I don't think Shenmue is open world. You cannot drive. You cannot fight any time you want because it is embued solely on the narrative (again). I think if you're comparing GTA to Shenmue for instance, that's pretty fucking stupid. What I get from GTA, I don't get from Shenmue and vice versa. I file Shenmue under adventure game. In Shenmue 1, all the characters have names, a story, a daily schedule, a place of residence, and many of them have story arcs. Shenmue's inclusion of holidays also helps it feel like a realized world. In GTA and other open world titles, npcs are blank slates you don't you care about as you run over them.
Saying open world games have improved on Shenmue is not only hilariously wrong, it is patently false. You cannot even talk to npcs in a modern open world games. Again, because Shenmue is not an open world game.
If Shenmue took cues from Yakuza, it'd be a fight fest. No thank you.
The fact that games continue to try to be big story epics without taking a look at what Shenmue did is what makes it unforgivable. So many games today want you to take their stories seriously, but you can't, because you're always on a journey to kill. Let's take Tomb Raider for instance. Lara goes from mewling little archaeologist to a murderer in just a few minutes. It isn't realistic. There is about maybe one - maybe two - fight on Shenmue 1's first disc, and it's towards the end of it. Ryo's on a quest for revenge, but he doesn't go beating people up automatically. If Tomb Raider were Shenmue, you wouldn't be able to kill or get into a fight until almost halfway through the game and when you did, it would be a major event. In Shenmue II, Ryo goes from guy from small town to a fish out of a water, and he's completely overwhelmed by the amount of people he fights. You lose. A LOT. In Tomb Raider, you kill an entire island of dudes. Ryo couldn't possibly do that. And this is why Shenmue fans love it so much. It's one of the few games that contains action and yet doesn't betray its narrative. Because Shenmue has BALLS, and we have learned to not make high budget games with low action and really slow burns, because they don't sell as well.
The fact that gamers cannot handle any type of slow narrative device - whether it's Shenmue or Yakuza 3's Okinawa sections - shows a tremendous lack of something from gamers and why games will probably never be relevant mediums for telling a story.