Hello! I finished the game just minutes ago as I write this, but I'm curious; is the True Ending/second final boss just gotten by beating the "DLC" levels?
Also, without spoiling too much, I'm a bit disappointed there's not much difference between the normal and True endings; although the Fire Emblem Awakening reference amuses me.
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As for my actual opinion on the game; it's neat! Has some scoring issues that made me nearly tear my hair out but it works well enough as a free one-man project blending 2hu and HLM together.
Though the upgrades and certain weapons are...horribly unbalanced; a common tactic I used to get more money quicker was just to nuke the highest-paying boss stages with the RPG repeatedly, helped by the ammunition upgrades and the ghost attack-twinning.
Turns out when you have iframes, suicide-carpetbombing the enemy is a perfectly legitimate strategy.
Yeah, I've always been pretty bad at game balance and it turns out that testing every upgrade in a vacuum led me to overlook some stuff... there's another hilarious bug called "Silver Knives" where the Silver Bullet modifier from Tactical Philosopher's Stone applies to the Sakuya throwing knives (because unlike other melee weapons they count as bullets), which lets you just melt bosses in seconds and have infinite ammo oneshots for regular enemies. I found it so amusing (and good for speedruns) I never patched it out.
During development I tested all stages in what's now Score Attack Mode, which meant starting with just Gohei and Concussive Grenades. My idea was that I'd need to make sure everything was beatable with the default loadout, but it led me to STRONGLY overestimate the difficulty in later levels when you've got access to stronger implants/weapons. I didn't really adjust anything because I figured gradually getting more powerful and just tearing through stages after struggling in the beginning of the game worked with the story being all about breaking free of the dreadful existence you were trapped in, some sort of "ludonarrative harmony"... still not 100% sure I did the right choice though...
Ah yes, the Izayoi Sakuya experience.
A lot of the enjoyment I had with the game was just messing with loadouts to see what clicked for me and was good at the same time, and it turns out having the observation device and wall-piercing crossbow alongside said ammunition upgrades means I often don't even step inside buildings proper before a sizable chunk of the enemy is dead, so I suppose beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all.
Also that invisible miwa cosplay let me just nick Kokoro from the prison without even a shot fired and I am just fucking entertained by that fact.
You specifically unlock the True Ending by doing the mission where you break Kokoro out of jail (though you also need to do the archives and train missions to unlock that in the first place), the other 9 DLC missions are just for auxiliary unlocks (e.g. the arms dealer Wheelghost boss unlocks the improved Picozi Portable variants) and extra lore.
My philosophy is that "it's the journey, not the destination" when it comes to storytelling, so I count all the extra stuff that happens on the path to unlocking the True Ending (e.g. clarification on the Puppet Master's plan, Yuuka's motivations, new true final boss) as part of it. The extended cutscene is just a little extra cherry on top.
2): Not really, the cutscenes are done in a pretty stupid way that makes it hard to trigger them without causing various side-effects (I managed to erase my save file once while testing cutscenes using debug hacks...). It would probably be possible to fix that but at the moment I'm focused on wrapping up another project + surviving day job crunch.
Correct, it's Streets of Frog. It really just needs a couple more assets and a bit of polish and it's done, it's just that a lot of that work is kinda boring and tedious so it goes slow.
And yeah, you'd think society had advanced so far, 60-hour weeks wouldn't be necessary anymore. But there's no technology that can fix bad planning and bad documentation...