So, the last act... I have feelings.

I'm in the last section of the game, post Will & King merge, and I honestly think the game peaked at 9/10, dipped, rose again at 9/24, and is a mess these last days before the confrontation.

Apparently the Louis boss is really hard unless you spend a lotta time grinding and honing your Archetypes... On the topic of Archetypes, not having some A-XP you can give to the newer party members is a real shame, because post Heismay I've really only kept the members on their assigned Archetypes.

Those are just minor gripes though, the real gripes are the Bonds around this time (that I have left.) I don't know if it's just me having accidentally left the worst Bonds for last, but Alfonzo's Bond is completely stupid and a roller coaster. I'm at Rank 7 and he's "dead" now for some fkn reason, and Cathrina's Bond, who now has become optional, is CRAZY in the way it basically undermines the games themes a bit imo. And Basilio's too.

Both the Paripus links basically boils down to "killing people who kill us is no better than them killing us." For a game so interested in politics, that's the most milquetoast ass take I've EVER heard, and it surprises me, coming from ATLUS. There's no nuance. Basillio never (or hasn't up 'till the rank I'm at, 6) said "They deserve it, but what does that actually do for your mental health/is this what you want to do with your life?" It would be much more interesting, and same with Cathrina.

A big issue, or rather "gripe" I have with the Bonds in general is that they're pretty linear, in the sense that a problem is talked about, and the next textbox after that, the problem is introduced, and EVERY roadblock they face is met with an immediate solution the next rank over. They never really shift their goals as a reaction to what had happened, save for the Igniter woman (I forget the name), who also happens to be one of the best, if not THE best Bond in Metaphor (along with Heismay's, but he also gets character development in the main story so not as comparable)

I also feel like, as opposed to the S. Link feature in Persona, Bonds suffer because every hang-out is a rank up. At first I was glad because I felt like it removed some of the time-management stress that the Persona games have, but after a couple Bonds were completed, I began to miss them dearly. It serves to pace the Bonds better, and show the MC and the Link hanging out outside of dire situations. It builds a more believable connection between the two, as opposed to every time you're hanging out with someone, something big happening.

I looked up a bit about the confrontation with Louis and the "Fantasy is Ruined" ending, and from what I could gather from Faz's video, and what Louis says then and there, I cannot say the party is better, or more right than Louis, especially after reading a comment that said Will becomes King in the "good" ending. Louis' solution is a cruel one, but it isn't, at least from what I know, curler than Euchronia. His idea of transforming people into Magla-humans and then asking them to overcome that with mental fortitude is basically a concentrated form of the journey of life. In the world they inhabit, people die on the streets, get hanged, or die of any number of reasons. Their will to live is the thing keeping them going. Louis is putting all of life's struggles into a concentrated event.

Where that logic falters is that children would also be subjected to it (or so I imagine). Expecting a child to have that strength is unfair... But Euchronia also asks that of them, but in different ways. Heismay even says that this world Louis suggests would be better than the world where he lived in the Sandworm nest.

If you think about it this way, in Will's vision, discrimination would be ended by... Some plan that I don't know, but he would have to change an innumerable amount of people's hearts to make that happen. What prevents him from succumbing to the same hopelessness that his father did? Then everything just goes back to the status qoue, and it relies on a handful of people picking up the slack for an entire continent, which isn't realistic. Assuming people survive, they would have provably been of sound enough mind, and a determined enough one to see change through. It even says that Louis and the MC shape the world together. I would assume that they do that alongside others as well, because the surviving population would be an independent one, and most likely determined enough to make a better world for everyone.

Both are flawed, but Louis' offers more potential than Will's does. The thing I'd change in Louis' version is that he's basically giving an un-prepared population a test they never knew they were going to have to take, and mental fortitude is determined by many things such as social status, poverty, etc., so it isn't really in any way a fair trial, but what it could lead to is a fairer future for aeons to come.

It just feels like ATLUS, or should I say Hashino is very non-committal when it comes to visions of what the future could look like. I know SMT is much better in that aspect, from what I know about the endings in, let's say, Strange Journey, where the Chaos route is more akin to Louis'. Persona 5 (vanilla) is pretty good at toeing the line, because the Phantom Thieves don't proclaim that they have a just vision of the world, rather that they don't believe that anyone should be able to trample on anyone else's freedom due to money and power. It never outlines their end goal (which could be seen as a failure of the narrative, but I think the issue demonstrates that they believe the populace should decide.) It's left open-ended. Royal, but especially Strikers, trample on that open-endedness by proving that what the Phantom Thieves did was for naught. Let me explain:

In Royal >!the masses are once again fooled by a false God... But this time, not of their own choosing, seeing as Maruki exploits the Metaverse merger in 12/24 to force a cognition change in everyone.!< The Phantom Thieves basically just say, "no, we believe in the public to change, without having to be forced into it." While an interesting theme, I don't feel like it goes naturally, happening only a WEEK after >!Yaldobaoth!< and both arc's thesis basically being the same.

Strikers on the other hand messes it up by showing that, a mere half year after P5, >!the Masses create a new deity to take all their Desires, and Yaldobaoth basically respawning (yes, different appearances and voices, but the same creature (Demiurge=Yaldobaoth in the scriptures they take from iirc)!<

I'm looking forward to having a new writer in P6, because while Hashino writes great characters, has great concepts, whenever the topic of "the future" comes up, he just says "let's hope to change a fundamentally broken system instead of replacing it." Most likely a mental block he has (as most people do), but it's infuriating in his writing, because I see the potential, but I think this would be remedied if each ending (minus the deadline ones) were treated with the same respect as the "true" one is, because even if you pick the "bad ending", the game clearly doesn't see it as valid. You get a game-over screen instead.