@Knight-Raime said in So,episode 4's story really IS bad eh?:
EP5 for me is hit and miss. It's more related to the events of 1-3 than EP4 was and I enjoy the medieval fantasy asthetic. It seemed like a better filler episode compared to 4. But it definitely has it's off moments. I still don't get why people like 1-3 so much. It's just a bunch of events happening that our character is semi involved in. EP6 so far is my most favorite episode.
When you get to the retconned version of Episodes 1-3 (which is what global has by default with the added context of Episode 5 explaining why) it is much better than how the original story was presented via the Matterboards and later the Omnibus. The old system was even more disconnected with the "events" happening and the excuse given was that the player had the ability to travel through time to experience alternative events. As a result you had a checklist of things to "clear" that weren't so obvious so you can be in the middle of a quest in the right conditions and suddenly get pulled out of your party to be forced into a cutscene and have to return to finish the quest or to trigger the next part of the scene (which was heavily dependent on the locations that spawned and the enemies that you encountered). This also required fighting bosses for specific rare drops to progress and waiting for Emergency Quest schedules to actually do the big fights that the story left you on cliffhangers for. In a lot of cases throughout Episodes 1-3 story scenes would be sprinkled in via updates that the player would be "time-traveling" back to see (such as the appearances of Dark Falz [Apprentice]).
By Episode 4 and 5 this was streamlined so that you can easily see what scenes you needed to clear and which scenes were optional or can be skipped. But with Episode 5's later updates and retcons the entire Epsidoes 1-3 story was streamlined so all of the extra fluff and side-stories (there were many of them) were cut from the game and put into the "Event Chronicle" so that new players had a much more straightforward experience. My impressions of Episodes 1-3 were really that the people behind the writing were trying very hard to shotgun ideas off of a brainstorming session and applied absolutely everything to see what would stick and it continued all the way about halfway through Episode 2. I recall that Quna was originally intended to be the Heroine of the story and only really was given the limelight because it turned out they needed something to end Episode 1 on and Episode 2 was largely more-of-the-same with retcons and rewrites introducing a new race and undoing story events. By the time you get to Episode 3 the story starts to condense and become a bit clearer but it reminds me of Halo in that regard where they tried to end the story on something that wasn't exactly built up or established.
In the grand scheme of things when you see how Episode 6 tries to retreat on familiar territory I feel that the story is interesting and entertaining but it definitely is something that is chunky to sift through. For the players who aren't expecting such a grand story I feel that it's entertaining to glance at because everyone has different standards and experiences even with things that can be poorly executed.