pleasantly surprised with how much i enjoyed this. as for the new content the total overhaul of tartarus is the best change here its probably the most addicting dungeon crawling in any persona and the mini social links for the male sees members are all somehow as good as the social links from the original game.
only real complaint is the game is way too easy now lol i guess its my fault for playing on normal but the tartarus minibosses were my favourite parts of the original and some of the most difficult and fun fights like change relic/intrepid knight/sleeping table have either been changed for the worse or are just trivialized entirely by the theurgy mechanic. overall tho this is about as good as the original

the gameplay here feels closer to other monster collector jrpgs where you're heavily encouraged to use a variety of team compositions and strategies (think smt or the digimon games) and can't just play on autopilot like the majority of pokemon games which i really enjoyed conceptually. everythings buffed to be at least somewhat viable here but the enemy teams are for the most part built to where theres nothing thats gonna steamroll the entire game.
the biggest issue i have with this game is that you are straight up forced to grind lol. even on 'minimal grinding mode' you're still spending like half the playtime mass murdering audinos till you reach the level cap whenever you want to add something to your team which really soured the back half of this game. like yea i kinda get it but why design a game around experimenting with all these options and then make it so annoying to do so!!!! its even worse on the higher difficulties cuz they make items like lucky egg harder to obtain for some reason (like you wouldnt even be able to overlevel anyways in this game because theres a cap lol whatever). theres prob some elegant ways to remedy this that i dont care that much to think about i just like to complain.
overall really solid hack tho. one of the few examples of a pokemon difficulty hack that is actually challenging in a fun way and not in the i wanna kill myself way. kinda unplayable without emulator speedup moreso than other pokemon games but i had fun

cute rpgmaker game that's semi-recently gotten an english translation that i think is still being updated. there's several different protagonists you can start the game as who each have their own unique trait that'll switch up their playstyle, along with other staples of the SaGa series like the open-ended progression, heavy amount of party member customization, even battle formations are here lmao. while i'm admittedly not an expert on the SaGa franchise (the only ones i can even remember playing are frontier and romancing saga 3), i feel hat world sets itself apart from its influence with a cool 'dreamy' sort of aesthetic it has going on (especially in the character and enemy designs). also it has cute character interactions w/ anime girls in silly hats (awesome)

i'm kind of a poser cuz sadly haven't been able to play through all of this (from what i've seen theres a shitload of content here in the first place) BUT what i've experienced so far with hat world has been a blast, i'm a bit shocked at the level of quality here lol. definitely recommend checking this game out, glad this didnt fly under my radar