They were gone for a year to make the same game but worse. It really sucks because I fell in love with the open beta, dumped 1k hours in over its lifespan, peaked very high on the leaderboard and loved (almost) every second of it but sadly this game just doesn't hit the same to me, I still enjoy it (somewhat) but it has so many issues. Just a few of mine are:

> They removed alot of the skill expression and combos that made characters cool
> The movement feels floatier (somehow? didn't think that was possible) and obviously slower
> The balancing is SIGNIFICANTLY worse and is easily my biggest complaint atm, the gap between top tiers to the rest of the cast is ABSURD
> The UIs were stripped of all their personality and replaced with Generic F2P Menus (seriously when I saw the new character select I thought it was Stumble Guys)
> The game is buggier, and missing multiple features from the beta
> The game released with no MMR or ranked mode so I'm constantly playing on boring, non-competitive maps and I'm almost always destroying newer players which sucks honestly :/

There are a few things better than beta like the new parry feature and dash attacks, and the netcode is the best I've seen on a FG! I definitely see the potential and think eventually this game WILL be better than beta as the issues are fixed but it launched in an embarrassing state and right now isn't worth playing like at all unless you really like the game.

I really hate to say this but this game has only gotten worse with every passing year. It no longer has any of it's intial charm in exchange for a ugly more simplified, realistic, corporate style and a vision for a metaverse that will fail just like every single attempt at a metaverse before it. Unfortunately, I'm tied to it forever because I can choose to play as Invincible, Goku, Spider-Man, Satoru Gojo etc etc anytime I want but I can't act like this game isn't significantly worse than it used to be.

This is my new favorite game of all time and it's not even close, they fixed EVERY single issue I had with the original Persona 3. The story is fantastic and it's the most emotion any piece of media has ever gotten out of me, the combat and tartarus are SO much more fun then the original and the main issue I had with the story was fixed being strega was extremely underutilized in the original.

To me personally this is the perfect game, I think the only thing that could possibly top this is a Persona 4 remake at this quality.