While I haven't played the other games in the list, I am just a bit surprised that it is considered GOTY material TBH. I played through the import a month or two back and thought it was okay.
The issues I had with it were the pre-end game is really poor (devolves into copy and paste dungeons), the overworld is inadvertently awkward to navigate meaning you rely on quick travel and map icons (meaning you aren't immersed) and the game just drags on, and on, and on, and on with little in the way of pacing.
In addition two of the plot twists in the game are handled poorly, one that, while cool, takes an hour of exposition to attempt to fully explain (and still left me with questions) because the set-up to the twist was not well done. The second twist implies something greater than what is really revealed and disappoints as a result.
In addition locking away the ability to baton pass move from new characters limits your ability to maximise the battle system's strategic depth until very, very late into the game, and also makes certain characters near pointless until later on (incidentally, Ann just isn't very useful, period).
On a positive note the game uses an immediate input system that gives you a kinesthetic sense of participating in battle, making combat feel like what I call 'turn-based action'. Other battle systems with their multiple layers of confirmation between player and action come across as bureaucratic as a result.
The game is also imminently player-friendly with save points dotted within 20 minutes of one another and battle shortcuts that allow you to jump to the relevant skill with relative ease (sadly Atlus STILL haven't thought to break the item menu down into categorised tabs for fast browsing!).
And, whilst the bulk of the plot twists and the moments leading up to the end game are poor, the end game itself (as well as the ending) and one of the major twists were simply standing ovation worthy -- such that, despite having a middling time with most of the game I left with a very positive impression (that was not, and is not, actually representative of how I felt about the game at large!).
For reference, I played the game on Hard, and it took me 145 hours on the clock (though I suspect with the retrying and experimentation not tracked by the clock it was around 160 hours long). I should also note that I felt the Hard mode felt about right, sitting somewhere between the upper-end of Persona 4's Normal and the middle-end of its Hard.
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