Have you even played Sonic Adventure 2? That does have real depth. Took me and my son two months to finish with very challenging and fun levels.
Ridge Racer - how can you compare a racing game to RPGs and action titles I've listed? Compare apples to apples. Your argument is illogical. I'm done with this thread.
I didn't really feel than Sonic transitioned well from 2D to 3D, and am in the camp feeling it still hasn't recovered, I wasn't even convinced by the later (non MD) 2D games if I'm honest.
Mario worked better as a 3D game because it required more calculated movements, Sonic's appeal was more 'speed' and in 3D there's just too much to take in if you try and do things fast, OR you end up turning half of the gameplay into 'set plays' rather than things you can play (loops that you have no real control over etc.) Sonic Adventure 2 I seem to remember is the one that felt more like Pokemon at times?
Shenmue was a fine technical achievement, visually mindblowing, but as a game, boring, stiff, difficult to relate to, held together with unwanted (at least for me QTE sequences) and what really amounted to a lot of dull mini-games. That said I think it was probably the closest the system came to a real killer title, it was more in the template of things to come, but maybe the theme / setting / pace of it limited the audience.
PSO was online, the only people online had dialup, there weren't many of them, it was too ahead of it's time, which was just as bad as being behind the times.
The other RPGs, while competent games are both a bit too cutsey Japanese.
Soul Calibur, yeah, good game, still an arcade port tho, and fighting games always have quite a specific audience, even people who like fighting games tend to be picky over which ones, and for anybody else it's just button mashing and therefore doesn't feel deep at all (you could complete the single player game by doing nothing but that)
Sony by that point had MGS, I don't think the DC had a real answer to that.
Sony also had Fifa and Pro Evolution Soccer, the 2 'big name' football games, those, at least in the UK market, are enough to make or break a system on their own, the football games the DC had were again shallow arcade ports (Virtua Soccer) or also-ran games which really didn't play well (UEFA titles etc.) That was probably the #1 reason the Playstation came back out at first.
The Playstation also had other solid 'mascots' such as Spyro, Crash etc. while Sega were still struggling for one, as they were on the Saturn.
The market was flooded with arcade ports, if anything it reminded me of all the stories about how the market crashed in the 80s because the software quality wasn't good enough, people spending a lot of money on a disappointing product. Mr Driller was often touted as a really good game, but, the original ran on Playstation hardware in the arcades, it's a 2D game, the DC version didn't really bring anything more.. Mars Matrix, a 16-bit arcade title, sold as a full price new game...
There was a single DC game I remember kept people hooked, Metropolis Street Racer, and even then the game was ridiculously buggy.
All SWT would have done is further add to the flood of arcade ports, and while I'm not denying that there were DC games with depth there were an awful lot without (and then you had the ones that SEEMED to have depth, but were really just novelty items that grew stale quickly too, Seaman for example)