Hey, I never liked Pigsy. The game was much better before they added him.

As for the ending... maybe it was rushed. But well, they needed an ending -- and it does at least explain the memory flashes from the headband. It doesn't explain much else, though.

I don't know much about literature, but I very much doubt that an ancient novel features mind-controlling headbands and gigantic robots. So, if there's a connection at all, it's probably something that only literature experts can construct.

Still, the ending didn't change much for "the world" as a whole, so they could have used the IP and even the characters to make more games. Unfotunately, they just dumped it :-(

It felt to me like there was a whole bunch of stuff that was either cut, or was meant to be there but they never got a chance to do it.
Like it just gave a quick explanation, quick end (she does it while Monkey is entranced by the matrix? Rubbish) to the "villain", and then it's done.
We got no information on what happened with our heroes, or what happened to the slaves. It just cut to the credits all of a sudden.

Completely agree. I felt like the whole game kind of fell apart narratively after you meet Pigsy. The motivation to get revenge on Pyramid worked as a premise but was never expanded on (nor was Pyramid mentioned like, at all after that point until you actually reach the place at the end of the game strangely). Pigsy sacrifices himself (which makes sense if you played Pigsy's Perfect 10, which I honestly think had a much stronger and concise plot), but Trip is upset for like one second but then they suddenly appear inside the pyramid. It feels really badly paced, as if they were rushed for time and had to cut some stuff out.

They call the final cutscene the "epilogue" but shouldn't this be the climax of the story, where you finally confront the main antagonist? Although you can barely call Pyramid an antagonist when you were given almost no knowlege of who he is or why Trip just assumes he is responsible for her father's death. The actual epilogue should have been a cutscene after killing Pyramid where the two leads decide what to do next and what they've learned through the journey. Once again, I think Ninja Theory ran out of time and/or money and just needed to get the game out, hoping to sell enough to make that sequel they wanted.

The ending felt very inconclusive, but it's really only one problem alongside several problems in the story's structure. The whole plot felt kind of ambiguous after the village. Like we know Trip's motivation is to avenge her father, but where we're going (besides "west") and especially who we're facing and why we should feel intimidated by this mysterious antagonist. It was a bit confusing but I assumed we would be learning more about the world as we continued on through Monkey and Trip's dialogue. By the time we meet Pigsy though and he just explains that we're gonna get the Leviathan, it felt like the story was losing focus at that point.

To remedy what I felt was wrong with the story, I'd give Pyramid a more menacing presence throughout the game by showing survivors NPCs being taken by slave ships (maybe even include a temporary additional companion that would be taken as a slave to add more personal stakes to reach Pyramid). Make it explicitly clear that Trip's village was enslaved by Pyramid, instead of mentioning the name "Pyramid" like one time halfway through the game and not mentioning it again until the end. Keep the quality of the character interactions as good as it was in the first half of the game, instead of Pigsy creating an awkward dynamic between all 3 that seemed to make the characters more distant instead of closer together. Make Pigsy as likable as he was in his DLC and make his relationship with Trip a lot less creepy so her reaction to his death feels more real, instead of being just flat-out hated like he was in the main game. Give more subtle hints toward the true intentions of Pyramid throughout the game, instead of just throwing in silly real life pictures as collectibles. Maybe include another section after Pigsy's sacrifice showing Monkey and Trip actually reaching Pyramid instead of sending the pacing into warp speed.

I was really enjoying the game in the beginning, because although the overarching plot was ambiguous at that point too, I felt like it was getting to something substantial and I was liking the dynamic between the two characters. It was just that the story kept feeling muddy and unclear the entire time after leaving the village and the character interactions were getting less and less frequent or meaningful.

Pigsy is an interesting character, I liked the fact that they added an ugly, yet charismatic character, and kinda lovable after all. A little bit cliché, but still.
Many devs think classy or handsome characters make them interesting and lovable, but it's not. You don't have to, look at Tyrion for example.

As for the ending, I can't agree more that it feels terribly rushed...
They tried to add some moral questionning if bringing back people in an ugly, yet real world is a good decision or not.
But it hasn't been worked hard enough, just like the relation with Trip and Monkey (so disappointed in this poor one minute cutscene when she cuts off the crown, it was the moment I was expecting the most...)

It reminded me a lot the Black Mirror series, the San Junipero episode for knowers. Very similar ending.

I really liked the story.
For the ending, i see the point. The game lacks a proper boss fight at the end. But for me it was really good nevertheless, because the idea that you have been fighting against an AI in auto-pilot all along is consistent with the world we are presesnted with.
I actually liked the relationship between Monkey and Trip, because you develop it over gameplay also. I think its better than most movies and tv series.

You got to play Abzu, it has connections to the pyramid in that game and it's link to this game.

As for the Monkey King, they took some kind of cyberpunk narrative in which the people living in this world was artificial, legendary like living in some kind of heaven or hell. And the flashbacks were the memories of what the person that was jacked in to the VR headset. It was a reminder of past life in this case, past memories before entering some form of virtual reality.