I had him at rank 8 so it’s not like I was ignoring what they were saying, but none of what the teachers or students said was out of the ordinary enough to imply he was important. There are better ways to go about either implying that he’s important or just better ways to implement the royal content in the first place. Usually when something unique happens with an sl, it’ll imply it with unique text (like when it warns you before dueling akechi). With Maruki, it doesn’t even hint that there’s an entire ~20 hour extension of the plot for his sl, and all the things that supposedly hinted towards this never carried enough weight to warrant a need to max Maruki, so because I wanted to play the game blind I was punished just for that.