game design How a Concealed Route-Split Cut the Black Eagle House in Two [Analysis/Essay]

[Etrurian emperor]

I don't know enough about Suikuden to judge how the characters match with the lords, but I've always found the three lords and their countries to be pretty clear expies of the three Dynasty Warriors leaders, and their nations following along the same theme. 

Edelgard/Cow Cow and Adrestia/Wei: The more ruthless but ultimately well meaning faction who rules the most powerful state. 
Dimitri/Liu Bei and Faergus/Shu: BENEVOLENT but also vulnerable to be corrupted completely by a combination of their beliefs and their worst traits
Claude/Sun Quan and the Alliace/Wu: The other guys.  

[SnowFire]

I worry that I come across as too grumpy in your posts...  to be clear, doing deep dive analysis is super cool!  But I still think you're proceeding from the wrong baseline assumptions about the design process, and thus come to the wrong conclusions.  I don't agree at all that CF / SS were incomplete on purpose.  I'll pick one example:

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• Speaking of which, it also ends up being the only Black Eagles branch which gets to keep access to Anna’s paralogue and its bonuses, seemingly because… the devs wanted Jeritza to be along for the ride in it??? (I honestly got no other explanation for it).

This is very easily explainable, via the same explanation for why certain parts of the Part II narrative are underbaked: Budget & time.  This is the usual reminder that Three Houses was already delayed twice, but stayed funded, which shows a significant amount of hope and expectations for the project on Nintendo / KT / IS's part.  Here's the conversation:

• Designer A: If we're adding Jeritza, we need a Paralogue for him.
• Designer B: If we're adding Anna, we need a Paralogue for her.
• Manager: Paralogues require testing, voice acting, and other effort.  Let's just make one paralogue for the both of them.  I don't care how forced the pairing is.
• Designer B: If Anna's Paralogue is paired with Jeritza, that means that the version with dialogue for the both of them will be locked to CF.  Do we really want to lock out Anna fans from her Paralogue in the other routes?  Besides, we already allow some Paralogues to be accessed by just one of the two paired characters.
• Manager: Fine.  Create a CF version with both A&J, and a WC version with just Anna.

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As I mentioned in the previous threads, the same reason applies to everything else.  The reason SS & CF feel a tad incomplete isn't that they were designed as a pair that required separating off plot points.  It's that...  they ran out of budget and time.  That's it.  Sometimes the simple answer is correct.

More generally, I don't think the failure was quite as bad as portrayed.  Those two routes have issues, but the fact that there were two routes was still a good thing.  It made one choice you made meaningful in a way that putting things on rails has trouble doing, and that is one of the core cool things video games can do that books can't.  (The setup was...  awkward...  and C11 really needed a CF-specific version...  but still.)  CF & SS's problems weren't "inevitable" as a result of the split.  It was just a combination of A) questionable writing in parts, and B) lack of budget / time to polish more differences for SS to let it stand out as unique.  But both of these are totally fixable.  Games that pull off a major route split well are awesome, and it can totally work.