Expanding the playable cast honestly hurt the series more than anything, along with the romantic bonding event feature, which is more egregious and pointless than when introduced in Crossbell. Trails excels with character to character interaction, with or without the main character's involvement, but to dumb it down to "everything revolves around Rean and only Rean" cheapens the writing quality by a lot. The locations are not as diverse- don't know how much of that was influenced by the change to full 3D- and it's funny in hindsight how little the original Class VII matters in the grand scheme of the arc. By the end of 4, they are still all empty puppets.