This game has great lore and worldbuilding, and a significant number of glaring fundamental issues. The combat is pretty decent, but it is hampered by mediocre hitboxes and gameplay issues. This game heavily relies on artificial difficulty, where they increase the number of enemies or the number of environmental hazards in an area to make it harder. There are also enemies in a later area that spawn out of thin air and can spawn directly on your character, making you take free damage from an enemy that you cannot even see. Similarly, the boss encounters are incredibly weak imo. Most bosses have a very small moveset of 3-4 moves that they relentlessly spam and later in the encounter, the bosses will just increase how quickly they use this repetitive moveset. It makes most fights very boring and while most bosses are very well-designed, their fights don't have the same effect. One simple gameplay mechanic that frustrated me to hell was the fact that your character is knocked down when taking damage in most cases. The bosses take advantage of this knockdown by spamming more of their attacks while you're knocked down, which in most cases would be fine, but it seems like the knockdown is an animation lock causing you to not be able to move or parry while you're down. You also will likely need a guide for this game because all of the item descriptions or questlines are incredibly cryptic and its often near impossible to determine what to do with specific quest items. Finally, while lorewise the final boss of the game is interesting, the actual encounter is a massive letdown due to the fight being terribly boring/uninteresting in phase 1 and gimmicky to an extent that it becomes frustrating in phase 2. Overall, I still enjoyed my time with this game, but I think that there are many gameplay aspects that don't feel right and I hope that they are fixed in Blasphemous 2.

Persona 1 is the prime example of why the ps1 generation was hit or miss, you had a generation that had classics like gran turismo and metal gear solid 1 yet Persona 1 leaves you feeling bored and depressed over the fact that you will waste many hours of your life playing a game that makes pokemon seem hard. The only thing that saves persona 1 from being absolute dog shit is the fact that te characters and writing were actually pretty decent, but everything else in the game is dreadful, at least the music in the psp version is better.