Seriously, I'm going to go into major spoilers for the entire series, even MoT's dream arena. Turn back if you either haven't finished everything or just don't care.

When reading other peoples' impressions of Mask of Truth, something I see very often is people saying that there was a huge dip in writing quality in the last arc of the story and that the final villain, Woshis, was badly handled. I disagree; I think the writing in the final arc was just as strong as the rest of the game, but I can understand why people might not have liked it. Maybe I can change your mind, or at least convince you to tell me what you thought about him.

Let's talk first about why I think people don't like him. Backing up a bit, at the end of Mask of Deception: the Mikado has been assassinated, Anju is badly injured and was also almost assassinated, and nobody in the court can be trusted. Vurai tried to kill Anju again after the assassination didn't work, Raiko is in control and everybody else is loyal to him, and Honoka has disappeared. This is obviously the work of a scheming mastermind, and exactly who was behind those events is a major mystery for most of MoT.

There was a lot of theorizing about who could've done it, and most people agreed Woshis was the most likely candidate; most of the other possibilities were obviously too stupid or too unimportant to be behind it. Raiko was a possibility, but too obvious, especially since he was the main antagonist for most of MoT. So, the most likely conclusion is that it was Woshis, and he must be some kind of master manipulator with a brilliant plan who is manipulating everybody else.

When the big reveal came after Raiko was defeated, at first it seems like that's true. He switches outfits into a slick, Western-inspired uniform, he has a crack team of hypercompetent underlings who infiltrated everybody else's followers, and when Haku and company go to Onkamiyamukai to get the master key, Woshis shows up fashionably late and then swindles the master key away from them. The big bad evil guy is here to fulfill his master plan, right?

Well, it turned out that's not really the case at all. He's basically a spoiled child; he's angry at his surrogate father, Mito, and his plan is basically to take humanity's technology for himself and usurp Mito as ruler. He doesn't have anything beyond that. The only people who really care about him are Mito and Honoka, and he's rejected both of them. The only people who are loyal to him are his yatanawarabe, but even one of them betrays him in the end, and that causes a mental breakdown that he never recovers from. He screws up and releases all of the tatari under the capital, and Haku & company have to use Amaterasu to destroy the capital to stop them. Woshis survives, but uses Mito's original akuruka, and he loses what's left of his sanity and just becomes a puppet for Uitsualnemetia's dark side.

If you're experienced with video game and anime plots, you've come to expect that the every villain is going to be smarter and more devious than the previous one, and the final one has to be the most sinister of all. I can see how Woshis would be a disappointment in that regard. He's a spoiled child who is lashing out against his parents, he's not as clever as Raiko, he doesn't have any brilliant strategy or plan, and in the end he just kind of falls apart and destroys himself.

On the other hand, I think that Woshis' arc is in line with the themes of Utawarerumono. A recurring theme through every game is that humanity destroyed themselves, and they deserved it. We don't know the exact details, but we know they caused some kind of apocalypse that made the surface uninhabitable and were forced underground. They they literally experimented on a god, created a new race of people, and treated them as disposable objects, and they were punished by being turned into tatari. The only human who is still living from that time and remembers everything is Mito, and he's gone to great lengths to make sure that nobody finds out about it. His goals are altruistic -- he wants to protect Yamato and save humanity -- but he's still selfish and tries to use his knowledge to overstep humanity's limits.

Woshis' character arc recapitulates that theme. He was given everything he wanted during his childhood, and Mito was raising him to be the next Mikado until he realized that Woshis wasn't really suited for the position of leading the country. Woshis was unable to be satisfied with what he was given, and so he repeated the mistake of trying to use humanity's technology for his personal gain, and in the end he destroyed himself with it. That's true for Mito, too; he wanted to find a way to undo humanity's transformation, but it was never possible in the first place. Both of them could have had happy lives if they had left all of that in the past, but they didn't.

This also directly contrasts with Haku's character arc; he goes in the opposite direction and is rewarded because of it. From the beginning of Mask of Deception, he never wanted to get his memories back. In contrast to most amnesiac protagonists, Haku is content to just enjoy his life as it is now without going back to the past. Even after he gets his memories back, he misses his family and friends, but he never dwells on it; he never tries to resurrect humanity's technology or use his knowledge to take advantage of the proxies.

Woshis is an effective final antagonist because the difference between him and Haku is central to the series' message. Both of them are humans who were born into the world with no knowledge about humanity. Haku was surrounded by people who treated him as friend and family and was content to enjoy the life he was given. Woshis rejected the people who cared about him and believed that he was superior to the proxies around him. When they learned about the past, Haku let it stay in the past, but Woshis repeated humanity's mistakes, and it destroyed him. It was definitely an intentional choice by the writers that Woshis is not a brilliant mastermind or leader; he represents everything that's wrong with humanity.

As a final thought, if you haven't played through the dream arena stages, you should at least watch Dream Arena 15. I know a lot of people stop playing after they see "The End," or they get a short ways into the DA stages and quit because they're too hard, but unlike Mask of Deception, Truth's are not just jokes; Truth's DA takes place after Haku dies after defeating Woshis and his spirit is in the Twilight Gardens but before he takes the power of Hakuoro's mask. There are some jokey "what if?" stages and alternate scenarios, but he also encounters the spirits of other characters who have passed into the afterlife, and I think that Mito, Raiko, and Woshis' words in DA 15 all underscore the aforementioned themes. Mito knows that he had good intentions, but his actions were wrong, and he wants Haku to forgive him; Woshis doesn't even have that much, and can only muse on how things might've been different if he was raised differently.

Anyway, that ended up being a lot of words, but let me know if you agree or not.