adjl posted... Bonus points where I went to bed after the post-Chapter 5 save, which resulted in genuinely losing sleep over speculating how they could possibly get out of it (or if they even could). I knew there was still game left and that the same people were still around for the endgame in some capacity, so they weren't *really* going to kill off the entire party, except for the part where they had established the cycle of reincarnation and also vaguely hinted at some sort of time loop deal with N and M's existence. They very easily could have killed everyone off and picked up the story a few years later with their reborn selves trying again. They could have sent Noah back in time to try again. There were enough plausible possibilities for killing everyone off without having to invent a solution that had no foreshadowing that I genuinely couldn't tell whether or not they were going to go there, especially where the time for "last-minute save because anime" had already passed when apparently-Mio evaporated. Some absolutely fantastic storytelling there, easily the highest point of the whole series.
Yeah the ambiguity of it all left me in far more suspense than fiction usually accomplishes.
I felt threatened by the prospect of a 2nd cycle the entire game honestly. and it was pretty cool that death for once wasn't the worst outcome. Usually I only like the beginning of stories because possibilities get minimized as time goes on, but that definitely wasn't the case here. I wasn't even sure if the split was actually going to happen at the very end.