So I just finished Persona 1 and am now figuring out what to do. I've got a fair bit to say about this game so I figured why not have a discussion about it and SMT and old Persona games in general. I'm still pretty new to SMT games all things considered.
What games are you playing and your thoughts on them and the franchise as a whole? Are they good or not? Why? Are you hopeful for SMT V? Anything you want to see? Is the community still shit with all that "gatekeeping" bullshit?
In terms of Persona 1 for me it was quite flawed, though there was a lot of charm and passion put in that makes it too hard to hate. I liked it all things considered, but I had some serious problems with it that, had they been better the game would've been 10/10. One thing to note is that I only finished the SEBEC route so far and I don't know whether I want to continue.and play through the Snow Queen route. While I liked the game and want to see the other half of the cast, a more dungeon focused route that sounds more like a sidequest might be too much for me.
Anyways my main thoughts (starting w/ flaws on) the game:
>The spell effects are utterly lacking
I feel like this is actually a huge fucking problem, because it makes the combat lack impact. The gameplay isn't nearly as fun as a result of this. What's the point of using powerful spells if they all just look… boring and bland. Megidola for example just looks like shit, I don't know how else to describe it. A field-wide explosion that doesn't give any sense of real damage, and its like this with a lot of spells in the game. The really frustrating part is that the Persona animations are fucking beautiful and the character and demon models are all nice. Using guns also feels incredibly satisfying, but the spells themselves… they just do not feel good at all to use and if the combat isn't fun (because that's the majority of what you'll be doing: spells) then the game suffers for it. Its rare that I feel something graphical had a tangible impact on a game but for JRPGs and SRPGs I feel this is important, especially since you're frequently selecting stuff off a menu. You at least want them to feel good to use, y'know. Shallow complaint, I know, but something I feel would've improved the game immensely. Despite this though I had fun. The combat was overall good if generally easy excluding that final boss, which actually forced me to grind and get new personas for half my group to deal with.
>Characters don't get enough dialogue and dialogue changes
It feels… not quite minimalistic, but just one notch above it. I feel like more exposition from them would've helped. Demon negotiation dialogue is nice and all but what about story and worldbuilding? It feels like most of it was frontloaded at the school in the beginning with NPCs and then just tapered off extremely quickly. Despite it I liked the pacing of the story and character and relationship development, but I just could've used more… content in general in this front.
>Combat was easy for the most part, but despite this it also felt annoying for various reasons
I'm really fucking glad the PSP version apparently reduced encounters because goddamn the shit became obnoxious. I almost never had any problems with the game's difficulty, even on Expert difficulty for my first blind playthrough for it aside from maybe a few bosses and the occasional spike in difficulty with a few of the dungeons. If you exclude the final boss my total Game Overs would fit on one hand. There's just… elements to this game that make it a bit annoying. You can rarely escape from encounters easily, estoma seems only good for avoiding extremely underleveled enemies and the fact that there was never any SP-restoring items that gave more than a single spell's worth of SP back. I bought 99 chewing souls for the final boss fight and used over 50 of them over the course of it. While it was gratifying and challenging to beat the boss and the fact that I had to keep a sort of "rhythm" going, it would've been nice to have an item that at least gave a moderate amount of SP, like maybe 3 spells' worth or something. In the end game you're bound to have at least 2,000,000+ yen but aside from shit like tablets and stones, and maxing out on beads and balms of life its way too hard to try and use it all. (then again I never used the casino so take that with a grain of salt). I'm rambling at this point but these elements combine together to make the game sort of annoying. Forced random encounters that you can't escape from, no matter how weak they are (and I tested even against very weak demons, it doesn't seem to affect escape rate), not enough tools provided to the player to increase convenience once real progression is made, and it combines doubly with the first problem. Forced combat that's not as interesting or as fun as it could've been.
(text limit, continuing; I don't hate the game promise)