The more I sit with it the more I think it has the best combat in one of these I've ever played. It also deserves a lot of credit for how much it sticks to the Pinnochio thing, it squeezes every last drop of possible theming and aesthetics from the story when building its world and story. It has some great twists too in both its story and gameplay its a lot of fun.

stray thoughts:

- I really prefer the more straightforward story telling here than what we usually get in these sorts of games. I was really invested in Pinnochio as a character and the ending hit way more because of it.

- Absurd amount of enemy and weapon variety. They will throw more unique movesets at you then you'll know what to do with, and will begin introducing 2-3 new enemies at once in an encounter.

- Parrying feels really rewarding when you can do it but the timing felt too strict for me to do it reliably during some of the more frantic fights, they apparently loosened the timing on it in a patch afterwards though.

- The reusable oil that lets you apply free elemental damage to your weapon once per life is a great way to get people to engage with that part of the combat, I feel like a lot of people play these games without considering elemental weaknesses at all which is a shame.

- I struggled a lot on the second to last final boss but I'm willing to admit it was a skill issue... still a real shake up that came out of nowhere.

- I have an issue where some of the side plots with some of the hub npcs turn out but thats spoiler territory.

- It has what might be the greatest post credits stinger is all of video games.