>>54240123I guess the problem is that the whole Team Star stuff is kinda poorly executed as a story. A lot of it is just indirectly implied and only mentioned somewhere, we don't really SEE much of the things that happened in the past.
Also, it's mostly about the Team Star incident, not exactly about Penny and her personality herself. In fact, for most of the game, she pretends to be someone else with a different persona(lity). So I guess her complexity just kinda falls flat due to how the story of Victory Road is presented, at least in my opinion.
I do like how she stands up for herself in Area Zero, though. I know a lot of people were bitching about how she's an asshole to Arven, but they didn't know each other and Arven was very standoffish, almost aggressive even with how he tried to one-up the others. She wasn't in the wrong when was being snappish, but most importantly, it showed how she has grown confidence to talk against someone who annoyed her. At the start of the game, she's way shyer when those Team Star grunts try to coax her into joining them. And she did apologize to him the moment she realized that he wasn't being malicious, just in a tough situation.
