The game has turned the french fry style quests into a massive bowl of mashed potato's. However the only thing that remains similar is that Sarah once again has become the glue that binds all of them together but on a larger scale.
Literally, every time it would get interesting the game would send you off to find another tinymon card.
Didn't feel too grindy though, and at least when you went to pick a few up it would advance another plot point. On second thought, maybe it's not Sarah who's the glue, but the heart of the cards you must learn to believe in.
Besides that, I actually like the linearity as it exists right now for two reasons:
1) If you didn't play previous versions of the game and follow the walkthrough linearly and exactly the game would bug out or you'd miss scenes. BoN fix to this was the less elegant approach; instead of working to make sure the quest lines mutually worked together and didn't bug out, just script them linearly and tie them together. Problem solved, but maybe it could've been solved while keeping some more of the branching paths
2) A big reason for the linearity of the first new version is the lack of the specific character content. The only linearity is with the school quest and the family quest, which both introduce and develop a lot of characters, but don't add in the quest lines and scenes from the older version. I have a feeling as the game develops all the characters will be spun off into their own independent questlines greatly reducing the linearity. Honestly having two main questlines to follow that spin off into a bunch of independent questlines sounds like a great design decision, allowing for a content center while still giving players a lot of choice.
