Bit of a rant here, it ended up longer than I expected when I started typing the post.
Just finished Lighter's mini event before time ran out on the limited time rewards. Man they did him dirty. His promo video showed a whole tease of a story with his old pre-Calydon friends and made it look like it was going to be a bittersweet tale of his past mixed in with where he's at now. Instead we got "so I walked in and started punching" 10x and then a quick epilogue where he talks briefly about his past while displaying a .jpg of him without a shirt on.
I thought Yanagi's mini story event also wasn't great for character development, but at least she got some dynamic story bits. Lighter's was all just punch punch punch punch. The sidescrolling beat'em up stuff was fun for a fight or two, but it kinda overstayed its welcome.
They really need to step up these character story quests a bit. The launch ones were better than the last few I've played, and you mostly don't learn anything new about the characters that you didn't already know going in. They seem to bury the interesting lore under random events and their promo vids. I learned about Yanagi through one of those random daily bond events that she wears glasses because she had surgery on her eyes to allow her to see things that normal humans can't (Miyabi's sword strikes as an example). This causes her to occasionally go blind for an hour or so where she just stands in place and panics but doesn't tell anyone that it's happening. Like where was that in her character story? What about when she found Soukaku and "adopted" her from the oni thirens.
I think ZZZ a lot of the time focuses on the wrong things, and maybe that's why the game is struggling a bit. I like the combat as much as the next guy, but you need high quality content that isn't combat to even things out and prevent burnout. The lore is already created and pretty interesting, but instead of giving us a nice voiced story quest, they just throw us in one of the same 10 arenas with two of the same 10 minibosses and pump the HP up to 11.
Same goes for the main story. We've barely done anything since the start of the game besides run errands and take misc proxy jobs for events and shit. The 'main' plot only got one nudge forward when we found out about the siblings' origins from that brief talk with Miyabi at the fence. Fairy pretty much took over for them anyways from a lore standpoint, so we're not even seeing what the siblings are truly capable of anymore. They just "Fairy, you take care of it" their way out of bad situations. That's why I think cutting too much TV mode out is really bad for the game. That was the siblings' mode where they can actually contribute to the game in some way, when you take control of Eous and do the puzzles/guiding of the agents. After that's gone, what is the fucking point of Belle/Wise?
I know they've been working on changing the gameplay systems quite a bit and adding a lot of QoL/player requested features for 1.4, but I hope their vision of the game expands past what it currently is once they get the base game sorted out.
