This whole saga about Jim Sterling and his opinion of Shenmue really highlights for me the reason why I stopped watching his videos and why I don't think he's a very good or interesting critic.
Shenmue is a game that set out to evoke, genre trappings aside, the day-to-day experiences of a high school aged young man in 1980's Yokosuka, Japan. The problem for Sterling, though, is not that Shenmue failed at what it set out to accomplish. Rather, the issue is that Shenmue succeeded, and that Jim Sterling does not value that in any way, shape, or form.
A movie or a book could deal with a similar approach to the same subject matter and be respected for it. However, a game, as Sterling would have it, can't do this sort of thing because it's not "fun" and it wastes too much of the player's time, whatever the hell either of those criticisms mean.
It is ultimately coming from the mindset of the consumer report. Sterling treats Shenmue not as a work of fiction but as a product that failed to function according to the arbitrary standards that he thinks all games ought to follow. Shenmue is a failure because it does not follow a narrow definition of what "fun" is and for finding meaning in daily tedium when it really should have been filled with wall to wall distractions.
This is a stifling mindset that serves to hold games back as a medium, placing limits on what games can do and what they can be about
