Good
- the sae flash forwards are cool way to tell story
- the story behind futaba wanting her heart changed makes me feel the phantom thieves were real, cause I could use a heart change myself. This allowed me to relate to the game on a deeper level
- there's a certain appeal and humor to leveling up skills doing random normal daily things like answering questions in class or crafting lock picks or eating a huge burger challenge.
- the Japanese locations are well done. Good replication of the real places.
- I love the foul language the characters use, like ryuji. It makes the chars feel organic.
- the mental symbolism behind each palace based on what the villain perceives their world is interesting to see. Like ATMs for people kaneshiro sees. And art pieces of madarame's students. And kamoshida's view of Ann. It makes me think about what my palace would look like, and the way I view others would be symbolized in my own palace.
- the music is awesome
- the characters are diverse and interesting.
- by the end of it, I felt like I knew the characters personally. It's like I knew them for a life time. This was one positive thing that came out of the insane amount of cutscenes and dialogue.
- despite the game feeling it was dragged on during the middle, the ending was absolutely beautiful, and it wouldn't have been so had the game not been so long. I really felt like a journey. An adventure. As if I've made a group of long lasting friends.
Bad
- too much dialogue. When shit goes down, it's fine. But when nothing's going on, it's tedious going through it.
- it's very hard to fuse the personas required by the twins because if the persona needed isn't on my list, I would need to spend yen to withdraw it just to see what the fusion result is, then toss it away to withdraw the personas I had on my list originally. This is so inconvenient to the point where I absolutely needed to refer to a guide.
- sometimes RNG can just completely f*** you over. There was one time I got ambushed, one of the enemies inflicted rage on my whole party, so I couldn't heal, and the enemy just wiped me out in two turns. There was literally nothing I could do to save the situation the moment I got to ambushed.
- it's unclear when you should spend time with a confidant. The game says bond Wong deepen, so does that mean I shouldn't request them? It's unclear what I should do
- there's a lot of unnecessary dialogue. Like when grabbing an item in dungeons, some other party members always have to chime in with a completely useless comment, like oh look it's a treasure chest when I clearly see it, or maybe we should try to press this button, when I obviously will press it already.
- the character animations aren't exactly ground breaking. The characters are standing there talking 95% of the time, making the cutscenes visually boring. MGS is known to have a crap ton of cutscenes too but at least you get to enjoy high quality animations, which makes it more interesting.
- the negotiations are way too vague. The answers are terribly ambiguous.
- it sucks that I can't angle the camera freely while running in one direction. This makes scouting for enemies around me while moving difficult