As a monster Magna's design is just fantastic. My main problem with it is it's just underwhelming in terms of story and presentation.

Throughout the village quests you get these small snippets of dialogue establishing some sort of ominous threat, which makes you think "Wow, this monster must be really dangerous". Fast forward to that one village rampage and they just tack it on as a cutscene? No quest intrusions, no quest where you only repel it if not killed by a certain time, nothing. While it did give me chills when it showed up at the Allmother fight, I don't actually remember any other noteworthy story beats tied to it. It also doesn't help that redos of the Allmother fight can have the other elder dragons instead of Magnamalo.

Obviously not everything has to be Gore spreading a virus. Not everything has to be a Tigrex you have a bone to pick with. Not everything has to be an invincible Lagia intruding on a monster guts quest. It's just that had they actually given it more to do, this wouldn't have been a problem. Hell, the game has this huge emphasis on rampage quests yet they feel particularly underutilized in service of the flagship monster. IMO it would've been significantly more impactful had the final village Magna fight taken place in one of those cleared out rampage arenas. With what we got, it wasn't really particularly cathartic to finally kill it because there were never any real stakes.

Granted, we're probably getting a tiny bit more story when the expansion comes out. But that game will have a flagship on its own to focus on, so it really wouldn't be the same. Magnamalo just deserved better.

But what do y'all think? Were you satisfied with how they used Magnamalo or were you hoping for something more?