Instead of a Final Fantasy post I'm gonna make a Persona post since I'm around a dozen hours in and it's not completely terrible.
Started playing Persona 4 due to what amounts to shittalking with a bro on Steam. He was always more of a fan of JRPGs and I hated Japan and everything Japan ever touched, and even he thought Persona was too fucking weeby and it got on his tits. Words were exchanged and I said I'd give it a try after falling off the deep end and having a lot of fun playing Final Fantasy and even enjoying some dumb shit like Danganronpa recently. First "Real" dungeon now complete and I sorta dig it.
The story feels like a mixed bag, I was with it a little more when it was on rails earlier on and then nearly dropped the game once it opened up and wanted me to go do highschooler shit since I couldn't give a less of a damn about that, buuuuuuuuuut all the weird and needlessly obtuse and mechanics started to pull me back in. The card system for post-battle loot is damn cool for example, and the persona fusing thing nearly made my eyes glaze over until I thought "Ah fuck it I'll just craft shit that looks cool and/or has elemental attacks I want" and that's been effective. The economy, at least this early on, is reasonably tight so ever scrap of money I pick up dungeoneering and selling used panties is useful for consumables and even trying to keep the party up to date on equipment. Even the highschooler shit that I don't care about adds to the flow of the game since you get a nice sense of dungeon crawling, relaxing in town, dungeon crawl, relax, etc which is something a lot of RPGs struggle to present well. It even has non-combat stats/skills that can lock off quests and impact your performance in jobs and shit.
The combat's... Interesting. It can be a little swingy with the "Weakness" system giving extra turns, and bosses seem way fucking stronger than regular mooks leading up to the bosses (That first real dungeon boss took me a few attempts even after my first TPK and rejiggering my dude to play off weaknesses more) which is a little odd. Progressing in a dungeon seems easy enough and then you get to the boss and go grind the previous floor a bit, I guess.
All in all I'll probably keep playing it which both surprised me and my buddy, but I haven't really played another RPG like this so I guess the uniqueness is appealing. He did warn me that he really ended up hating it later when he was alternating between dungeon grinding and social grinding non-stop and apparently the later bosses are an even larger jump in difficulty than this one was for their respective dungeons, but I dunno. It managed to disrupt my Final Fantasy play and even though I like FF more widely than Persona 4 I find myself wanting to play Persona 4 just because I want to see what the fuck it does next. See if I can chain a bunch of shuffle-times together for loot, see if I can rub some monsters together to make a cool new one, see if I can raise courage enough to see what the fuck is in the shrine at night, and so on. The supernatural mystery part is better than the highschool shit but it's still getting put behind the gameplay. Also THE FUCKING TIMER, I always love a ticking clock in a game and having finite time to complete objectives is great. Love all the timed shit in Kingmaker, love timed shit in Fallout 1 even though it's so generous it may as well not even be timed, love the harsh timers in Xcom 2, love having a deadline in this.
PS: I swear it seems like 90% of the school is gay. Went and joined the basketball club and then the split second after I did it looked like I was going to be spitroasting a basketball twink with some soccer player. I don't
think it's a Japanese cultural thing since the other Japanese games I've played haven't been like that, but maybe the Persona series is.
