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However, the Holy Cross (or anything related to it) is not necessary to complete the game. You can go restore all your upgrades without it, go fight the Heir, and finish the game. That's your route if you don't like the puzzle stuff. You don't need to do anything more to finish.
And if you figured out the language yourself, that's also very impressive. It's only needed for a single trophy which is not needed for the good ending.
But anyway, I'm ADHD as ♥♥♥♥ and this game went from "pretty good" to "masterpiece" to me with the stuff you said made it bad.
I was really looking forward to figuring out the language. I thought it was translating as I picked up more pages and that would have been very cool, but it didn't. So I was thinking I might get some cipher and kept waiting for it to happen. I spent the entire game waiting for it and it came right at the end when I didn't really need it any more. That's really frustrating because of the wasted potential. Also, when I'm pretty much done with the story of games, I tend to want to move on. The idea of this 'busy work' at the end, and a major ending being locked behind so much hassle, is frustrating, because it's so much work for so little pay-off. I think this is a major balance issue. Games need to set up gameplay mechanics early on and remain consistent with them, or it will blind-side some people. If I'd been doing 'Holy Cross' puzzles right from the start, that would be consistent and expected. I appreciate learning mechanics throughout a game, Toki Tori 2 does that and I think it's fantastic. Most importantly, it's paced throughout.
Honestly, I've seen that observation a number of times, the language is only needed for one treasure? It's not needed to do anything major? Then why is it so prominent and why is it such the mystery? That makes me really mad because it seems like we are meant to be able to solve it, it's this mystery-box component and what is in the box? nothing really. That's so contrived, it's beyond belief. It's not even part of the world building, it doesn't inform you of anything about the world. why is everything in this language? no reason is given at all. The only reason I can see is that it affords the developer the option to be deliberately vague.
I also think the Holy Cross puzzles are needlessly complicated. Either that or they need some form of feedback and potential to do them in portions or rewind time if you make a mistake in the input. And they should be hinted at way earlier. OR, not have the good ending locked behind this.
The instruction book is meant to be solved, but not my translation -- instead by inductive reasoning, theorizing, and experimenting. You can figure out every single bit other than that tiny one by doing these methods.
The framing of the game is that we're playing a normal SNES style game except that it's in another language, and we've got an instruction booklet that another player has scribbled notes in. We can imagine that the game isn't vague at all if we speak that language, that it gives simple instructions like any SNES game. In these SNES games most of the plot was in the instruction book you read on the way home from the store and you didn't expect much story in the game itself. The game never breaks that framing. It's not that we don't understand the language because the fox doesn't know it. The fox probably understands the language, but he's just our avatar, he doesn't feel the need to communicate it to us any more than Link turns to the camera and offers his input on what goes on in Link to the Past.
This leads to very unique abstract puzzles and many 'AHA' moments. It's fine if it didn't do it for you, but for those of us that like this game, it's a wonderful and unique experience that hasn't really been replicated (the closest I can think is outer wilds.) We weren't looking for heavy world building or a moment of exposition. We got what we wanted. There are a lot of great puzzle games out there but most of them clearly define the bounds of what you can and can't do out of mechanical necessity.
I've always wondered if it kinda cheats for that last holy cross puzzle, because I got it on my second try. Maybe it has some tolerance for mistaken inputs. Anyway, I don't know what you're talking about for "hinted at way earlier". There are a lot of very short holy cross entries which will teach you that mechanic.