i’m really fond of a lot of things about this game, but it’s also deeply flawed. i like the tone and (most of) the characters; the basic thematic elements it shares with most of the other persona games (jungian bullshit, mostly shallow character/self-realization arcs) are still pretty uninteresting and lightweight, but there’s more texture and charm throughout and it doesn’t have the fundamental teen boy-oriented cynicism of the later dating sim games. the demon negotiation is so cute and characterful and the upfront bluntness of the gay romance option is both pleasantly refreshing and a nice little fujoshi snack. the plot is silly and all over the place in a way that winds up feeling coherent, i really like how small scale and intimately specific the central past dramatic event turns out to be, and the conclusion is weird and ambiguous and ultimately unhappy in a way i appreciate. i also love that the last thing you are presented with is the choice to punch philemon for treating the whole game as an orchestrated bet with nyarlathotep and his mask falls off and he has tatsuya’s face.

buuuuut… the fights up until the final boss were generally trivial and low on strategy. i fought almost no random encounters, did very few optional fights and finished at level 50, and because the game gives you three successive sets of story personas that are fine to use for the first ~quarter and second half of the game before the final boss, i only ended up summoning a few on my own despite how many cards i had by the end. and since i was always underleveled, pacts only became possible/useful at the very end when i was developing a specific strategy for the last boss. there were relatively basic mechanics i didn’t even know existed for most of the game, and ones i enjoyed that quickly became useless from a dps/efficiency perspective since there was no need to mess around with advanced summoning and customization anyway. this was frustrating because i really like the systems in these games! and it made me sad that i didn’t have any incentive to engage with them much in this one until the very end. i got stomped by the final boss the first time and it was fun to rework, plan a strategy and stomp him back the next time using skills and mechanics that hadn’t been necessary up til then (finally, buffs! pacts! turn-canceling! mid-battle persona swapping! research-based summoning and customization decisions! big number fusion spells!). it was a very megaten-y dynamic reversal that only required a bit of backtracking, but it was pretty dispiriting at first since i wasn’t sure if i was expected to have been getting even more OP up to that point. it just seemed out of place with how… not designed the rest of the game felt. curious about how it would change on the hard mode they added for the psp version since i stuck with normal.