Thank goodness there wasn't a Gen 3, as I suspect it would've been even worse.
On the other hand, I wonder if making Gen 2 longer might have helped... or if the addition of a third generation would have let them shift/rework/space out some of the big picture plot elements to give them more impact. For me the problem with Gen 2 has always been that it felt too rushed despite all the complicated stuff going on. When I found out that a third part had been planned, that made me suspect the original structure hadn't been intended as mirrored halves, and that young!Celice & co. were actually meant to be a transitional arc. I basically had the impression that the dev team was overambitious and that they'd wanted to do a true overblown generational epic in which it feels like the heroes are fighting a losing battle across the ages (until it finally gets better), but ran into time/budget/data constraints so had to compress everything.
(and then they tried to compensate for FE4's overly neat resolution with FE5, LOL. Though I sometimes seriously wonder if the way FE5 is more or less structured as a coming-of-age story for Leaf is what they'd actually originally intended for Celice in the final two arcs. Julia just seems like one of those things they meant to be a Big Twist on par with Barhara, but the way that revelation is structured totally falls short.)
(If it were up to me, at least one of those handy 2nd gen heirs would have switched sides again in the 3rd arc in an Abel redux, hahaha! TearRing Saga is actually the other thing that makes me wonder about Kaga's original intentions for a third arc... There were definite echoes in the political context that were hard to ignore, but I haven't touched TRS since I finished the first stretch of chapters, so it's hard to say for sure. But part of what I really did like were the uneasy alliances and the overall sense of fluidity and actual political dealmaking/favor-swapping.)
no subject
On the other hand, I wonder if making Gen 2 longer might have helped... or if the addition of a third generation would have let them shift/rework/space out some of the big picture plot elements to give them more impact. For me the problem with Gen 2 has always been that it felt too rushed despite all the complicated stuff going on. When I found out that a third part had been planned, that made me suspect the original structure hadn't been intended as mirrored halves, and that young!Celice & co. were actually meant to be a transitional arc. I basically had the impression that the dev team was overambitious and that they'd wanted to do a true overblown generational epic in which it feels like the heroes are fighting a losing battle across the ages (until it finally gets better), but ran into time/budget/data constraints so had to compress everything.
(and then they tried to compensate for FE4's overly neat resolution with FE5, LOL. Though I sometimes seriously wonder if the way FE5 is more or less structured as a coming-of-age story for Leaf is what they'd actually originally intended for Celice in the final two arcs. Julia just seems like one of those things they meant to be a Big Twist on par with Barhara, but the way that revelation is structured totally falls short.)
(If it were up to me, at least one of those handy 2nd gen heirs would have switched sides again in the 3rd arc in an Abel redux, hahaha! TearRing Saga is actually the other thing that makes me wonder about Kaga's original intentions for a third arc... There were definite echoes in the political context that were hard to ignore, but I haven't touched TRS since I finished the first stretch of chapters, so it's hard to say for sure. But part of what I really did like were the uneasy alliances and the overall sense of fluidity and actual political dealmaking/favor-swapping.)