If there was more time to get to know li Feng the niao sun twist would have better weight, all it needed was the fortified castle area to also be a proper sequence not 30 minutes.
I've been thinking about this non stop since beating it...I think the thing about these games is that they are so focused on putting you in Ryo's shoes and having you see EVERYTHING from his perspective that sometimes other characters' development gets lost. Unless they're directly interacting with Ryo, you really don't get see them from their perspective.
For instance, would you have known that Joy knew Master Chen if you hadn't have talked to her? Never came up once in the main plot...but that connection was there and it was only brought up through direct conversation with her. Or how about Nozomi moving to Canada? That whole sub plot kinda goes buried if you don’t interact with her personally in the first game.
This whole world is seen through Ryo's eyes and is so concerned with putting the player in Ryo's shoes the entire way. It's why I say Ryo is somewhere in between silent protagonist and actual fleshed out protagonist. Hence why the conversations with Shenhua are so interesting - because it allows the player to shape their own version of Ryo with the answers they pick.
Like you can't exactly do a cut away to Lan Di and Niao Sun interacting because the entire series is seen primarily through Ryo's eyes. Yes, there are moments in II where we see Xiuying remember her brother, but it's within an interaction with Ryo...it's not something that is happening third party. I think that's the one time the series has cheated perspectives. Well maybe also the cut scene in this game with Niao Sun lighting the fires is another moment of cheating the perspective, but I really can’t think of any other moments like that in all three games besides the two I just mentioned. Maybe this is why the original character perspective system for III could have been interesting?
This is where I think the character development with Niao Sun got lost and why I think, in order for it to work, they needed to have Niao Sun interacting with Ryo directly...like maybe goading or manipulating him a little. But then again, considering how uninterested in women Ryo seems to be (with exception of Xiuying who he called beautiful — BAE Waifu confirmed!
) maybe her charms wouldn't have any effect
.
The Niao Sun plot twist is really under developed and I think the key problem comes from the fact that we're so within Ryo's perspective throughout the entire game that we never got a chance to find out who she was since there was never a real strong narrative interaction between them.
As I've said elsewhere, story isn't this games problem. The story is structurally fine and what this chapter is trying to be is solid at best. It's the character development that got lost. The motivations for why this is all happening is what got lost here. We don't know why Niao Sun is doing what she is doing other than she's looking for power within the Chi You Men. And that I think is the problem with III. It's not the story, it's the characters motivations and development that got lost.