This was my first time ever playing a Shenmue game, so my review is free from nostalgia.
You need to approach these as adventure games first and foremost. These are very slow games, but I really enjoyed the story. Slow-paced and understated stories are things still we get very little of in gaming, so it feels fresh even today, as long as you have the patience for it. Much of the games involve just traveling from place to place, observing your surroundings and checking street maps to find out where buildings are located, and pressing one button to have long conversations that you unfortunately have absolutely no input in. At times you will probably find yourself wanting to check a walkthrough too, and I would advise not holding back and just doing that sometimes. There is some combat, which is more intricate than it seems at face value, but clunky. Most fighting is portrayed through quick time events though. Press buttons at the right moments to watch this cutscene, and if you fail, watch the cutscene again and press the buttons correctly this time. Throughout your journey you'll need to put up with the seriously shitty tank controls and some unavoidable tedium.
So most of this doesn't sound very good the way I'm describing it, but the games make up for this somewhat by being highly interactive. All the NPCs can be talked to and have their own schedules, lives, and purposes, and almost every building can be entered. You can interact with so many objects in the game world, open cupboards, turn lights on and off, buy random items from shops, and a lot of this isn't there for any particular reason except to add to the immersion. I didn't realise how interactive the world actually was until I learned to press the left trigger to focus in on specific objects. I'm not sure if I missed the instruction, or the game just didn't teach me it, but once you do this you'll see just how much effort was put into this aspect, and at times it can be fascinating. I love the design of the world too. It's small (by today's standards) but intimate and highly detailed, which I prefer so much to a large meaningless open world; and the weather system is really impressive for its age. Shenmue really gives you the feeling, at least at first, that anything is possible.
It's very easy to see why these games were so impressive back in the day, but there isn't really much to do to actually pass the time. The games run on a 24 hour cycle, businesses open and close at certain hours, and scripted events can only happen at specific moments. This quickly gets very annoying when you're forced to wait around for something to happen. You can go and buy a soda for no reason, collect Gachas for no reason, feed a cat for no reason, try some awkward pool shots, or go and gamble all your money away... All of which can be amusing for a moment, but there's not much that's actually engaging to do. I did spend a lot of time playing Sega's "Hang On" in the in-game arcade, which is great, but has the unfortunate side effect of reminding me it's more fun than Shenmue. Once I ran out of things to do to pass the time, I started alt-tabbing out of the game and let the time pass while I browsed websites. That's not good.
It's not a great port. I can forgive the 30fps lock, because it's an old game that wasn't designed with higher framerates in mind, but cutscenes are stuck in 4:3 in Shenmue 1, and letterboxed 4:3 in Shenmue 2 (which is fucking painful, why didn't they just zoom it in?) Menus are a convoluted mess, but this is something a lot of Japanese games still have issues with today. I also had some sound problems. Popping/crackling, and a bug where the sound stopped working completely and was replaced by a harsh noise I can only describe as a shrill car horn, that wouldn't stop until I restarted the game. On the positive side, the addition of supersampling is a nice feature, as it always makes the geometry in old games look a lot more pleasing and improves the clarity of distant details.
I stopped playing Shenmue 1 after I reached a point where it wanted me to work a forklift job for 6 days straight. Yeah, sorry game, I'm not doing that. I didn't play very much of Shenmue 2, because I was worn out and just gave up. I mostly just tested that one, so I can only really comment on the port. I obviously didn't enjoy Shenmue very much, but I'm glad I had the experience. Maybe I would have loved it if I'd played it in 2000, but it's hard to say. It's an incredibly niche game, and I don't think I'm really part of that niche, but in a way Shenmue is a bit like traveling to another country. It was an interesting trip and I learned some things, but now it's over I'm glad to be back to the comfort and familiarity of home. As far as I can tell, the Yakuza series does everything Shenmue does, but better, so I'm looking forward to playing those.