>>723057837
>it is impossible to know on a first playthrough if the soul is for kanako or the serum
I'm not saying you're supposed to magically intuit that she's trying to take Clover's soul for the serum project, obviously because you only learn that once the game sees fit to exposit it all at you once the steamworks is done, I'm saying you should've put two and two together and figured out that Ceroba was lying to you in general, and she obviously wasn't trying to actually save her daughter, even if her *actual* reasons for wanting to be alone with Clover weren't obvious yet.
If someone tells you they want to be alone with you for a specific purpose, and then proceeds to act shifty and suspicious the entire time you're with them, not letting anyone else see them with you, leaving out of the blue for completely arbitrary reasons, and dancing around any issues you bring up as to why they're doing what they're doing, it should be pretty obvious that whatever reason they initially told you was a lie to cover up something else. That's really not a hard concept to grasp.
I figured this out when I played the game blind just after it came out, all my friends who've played it reached the same conclusion about Ceroba before they were even through with the steamworks, it's really obvious if you pay attention to how she acts.
Any chance you thought breaking into a chinese police station when picrel asked you to was a good idea too?