Impeccable presentation. The music, cutscenes, and locales are all excellent. There is SEGA essence oozing throughout this whole thing.

The gameplay... was just a damn slog. I don't like fighting games so that core gameplay wasn't really for me... but the adventure piece basically boils down to talking to everyone randomly and investigating the cryptic writing Ryo puts in his notebook. There are also QTE's... which I think we've all decided are bad at this point. Sometimes you just have to wait around to go to bed, which is somewhat of an interesting idea in forcing a player to really "simulate" the world... but it is much more interesting than enjoyable.

In fact, that's a great summary of how I feel about Shenmue: "much more interesting than enjoyable".