THIS GAME IS SO FUCKING FRUSTRATING!!!!! An issue I've had with the previous two games was characters leaving your party with little to no warning, often with powerful equipment that you aren't given an opportunity to unequip. My solution to this on my first playthroughs were to unequip all items after every battle. This occasionally presented problems in certain sequences where you would have to enter battle without the opportunity to arm your heroes, particularly in BS2, but it was generally manageable. No more!

Now you are actively fucking yourself if you use the above method. There are battles now that come in waves, and in between each wave you are given the opportunity to swap out heroes with fresh reinforcements, but you aren't allowed to swap equipped items at this stage, so if you don't have an item equipped on every character you're putting yourself at a not insignificant disadvantage. And unequipping and reequipping items to the six MVP heroes is fairly straightforward, but doing it for all 20 or so characters is fucking tedious and time consuming. So, just keep items equipped all the time, right? But of course that brings back the original problem of characters dying or fucking off, sometimes temporarily, others permanently, and in the third game this happens CONSTANTLY!

Is it so much to ask for a prompt during character departures where you get to choose where your items wind up (sometimes it's smarter to let a departing hero keep their gear, most times it's a kick in the junk)? I mean fuck, Stoic, you had three games to get this right, and somehow you made it progressively worse! And you no longer have opportunities to make camp, which feels like even more player freedom being stripped away. I can't believe that I've thrown down more money with each subsequent game and they keep getting worse.