>>12570755Half of those become borderline irreverent once the whole save the world thing comes in anyway, namely Team Skull (just annoying) and the guild (walking verbal tics, do nothing of value or interest)
The player-partner relationship I personally despised. I can however see why people like it and why they might find the partner endearing, but as far as I was concerned, I was loitering around in HIS story as he leeched off a silent protagonist for self confidence. If I have to ask 'why would I want to befriend this guy? And why would I want to go on an expedition with him? There's nothing in it for me!' to a character who's supposed to be my trusted partner, then there's a fundamental problem that severely curtailed the enjoyment of the story for me.
The world-setting in Gates, showing that the world was more cynical this time around at least gave me a reason to care about the partner's paradise ambitions, not to mention he actually had a spine which made the friendship feel more balanced and symbiotic to me instead of this one-way-street thing.
The dimensional-scream was pure deus ex machina at will/mary sue territory that was ill-explained in the end.
It does pick up by the dark future part, but waiting for over 10 hours for the story to do anything interesting is borderline unforgivable, and even then, I never cared about the partner and Grovyle as much as even some of the less important characters in Gates, which felt like I was part of a large team who did things together rather than putting the entire weight of the story on the partner.
I'm probably being really unfair to Explorer's story though, I did have really high expectations for it, so it's probably why I'm being so critical of it.
