vegaful's endgame in both modes has jerry squaring up to a completely healthy sindy and his men after gabriel gets himself stomped to death, then boom, sweetheart appears

a very healthy sweetheart with wounds that can be considered minor compared to what sweetheart looked like in joyful, where she was covered in blood and arrows and spears

and guess what, an injured sweetheart was apparently so strong bernard turned into a joy mutant from the stress of barely defeating her and walking away with an arm missing

jerry fights sweetheart at practically full health, we get a cutscene of her shredding apart sindy's men

+not gonna sugarcoat it, jerry wins easily and sweetheart retreats, suck it bernard

right after that, jerry has to fight sindy gallows, and assuming he doesn't whip out the +paralysis move in a later phase, it's a hilariously easy victory

meaning that jerry fought and defeated sweetheart and sindy, both at their apparent peak, and walks away injured even though you could easily beat them both with an almost full health bar

most of this actually isn't jerry's fault, but rather the devs' apparent oversight when it comes to enemy stats, could also be reluctance, i can't tell

virtually all of jerry's special moves have ridiculous damage formulas that make them useless if the enemy has a decent defense stat, it doesn't have to be a particularly high defense stat, it just needs to be decent

just look at big lincoln revamp, gravitational drop does 0 damage against big lincoln, but jerry's normal moves actually have an effect on the guy even though they're supposed to be weaker

you could have easily forced the player to use jerry's non-special moves in a more orthodox way by giving sindy and sweetheart higher defense, though that'll also feel kinda cheap in a way because it still reeks of poor balancing that the player isn't allowed to utilise new moves they needed to work to earn because of how unstable they are, even it will be much better than a ridiculously easy fight that ends with the player character incredibly injured because... because

dice mahone gets to have a cool multi-phase boss fight that has opportunities to be genuinely challenging because of vegaful's open-world nature, but because sindy and sweetheart are endgame material, and sindy doesn't even receive any unique moves on top of having an insultingly low attack stat, the best you can get is either a one-two turn victory or getting stuck with +paralysis almost the entire time

90% of jerry's moveset is dedicated to attacking the enemy rather than giving himself buffs, and ~80% of that 90% are single target, effectively making him powerless when he's up against a crowd

the status effects these moves inflict are either stunning moves, whom enemies and bosses tend to be resistant to the higher you go, or have a very low chance of proccing even though they only inflict minor debuffs when they do land

statuses like +bleed, +burning and +punctured are good, no doubt, but since most of jerry's moves are labelled "physical attack" instead of "certain hit" down to even his combo dial moves, +hide and +counterattack will royally fuck him over until you finally reach the level where jerry gets to have some moves labelled "magical attack"

so warm take, jerry isn't that amazing, i'm more upset about how nerfed sweetheart and sindy gallows are

give sweetheart 150,000 hp, she's good enough to have it, especially since she retreats once her health reaches a certain percentage anyway

and go play sindy gallows overhaul if you haven't, it rebalances every vegaful party member too