It bothered me too. Especially with Shinryu, the ending of HW made such a big deal of Shinryu, having Popolymo sacrifice himself to stall it and us resorting to unleashing Omega rather than fighting it. Then we just fight it like any other primal.

You can try and say 'it was weakened' but the story doesn't really confirm that.

There really is no explanation beyond 'we leveled up.' Now if this was say ARR, maybe it wouldn't bug me. We start off as a new adventurer and work our way up to a grand hero standing against godlike monsters.

But by the start of SB we've been doing this a while, and nothing we go through in SB is really out of the ordinary for what we did in ARR and HW. It's not like we were being pushed to new extremes to become more powerful. We just keep doing what we normally do and arbitrarily get 'stronger' in that vague shoenen sense. Compared to say Fordola who we beat, then she gets empowered and beats us, and then we capture her by using a device to use her artifical echo against her and weaken her. With Zenos we just kind of stroll up and fight him.

And there aren't even any real stakes to losing to him either. A couple npcs get wounded I guess. One unnamed npc dies at RR but if I recall it was Fordola that killed him anyway. The resistance doesn't have to abandon its headquarters, and in Doma there are no negative consequences for our failed assassination attempt. In fact, it plays into our hands because Grynwhat's attack on the Steppe coming after us helps to rally the Xaela against them after we win the thing.

Zenos has the potential to become interesting for me in 5.0 with his current path of reclaiming 'what's his' in the empire but for now I find him unengaging both as a character and as a menacing foe to face due to the lack of consequence when he wins.