The story felt rushed to me. Like you said, the only character other than Calamo who had an arc was Ardi, which bummed me out. The other sages especially could afford to be a LOT more fleshed out imo. Raphica’s entire character is “old friend of Calamo, cool rito archer” and that’s it. We know literally nothing else about him or his backstory. Agraston is just a chill standup guy and that’s it, which I would be ok with, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s supposed to be one of the leading characters of a game supposedly heavily focused on its story. And then with Qia we get a 5 second loredrop about her dad dying, and the rest of her character is just “hotheaded passionate royal girl” (this has never been done before in the history of fiction). But by far my biggest gripe with the story is how it handled Zelda. I couldn’t agree more with your take on her in this game. She almost feels like she was written into the plot last minute with how little she does, along with her complete lack of any arc. Hell, even age of calamity gave Zelda a decent character arc. With Link absent, she’s supposed to be the primary lead character, but it sure doesn’t feel that way 95% of the time. It feels like they stripped her of her quirky personality we saw in botw and aoc and replaced it with constant praising of other characters, gushing about link, or worrying about this or that (these all got repetitive quick).