Very frustrating game. It has potential, but never lives up to it.
It has interesting characters and explores them quite well, and the themes are fairly interesting. But the way it portrays antagonists is really shallow, their backstory is more interesting than how they act. And the pacing is very poor, leading to the same beats getting repeated over and over. It's not story related, but with abundance of NPCs you can talk to and their dialogues getting updated every now and then, the game incentivizes you to talk to them all, except every room transition has lengthy loading screen, which adds up to impressive amount as you move between NPCs. It's not fun.
And the dark underbelly comes up, which is the gameplay. It's atrocious. The battle system is epitome of unfun slog. But how is it possible, when they literally just copy-pasted it from another FuRyu game, Lost Dimension? It's simple, they heavily restricted movement and battle arenas became really poor. Plus enemy variety is really bad as well, not that Lost Dimension was really exceptional in that department, but it wasn't this bad, and most importantly, Lost Dimension isn't nearly as long. Also, leveling system is complete crap. The leveling is done with money instead of steadily gaining experience every battle, and by trying to deviate from the norm, they completely shattered any sense of progression and fun of upgrading new skills. It doesn't help that early skillsets available to you are all incredibly lame compared to stuff you get later on. All in all, everything related to combat is just lame. If you're willing to give this game a try, just give up on combat. People complaining about Persona 2 combat have no idea that it can be much, much worse than simply slightly boring button masher.
It has interesting characters and explores them quite well, and the themes are fairly interesting. But the way it portrays antagonists is really shallow, their backstory is more interesting than how they act. And the pacing is very poor, leading to the same beats getting repeated over and over. It's not story related, but with abundance of NPCs you can talk to and their dialogues getting updated every now and then, the game incentivizes you to talk to them all, except every room transition has lengthy loading screen, which adds up to impressive amount as you move between NPCs. It's not fun.
And the dark underbelly comes up, which is the gameplay. It's atrocious. The battle system is epitome of unfun slog. But how is it possible, when they literally just copy-pasted it from another FuRyu game, Lost Dimension? It's simple, they heavily restricted movement and battle arenas became really poor. Plus enemy variety is really bad as well, not that Lost Dimension was really exceptional in that department, but it wasn't this bad, and most importantly, Lost Dimension isn't nearly as long. Also, leveling system is complete crap. The leveling is done with money instead of steadily gaining experience every battle, and by trying to deviate from the norm, they completely shattered any sense of progression and fun of upgrading new skills. It doesn't help that early skillsets available to you are all incredibly lame compared to stuff you get later on. All in all, everything related to combat is just lame. If you're willing to give this game a try, just give up on combat. People complaining about Persona 2 combat have no idea that it can be much, much worse than simply slightly boring button masher.