Is Sakurai Hikaru a good author?

[Reign]

Raikou syncrenetism was nasu right?

I'm not sure. I just know Takeuchi was the one who wanted Raikou to be a woman.

[Rafflesiac]

Hero of the People Takeuchi.

[Lobo]

Raikou syncrenetism was nasu right?

Raikou's mats credit Nasu and Sakurai as her writers so is very likely
But also, from what I remember from old interviews, Takeuchi kinda decided last minute that Raikou should be a woman which prompt the writers to rework her profile and research to try to find a reason for the genderbend and the legend of Ushi-Gozen is what they found

[fumei]

how many times has Dantes appeared for only one scene to save us from a mental attack and then not showed up again for the rest of the chapter?

Okay, true, but if you look at it from the bright side, that became such an eye-roll moment that when it was subverted in LB6 it was REALLY good.

[Lobo]

Okay, true, but if you look at it from the bright side, that became such an eye-roll moment that when it was subverted in LB6 it was REALLY good.

Yeah, I can also give an example of this repetitive and subversion on Fragments.
Volume 1 gets really tedious because it focus so heavily on Manaka and the narration goes on and on how fairy-princess like she is (which is why I say the later volumes that focus on other characters are better). But then on the last volume we get this sequence in which all of Manaka's spells and influence starts to break because she's dead and then when her reanimated corpse appears the narration is about to go on again on the same tangent just to cut itself mid sentence and declare that she's actually a monster, that is presented as if Manaka's powers have been affecting the narration itself all along, which I found really cool.
So there I'm torn between eye rolling on volume 1's tangents while also liking the last volume twist for said tangents.

[Malgos]

A predetermined prequel story, a side story that exists just for fun I guess attached to that, and Extella and FGO.

Ah so Extella was from her I've got a very split opinion on that depending on whether or not the things I disliked were even from her. Bond events or whatever they were called didn't hit the mark for me or maybe I can't correctly place the few that I liked and just thought they were part of was main story. Nero route I can barely even remember, except for worshiping Nero and it didn't really endear Nero to me much.

Tamamo was less annoying than Nero's but it still spent a lot of time talking up and hyping up Tamamo and how amazing she is, basically same as Nero and I got tired of that stuff. At a certain point during Nero's story and from that point on I had the general reaction: "Okay I got it already how amazing of a wife/lover they are, please stop talking about it"

Altera's route was very good, but it also had the same issue that plagued the other routes albeit for a better reasons like MC following along can be mostly explained as them being indeed a prisoner and therefore no real power unlike the others where he just lets the Servant decide whatever they want and barely if ever acts as a partner as opposed to a mana battery. It's kind of ironic how in the route where he starts as a battery he makes his own plans and what not. It still felt like the praise fest for Altera was a bit much, yes I get that all three routes feature romance and he had a prior bond with his Servants already and I guess it was to act out lovey-dovey couples and he was falling in love with Altera but I just felt it was too much for me at times when I was hoping to see more of the meat of the story, and the bond events were really weird too. Overall this story felt the best and it felt like near the end that they drew inspiration from the Fate route.

Final well it had an active MC so I really liked it for that and in general with the MC being more active it lead to in my opinion more interesting scenarios like the team up and the tension was felt there as this being their best and only shot at this. Venus was kinda weird to me but I dunno, I don't really have too strong feelings aside from that the MC had an agenda. Oh, I was kinda disappointed that they didn't combine their forces properly and instead they just had Tamamo's as the base defend team. Maybe it's to preserve teamwork, but I'd have figured Archer would've been amazing on defense compared to Lu Bu, although he was second in command so it makes sense but I was still a tad disappointed at that.

So basically Extella for me can be summed up in the words of Petri for me:

No.

But also yes.

