Man, all the characters in FF7R are so good [except Roche lmao]. Why can't all of modern Square's game have characters/characterization this good?
This is an incredibly good question. Progress has been made overall since FFXIII, which almost objectively has the worst party and cast in any Final Fantasy game. FFXV has fantastic moments with it's characters, but the first half of the game doesn't utilize any character besides Noctis.
XIII?
Are you kidding me? FF has struggled with stories since XII. The last FF with a good, memorable story with good memorable characters was X. In XII the villains get more development than the main cast. There's entire section of FFXII where you travel to Archadia where it's like hours and hours of gameplay with like one cutscene. Its been a problem for a decade and a half. Like I said a few pages back, FF tends to struggle balancing one thing (story) with another (gameplay). Often the best gameplay FF's have the worst stories (V, XII) and often the best story FF's don't have the best gameplay. FF's that have a good mix of both good gameplay and story are rare (Tactics, arguably X, VI).
This problem has only been exacerbated in the post-Sakaguchi era.
Even XV, which was a sizable improvement on XII and XIII, still had weird editing issues where it's poorly told because they designed it so that you had to consume 9999 pieces of side media, from an OVA movie to anime mini series, to understand the entire story.
XIII is noticably bad though, incredibly bad, not even in the same ballpark bad compared to any mainline Final Fantasy.
Vanille was hated, Snow was hated, Lightning was a cold mop for the majority of the game, Hope was a lil momma's boy bitch, Fang was a late addition and served as a lesbian Auron, which sounds awesome but she had no noticable personality. Sazh was the only likable and relatable character in the cast.
Important word there is relatable. FFXII has weak characterization, but the characters still have personality and are relatable in their motivations.
It's telling that the most interesting route to go for XIII's characters in two sequels, was to basically make all their lives worse or meaningless.
The issue with XV isn't understanding the story, it's that the story is told in the last 10 hours, and that the first 20 really don't matter. It's front loaded with filler.
