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.