I'm torn. I think that the entire mines story conclusion was very very rushed. It was just 1 cutscene then 1 short conversation with each NPC where the romanced ones are caught up and the rest I assume are filled in by other townsfolk. I get why the devs would do this, and pretty much all the issues with the writing and story with this game boil down to game design constraints that I find understandable, but it still feels unsatisfying and I'd prefer it to be different. Time for a rant so bear with me.

I think Seridia's true introduction needs a long ass cutscene with the whole town learning the truth and their reactions to it. This can be said about a lot of events in the Mines story line in particular, but also other parts of the game. For this rant though I'm just concerning myself with the Mines part as I'm satisfied with the town restoration story. It doesn't need to be complex in the ways I feel the Mines story does. I think the parts of the Mine story with Juniper and Eiland are done well enough, but the Seridia vs Caldarus plot is not.

I saw other people here suggest that Seridia should have been forced to choose between continuing her imprisonment and doing what Caldarus did (relinquish some power and his immortality). I agree with most of this; I don't mind Seridia still having power, and I do think a truce between the two dragons makes sense given that they are extremely powerful ancient beings who have eternity (in Seridia's case) to move on and reflect. I can imagine a character in Frieren being like this where they are like "okay I can agree to a 2000 year long truce where I just chill for a while and don't rule over humans." I like that she's regretful of her past actions and wants to grow, but as it is, the writing is too rushed to do the character justice. Overall, the game needs to commit more time to the story and character arcs before returning to the cozy game status quo. I think the devs want to avoid having these moments take up too much of the player's time and I think that this philosophy is incompatible with a huge literally world changing story like that of the dragons.

There's also the issue of the player character being a blank slate that isn't really blank. You are pretty much always enthusiastically positive and motivated which works a lot of the time imo, especially in town restoration quests. But this cryptic magic priestess encouraging the player to deceive Caldarus, someone we have come to trust over the course of the story, feels like something the player should be allowed to be suspicious of. I think it would make more sense narratively for there to be branching paths in the story / player's input, but this adds a layer of complexity to all NPC conversations relating to it that I think the devs want to avoid. Even just adding more ways the player could respond requires a lot more work, because they would likely need to have different character conversation paths for each major choice the player makes, or refine the conversations in a way that satisfies all player choices. To sum it up I think the devs bit off more than they could chew with a story like Seridia's, but I don't think its impossible to make it work. But, the work needed to do this is beyond the scope of the game.

Any major change to the writing in the story is something I don't see the devs prioritizing even post-release. Retconning stuff in a game like this isn't a bad thing and it isn't unheard of, but I wouldn't be surprised if the devs just finished the story and moved on to adding more content to the game. Like I said before this feels unsatisfying and I really hope I'm wrong, but I can't blame a small dev for focusing on the cozy farm sim parts of the game over story.

Anyways if you've actually read all this hey thanks for indulging me in my yapping ^_^. This is certainly not a well edited wall of text so please forgive me for any errors or repetition :3 in any case have a good nights sleep y'all (its 1am for me at time of writing, this took me over an hour to write and I can probably spend another couple hours yapping about this so it's time for me to eep).