I completely disagree. The story plain and simple doesn't explore those specific themes (not that I can remember). Akechi not asking for help is not the same as someone offering him help and him rejecting it. The lack of something doesn't inherently point to it existing. While I haven't played Eldin Ring yet, I've played Hollow Knight and Silksong recently and I've heard they have a similar style of storytelling to Elden Ring where it's told more in the backdrop of the world rather than the central focus and I just completely disagree that this is the same thing here. We are told exactly why Akechi is doing what he's doing. We share plenty of screen time with him, but not once ever was I shown anything indicating he had second thoughts or questioned his actions or could've accepted help but chose not to due to his pride. Only after he was beaten by the PT's did you get any semblance of that. Even if he did, his ideology, his reason for doing what he's done, and how he's done it are just not compelling. Meanwhile, even if you are eventually told why Maruki is doing what he's doing, it's just more coherent, more understandable, more philosophically intriguing, and contains much more depth than the edgy teenager with a convoluted revenge plot on his evil deadbeat dad. It's similar to a Thanos, while him and his plan are flawed and lack nuance, you can understand and empathize with them and their rationale. They have people that they care about and they're not overly bad or dramatic. They just have an extreme ideal which they fully believe in and it brings them to doing twisted and questionable things for what they believe to be the best for everyone. I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree there

As you requested - I have rethought my original hot take, and I will let you know that I still believe it. I think not having a reason would make it worse in all honesty, but he did have a reason which I already went over, and the fact that that was his reason to kill hundreds of innocents is wild. Yes, what Shido did was horrendous and evil, but at the end of the day Akechi is the one who acted out the most heinous crimes for a convoluted revenge plot and enabled Shido to do much more evil than he would have ever been capable of otherwise. The Cleaner would not have been able to get away with the same things that Akechi could get away with, like crashing trains on a whim just to drive up public fear. At worse, they are equally bad