The thing that angers me the most about what was cut was the entire dynamic with Daisy and ultimately there being consequences for your actions. Act 1 is solid, but Act 3 feels like a trainwreck, especially with knowledge of what was supposed to take place in it. Especially with how not only is this game easy but there's just no consequences for choices that originally were supposed to be dire, especially for the tadpoles. It feels far too casual of a game wherein you can have half of your brain eaten by illithid worms yet somehow this causes no negative penalty whatsoever in the ending, when the original alternative of potentially getting a game over made far more sense. Instead there's objectively no gameplay reason to turn down any illithid powers since they're just flat buffs to your character without any downside. Cut plotlines hurt but what really stinks is that the offerings of incredible power have no cost to them, trivializing the game on a whole.
I believed from what my Party NPCs said and from the visuals of more worms eating my brain if I consume more tadpoles that FOR SURE I would lose my personality at some point and that that would somehow influence the story.
Wouldn't it be great if, for example, the Emperor would have different dialogue or a different appearance depending on how many tadpoles you eat? Maybe characters who refuse any and all tadpoles and powers, would see through the Emperor's disguise much earlier in the story and the Emperor would be much more hostile towards such characters.
On the other hand, characters who consume more tadpoles fall for the Emperor's disguise, the Emperor's dialogue would be more friendly and Tav would even romance it and find out only later that the Emperor is a Mindflayer with an own agenda.
And characters who consume too many tadpoles don't have a choice but to become a mindflayer by the end of the story. A grim price for gullible characters, but an opportunity for power hungy ones.
