Only if you exclude the backstory, humor and character interactions...you're basically talking about the straight up story, which is exactly why I was bringing up the difference between story and writing, or we just disagree. IMO the character interactions and backstories were great even if the story itself is mostly just stretching "we must fight because we must fight" into 5 chapters across 4 schools.
Can't agree Hebijo was terrible though I know some people don't like it due to the tonal shift. It's the only story where anything happens outside of the last chapter of crimson squad, though the ending spoils it since they basically pulled a "JUST KIDDING". It was interesting to see "evil shinobi" almost actually be evil for a brief time. Hopefully they've given up on the "evil shinobi" stuff after two full games of awkwardly explaining actually there's no relevant difference. Best I can tell Estival forgoes that entirely, but it also seems entirely outside the standard storyline.
Not at all.
Neither Gessen nor Hebijo have a team dynamic to speak of. There's no reason at all to believe that the Gessen girls are the family the plot tell us about. Yumi spends all of their shared screen time barking orders and doing whatever the hell she pleases, dragging the rest of them with her. The only characters that receive some development are Murakumo and Shiki.
Character-wise, Yumi is walking cliche with nothing to make her stand out between other characters from the same archetype. Yozakura is totally inconsequential in story and her character can be summed as simple waifubait. Minori has an interesting background to explore but it goes nowhere. Shiki is by far the best developed character on the Gessen side but even then, her importance is minimal. Murakumo's gimmick gets irritating pretty fast and her backstory is a poor attempt of combining Yomi's and Ikaruga's into one with Kumo's dynamic to those two being really forced and filled with plot holes.
Hebijo's story is terrible because things happen just because. We're led to believe that Miyabi's motivations are one for the bulk of the story just to suddenly change on the final chapter. There's simply not logic or sequence to their actions other than "look how badass we are by killing the other characters" And what is worse, their ending is just incoherent with the plot itself.
Imu as character is pretty one-note (on Versus at least) and her actions at the end are a massive asspull.
Murasaki is the best Hebijo if only because they developed her issues but even then, she's quite irritating at times.
The twins are just horrible characters. Ryoubi is an uredeemable character that doesn't grow at all through the story and just lashes at everyone who interacts with her, Ryouna has some redeeming qualities but sadly her entire character is overwhelmed by the masochist BS
And really, if you seriously believed that Burst's story was setting a real conflict between good and evil faction you misread it completely.