I think the story is too fragmented

I was originally going to post this as a reply to a previous post that I saw but I thought that it was a bit too long so it should probably be its own post.

Idk if I have a different perspective with the game or something due to me being an older player, but I feel like some issues with the story started occurring after chapter 12, (maybe chapter 18 if I'll be generous).

To me, it felt as if the story, leading up to chapter 12, felt very clear in what was actually happening. There was an overarching plotline to the story. >!Finding out more about the PV, journeying to Kowloong, having a final standoff at the end. !<Despite the shitty writing in the beginning few chapters, it felt like things were at least "flowing" well. At the end, the writing was a lot better, and in my mind, chapter 12 is still one of my favorite chapters in spite of it having objectively worse writing.

This may also be in-part due to me being able to binge the stories constantly instead of reading them patch-by-patch, waiting a month in between, but it really felt like the story was way more connected.

I'm behind on stories now, I'm still on Shaper's Ripples. I really appreciate the work that they've done in increasing the quality of writing and developing the characters more. I also see that the regular in-game stages (though still rough) have indeed had their quality increased.

However, it just feels like the story is getting to be a little "much". It feels like there's so much going on, with each patch focusing on different parts of the story and different plotlines get created with every patch. Stuff like >!Dominik, Time travel, Agent 0, etc. !< To me, it feels like there's just so much stuff going on that it's getting hard to track (I've started to literally annotate the story and summarize things in a notepad document and I find that I need to keep referring back to it as I read).

Maybe I'm just stupid for that, and maybe that's correct, but I truly just does feel like there's too much happening. The triple patches didn't help either as things just sped up a lot more.

The story doesn't need to be "more simple" either though, I feel like there should be more of a focus on just one "big event" that things revolve around. The >!mystery surrounding Vonnegut's plans, chaos, agent 0, ishmael, the tower, babylonian faction's internal scheming, nanami & the church of machina, Dominik, gestalt etc.!< kinda function as that but these are still very separate things and it really feels like the earlier cohesion between the chapters disappeared. I'd really love if we could have a few story patches that are dedicated specifically to tackle and get to the bottom of at least one of these mysteries, because as of now it feels like there's just too many unanswered questions and the story's getting fragmented. There's also the issue of each patch that I've read so far serving to add more mysteries to the ever-growing pile instead of solving them.

Previous chapters like Spiral of Chronos tackled the issues a bit, it felt like there was a definitive "conclusion" reached there, but even then, >!there were several, new, huge mysteries added regarding things like the tower, the "observers", etc. that were added which previously didn't exist. !<In the end, we were still left with more questions than answers.

The thing that have hope for is that from what I've read in Shaper's Ripples so far, it feels like they're actually bringing in a lot of the previous fragments together so that by the end, maybe major plot questions will be tied up and we can move on. I really hope that there will be real progress in the story here, and I hope that future patches could continue this trend, at least for a while. I just wish that there could be some definitive conclusion to a few of many of the major things going on in the story.

This is less of a critique of the story's writing quality and emotional feelings I get from reading it, which I think has only gone up. More of just me expressing concern over where the general focus of where the plot is going, because I just think that there's just too much stuff going on at once and some of it should be wrapped up.