She's more competent a writer than pretty much everyone on this forum - and yet FGO is still bad. Explain that, reddit

Grand Order has had such a bad start and ex Delight Works is so bad at managing it or complacent that they never manage to catch up to make it good. I'm not reddit, though so sorry!

what the actual fuck makes a good zelda game then

More enemy variety would be nice, shrines are so-so for me, I don't like the Divine Beasts as dungeons very much, although the Rito one was kinda fun.

Anyways you might not like it, but I do enjoy the standard Zelda formula. Maybe making it a bit more like A Link Between Worlds would be nice so you can go wherever, but aside from that I didn't need something like BotW in particular. I still had a lot of fun with it don't get me wrong, but I also don't want to lose the old style of Zelda games.

[Kubera]

I haven't read Fragments or her non-TM stuff, so can only comment on GO (and also only on her style when filtered through a translation).

I thought Olympus was for the most part just okay, remember quite enjoying Shimousa, and don't remember liking Gotterdammerung all that much. I think the vitriol directed at her sometimes seems really exaggerated. But I also think her biggest flaw that I can see is maybe repetition? Like all of GO's writers have characters they enjoy and use a lot - a Higashide story is likely to have an Apocrypha character or two, for example - but I feel like for Sakurai she not only repeats using the same charaacters a lot, but also repeats the same joke or plot point with them a lot. Like how many times have Edison, Tesla, and Helena had the exact same argument, or how many times has Dantes appeared for only one scene to save us from a mental attack and then not showed up again for the rest of the chapter?

I also feel like her repetitiveness sometimes extends to her dialogue writing. I felt like a lot of dialogue in Olympus, especially from Mash, felt like talking in circles and stating the same thing as each other in just slightly different wording.

On the other hand (and this is something Lobo brought up yesterday in the TM Ace thread), to me Sakurai feels like she does the best job of integrating a Servant's historical background into their stories. Other writers tend to bend or stretch things (Nasu loves his syncretism), which to be clear I'm not saying is necessarily bad since at the end of the day what matters is that these characters are interesting and work as characters, not that they stick to the words in the history books. But I think Sakurai tries her best to keep them more anchored in their source material.

This is pretty much exactly my opinion, especially for the repetitiviness, with the difference that I actually enjoy her part in Olympus and really enjoy Scandinavia, even with their problems. I like Heian too, unpopular as it might be. Love the way she goes full shounen, even if it's exxagerated at times.

Also some of my favorite servants have a great spotlight in her chapters (Skadi, Musashi, Sigurd) so it's impossible for me to dislike her.

[mAc Chaos]

So everyone has talked about her weaknesses, what are her strengths that are shown in other mediums but not in Fate apparently? What kind of work does she shine in, that it gets crippled by being in Fate?

[Kamera]

Very hard question, since nobody read any of her other works.

[Petrikow]

I've actually read Gahkthun and it was alright, I guess.

Sakurai gets to have what is the most important, a female protagonist, and that does sort of make the romance click more than the strange attempts of it in FGO.

That said it had pretty bad H-scenes (writing wise, good art).

[Ideofago]

why do they always skimp on the writing in the porn scenes
either have good dialogue or just have none at all, ffs

[Petrikow]

I'm not sure I want to talk about my thoughts on what makes a good H-scene right now, but I can tell you the problem with Gahkthun's (and Sakurai's in general) H-scenes are not what you think they are.

Maybe they're more enjoyable to women?

[OnesFleetingGlory]

Maybe people who read her VNs back when she was with Liar-soft know more of her strengths. Menwearpink mentioned her works called "What A Beautiful..." series. From the reviews, she seems to excel in mystery genre, about otherworldly settings with wide cast of characters. The perspectives in her stories switch around frequently, and it helps in term of worldbuilding and revealing there's more to these characters.

I could see the similar style in Fragments, though Fragments seem to suffer from this style however, due to it's not constructed coherently to set the right timing for perspective-switch, unlike in VN where it's been arranged for each scene, so it's confusing for some people. That's the impression I got from the reviews, at least.

[Sesto]

For non-Fate works, I tried reading Gahkthun but thought it was kinda boring so stopped. I only got an hour or so into it so maybe my opinion there is not very relevant.

