Ha ha Pinocchio aside, what a surprising game! The final set of bosses are kind of audaciously difficult for simply completing the game (at least if you're playing a big, dumb Motivity build). I'm unsure how I feel about putting your Sen's Fortress analogue at the very end of the game - smart in that you arrive with the perfect mixture of weariness and cockiness that makes you a sucker for getting shoved off a ledge by some freakazoid, annoying in that the playfulness or humor of the traps is drowned out by that weariness. It feels like the clown puppets that you fight a couple times -- brutal and silly and it seems like they're having a good time even though you're not.

NPC quests all felt a little underbaked, but giving you an indicator that they're ready to advance was a nice quality of life change, though it does lose some of the magic of the opaque, fragile nightmare of a FromSoft NPC quest line.

I might have had even more fun if I'd played around with the weapon customizations, but the number of options is a little overwhelming. I wonder if there's an easier way to communicate how it wants you to engage with that.

Okay, here's my gripe. Persona 3 introduces social links and a fixed calendar that you need to cram your silly little anime life into because it's a game about mortality and the finite time you have to get to know the world you live in. That's great, that makes sense, that's cool. What is added thematically to this game by me reaching the end, finding out that I will miss maxing Haru's social link by one time slot because I presumably ate one too many burgers? Is that justice? Am I being punished for not sufficiently throwing off the shackles of freedom, or is it just an accepted truth that a modern Persona game must have a highly regimented golden path that you need to follow to become friends with your friends?

The game really wore out its welcome with me by the end of the runtime (~150 hours) but probably not as much as worse games would have. The game does a great job of hooking you with its correctly celebrated style and bringing you into its world enough that you barely notice when the sunk cost fallacy dead-eyed grind starts to set in. Maybe I'll look back on the game more fondly as time goes on, maybe I should have waited to play the Person 3 Reload instead of forcing myself through this one. Maybe Strikers will be more fun. Who know! Very happy to be done with it and to move on to other things with a clear conscience.

Finally wrapped up the game after dropping it earlier this year. I managed to get through the whole thing only restarting once towards the beginning of the game, which made for an interesting experience where I spent its entire twenty-odd hours anticipating needing to do it all over again and ultimately being just fine. The other side effect of that though is that I never got the pay-off of restarting and having all of the skills and banked EXP giving me the power trip of blowing through the once difficult earlier game. In any case!
The game has so much personality. There are so many bizarre design decisions and weird quirks to the game that you need to slowly figure out yourself, and even now I couldn't tell you with certainty what you do and don't lose when you do the different kind of SOLs, but it's so strange and compelling.
The Regent fights at the end are impressively tough, and each time I was convinced that this would be the boss that sent me back to the beginning only to come out ahead. Absolute Defense is a crazy mechanic, but it really does a lot to crank up the tension in the end game.

The game feels excellent to play. The Adrenaline system is so good at pulling you into that high-risk high-reward flow state. It does a poor job of explaining the weapon mods, which is a shame because once I figured out how they worked upgrading and unlocking new ones became a really compelling focus for any given run. Playing co-op is also a great time, though a much more frantic experience than playing solo. I'm curious to try out the Sisyphean Tower with a partner, because that seems like it would be where this game would shine its absolute brightest as a fast, fluid, arcadey shooter.

What an odd little game! My main gripe with it is that it doesn't give you great directions about how to pace yourself with it, resulting in scenarios either dragging on if you do things like bounties or feeling a little underbaked if you rush through. There is a sweet spot though, and when you find it the game's a lot of fun with a lot of charm.
Some of its systems are a bit tedious/unsatisfying to engage with (armor upgrading, most of the abilities) but overall solving the game's quests and puzzles is engaging and the characters are interesting and enjoyable to spend time with. It's at its best when it leans into its weirdness (right there in the name, isn't it?) but even when it's not at its best, bugging out as you try a chaotic, repetitive encounter for the sixth time, it's still pretty fun.

Despite this being Not Very Good, I've played through the entire thing twice. Once on my own and once with friends. The experience of playing it solo was definitely slower and more methodical. It felt much more tense moment to moment and feels occasionally more like a survival horror than an action RPG. As a group was certainly quicker and still harrowing during boss fights, but the actual world exploration was usually pretty breezy. On both modes the boss fights are kind of excruciating. Really felt like smashing your head into the wall over and over until finally something gave. Nonetheless, there is fun to be had.

The procedurally generated features aren't very interesting, and the randomness they inject into the game doesn't feel novel or rewarding and the interactions between random events feels pretty hollow (I think of the bandit man with the watch, in particular).

Played the entire time just filled with gratitude to (finally) be getting more Psychonauts. I have no interest in parsing out what components of my enjoyment came from nostalgia vs. genuine passion for the game at hand, all I know is I loved every second and that these characters are incredibly dear to me. It is fun to run and jump and zap and bop things. The levels are consistently so delightful and surprising and imaginative.
My only frustration with this game (and Psychonauts before it) is that my love for the vibe drives me to exhaustively seek out every character possible between every trigger and flag to see if they have something new to say. This grinds the momentum to a halt more often than is necessarily fun, but the writing frequently rewards the diligence.

If your game is going to be that stylish you can't just throw me into four differently coloured deserts! Baby, no! Give me a sexy little jungle! Why not underwater? Please, baby!
Sadly really underwhelmed by the game in the end. Also, once you've got a pretty beefy, buffy team it's hard to find motivation to change things up when you can just Golden Apple your way through so much of the game.
Also, very sad how little you get to hang out with the side characters. They all look so cool, why can't I be their friend until I decide to kill God for them?