@miraculous-stardust replied to this:
maybe I’m misremembering, lemme know if so. but the lack of gloating from akechi and the differences in the scenes where akiren fails/dies makes me wonder if goro knew about the plan. (or that a plan was happening.) bc why wouldn’t he monologue in reality? & in reality, doesn’t akira fall backwards from the force of the bullet, while in sae’s cognition he slumps forward in a way that’s noticeably unrealistic? & we never see him leave the metaverse + realize, which I wonder abt the most… idk…
Yeah, that's also a really neat take on it! He definitely does react when Sae shows him the phone, so it's fair to assume that he's either fully cognizant, or at the very least skeptical, of his surroundings after that.
As for the Akechi killing Akira in reality ending, that's a little more complicated. In the missed deadline endings, yes, Akira's shot and blown backwards onto the ground. But in the "real" bad ending when you make it to the interrogation room, it plays out the animated cutscene like the normal route where his head hits the table. The cutscene plays out, it cuts to the Velvet Room with Igor telling Akira that ruin is coming and that he will be stuck in that cell forever, and then it cuts back to the game's model of Akira bleeding out on the ground without the gun in his hand like in the missed deadline endings.
I know we all drag this plan/sequence of events for all the flaws and stuff, but truly... there's a lot to interpret, and knowing that Akechi's a Metaverse veteran at this point makes it difficult to believe he wasn't aware at both the entry and exit points that something was up. Unless we're to believe he was just riding that high of victory so hard he didn't notice the obvious, which... fair. But also. What if.