Fidus achates, how could you insult this flawless masterpiece? Nevermind, I'm not Margulis. Xeno has always been a clusterffffoffffstars. If you mean character development and how they choose to steer the story, I agree, especially when events are drawing to a close. Don't know how much Chronicles will be the same. These three are in my waiting line.
But we don't need to deny lengths gone for detail and world-building before we can complain about storytelling. I can say the stars are beautiful even when the people sitting under them decide to make no sense.
Heh, I suppose that last bit of sophistry isn't exactly disagreeable. But as I keep saying to the Enelcordians and the like that tell me to 'pack up' because the end of Saga III is over
17 years old (...oof, where did that time go?) - the regrets that Takahashi has learned from are still relevant to his works today. And I don't have to have the nostrils of a bloodhound to smell goalpost-moving when the very thing he's 'written off as a failure' is starting to seep back into his works in a bizarrely non-committal way. Something is telling me he didn't want to make some of the decisions that he's forced to commit to.
As for Saga and it's characters, there's a set of terms I... compiled, shall we say? Along the lines of 'Agency and Accountability', and how the two have a little but of each other in how they overlap and contrast (a bit like yin and yang, in a sense). If we take Shion as an example (of who I have a laborious amount of detail on in my script, but the documents are back at home, so don't expect me to cite anything yet) - I think in the first two games, her balance of these concepts were well handled (her workaholism always coming to the front of my mind as part of her agency, and calling out the powers that be in various scenarios playing into her sense of accountability (and I'm aware of the whole 'mental illness' talks, and I've spoken at length about that in the script, so I won't open that can of worms here)). However in III, the narrative almost strawman's how much she takes responsibility for other people's bullsh*t - so when it comes to what I simply refer to as 'the retcon' (/ the 'Gnosis summoning dis-qualifier'), her agency is effectively thrown out the window for the sake of the plot, at a point in the story that is already bending over backwards to tell lies about 'her past' (as I've said to several, there is seldom any distinction between the events that the likes of the Saga III database try to describe (already a collection of discredited articles due to matters of the Y-data, the Testaments and... Jin being classed as one, for some reason?) - and actual temporal manipulation due to how the U.M.N is described).
This reply has gone on longer than I earnestly intended, so I hope I've given you all something to chew on. It's also why I've had concerns about how the
reasoning for Blade scaling post-FR, despite being involved in discussions of revisions described thusly. I think a lot of this can be categorised as one thing, and one thing alone:
Plot-Induced Stupidity. It's why I've ordained to contest stuff like 'Matthew being in possession of Pneuma's core crystal' despite consistent character actions implying that Rex would leave the Aegis girls in the hands of the Trinity Processor and
not to the city folk (even knowing Matthew/Na'el's Agnian ancestry, how would he know of these two specifically?) - this being something I plan to write an article about at some point, and is something I've been thinking about since
@JoshSSJGod and I talked about it, and he left it at 'we don't know how the CC got there, but-'. And I want to make it clear that this is not grounds for a nerf (mostly on a count of the scaling chains being so open-ended, that Matthew ending up with or without Pneuma's power wouldn't change his standing). So, uh... stay tuned?