Yeah once you get some decent pictos on, you can build little engines for constant auto-healing by mid-game, and then dodging becomes less essential. The dodging for endgame bosses gets almost ridiculous and so your picto strategy becomes critical.

I admit I was annoyed by the unfairness of dying to a pattern I haven’t learned yet early on, but you learn to work around it - and I say this as someone who detests QTEs and games with dodging 😂

You won’t regret it - it took me until I was 80% through to realize it was the best thing I’ve played in many many years, and I’m still grinding endgame content because I can’t imagine parting with it