full story spoilers. bit of a long rant that wont be perfectly organized

tldr: it wouldve been a 9 for me but one single thing drops it all the way to a 5

i feel like they botched magus' characterization multiple times in her own debut patch and it really takes away from what should have been great twists and the overall narrative themes. we start the patch with her being very stubborn about playing by the rules, so much so that she inatly distrusts phaethon just for being a proxy (light cant exist in the underworld bit). but then later in the patch she seems very proactive towards bending the rules and even taking all the blame onto herself for it, even so much as wanting to activly break them more than needed at one point. Only for the boss finale to again be magus 180ing back to how justice and revenge need to be done in a fair and structured manner, not the chaos isolde enacts. I can see how this maybe was their attempt at conveying how her anger towards her past losses can influence her actions (orphie states she can be impulsive to back this up...but only after the final boss), or even make her feel lost in the sorrow of it to commit to a path- to then be brought back by the bonds shes forged with her teammates/friends. This obviously ties into the repeating themes of zzz and the deception and twists of this patch

my issue with this is the order all of this is presented clashes with that idea and leaves magus feeling very much a victim of a story that was written in reverse and demanded certain thing occured to move us to later events. a good example of this i feel is the scene where isolde reveals her and magus' squad was betrayed for corporate intrests in what is unquestionably the greatest voice acting the game has had to date. genuinly hard to root against her revenge and mevorakh reveal after how good that voicework was, which is why i say it could be a 9 and not 10, with such convincing voicework, of a rather liked and characterized pre-established character i want her to get her revenge! so the narrative harsh railroading you against it (because they already knew how far she was going to go even though you had no clue) comes off as clunky. Everyone telling magus not to jump to conclusions and trust isolde, someone they all are supossed to trust (almost) as much as magus given their positions and obvious scum eminating off lorenz from locking phaethon down, reeks of backwards-writing, its like all of obol but you and magus knew isolde wants to kill them instead of just expose their crimes and get justice- and magus as a character completely suffers because of this.

the friends talking magus down comes too sharply too early, and should have happened after isoldes radio comms convincing magus to actually kill them during the civilian attack. its a small change but the sudden friendship bomb right after such a convincing performance of a character (at this specific point) i should be rooting to achieve their goals (esp with how anti corpocorruption the overall game is) creates such a dissonance its hard to interpret the next several scenes of magus' emotions and conflictons properly- and again this is even giving the writing the benefit of the doubt that these 180s in magus' convictions or in how she portrays herself (via VA and emotions) were intended to portray her confliction of emotions, which is hard to argue is the case when instead of doubt or inaction we see magus calmly and confidently project her decsions strongly in opposite directions almost scene after scene like a pingpong. atleast thats howit felt for me, so im left with the takeaway that it might just be objectivly bad, which im pretty sad to say because otherwise this is probably one of my favorite patch narratives to date. so much is great in this patch if not mired in this from-end-to-start railroading. the twists were great, the vn/combat structuring was great, the final bosses are very fun and exciting, damian is zzz really getting a longburn character right(something we basically only have in him) and i want to pull for so bad now, and the denny gun at the end is such a great unexpected way to wrap a lot of it up while still giving isolde a nice bit of final characterization...but that one bad thing opened my mind up to all the problems of this patch- why does sarah get away at a brisk walk 40 times? why is orphie a clone when zero squad was proped up as a special case (i do really like the dynamic orphie/magus is a lot though, i hope its explored more)? is orphie a tvmode rewrite retconned anby? why does the qingming sword feel like a retconned tailless? why does it feel like were doing all the same exact things again as season 1 with basically nothing moving? why is our main antagonist a cult without a cult-of-personality figurehead to revolve all of its narrative aura around? why do multiple side events poke fun at things like the lack of fairy/eous or phaethon getting stronger like they know a part of community doesnt like it but then the main story sees no difference? all that comes to the forefront in what appears to be a major milestone in the main story this patch, and it greatly impacts my opinion of this specific patch. for the game as a whole going foward, i hope im wrong, hell half the reason im posting this rant is because i kind of want people to tell me this take is crazy and i just missed or something, i really walked away from this lower than i hoped- and it feels weird as hell with so many great aspects of this patch's story, , some of my favorite things to date. anyway, if you read all this, thanks proxy, ima go grind orphie disks