Even thought we don't know many specifics, you don't need to guess that trying to finish a game that was in such pre production hell that maybe 20% of it was actually done between 2006 and 2014 (courtesy of the Versus team having to alternate between trying to wrangle a functional game out of Crystal Tools and putting out the dev hell fires for other projects while also Nomura was doing KH III on the side) on an extremely tight deadline is already A Big Ask to put it mildly.

But then shortly after, the big geniuses at Square decided to also rebrand this game into a ~Multimedia Experience~ which really did not help the pre-existing logistics problems.

Add to that the fact this game was originally going to be a fairly linear RPG with explorable areas, and how they decided it should be an open world game instead with all that entails - it's really not surprising that the finished story was a teeny-tiny bit on the messy side.

You can really feel from the game's script that it's being pulled in 15 (heh) different directions. On the one hand, it's a Heroic Epic with the tone of a Shakespearean tragedy, a story about the weight of the crown and how heavy is the head that wears it, a meeting predestined by the divine, unspeakable personal tragedies, grudges of the past haunting the current generation that they have to take responsibility for whether they asked for it or not. On the other hand it is a game about going fishing with the bros, traveling the world, discovering the most bitchin way to make cup noodles, comraderie, brotherhood, all that good shit. Now both of these concepts are good on their own. And like, there absolutely are ways you can marry them seamlessly - but this is where the whole ~Multimedia Experience~ shit comes in with the steel chair, making the narrative even more disjointed by splitting it into pieces. And all of that under a pretty-short-considering-the-circumstances deadline.