The fact that the voice acting is so bad despite bringing aboard a bunch of talented new big name voice actors leads me to genuinely believe that they were told to purposely make the voice acting sound bad so that it would feel like the other two games.
Shenmue 1 crawled on all fours so that Yakuza could walk Shenmue 2 stumbled around in a dark room so that Yakuza could run Shenmue 3 took 19 years and then fell down, dragged himself through the mud trying to get back up but then decided to stay there... At this point Yakuza was flippin' soaring the sky