drunkensailor wrote: I know from german and dutch major magazines rating the game a 7.5 and you guys seem to completely miss my point about consumers rating the game much lower back in the day. the game got a ton of hatred from gamers, who simply were not ready. just like people were not ready for blade runner in 1982 and blade runner 2049 in 2017. shenmue is now almost universally loved but that was not the case at all when shenmue 1 got released.
Interesting. Well, the difficulty lies in the fact that it's near-impossible to find out, today, whether or not the game was met with backlash from consumers at the time. Sure, we may be able to roam old forums and websites, but there were nowhere near as many people using the internet to talk about games at the time, as there are today. Thus, the majority of those people at the time would only really talk about a game on the internet if they really didn't like it, or if they really loved it. Therefore, one can only trust their subjective experiences on this, which isn't the best indicator.
I am a bit young to have played Shenmue upon release, so I understand your point about people not being ready for Shenmue (I ended up loving it without nostalgia). However, with that being said, most of what I have heard from people, predominantly in the UK and US, is that they really enjoyed it at release. I got the feeling that it was completely normal for people to like the game because those who say they hated it at release, say it in such a way as though they were the minority and didn't get what other people were fussed about.
To maybe back up your argument though, some of the reasons why people enjoyed Shenmue upon release are different to the reasons why they enjoy it today. The graphics, open world, combat, QTEs and voiced NPS were all very advanced for the time. Today, us fans care more about the immersion and soundtrack because the other factors are more common nowadays. So, I think that whilst they may not have been fully ready for Shenmue as you said, they still enjoyed it for different reasons.
Everyone has very different personal experiences of how Shenmue did at release for consumers, based on friend groups, geographical location and simply luck that the people around them are into slower games; for all you know that hatred for the game was more exclusive to Germany and the Netherlands, rather than the US and UK.