Impressively and gallingly bad almost immediately. I bought this for $3 and still felt like it wasn't worth it. It got mixed reviews so I wasn't expecting the world but I was expecting better than abject misery.

Shiness feels like "jack of all trades, master of none." What would happen if you got 3 different artistic styles and game design documents together? There's a mix between animesque furry characters, western inspired fury characters, anime people and realistic people. The art design isn't very cohesive at all, despite the comic book cutscenes looking impressive.

As an RPG, the material gathering isn't fun and the (non-mappable) menus are more confusing than anything else. You can't fast travel anywhere. Plot wise, I can barely buy why the leads are friends, the world is generic and the music is instantly forgettable.
As a fighting game, the animations lack any sort of weight or impact, with many battles dragging on for overly long against damage sponge enemies. The camera, even with the option to autolock, very frequently gets caught on grass or terrain rather than stick to the enemies.
As a platform adventure game, it's incredibly clunky, with only a single heavy jump and incredibly slow movement despite having a dash.

It aimed for Indivisible but came out Sonic Boom Rise of Lyric.

Return of the Jedi for sandbox games starring talking animals. It's a game full of selective improvements, like the more maneuverable hub worlds, despite the lack of stuff to find in them and absurdly high coin counts. There's slightly better boss fights, and more characters to break up the gameplay, some of which are interesting shake ups and others feel like wasted development with little use. The pirate ship stage in particular is a massive annoyance. In line with RotJ, the final stretch is amazing, an excellent culmination of the entire series up to that point; if only the series ended here...

Filled to the brim with charm and strong demonstration of the GameCube’s power. Pretty good. There’s a lot to love about the atmosphere of the game (particularly in boss fights), the animations/lighting, Luigi humming the theme tune whenever you walk about, distinctness of each portrait ghost with their respective rooms and puzzle, etc.

It’s held back, for me, by the inconsistency of its core vacuuming controls. The game’s very loose with what the best way for catching them is between tilting or holding the control stick, which leads to some frustration where it feels like you’re barely having any effect and you’re starting at the screen and not your two controller sticks. It’s hard to say the control really works with you, which makes a lot of the portraits feel like a slog or hard to get a start on. That, plus some camera issues in a few places and inconsistency in starting the suction for portrait ghosts in the split second holds the game back.

It’s no REmake 1 for me, but it’s still quite good, a great launch title and I admire 2001 Nintendo plenty for taking on such a novel concept that eventually led to two sequels years later.

Excellently developed protagonist, strong story with a great thematic thrust, a compelling cast of villains that serve as complimentary rivals..............................................................................

All that compounded by a tedious, boring, backtrack loaded emptily designed game. There's so little to sink into with the combat systems on offer and most of the dungeons are just walking from entrance to exit or putting colored balls in the right holes. Maybe there was one good puzzle but I don't know if it was required or not. There's an overly long segment which just consists of your party split in half walking across the map from location to location and having to forcibly stop for a cutscene if you're doing it too long. It's atrocious. The game also feels optimized poorly for PS2. Merely saving the game takes a solid 7-10 seconds, and trying to move the camera in the overworld results in a ton of lag. But the story kept me interested enough to see it to the end, and for what it's worth, the final dungeon delivers as it should.

Great story but it feels especially rough to experience all of it.