Reached evening of 4/15 - Ann joins the party! At the same time, got the Lovers and Magician Confidants. I definitely think Safe Mode was the right call (she got ambushed three times in a row!) - it gives her the freedom to make mistakes and struggle to learn concepts without being penalised for it

Just did school exploration over 4/13 and 4/14 - reached evening of 4/14

Reached evening of 4/12 - Ryuji joins the party!
Nothing super remarkable happened from a gameplay perspective, which, by itself, is remarkable! She is clearly getting better at navigation
What was VERY interesting was that Mum decided that she'd rather have AI party members than Direct Commands. This is going to be very interesting for me, as a person who likes that
Will note I looked away from the TV in shame when virtually naked Cognitive Ann came on screen

Reached 4/12! Mum is gettint better and better at exploring 3D environments, and is able to intuit where to go based on their environments now - her instinct was to go to the branch off the main hall for the faculty office (although got lost anyway due to lack of signposting), beelined to the stairs when told to go to the roof. Also made the classic mistake of going backwards on the roof door room because she was holding forwards, teaching her a little lesson about how movement input always corresponds to camera placement! Besides that, is happy that she finally has a better idea what's happening after Morgana's expository dialogue, and learned that auto-advancing cutscenes is actually more convenient. (Also noted that a lot of the dialogue doesn't contain essential information but just nudges the flow of conversation along bit by bit)

Wow! It's been a while!!
Started off from the save point right before Ren's awakening.
Hilariously, immediately afterwards, when you have to navigate out of Kamoshida's palace for the first time, when she couldn't figure out how to move forward after crossing the crates, she handed the controller over to me... and I couldn't figure it out either! Eventually we figured it out, finding the hole in the wall at the room at the end of the hallway, but it was fascinating!
I'm not sure if it was a deliberate design decision to make it so obtuse, but I think it had a beneficial effect, in that it sets expectations for exploration accordingly - she got better at exploration after that, eventually getting the hang of the camera to the degree she used the circle button to reset the camera independently of anything I was saying!
Stopped before sinking teeth too deep into anything, looking forward to next session

Reached 4/11; got to meeting Ryuji / "Vulgar Boy", and specifically the save point right before Joker's awakening.
Not much to say about today, except that I wasn't expecting how much trouble Mum had navigating the train line; she basically went to every possible wrong turn you could theoretically take getting out of Shibuya station. I did not realise how unclear it was in terms of direction!
She figured out where to go by following signs in the end.
I think the confusion there is intentional, although I'm not sure it was meant to be THAT difficult. That they added all the details on the signs was nice!
I look forward to the day she can navigate these environs like the back of her hand.

First day; started playing on my exam results day.
This playthrough is not played by me, but rather my mum! As such, will be MY observations watching her play
Game will be played on Safe Mode.
Showed her the OG opening before we started, then also watched the Royal one - she smiled during that and said she "liked it"
We then spent the first 10 mins (not incl. in Time Played) setting her up a PSN acc for her to use the Network functions which she found interesting
Surprisingly, went through the exploration section of the tut like a charm. No problems with camera control - was expecting it to be worse, since she struggles to grasp it. I think the first dungeon will be more difficult
She clearly liked Sae (as you do, she's great) because she picked the nicer dialogue options, in contrast to her more snarky Sojiro responses
She loved the visual style - she was very happy when she found out she was playing as Joker since she thought he was cool, and also later commented how much she liked his outfit. I found this cute
She was somehow MISSILE TARGETED on Kawakami's character being weird
"Kawakami's fun" "Does she have a weird character arc" "..."
We stopped after 50 mins since her eyes started getting sore; I think it's partly getting used to playing games like that but also solidly because she was playing in the dark.
Not sure when she wants to / will be able to play again, but she said she really wants to. Curious how far this is gonna go - Persona 5 is EXTREMELY long