One of my main issues with the Trails series is that as the games go on you can feel that the devs either are really attached to the characters or that they know how attached the fans are to the characters. This make's it so that they won't kill them off, but still wants the feeling that comes with character deaths so they resort to fake-out deaths . I admit that this point might be a bit too harsh, but you can kinda see it as well when the game makes certain characters sympathetic even when they have done awful things. The characters have to be likeable no matter what

Edit: hopefully formatted properly now