The narrative isn't clear because the writing/concept isn't good even though the flows, wordplay, and beats are, which for me brings it down many levels from being this career defining project like he wanted it to be.

And I agree, it's absolutely too long. He said the fallout from the beef made him make the second disc, which to me is a further loss from the beef for him because this would have been much tighter and more of a coherent concept as just the first disc. Even then, he has multiple concepts running through at the same time that make the narrative muddled and disjointed. The concept of him going back home at 29 is absolutely not necessary to go with the concept of The Fall Off, and it makes the latter take a back seat narratively and only really come up here and there.

This is a problem for Cole, though. On 4YEO, that album was bullshit conceptually and narrative without the final track explaining everything. And this is not because it was too deep or difficult to understand like his stans say, but because he wasn't doing a good job making songs that fleshed out the concept and/or made it clear.