Good friend, bad GM/Player, what would you do?

[CombatBunny]

First of all, thank you very, very much for taking your time to reply such a well thought answer.

Sounds like he doesn't really allow for allot of player agency, does he regularly take control of aspects of your characters and things?
Another thing we had an issue with was that he had HIS story, and continually was railroading us by only giving us one option

This pretty much describes him. He used to take a lot of agency from our characters (thankfully he has improved that), but usually is listening to his story the whole time. He starts talking about the background of his kingdom, his NPC’s and all his setting and when he finally comes to us, it’s something like this:

“So, you are walking in the woods when suddenly rain pours down, there is nothing around but a cave”

And no matter how you roll or what you do, the cave is the only thing that there is, so we usually go to the cave and he states that there are some carvings and asks us to roll intelligence or knowledge or whatever. If the roll fails, he asks the next player to roll and so on. If everyone fails, he takes the higher roll as a success and spends another half an hour to explain the carvings and all the story behind them. The cave doesn’t have anything else other than that, so when we decide to go out, he will railroad us to point B where there will be a statue or a building or some other thing with another clue that will trigger another boringly long monologue.

After long discussions he finally gave us a lot more agency, but as soon as we are not in rails, the story turns to daily happenings mode (until we step back on the rails):

“What do you eat for dinner? Describe it please”, “what do you do after dinner?” “what do you do once you wake up?” “what do you do for breakfast?” “are you going to do something else? If not, another day passes” “what do you do for dinner the next day”. No kidding.

What are his strengths as a DM?

His settings have a lot of background. He seems to spend a lot of time creating the story for his settings. All his NPCs have a rich story although none of it has to do with the players nor is his intention to involve us.

He no longer railroads but as I said, he replaced that with “nothing happens”.

He doesn’t get mind-block, he can talk all the session without needing a break or running out of his script.

Is his story good, but player involvement has been sacrificed for it?

Not good, not bad. The usual tropes of anime and fantasy. Collect de X McGuffins, the whole kingdom is surrounded by zombies, the nobles have a curse associated with demons, etc.

Has he tried more sandbox style gaming?

Eat, sleep, walk, repeat.

Is he creative with NPC making or are they bland?

They are all clones of the same archetype. Be them kings, priests, villagers, warriors, they all act as a curious child exploring the world, something like Goku when he was a child. Same voice, same acting, same everything, no matter their gender, age, race.

What settings does he like? (He might benefit from extra source material)

Anime fantasy: Claymore, overlord, tate no yuusha, Magic knight rayearth, etc. Not picky in that aspect, he loves them all.