My very first persona game, I remember playing this when I was younger and not understanding the ending, looking back I can see why. This game handles underlying complex themes dealing with depression and losses, and masked it as some kind of JRPG with a highschool/dating sim. The gameplay can get repetitive as you basically need to fight through all floors of this tall structure with little changes, the story is definitely where it shines, and the ending still surprises me when I finally understood what happened.

It feels outdated, but it's definitely not as bad as they say. Enemies do block yes, but that's only if you keep spamming attacks, there's a lot of ways to get around that, so i never really see this "enemies block a lot" thing as a problem in at least most of my playthrough. Combat is rough early on but once you get to a certain point in the story, you will have an arsenal of moves you can use to make combat much easier and smoother, (especially Komaki's moves) Also enemies or bosses that keeps strafing/dodging are 100x more annoying than enemies that keeps blocking. The final bosses of the Hitman side mission are more annoying than the final boss of the game itself. At the very least you can cheese the very final boss.

Another problem is the fact that enemies do attack together, at least when you're fighting a crowd (Which you will A LOT) because the moment you turn your back to attack one guy, 2 or 3 will instantly attack you from behind.

Story is alright, It's pacing is bad and there's a lot of filler but it's still Ok.

Honestly, it's not that bad. It's an alright game which is just dragged down by being outdated in a lot of ways but I could definitely see how this game worked back then. I think if it gets the Kiwami treatment, it could be one of the higher ones in the series.

The story is where it truly shines, it doesn't follow the usual anime tropes, where everyone is op and somehow survives fighting everyone else in a war but instead isn't afraid to kill off a character. The gameplay is also different than other tactical RPG, which is nice.

My only complaint is the RNG aspect of the battles, I've seen people defend it by saying that "if you plan well, it won't matter" but sometimes you may plan things really well only for it to be ruined because an enemy managed to win the evasion skill check and ducked to then perhaps counter-kill you, or you completely missing a shot from your tank because you failed your accuracy skill check causing you to then waste your command point/s, all these can really force you to save scum.

One of the most fun I've had in a JRPG, and this was before I played the Royal edition, I remember coming home from school as soon as possible just to play this game, gaining more than 100 hours before finally finishing it. It has one of the best gameplay mechanic in a JRPG along with a very unique UI, the story is a bit formulaic but it's still really good, it also has a unique cast of characters which I liked a bit more than some of the ones in the previous entries. The soundtrack is also easily 11/10.

There's a lot of improvements from the first, there's even multiple iconic scenes of the series accompanied by the most iconic and one of Falcom's magnum opus soundtrack "Blue Destination"

The concept of the story itself is nice, going from a usual school setting to the middle of the war, though some moments are really "anime" and some parts (especially in chapter 2) is really dragged out, it's still really engaging at times, the high of this game is really high while the low can match the first game's pacing.

It's the culmination of the world building of the first, so it's much better than the first game at least.