That's fine, doesn't take away from my point of first impression giving me a taste of a trope I despise. There's no internal monologue or anything to suggest other than what is initially perceived and if you're someone like me who's very tired of that specific trope, you wouldn't exactly be enclined to play another 5 to 10 hours of a game just to get to that revelation. This is why initial impressions of a game is important.
And don't get me wrong, the dev should make and write whatever he/she/they are passionate about, it just didn't vibe with me.
To be clear, I'm with you, and I personally don't think it was a great choice. If the
MC is actually a badass and is pulling a ruse twist was hinted at fairly shortly thereafter that'd be one thing, but there is actually a hell of a lot of content that builds the character up and
shows rather than
tells you that she's a well-respected and seriously tough cookie. From a narrative standpoint this is good stuff, but the reality is it's a game that is in work, not a completed novel; seeing this play out takes months of waiting for releases, not thirty minutes of reading. For that reason some kind of a hint would have been appropriate and appreciated.
To be fair though, we _do_ get a hint by how she handles herself in the opening scenes when meeting the Reds. It's just that we are so conditioned to expect shit writing in adult games that we are quick to assume "Oh, the writer is an idiot, and wants to have his character be both badass and a victim, without any effort at reconciling" because, as you point out,
it has been done so many times in so many games that it is actually a trope. I think the expected (and more fair) reaction is "wait a minute, that self-confident bad-ass suddenly became a sniveling wimp-- something is up". But that requires trust in the writer, which is hard to come by around here.
Anyway, to TL,DR: Namco has earned my trust with the subsequent writing, and it saddens me to see this excellent story lose readers because it fails to accomodate some damage done by lesser writers.