I think Episode Aigis does have a lot of promise with improving on a lot of narrative elements, since a lot of its major elements are stuff I really like on paper (Yukari's characterization) that felt a bit off in execution. I always like seeing you talk about P3's gameplay after being so used to basically everyone else just rejecting the AI party aspect of its mechanics outright. Great stuff.

I think when it's used relatively, like Yoshi's New Island, it's fine, at some point in time that Island must've been new to Yoshi. But when it's meant to be new for the audience, like NSMB, and those games are over a decade old, it's just sad.

@godisinthecable
I never got the idea that any of it was "bad on purpose" from a gameplay perspective as much as just not having chops in the genre. Takamasa Shiba even commented back in 2013 that Cavia had been inexperienced in making action games and thus DoD1 was not up to the standards of its contemporaries.