The following contains spoilers for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.
With every new release, the MCU keeps getting a lot of the same criticism, as both fans and the general public alike are starting to have a bit of Marvel fatigue from the constant barrage of new releases. One of these oft-cited criticisms is about how every Marvel story now needs to connect to a bunch of others and also set up multiple other new movies or heroes while still managing to tell the main story it set out to tell. There are a lot of MCU properties that don't do this successfully, and really suffer from too much focus on what's next for the shared universe.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever recently released to both critical and commercial success. Many fans are praising the film's storytelling and how it manages to focus on themes like grief. While the movie isn't totally perfect, it's quite strong overall, and all of its strongest moments come from its individual story. The parts of the film that attempt to bring in unrelated characters or set up another part of the MCU are what hold Wakanda Forever back from its full potential.
Wakanda Forever has a very clear, and very important, story to tell. The moments where it is fully focused on that story are magical, and are up there with some of the MCU's best. Shuri's journey of self-discovery and working through the deaths of her family members, Wakanda's response to the world wanting its resources, the introduction of the Talokan and Namor's arc - all of these are plot points that are distinct to this film, and the scenes when it chooses to focus on them are absolutely some of the strongest in the whole movie.
There are other elements, however, that were added in to try and connect Wakanda Forever to the wider MCU, but they just unnecessarily pad out the run time and distract from the movie's unique conflicts. The storyline involving Valentina Allegra de Fontaine and Everett Ross, as well as many of the moments that introduce Riri Williams, feel like additions that did not need to be made to this movie. Every cut to the Ross/Val storyline felt jarring, like it was coming from a different MCU entry. It also didn't do much to actually further the story in any way, and was just a way to further introduce Val to the MCU before she becomes a major player.
Val has wormed her way into multiple MCU shows and movies at this point, but has yet to actually make much of an impact, which can become frustrating after a while. Clearly, Marvel wants her to slowly enter the fray, but it just feels like she keeps showing up for a moment to do nothing except be a teaser for a future Thunderbolts story. She keeps collecting characters from across these entries for her team, but her appearances are so short that the audience has no time to become attached to her in any way, and she ends up feeling like more of a distraction from the main story than any sort of future threat.
Riri's inclusion in Wakanda Forever is a little more fitting, but it still mostly feels like a setup for Ironheart, more than actually being an important part of this particular story. Her connection with Shuri helps the inclusion to feel more seamless, but the fact that she's introduced and then almost forgotten about in the third act of the film (despite kind of being an essential part of the earlier story, as she's who the Talokans are trying to capture) makes it feel a little less intentional. It just feels like a precursor to the upcoming Ironheart series, rather than an integral part of Wakanda Forever's specific storyline.
This movie has the difficult task of needing to introduce the audience to Riri and have her become endeared enough to fans that they care about her and want to root for her, which is hard to do when she's a very minor player in the overall story. It actually might have helped if this came out after Ironheart, once the audience already has an idea of who Riri Williams is and might be excited to see her interact with the Wakandan characters. Of course, no one knows exactly what storyline the Ironheart series will follow, so perhaps her inclusion in this movie will be necessary to where her character begins her journey in her own show, but reversing the order would have given the audience more time to fall in love with her, rather than the very brief (albeit humorous) moments that appear in Wakanda Forever.
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever would have worked much better as a standalone story that didn't try to connect to the wider MCU in any way, because that's where all of its best moments lie. Most of what makes the movie memorable are those scenes that are specifically about Wakanda and the Black Panther cast of characters, as well as the newly-introduced-for-this-film Talokans. While the movie succeeds fairly well as is, it would have been so much stronger if they had kept the focus on simply continuing the story from Black Panther rather than trying to set up future phases of the MCU, since that seems to be all they care about these days. But perhaps that was what should have been expected from Marvel's final closure to Phase 4.