strange entry that i ended up coming to terms with eventually. the budget was absolutely not evenly applied to this game but unlike most games where this is true there's way more care and effort put in to the latter half of the game than the former. lots of odd narrative choices and callbacks to the previous two games, as well as attempts to spice up the series competitively (4 slot max-slotters are insane, but capable of being overcome with careful party setup, which is neat) and near the end of the main story, which has much tougher bosses than the past couple games' postgames. also gave us multi-palette fusion-transferrable shinies - all this cool stuff lets me look past the wonkiness a little.