Yeah, personally, it didn't bother me at all to have to progress the story at least at Yu's pace. That pace was actually faster than I was willing to go most of the time (as evidenced by my playtime being such an extreme outlier), bu~t
Sload Soap wrote:I do feel somewhat vindicated that really Suzuki doesn't know how to pace a story in a videogame and yes we could have had this wrapped up with better decision making.
I don't believe this to be true, and that's mainly because Shenmue games aren't just a linear progression of story elements, they're inexorably tied to very diverse locations, and characters. Shenmue III would have potentially needed to cover six or seven different areas in order to reach a true conclusion. If there had just been no side activities, or greater world to explore, that's probably an option, but as an open world experience, that's just not feasible on the relatively shoestring budget they had. So I would absolutely agree that the actual story that was meant to take place in Choubu was just too spartan for an area of its size. I don't see a way that anything would have been wrapped up with the same sort of scope, though. I do wish the story bits between leaving Bailu, and the final stanza of the game had been augmented a little more to keep the momentum building, but without spoiling anything, once you get to the final part of the game, you'll see a lot of what they did add in. I don't think you'll be happy at all with the ending, but I do think that you'll come away from it wishing that more of that level of action had been worked into more parts of Choubu.
I'm pretty surprised you were able to pick out En from the wall of photos before the story directed you there. I didn't notice him at all when just looking at all the photos on my own (although I was kind of upset that so many of them were just photos of characters from Bailu). Even later on, when the story directs you to the wall of photos, I just directed Ryo over one that happened to be the right one, and he automatically saw him. In my case, Ryo was way more observant than I was.
