Red coins against prescript target
Just don't clash with the prescript target, he has 6 slots and you have 7 sinners in the fight. Other than that it's just matching damage types, i.e using blunt attacks against his blunt skills, and a damage race with Bleed and Burn being the fastest due to his weakness to them. Other than that you're trying to increase his Karmic Consequences gain since it makes him weaker.
We got some cool moments for other characters which was nice.
I liked it a lot more in comparison to Canto 8, even with three less cutscenes I feel like the characters were a lot more realized. Xichun was nice in 8 and before, but I didn't feel like she was complete until the intervallo. I guess the characters I liked the most were Lin Daiyu and Kong Qiu. Even the Xue siblings felt underdeveloped while the Elders and Granny were just kind of there, same thing with Kong's disciples. The five nursefathers coming from preexisting factions helped as we already had a reference point to compare them to. They all seem remarkably dysfunctional wash ups by their factions standard.
- Matthais seems the nicest but he's the most superficial and doesn't actually look out for his underlings when they aren't useful to him while also being altogether unreliable.
- Valencia doesn't show mutual respect, hierarchy only matters to her to the extent it allows her to push other around. While she also needlessly mistreats her subordinates, emphasis of the needlessly part.
- Rein seems hollow, lonely, and childish. Even by the standards of the Index. This comes across even if you don't know what their deal is since we have Sora by comparison.
Although I imagine Valencia doesn't come off as strongly since we never meet proper Thumb members in Limbus, while we don't have much prior comparison for Callisto due to so few people reading Leviathan. Even then, attaching them to a faction with an ideology acts as a sort of short hand and they all make striking impressions. The apprentices are all good as well, and the only one who didn't leave a strong impression at first, Ren,
went out good. I ended up liking him a surprising amount when he decided to put his life on the line.
That said the game still really needs an ingame encyclopedia, especially since they're putting character details in passive page and status descriptions now.
- The specific reason Matthais is disliked is because he killed his Big Brother and a fellow Sister in order to get his hands on his relic weapon. Which is temperamental and doesn't even like him. Although honestly I don't think the specific reason matters much in his case as he already come off as unreliable.
- Callisto was a long time companion of Rein and was secretly working with the Index while being unfashionable. Which is why the Pinky doesn't like him. That one is funny.
- Seemingly the reason why Rein was stripped of his cloak is that, he actually tried to stop Callisto from acting on the prescript's orders to kill his family and presumably turn them into a musical instrument, but stopped at the last moment.
I do have some speculation on the last one.
I think Rein was punished for being indecisive, if he went on the mission and returned with vengeance or earnestly tried to save his family, he would have fulfilled the role of Roland. Either way he was punished, hunted down despite still being given prescripts, given a cursed weapon, mocked, and ultimately told to kill himself offhandedly by the god he devoted his entire life to.
Really I think that shows a petty, almost vindictiveness to the Will of the City. It isn't as all powerful or all knowing as it previously seemed with it's Yan plan working out, but when it fails it seemingly throws a fit. Although it did attempt to reuse Rein, even that ended up being a failure.
Edit: also, if you check Ryoshu's base sinner Identity,
it looks like the Pinky has granted her the seat of Tiansha Star, seemingly without her input. With what Rein says it feels like they're going to try to entrap her into some bullshit.
