Emil Pagliarulo is a hack who deserved to be sacked years ago. Utterly talentless gobshite who has milked the goodwill from writing the Dark Brotherhood Oblivion questline to death.
Any product that releases in such a poor state and expects full price definitely deserves the hate. The game was unplayable on half the platforms it released on for months.
Their biggest, most consistent fault isn’t bugs orjank, it’s the stale as fuck writing. They desperately need the hand the reigns to some new talent in that area.
It feels like they’ve been incapable of writing a compelling narrative with interesting characters for decades now.
I’ve played and finished every mainline non MMO FF game and hated everything after 10, so I wasn’t exactly hopeful that I would enjoy it.
It’s the 5th best in the series for me after having finished it a couple weeks ago. I used to think the loss of Sakaguchi is what killed my love for FF but now I realise it was the lack of well written likeable characters that did it.
I will say one thing though, while a great game it’s not much of an rpg. There’s pretty much no variety in how you build Clive.