Talk:Halloween 2017 Event/@comment-13224152-20171024091704/@comment-2620:0:2820:220E:3C04:C9DD:6E97:3B1E-20171024175752

Huh. Wada Arco is female. All these years not knowing... I feel like an idiot. It might be partially because I'm avoiding Tamamo's page on the Type-Moon wiki until Extra CCC's fan translation is complete (or I perhaps learn Japanese kanji, whichever comes first).

@Valeth I don't believe Sakurai was a writer for Extra or CCC, but regardless, we're complaining about Extella, so the routes are Nero, Tamamo, and Altera.

Also, that first route heroine thing seems a little off. Although Sakura doesn't really do much of anything outside of HF (justified, though), Rin does plenty outside of UBW, and some may even argue she does more in HF. Artoria, to some extent, has to play a fairly important role as Shirou's servant in general, but in UBW and HF, her role is definitely toned down a bit to let other characters have the spotlight.

Now, Extella's first two routes, Nero's and Tamamo's, I feel, are actually kind of interchangeable. As much as I love Tamamo, I'd say both of them are equally poorly written and they essentially have the same relevance within each other's routes. Altera's is actually quite decent in comparison, and while Nero certainly does more there than Tamamo in this route, I wouldn't say it goes up to unjustifiable levels.

Extella, however, then does something fairly dumb: it has a final, fourth route, and it is here where the infamous Nero circlejerk begins. Tamamo has some relevance for a very short period of time, and then very quickly becomes an afterthought, while Altera, still holding some significance towards the end, eventually steps down to let Nero basically take care of everything on her own. Without spoiling too much, I'll just say there's a very bullshit transformation for the final battle, which I still don't really understand the logic behind. (And not to put too fine a point on it, I felt like in Heaven's Feel, Shirou was closer and had more chemistry each with Saber, Rin, and Ilya, then Hakuno with Tamamo in the fourth route. To clarify, after joining up with Hakuno and Nero, Tamamo only gets one scene of even remote relevance, and it's to be the third wheel who interrupts a lovey-dovey moment between Hakuno and Nero.)

Artoria was certainly important in FSN, but never to the extent that it felt like Nasu was pushing away other characters so that Artoria could just eat up all the story relevance. That's why people believe Sakurai has a bias towards Nero that had negatively affected Extella's writing. (To some extent, though, I think a large issue was that there was a fourth route at all, since while in FSN you could have your own favorite route and heroine out of three, Extella's fourth route is basically the ultimate, "true" route, and so, by extension, Nero becomes the indisputable "true" heroine of the game.)