you go from having defeated the villains, having cut them down in melee and trashed their army, to… the villains managing to get onto a ship and be sailing away while the victorious PC army just gawks at them. The concept of defeated enemy leaders having guards making sure they don’t just run away is something Engage constantly struggles with, as if there’s nothing anyone can do to stop the movement of enemy commanders you’ve just surrounded and beaten up.
It’s not even just spatial, it’s one of scale too, in that just because they might only have Alear and 2/3 of the most relevant royals in a cut scene, the story pretends that that’s all there is, as if it’s a small undersized JRPG party only able to watch while defeated forces threaten them, drag people away and retreat. Then in other cut scenes it’s all ‘we should send troops to secure x’, as if the force in massive. There’s this constant disconnect with the cut scenes wanting it to be a small handful of passive observers watching the NPCs do whatever they want to drive the plot, as if armies are something leaders carry in their pocket like a pokeball that disappear immediately afterwards. Plus imprisonment for defeated enemy generals being something that never occurs to Alear, so if you don’t want to kill someone your only option is to let them go and amass more armies for the big evil dragon. Presumably because they’ve only made so many characters and they all need to be active until endgame or recruited. So none of the four enemy leaders can actually be removed, meaning you fight them a comical amount of times. Ridiculous.