welp. Brain deciding to have more ideas to distract me. Note to self: save the generational game concept for later. It's a cool concept and actually doable (albeit hell on the writing front) but...fuck. Got a weird soft spot for them in concept

worth noting: generational sagas are probably some of the hardest things to actually pull off, period. You can somewhat railroad (if the plot would continue for want of a specific lineade--DQ5 does this) but if you don't, well...you can easily triple your needed writing or more as we can see from, well...Phantasy Star 3

A case where the game was too ambitious for the technology of its age. Or the team assigned to work on it

(It had only one guy who had any previous PS work, was cranked out in one year, and on a Sega Genesis cartridge...it shows)

generational games are really hard, yeah

I liked the way FE4 handled it if you didn't pair off characters

like there's some set kids that are there regardless (already married characters or characters that marry because of plot)

PS3 is a massive case of "ambition overshot capabilities", as it actually had a different story arc based on each possible descendant (that is to say, each descendant gave you a different story arc, though the very endgame was the same)

but if you didn't pair off the other characters, you get replacements for their children, who are like commoner...members of the resistance group the 2nd gen lord is associated with, or raised alongside some of the Plot Kids, or like adopted instead of the non-substitute kids, etc

That sort of foresight in writing is commendable, yeah. Being able to accommodate the choices like that is awesome as hell

so generally a Logical Reason for them to be around instead

and the only children who are like necessitated by Plot are there already

(I definitely had the idea that not everyone would have children in the normal sense in such a case, even. Adoption is a natural case, of course, but also switching up that some actually stay on for multiple generations (a tradition in a lot of these, though in this case I find it more interesting when aging up is a thing). Or just shuffle out entirely)