So guys.. I gave in and played the fight since i had nothing else to do in my free time. I know I know, i was the one who preached patience and ****. But I didnt have anything to occupy me during my free time and i thought why not, im gonna play this multiple times anyway.
Niki did change the fight system, i forgot how it was for the blood hunter ones but the fight is way more sandbox-y than before. It feels more like a turn based fight now where during your turn you can choose to attack, defend, or you have an 'other' option where you can choose your transformation or taunt and some other stuff depending on what goes on during the fight. You can break his domain in 3 different ways in the other option, so you get the gist. Niki really went overboard with the amount of options you have during the fight. You can specifically go just body or just dao or both. If you have strong stats, you can go apeshit on him. Story mode MC's will eat him for breakfast and im not kidding. He gets dumbfounded after we manage to overpower his first two big attacks and i think there are 4 or 5 inluding the domain, the world freeze and the wisp. His big attacks will escelate in stats from 60s to 70s to 80s and eventually somewhere close to 100. You can increase your stats temporarily via the defensive options during the fight but it might become usless after he escelates furthur. If Niki is going this route, then i dont think he will do impossible checks even for story mode MC considering MC can win 100 stat checks.
You can actually almost kill him multiple times but he has i think 3 life saving artifcats and talismans which he keeps using everytime MC almost kills him. In the attack option, we have seprate options which have even more multiple options within. Attack options has physical attacks, elemental, body, void and tri-dao. each of these has atleast 3 different attacks. After exhausting all his options, man gets tired and gives us the sneak peek where he says we are a nobody yet we beat him. Niki actually added an option to call him out on calling us a nobody which was pleasent surpirse considering we actually talked about this after the sneak peek. Depending on your response and whether youre cocky insulting and arrogant, he will either just give up respectfully and try to crush his token to escape or he will unleash the wisp. We can try to destroy the wisp but its costly. MC states even the weakest wisp is atleast EX. And yes we can absorb the wisp for dao exp. You can also set the wisp free out of pity cuz it begs for mercy when you try to abosrb it. If you free or absorb the wisp, Chu Muchen goes manic and attacks us throwing weak punches telling us to give the wisp back to him lmao. He looks so pathetic and pitiful. But before he breaks his token, or when he weakly tries to attack MC, Someone jumps in screaming "let me help you" in an "unexpected turn of event" acc to MC. That someone is He Gang most probably. So he's showing his true colours after we did all the work for him.
Niki did a good job with the fight but my concern is stat balancing and that each moment in the fight feels a tad bit detached to the existing narrative. Niki needs to find the sweet spot and blend in MC's choices and what Chu Muchen does to respond to it. In simple terms, the cohesion of the fight is kinda off. It might be difficult considering he made the fight system way more sandbox than before but over time im sure he'll figure it out. I also have a concern on how the after match of the fight will be handled but Niki can just give priority to the important moments in the fight like the domain, wisp and stuff like that. I enjoyed the fight. Depending on how the fight goes for you, it might just become your favourite fight in poma.