The reason for me why that arc was working as Jake positioned as the villain wasn't because he was "the ultimate villain".If you don't like anything else but the Jake stuff(which is shocking because there's nothing special at all there from him), then that's fine and I'm not going to try to change your mind on it. My only goal was to clear up that we indeed saw the "big bad" already. You not liking it at all is a whole other thing and I frankly have no interest is discussing it. You not getting those scenes just mean you weren't doing the corruption route.
I will say though, I find it funny that you liked Jake's stuff when he was basically being manipulated by Ella and the 1st Numbered Monster during that whole thing. The thing you "detested".
In fact, if it turned out to be that Ella is indeed just a super maniac that wants to murder everyone in the world, that would make this whole story work. Yet hints are there that this wont be the case.
The antagonist of an arc can easily not be the superb villain of them all and make it work. Thing is... Who is the villain of any arc after him? Like.... MC fights some undead knight. Govt comes after him.
And mind you, there should be some more super corrupt options that shouldn't lead down a direct dead end, if we want to have a branch where MC IS the villain. As it stands, I don't understand who I'm supposed to root for or against.
This is one of those situations where the writer does worldbuilding to the extreme detriment of the narrative itself.
Sub-note to this point: After ditching the school setting, there should've %110 been a "Kratos / Alex Mercer" route. (I.e. KILL EVERYTHING that mildly annoys you) That was the logical break point for that. To prevent that, you start unveiling more and more godlike new characters, again, a very tiresome anime trope. Like, if you can move instanteanously to another continent and wipe an entire mountain off the map, Valran would take that middle aged wind guy 0.11 seconds to end.
So the whole point of that fight is just.... gone.