There are hundreds of NPCS from JRPG games that I personally wanted to see more under focus or have a larger impact in the story.
Neutral, good or evil npcs, does not matter.
There are many, too many to list, that I wanted to be more developed or interacted with, but there are two from my beloved Final Fantasy 9 that were not given justice.
1st case: I still seethe thinking of how much of a waste the 4 elemental lords were in Final Fantasy IX.
The one I am most pissed off not being the spotlight?
Marilith in her human form.
Super original design, mixing elements of serpentine fantasy with a dope stripper outfit and dope high-heel, thick shoes? The hair turning into a fully functional snake tail too? Also, in-game she is more covered in the chest area, but I appreciate the blurred nudity in the official artwork, it is good taste.
Never seen that anywhere, the first moment I saw her, smitten with her design and concept.
Perfect reinvention of the Marilith serpentine sub-archetype, her humanoid design is even better than her "revived" design, which is still great (her own human body, naked, being the head of the serpentine tail, and she is massive in that 2nd form)
And YOU USE THIS COOL CHARACTER 1ST DESIGN ONLY FOR A SINGLE THROW-AWAY SCENE?!!!
By what I have read online, her and the other archfiends were supposed to be much more impactful and long-lasting in the story, with much more agency against the heroes, but because "MUH Final Corridor 10", which was co-developed as FF9 was being developed, lot of concepts, plot points and resources were literally tossed away and forever turned into lost-media.
2nd case, always from FF9, is Lani the Busty Fashionable Berserker Bounty Hunter:
https://www.giantbomb.com/a/uploads/scale_small/4/49366/1174123-lani.jpg
Her design and in-game scenes SCREAM potentially redeemable villain main character, a then unique archetype (self-made rage-prone berserker woman with massive axe and tomboy attitude but very feminine body and great attire), and instead she was tossed to the sides for the Flaming Lamerant, maybe the worst designed (not gameplay-related, he is OP in-game, but as a character design) main characters ever, guy literally comes from nowhere, no true involvement with the plot too expect for "booo ooo ooo Main Character pwned my ass because I am a naive idiot" (Lani is much more relevant because she is supposed to retrieve or outright kill the game's heroine, Princess Garnet, and her presence is also much more felt in the shadows because she is the one that crafted deadly traps that the heroes had to overrun because facing her face-to-face, truely the strong and independet woman hundreds of thousands of posers in real life claim to be, just in a non-warring setting).
For an hypotetical FF9 Remake, I expect, no hell, as a fan of great character design concepts, I DEMAND everything that was tossed away is reinstated and exanded upon and made perfectly interactible with - FF9 Trance Seek Mod reinstates and adds score of content and overhauls the gameplay mechanics to the root, and it is a 1 person effort, how in the holy fk of hell does not a multi-milionary company like Square-Enix achieve that with all the money they have?!
