cleared the ending of p5s. i called the twist villain as soon as she showed up but i was not expecting her motivation to be an Autism Manifesto.
...i still dont know exactly how i feel about it. they handled changing her mind well enough but the premise feels so gross i dunno if that's enough to make it okay.
phase 1 of the final boss is boring as fuck but the rest of it was alright. weird game. i wanna dig into the postgame before i deliver my FINAL final thoughts but at this point it's a really mixed bag and i'd struggle to recommend it to anyone. might be better off just playing DMC with a fanfic audio book playing in the background.
it's weird to see that through to the very end the game seems upset at its own action elements. it forces you to engage PRIMARILY with the RPG elements: elemental weaknesses, mana bars, healing and buff spells. every character has a reasonably complex moveset and the best plan for almost every single encounter is mashing XXY to get the zero-mana elemental combo finisher because the only way to stagger things is to crit or hit a weakness, and stance damage is based on damage taken so hitting their weakness deals twice as much stance damage. and almost the entire back-half of the game is resistant to physical even if you did wanna brute force the crit route. i didnt even end up using the baton passes because the only benefit is increased Super meter and the downside of trying to use someone who cant hit an elemental weakness is so severe.
characters' movesets feel mostly good, smooth and responsive and cool to see, but everything pales in comparison to the power of color matching.