>>723717907
>I just wish Ubislop would drop this non-linear narrative thing they've been doing since Odyssey
Canon mode exists now to mitigate that issue to a degree. They also made it so that the Shinbakufu story is the "Main" story while everything else is for fun so if you want character development and building that's where you look. The Winter Raiders and arguably Seta River Killers are for Yasuke, but the rest are meant for Naoe. Yasuke's main character development is in stuff like Rin's side quests, the crests, and a few other side quests when not talking about the story.

My bigger issue with the recent games is the country exploration structure. Even though it leads to beautiful visuals and vistas it has exacerbated the bloat issue heavily.
>Origins had the whole "Three regions of desert where there's nothing but a cave or Isu structure?"
>Odyssey was so bloated even normalfags were complaining about how big it was.
>Valhalla was a minimum of 350+ hours just to 100% it because of all the maps that don't initially seem big but when added together are so absurdly large that the DLC + post-patch content + base game content is equivalent to like three AC games.
>Now we have Shadows where a good 1/5th of the map is not meant to be traversed.
Then there's the fact that to justify these large locations they need to copy and paste so much. The Katas and Kuji-kiri locations in Shadows are a great example along with the 36 temples and 27 shrines that feel like there are more of them than actual villages, there's the Ptolemy statues in Origins, the checklist of random barracks, camps, sanctuaries, and tombs in Odyssey, and the rock balancing and other assorted things in Valhalla.

I don't understand why they can't help themselves, Mirage was like a breath of fresh air because it still had the country structure but sequestered it to a small area and focused on the city in that small area with the village and farmlands being supplementary.