I for one dont like the root the series took here. IMO they need to add more darker themes to it like it used to be in 4 and 3. I mean the game USED to be about souls, hell and the dead as the threat to the worlf. Now all of a sudden everything is all happy-go-lucky boring to me. The only aspect of SC5 I liked was Pyrha being the darkness SC had burt was poorly handled and shouldn't have been resolved so fast. Cervantes being human ruined his character for me, making him human takes away his character and leaves us with a horribly generic swap. Zwei is the stain of the series to me and I wish he was removed altogether.. I just hate everything about him. I just generally feel SC5 has too maany "good guys" and not enough possible villains or threats like what SC3 had. I miss SC3's atmosphere.
I don't know what character Cervantes really had left to ruin at this point, although making him human did make him completely fucking irrelevant to everything that was going on.
Really, what is Cervantes? As a zombie, he's never even gotten close to reclaiming his old power canonically, Nightmare couldn't give less of a shit what he's up to, and the only character all that concerned with what the guy does is Ivy. He's her grudge-match slot. That's literally his only worthwhile contribution to the series post-death. Frankly, I think that he, Mitsu, and Voldo have
got to go from a storyline perspective, because all they can do is go through the motions they've been stuck in for most of the series now and never do anything interesting. Shura's a popular character, and at this point it makes more sense narratively for HER to have Cervantes' movelist than it does for completely-normal-human Cervantes to! Grandfather-clauseing all these characters in really hurts the credibility of the timeskip; I don't think anyone really gave a crap that Voldo was exactly the same 17 years later as he was in 4, or that people wanted to see his infinite loop of trying and failing to steal Soul Edge continue if it meant we never even found out what happened to Talim or Zasalamel or one of those people who didn't make the cut because they weren't in the first game. If they had the balls to kill off Sophitia, some more of the old guys have got to go and be replaced.
I do agree that SCV had too many heroes, though. I don't agree that there's any need to grimdark things up, since Pyrrha's storyline was incredibly dark and Patrokolos isn't exactly mr admirable hero himself, but I do think a stronger villainous presence in the cast is needed, particularly Zasalamel returning. I dunno, maybe give Tira and Nightmare some hangers-on if you need to add some more evil characters.
As for ZWEI, I tolerated him because I assume he's an extension of the Shamanic magic Talim is known to possess in a different form. If we knew literally ANYTHING about him, though, it'd help his cause a lot.