Previously I was mostly venting my frustrations, I wasn’t concerned with being precise, and looking back it's very disjointed. So, to clarify: my issue isn’t just that the story isn’t magically finished. The real problem is how the cliffhanger is handled and wait time is just the icing. It was first introduced in, I assume, 0.9 it will have been in limbo until at least 0.11. That’s a long wait in real-world time, and while the development timeline is what it is, I repeat, the real issue is that the payoff for that wait feels underwhelming if not outright bad.
So to exapnd on this, the cliffhanger is introduced at the end of the Noriko chapter, but it’s only revealed directly to the player, not the characters to build tention. But I think this reveal (to the player) should have been delayed to at least halfway through what we currently have of the Sayuri chapter, and cutaways should have been more vague until then. But that’s only if we want to keep the dramatic irony at all, personally, I’d do away with it entirely. Because this is a “game”, the use of dramatic irony creates major problems with player agency.
Now while writing I think I’ve stumbled onto the real root of my frustration. While I already have a bias against dramatic irony for tension-building, I noticed it’s particularly difficult to pull off in games compared to other forms of media. In a book or movie, we don’t expect to change anything, we’re just observers. But in a game, we are players, and we expect a certain level of agency, even if minimal. Being denied that agency for such a large portion of the story is frustrating.
This actually ties back to the small note I made at the end of my last message: why is this even a game? Why does it let me ring Minato’s door a hundred thousand times if nothing ever comes of it? Then Sayuri chapter constantly cuts away to the villains scheming villainously, yet the game forces me the “player” to ignore it. Surely, I’m not the only one who found that frustrating. While previous chapters had occasional cutaways like this, they weren’t as frequent or as detailed, which made the issue not stand out as much.
So what do I want? Well I'm usually able to suspend my disbelief a lot more than most, which leaves issues like this one to take me out of the story, so finally it boils down to the usual, "better writing". Alternatively you can put the development of the story on pause to figure out how to make this a proper game, and solve the agency problem through that somehow but even I wouldn't want that at his point, it would take too long.
