to be fair to tabata, both type-0 and ffxv were projects that were handed to him after being stuck in development hell. while he did essentially start with a brand new story for all of them, there were essentially expectations of how the story should be thanks to SE continuously teasing the game. he basicallly had to tie in all these characters and world together in a story that felt integrated and alive.

i don’t think his work is bad but i do feel like he was starting to turn into the guy square would push off their messes to fix. crisis core is the only one that he had control of from start to finish iirc.