As someone who put countless hours into both games, the idea that E7 is in any way worse than DL story-wise is actually unfathomable to me. Chapter 2 is actually the single worst story example you could possibly pull from E7; literally every other chapter has more interesting things going on. Chapter 3, amusingly enough, is actually where the story starts picking up, and the strength of the main protagonist (Ras) alone is far,
far superior to anything Euden possesses. He isn't just a bland, generic shounen with a personality as exciting as stale white bread - he actually has his own unique history and a view point that is somewhat alien to the people he's surrounded by, and grows
considerably as a person over the course of the story.
He doesn't have a generic dragon-cum-waifu who dotes over him at every turn in the most cringeworthy of fashions. His mascot character is actually a hilarious scumbag who is fun to watch (and also useful in a fight). The people he runs into aren't all one-note personalities who exist purely to push a single trope to an excessive and illogical degree (seriously, WAY too much of DL's cast falls into this category). Additionally, there is a
huge difference in the sense of geography and culture you get from a game like E7 vs a game like DL, where there are actual geographical boundaries and unique cultural identities to explore. DL has done a VERY poor job of building up its world; I literally have no idea what the world is laid out like, and outside of specific instances like the LNY event, there are pretty much no references to actual geographical locations to begin with. Shit, the cities he visits have
no name, which is fucking
bizarre!
Plus the way E7 handles internal politics is far and away superior to anything we've ever gotten out of DL. There's tons of political intrigue going on behind the scenes in E7 whereas DL just has... nothing, really. You'd think there'd be more discussion of internal divisions after the kingdom gets usurped by the king's very obviously possessed daughter, but there's
nothing. Again, the world building is almost nonexistent. The world basically exists as a backdrop for the cast to dispatch more and more fiends. It's sad how underutilized and underdeveloped it is.
The worst part is how every goddamn side story has some kind of mandate that Euden
must be involved somehow, which is a HUGE flaw in my book not
only due to how boring Euden is as a character, but
also because it heavily constrains the types of stories they can tell. The castle stories are far and way more interesting than any of the side stories and that's especially
because Euden isn't involved in them. E7 doesn't have this problem; almost every side story, including the reputation stories, don't involve Ras in any way.
The way DL's writing in
general has been handled was a major factor in me dropping it in the first place. It just... kind of hurts to read. I mean, it's just so bland and boring that I skipped a huge number of side stories because I could see the tropes coming from a mile away. The writing is absolutely one of the game's biggest failures and I remain baffled as to how anyone gets anything resembling entertainment value out of it. Even children's fairy tales often have more interesting twists and turns than DL's stories! There's nothing for me to latch onto: no sense that any of these characters are (fictional) people and not just caricatures thrown in to fill specific roles, nor any interesting twists to what is already a pretty staid formula. It just feels like a whole lot of
nothing, and I wish, I wish, I REALLY wish there was something more to it.
I'll note that I still remain subscribed to this thread because I keep hoping for signs of change. Mostly, signs of change in the area of gameplay, which, as Einbroch mentioned, feels awfully stale when every single character of the same class plays almost exactly the same way. I don't really have much in the way of faith that the writing will ever improve, as baffling as it is that the writers here somehow remain employed despite their thoroughly mediocre output.
Even blatant fanservice characters like Mym have actual character and personality and aren't all just tits and ass like the characters in Epic Seven, and while some of the artwork in DL has female characters in sexy poses the characters themselves are not treated as pieces of meat despite what the waifu brigade make it appear, and to add to this we have good Male character fanservice too.
As someone who also happened to be pushed away from DL
specifically because of how the female cast is treated, this paragraph in particular is especially laughable. Still waiting for DL to get a female character with the gender ambiguity of Rima, the obnoxiously bulky armor of Armin, the pleasing simplicity of Diene, the sheer
distinctiveness of Nemunas, and so on and so forth. Shit, DL in particular is especially guilty of associating "warrior woman = big boobs & butt and lots of exposed skin" together which is
actually offensive to me. I get a very strong sense that DL's character design team has maybe all of one woman among the team, if even that, whereas there are several characters in E7 where I get the distinct sense that a woman
had to have designed her. Yeah, there's a lot of shitty designs in E7 still, but DL has that
and doesn't have anything for me to get attached to.
I really wanted to like this game, man. They still have a chance to pull me back in someday, but not if they just maintain their current trajectory forever more. Something has to change among that team before I'll jump back in, and even the removal of wyrmprints just isn't enough for me to give it a second chance just yet.