Rosenkrantz's cleavage cutout was absolutely necessary to compete with Ashley.

I feel like Vagrant Story's art style distracts people from how absolutely bizarre Ashley's design is. He's got the big squiggly hair strands, the tiny not-shirt, his entire ass hanging out, the shorts, like what is going on with this man

The answer is: they don't have an advantage! Scythes have never been used in any sort of real war, and peasants who wished to use their farming scythes as weapons would typically remove the blade and reattach it in the orientation of a spear so that it could be easily used for slashing or thrusting.

I'm pretty bummed about it because I really don't want MP3-style self-contained areas with no interconnectivity, but now you have a big barren wasteland to drive through between islands of content instead of a level select.

Best case scenario now is that it's a one or two zone gimmick.

Thinking about that part in episode two or three where Duo offers parts to repair the Wing, Heero refuses, and then shortly afterwards basically steals the parts he needs from Duo in the middle of the night which is totally pointless and antagonistic and says a lot about Heero and his mindset.

I think one of the most obnoxious styles of writing villains is to have them just go "nuh-uh" to whatever just happened and have no real reaction to clearly just losing.

See also: regenerating villains who get beaten up for twenty minutes then go "nuh uh didn't count" and undo the damage instantly.

It's a bit sad that they basically undid both of their major ideas (no i-frames and no XP), but that plus a lot of polishing did make the game hit Mostly Positive on Steam after a very rough launch. They also let you toggle the old roll by equipping an accessory, which I did for some bosses.

I think its core failing was still having conventional Souls enemy/boss design, but it didn't de-emphasise dodges or promote alternate options more than From's games, it just changed from "i-frame through" to "get really far away when you see them start to wind up". It looked pretty silly too.

Bleak Faith tried having no i-frames on its dodge, but they had to back down and patch a conventional Souls roll in because their solution of "slow player with a roll that sends you really far really fast" was awkward, janky, and unpopular. I don't think it changed the gameplay flow enough either.