pretty.