For Fate works, I liked Extella a lot, specifically the Altera route. If Sakurai wrote that then she's good in my book. Altera/True route Extella is honestly some of my favourite Fate stuff.
I haven't finished Olympus yet but her other GO chapters were alright to bad. Also if she is responsible for Dantes limbo where he isn't allowed to do anything except be our nightmare bf then I'd say that's bad because please let Dantes do something else for once.
Lastly, Sakurai is responsible for Marie so I have the moral obligation to (half-heartedly) defend her whenever she gets hate.

Honestly I find a lot of the Fate Sakurai hate is largely skewed around certain characters (Nero, Musashi) or how she's the scapegoat for most (You)fans who blame her whenever we get a Servant who isn't for (You). But maybe that's because my opinion is skewed by the places I normally visit to talk about Fate (eff gee oh gee). Not to say she doesn't deserve some criticism though, because yeah her F/GO chapters are not that great.

[RacingeR]

I hear the fandom bashing her nonstop. They seem to criticize her more than other authors. What is the deal? Are her works really that bad?

Keep Sakurai away from Nero and she's an okay writer.

I mean there's a bunch of criticism that could be heaped in her fate works, to my understanding. I'm not a fan of, say, how mary sueish Manaka feels on what I've seen of Fragments, but there's a limit on what I can say of stuff of hers I haven't read.

I did read Extella and it was okay. It had very notorious flaws (like Tamamo's route overall), but it had its strengths as well.

Generally speaking she just has the same issue most non-Nasu writers do which is that they just can't quite get the essence of what made FSN work, or are unable to replicate the 'feel', let's say, while Nasu can still mostly produce it when he bothers to write. (Ironically Urobuchi's the one that has come the closest to being able to do this, as much as I think Fate/Zero is bad, he did manage to get this right so at least the work does feel like part of the setting and doesn't have this weird feeling of disconnect most non-Nasu stuff has.)

[pinetree]

Honestly when I think about Sakurai, I can only compare her to Higashide since they're the main Fate writers bellow Nasu (actually I don't even know if that statement is true anymore).
Between the two, she's definitely the worst one, and I don't even hold Higashide in such high-regard so there's that.

Higa at least has some interesting or emotionally impactful stuff like (parts of) Apocrypha and Atlantis. He also has a great FGO chapter in Anastasia.
Meanwhile Sakurai has Fragments, which I find thouroughly boring even putting aside the weird structure she went with, a bunch of mid or awful FGO chapters and a (probably?) major contribution to Extella which is offensively bad. I do like Shimosa and Musashi but that's the only thing of hers that I enjoy. I haven't read Olympus yet though.

[Reign]

Also if she is responsible for Dantes limbo where he isn't allowed to do anything except be our nightmare bf then I'd say that's bad because please let Dantes do something else for once.

Honestly I think it's the opposite, she's the only one who uses him for the most part. His only non-Sakurai roles I can think of are Summer 3 and Shinjuku (and the latter wasn't even actually him).

Sakurai does that thing where Dantes shows up to be Guda's mental firewall for one scene, like he did in LB2 and LB5. If the other writers have someone attacking Guda mentally they don't include him.

[Sesto]

tfw ywn have the count of monte cristo live in your dreams and protect you from attacks to your mental

But yeah, given how Dantes is Sakurai's my main wish is she would just use him more extensively. His small event wasn't really that great and besides that Dantes has basically done absolutely nothing. I don't really think the dream sequences are very good especially given they essentially have little to do with his actual origin.

[pinetree]

She does seem weirdly reluctant to use him beyond small cameos. It'd be so easy to include him in Shinjuku, for example.
Not even as a major ally throughout, just more extensively during the climax.

[AAM1232]

Feels more like sharing and integrating more Servants in a plot in FGO is a problem everyone has really. There shouldn't really be a situation where people can note X chapter writer by the characters that keep appearing in the story.