Don't get tricked by the cute exterior, this is one of the most infuriating games ever conceived.
Essentially a slot machine that tricks you into thinking it's more skill than luck because you'll see the community throwing around fancy words like "current meta" and "viable build".

Trying to have fun with the billion different pets the game provides you with? Get fucked nerd, "The Wet Aunties" summon a 50/50 Rhinoceros that one-shots your entire squad. Back to the mosquito dimension with you.
It doesn't even feel good to win, since it usually ends just before you finally manage to create a satisfying team.

File under "Games that are actually just fidget toys for when you want to listen to a podcast" along with Vampire Survivors and all that other brain slop.

Extremely unserious game where random stuff happens because it’s cool. I’ll be honest, it was a bit jarring going from RE2:Remake (the only other Resident Evil game I’ve played) to this, especially since I thought the survival horror aspects were the best parts of that game, but I had a great time after getting into it and embracing the goofiness.
I like how they specifically went out of their way to make Leon be the lamest cool guy of all time. Like, check this shit out. Why did he do that.

Action games are an inherently silly medium. I personally really don't enjoy that whole ultra-realism thing a lot of newer games are trying to pull off. It's cool that RDR2 has your horse's balls shrink in cold weather or whatever, but too much realism is clunky, because real life is clunky and badly designed. Let me have fun!
"Press E to do a cool backflip", "Climb a ladder to get invincibility frames and dodge an attack" and "Literally just get a rocket launcher and instakill the final boss" might sound like pretty stupid concepts, but who cares, they're sick.

As I said, I haven't played the original RE4. I don't know what's new or what's changed, so I can't add anything to that discussion, but I had a blast playing this. Huge props for making an "escort mission" actually fun. I genuinely missed not having Ashley around when she got taken away.
Some random nitpicks off the dome:
- Surely there are more possible sidequest ideas than "kill 4 rats for the sixth time".
- The soundtrack is a mixed bag. Nickelback ass credits song, made me chuckle.
- Saddler is boring. Wish he had more than 2 zeptoseconds of screentime.

Another anecdote to wrap things up: I played this on a laptop because I'm insane, and had a chocolate bar on my table about half a meter away from the exhaust vent. Motherfucker got pulverized.
Worth it to see every pore on the Regenerador's asscheeks in crystal clear HD though.

Persona developers learn how to pace a video game challenge (impossible)

I have very mixed feelings about this game.
On one hand, it’s got some fantastic characters (especially Nanako and Dojima), a lot of memorable moments and some genuinely funny dialogue. Probably the only game to have a dialogue prompt to compliment another man’s cock after he lost his underwear - they were truly firing on all cylinders when they wrote that.

On the other hand, it’s bogged down by insanely boring, randomly generated dungeons with the most pathetic excuses for gameplay gimmicks known to man, designed to waste as much of your time as humanly possible.
Who could forget everybody’s favorite “floor that randomly teleports you”, or the classic “floor that requires you to backtrack two floors up”.
Then there’s the story. I don’t have any issue with the overall message, even if it’s not very deep, but the pacing of everything was agonizing to sit through. There’s so much downtime and zero urgency to anything. I swear to god, I could have started a family and had 3 children by the time Naoto recovered.
Despite trying to be a murder mystery, the characters find a grand total of 0 pieces of evidence pointing to anyone for 80 hours, as the game desperately chucks false suspects at you to try and pull some cheap “Gotcha!”s.
They fuck around for a whole year and then the game remembers that it's a JRPG in the final act and inflates its stakes from 0 to a trillion in like 30 minutes by doing your regular "God's going to destroy the world" shtick that felt extremely out of place and tacked on.
Plus the actual real suspect is kind of underdeveloped. Dude has like 5 minutes of screentime not counting their social link. Definitely better than Persona 5’s villain though (not a very high bar).

Just a random final thought: I think Persona games would benefit from shortening the social links. Make the max level be 8 or something like that. They always add so many side activities that I never touch because I want to finish the characters' stories. Like fuck no, I’m not going fishing - it’s Sunday, grandma is waiting for me.

I’m happy I played this, even if I didn’t really enjoy it that much. The endings for these games always get me weirdly emotional nonetheless. I like what the Persona games are trying to do. I’ll be there when Persona 6 releases in 30 years.

So, in conclusion:
I learn how to express my thoughts on JRPGs without writing a rambling, barely coherent wall of text challenge (impossible)