Ran Dum

Purely from a writing perspective, the MSQ is bad, bordering on terrible it's juvenile in it's attempt to tell a story. Some people will still like it, there are many people that like Soap operas even though they are poorly written. One of the characters has over double the lines of the next nearest NPC. As many people have pointed out already the character is written poorly. That's not because she's loud and a bit of a meme character, alot of people will like or dislike that based on personal preference. No, she's poorly written because she goes through no journey and is still handed powerup and "rewards" (don't want to spoil things) which come accross as unearned to the player as she never struggles she never really does anything of impact alot of talking about love and friendship and then I win. The writers poor pacing is what causes this. They are happy to have lengthy cutscenes where just characters stand there and info dumb lore onto the player, telling the player about things instead of showing them with gameplay. Then when it comes to any of the emotional and developmental story beats, they will glase over it comepletely. I'm not sure if it was due to the graphics update eating up budget, so they didn't have the animators to spare for cutscenes, but close to 95% of all cutscenes in the game are literally static dialogue scenes. Cutscenes in a game from a narrative perspective should be surgical strikes short and precise. They should contain either action in almost all of them or there emphasis a particular emtional/developmental. Cutscenes shouldn't be used to monologue lore at a player, especially when they are constantly repeating the same plot point or even doing flashbacks to previous cuscenes that the player went through a couple hours ago. To give an example, in FF8 you beat the boss at the top of the satellite dish, the player is then chased through the town by a giant spider bot. You as the player are running from this thing, getting in fights trying to escape, you feel connected, there are 2 cutscenes, one when the player moves from one screen to the next the bot has a 4s cuscene smashing a car as it run, then another roughly 10s cutscene at the end when you jump onto your ship to get away. This is excellent use of cutscenes to highten the story but leaving the bulk of the actions to the players. If this was done by theses writers, there would be no gameplay section, you would leave the satellite tower, and the a cutscene of you running through the town would play and then end with you getting on the boat. Then once on the boat you would have 6 different 1m cutscenes where the character would speak about the escape 6 times to each character talking about the exact same plot points that have just been covered. Without the gameplay there's not really a game, you're watching a movie with extra steps, and it's a rather boring story where everyone stands still and monologues.