So, everything surrounding the final boss was extremely My Shit but as always it would have been nice if, uh, they subtitled the ambient dialogue. Hell, there's a line of Ryuji's later on that's left unsubbed. The localization issues are one thing but the next time they claim they have dual audio they should at least put in the work to make sure it's not a worse experience playing with Japanese. I even understand that some of the in-engine stuff almost certainly couldn't be subbed easily, but it's ridiculous to have anime cutscenes where dialogue's unsubbed.
Anyway... I will say that, though part of it's due to having kinda broken Personas, I wish the combat was better. I know Tokyo Mirage Sessions is such a different thing due to the FE elements but it's my context for SMT games and: the combat in that works WAY better. Bosses were actually challenging and demanded good use of weaknesses and buffs/debuffs. Most of the back half of this game is just not hitting resistances rather than hitting weaknesses. It makes physical attacks and crits way more important than any spells; I have a ton of Severe magic attacks that I barely ever used because it was much more worthwhile to do 100 HP costing attacks, which is a joke. Every fight becomes a matter of just doing raw damage and healing, that's it, and it makes fights pretty boring as a result.
Plotwise, I enjoyed the ending more than expected. I really wish they had all your confidants actually come out to protest or something; there was all that buildup and then just... Sae shows up to say "hey, you're free"? Are you serious...? Morgana dying and then coming back I sooorta saw coming (rather, I expected it, then thought they might commit to the death, then they started mourning again and it was clearer what was about to happen) though I had thought he'd no longer be able to talk, so if was still a surprise. I thought all the saying goodbye to Confidants and such worked pretty well, though I'm confused by how much I've seen people say the items give you the rank 10 bonuses because that's false more often than not- some give you a mix of/all their bonuses, some give you a bonus that's not rank 10, and party members in particular seem pretty arbitrary.
But like... all that being said: the fuck was up with the Akechi plotline? The sacrifice sucks, their discussion after is a single group text, and then... nothing? He's literally not even in the credits! There's literally nothing said about him in the epilogue portion of the game except the bit where Sae mentions that he's missing, which makes me wonder if the Phantom Thieves even bothered to tell her that he fucking died! I don't even think the guy was that great of a character but it's baffling that no one even thinks about the character looming over like 4/5 of the game after he sacrifices himself. Being spoiled for both the Akechi and Igor twists really made it apparent how disjointed parts of the plot are: Akechi is all buildup (probably too much buildup, really) with no payoff; Igor is barely any buildup but with a really satisfying (as a player, if not from a writing standpoint) resolution.
So in the end... I think pretty positively of the game overall, and I'm happy I played through it despite its length, because I loved a lot of it. It's just a shame that some parts weren't as good as they could have been.
