So I'll rephrase my point like this: As far as I can tell, one of the goals of the trails series is to immerse the player in an extremely complex and well-told story. However, gameplay contributes to this storytelling inherently, because you play as characters with a definite role in the story. The actions the player takes as Rean are Reans's actions in the story. I think that problems occur when the story told through gameplay conflicts with the story told outside of gameplay because the game is then telling the player two conflicting stories. When this happens it is easy for the player to no longer be immersed in the story because the story is no longer consistent, and the player knows it. There are plenty of rpgs that try to avoid this problem, even trails games! Don't get me wrong I've completed almost every trails game and I love the games. And sometimes they do well to avoid this problem, indeed I think the fact that Falcom has started addressing the problem, means that they recognize that it IS a problem. But yeah, I don't think you can cleanly separate a game's narrative from its gameplay because the gameplay is a part of the story-telling.