Well I mean, it's a fairly ambitious 3D openworld game that killed a game company.Maybe if it had come together. Ultima IX was buggy and bad and effectively killed the whole damn franchise (still bitter about that).
You can argue that Shemnue is like that too...
Still though while groundbreaking at the time, I don't really get the whole influential part of Shenmue when I don't think there's that many games out there that use what Shenmue did in any way.
You have absolutely how much I love the SaGa games but I would have a really hard time explaining how influential it was for gaming in general despite it being really influential to me.