I found the 1st one to be a bit of a chore, as amazing as it was. The 2nd one basically fixed everything wrong with the 1st one and pretty much blew my mind. I played the last 7 hours or so in one marathon stretch, which isn't like me at all.
I bought the EU DC one from EB for $40 when it first came out, emailed myself my save file, manually hex edited it, and emailed it back to myself so that it would transfer to the different region of game. If I were to play through this again I'd probably just buy an EU copy of Shenmue 1 to make it easier.