u/Standata0

My brief thoughts on chapter 16:

What I liked:

• I am so relieved that the story is done with vitus and team xen. I did not expect any of them to finally be beaten in chapter 16 so it's a pleasant surprise
• The xenpurgis roguelike and oblitus town gym puzzle are awesome
• Kanon's death was very well done and he's one of my favorite characters
• Storm-nym's character eventually grew on me and her alliance with vitus parallels events earlier in the story
• Deux finalis was awesome and a great sibling to Reborn's new world. I would have had the same reaction as Melia and the protagonist being told to adjust to a world without pokemon
• Vitus execution scenes were cool
• Madame X was finally unmasked, twice
• Freeing Marianette and seeing her call the protagonist by the nickname she gave them after 13 long chapters felt very rewarding
• Kaina's character is very cool and makes the remaining villain lineup feel much more focused and high-stakes than the chaotic messiness of Vitus and Madame X
• The first Madame X turning out to be a puppet is a nice nod to a certain someone from Reborn
• Melia's growth as a character and her bond with the protagonist is awesome. She feels close to the main character and understands them in a way that other characters in the game don't
• The entire chapter overall, which I need to emphasize because my negative section will be verbose.

What I disliked:

• I did not like Madame Shogun. Madame X's regular design was already great and the whole shogun thing felt over the top and ridiculous
• Having to press the A button during some cutscenes was not fun. Interactive cutscenes are not fun, please just let me watch the cutscene in peace
• I'm not sure how I feel about making Vitus the mastermind behind team xen. For the whole game Vitus and team xen were separate villains with their own ambiguous motives, until suddenly they weren't
• The snarky dialogue and profanity (MY LEAST FAVORITE PART OF THIS VERSION AND NEEDS ITS OWN SECTION)
  • I don't know why but out of nowhere V13.5 and V14 just has this random spike in snarky, ironic dialogue and too much swearing. Like why??? It was funny and in-character with the "they're coping, and seething!" line with Aelita but it does not belong in serious scenes. Why is spacea dropping an f-bomb like she's a teenager from Earth and not an unknown years old space dragon lady in response to her sister getting incapacitated? It's the most glaring and egregious during the scene where the A-team stands up to storm-nym, it just goes too far over the edge and sours the mood. Like why are we having Alain telling nym to kill herself??? Are we serious? And then the rest of the scene is riddled with too much snark and irony, like there's such a thing as too much. I feel so strongly about this because I played 13.5 and 14 right after each other and tried my hardest to excuse it and overlook it but it's too much. I really hope the dialogue for the A-team vs nym scene is rewritten in later versions because it ruins the mood. One of Reborn's biggest criticisms is that the dialogue is rough and cringe, and I don't want to see Rejuv have that same sentiment. The dialogue was fine in V13's content and I think they should stick to what works.
• The difficulty (My least favorite after the snark)
  • To preface I've beat Reborn's main game 4 times and postgame 3 times, with 3 of those runs being monotype runs. I'm familiar with adapting strategies, using every tool available, crafting teams around new challenges, and soft-resetting for the perfect opening that lets me sweep the fight. It was fun in Reborn, and Reborn isn't difficult to me anymore. Getting good at Reborn felt natural, organic, rewarding, and the difficulty of Reborn overall feels balanced and fair. This is not the case in Rejuv. I played through all of V13 on normal (which felt more unfair than Reborn) and I played through V13.5 on classic, and having to spam items during the spacea fight finally gave me the reality check that the game is difficult past the point of fun, so I swapped to story mode right after and did all of V14 on story mode. Most fights were easily handled by my stacked team, but the fights that did matter were challenging and fun to overcome. When the devs removed intense mode because it got too out of hand, it seems like they intended for classic to be normal and for story to be easy, but it was the opposite with story mode feeling like a normal mode for rejuv and classic feeling like an intense mode. Anyways what finally broke me out of my stubborn mindset of brute forcing classic for the sake of it was realizing that difficulty in games is simply a means to an end and that the most important thing is to optimize it for maximum fun, and that it's valid to turn the difficulty down. So rambling aside Rejuv is a level more unfair and difficult compared to Reborn.
• Kieran and clear being brought back does feel anticlimactic, but with the way the story went it wouldn't make sense for them to stay dead and without clear and kieran, Kaina would have felt a lot less threatening.
• Shields SUCK. I could hit a boss with a move it's quad-weak to, with a life orb mon, that would nearly erase it from existence, only for it to remove one measly health bar and stop there.
• The Damien fight and the eighteenth badge feels a tiiiiiiny bit shoehorned, seeing as how the progression of events will now probably look something like: Kaina -> League -> Variya/Karma/Zed in postgame. I would have liked to see the eighteenth gym be something massively fleshed out and important to the plot like the labradorra gym in Reborn, especially since the level 100 cap has already been hit with badge seventeen, making the eighteenth badge a formality.

Anyways that's all my thoughts on it off the top of my head. Very excited to see what's in V15. Things seem very rough right now, but a lot of that is simply the nature of where the story is at right now. If the devs were able to take a character like Melia that I initially disliked into a character that felt like a true friend for the main character, I have high hopes for what they can do with Kaina's character.