One thing I will point out about Japanese writers, is that often the story and characters are a collaborative process among the whole team. What this means is that just because the plot may seem terrible to you, it may not be the writer's fault as the part you may not like has to do with some input from the director and other team members. For example:

Daisuke Watanabe is one of the main writers of the Kingdom Heart's franchise, the only game he wasn't one of the main writers for was KH2. He also wrote the plot of FFXII and helped with the plot of FFXIII. In the case of XII, he was helping Matsuno write the plot but after Matsuno left, Watanabe was forced to try to tie up a story that mostly was in the head of Matsuno and also had to deal with a team that had conflicting views about where to take the story and characters. In XIII's case, he was asked to take Toriyama's rough script and make it workable. He allegedly only worked on the first eight chapters of the game and had to do several re-writes due to Toriyama's wishes.

In both cases, Watatnabe is listed as the main scenario writer but background information shows he wasn't necessarily the mastermind behind each script. Masato Kato was one of the writer's for Chrono Trigger but Yuji Horii (Dragon Quest creator and DQ's head writer) wrote out several sections of the game such as the opening with Marle disappearing in 600 A.D. because she accidentally changed history and erased her existence. Hence why time travel rules are a bit inconsistent because Kato wasn't consulted while he was writing out the later parts of the story. Sakaguchi has also had a strong hand in writing or at least putting his own stamp on the plot for the first nine games in the FF series even though he isn't always listed as being part of the writing team.