Quote Originally Posted by AnotherPerson View Post
Oh, nevermind then. I recall hearing people saying Kaiten's damage boost caused a huge gap in Sam's performance, resulting in crit variance actually breaking DSR balance depending whether Sam crits or misses. Hence a portion of the changes were to guarantee crit to stabilize performance and balance, but I guess I recalled incorrectly. I figured even if they did change Kaiten to "guarantee a critical hit", the reasoning behind "removing button bloat" wouldn't then make sense for the changes... not like it made sense in the first place when Shoha & Shoha II exist.
Again, their rationale for removing Kaiten was the same as for removing Power Surge from Dragoon: "Action Bloat". And they're right, it was action bloat.

The problems were that (A) virtually no SAMs complained about "action bloat", let alone from Kaiten (comments were focused instead on "button bloat"), (B) rather than revitalizing the tool to make it more interesting, they just removed it outright, and (C) was that they did nothing to address the (especially, trickle-down) effects removing it would have on gameplay.