Spoiler I liked the parts that weren't in the games. Where the anime tries to cover what we've seen in the game it's clearly lacking because it's rushing through the story and not going into any real depth, leaving things just happening and then moving on ("Oh that guy who's been kicking my ass the last 12 times we met? Yeah I just finished him off in 30 seconds."). The Wude section was well-paced; we got a focus on Ryo's personal development alongside the story development (where the game treats them separately) and this massively improved the flow of things. We even got some cameos from Eileen and Izumi, although no Duck Racing unfortunately. The rest of it seems to have been a case of "well we need to get 100 hours of content into 5 hours of anime... also we're going to make a bunch of new stuff too" and it's just things happening as a result. I still don't know what the purpose was to making Mark, Goro, and Mai involved in the Terry showdown, it seemed like a change just for change's sake. Also, Shenmue III version of the cave scene, guess that retcon's staying.
Also never played the games, but the show definitely had its moments. I'd love to get a second season and after that play Shenmue 3. No kidding! Hong Kong altogether was great, everyone's an individual and goes through stuff. The problem is: I have not heard good things about the PC ports of Shenmue 1 & 2 and would rather play the original Dreamcast versions. Why can't Sega just make a Dreamcast Mini?
Because they're not going to put actual DC hardware in a DC mini, and DC emulation is still not perfect. Shenmue is one of the harder games to emulate correctly too; apparently you can get decent results with Reicast, but you can do better by taking the PC versions and using mods to fix the issues. (and buying a DC is still the best option)
Hopefully they'll do a more fleshed out version of Shenmue 3's story if there's a second series Spoiler and not just "Ryo gets ass kicked by thug, buys scroll, kicks thug's ass, then Ryo goes somewhere else, same thing happens".
The second season was basically greenlit, but the Warner/Discovery merger that is destroying tons of shows happened to Shenmue as well.
Yet the powers that be somehow believed this fusion would be a good thing... I wonder if any now regret it or feel any shame for everything they've lost and/or screwed over.
