Everything went downhill right when he revealed himself as the Emperor for me. His motivations are all over the place and nonsensical. At the very least more needs to go into explaining why he does what he does, not just jumping between plots and ideas as if they're disconnected or things were set up to be railroaded.
It might just be because they wanted to push out the game instead of keeping it in the oven longer, but the closer you get to the ending especially concerning the Emperor everything feels like it falls flat.
The whole idea around editing your guardian just for it to be a vision created by the Emperor/Balduraan feels self defeating as it ultimately meant nothing to the story in the end.
I agree with this. I personally really like the fact that Daisy is an actual character and not just the little worm in our head but I do think that there's room to make the emperor more "solid" when it comes to the way he is written. And, ironically, this could probably be done by actually making Orpheus less of a 100% great guy and more ambiguous/sinister. He has been trapped for centuries, he is the heir of a hypervengeful warrior race... honestly the Emperor's fear that he'll turn against the player is justified and should come into play somehow. Sadly, the fact that we can only interact with Orph in the final stretch of the game really prevents the devs from expanding on him and that badly affects how the Emperor is written and how he comes across too.
Still, I much prefer this to OG Daisy. Daisy was the least memorable thing for me in EA, an element of the story that never captivated me in any way and I found flat out boring while I think that the Guardian has a lot of potential as an idea. Needed more time in the oven and more scenes tho.
