Shenmue's devs may have bitten off more than they could chew, but the game was still an astounding technological and conceptual achievement in its day. The sheer amount of things you can interact with, the huge number of NPCs each with their own routines and schedules, the weather and time of day system, the whole package was lightyears ahead of anything else around back in 1999.
Really shows the muscle under Dreamcast's hood too. Despite releasing earlier, it outperformed the PS2 in some ways. It's both fascinating and tragic to consider how its games might have looked if it had gotten a full 4-6 years on the market like the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox. For the brief time that it coexisted with PS2, it held its own remarkably well.
And I too am loving DF's recent retro videos, I hope they keep doing them, there's so many technically interesting games from before last gen.
