So this game is not like Persona 3, 4 and 5 AT ALL, but I knew that and wanted to give it a shot anyway.

The amount of random encounters in this game is quite absurd. Prepare to suffer. Some things that annoyed me in battle:

• Why does switching Personas take a single turn? :/
• Why do you have to cast useless spells to learn better ones?

Thank jebus for the auto battle/replay feature, which made things a lot more bearable. Can’t imagine playing the PS1 version which didn’t have this, each encounter would have dragged on.

There was a dialogue option halfway through the game that seemed innocuous at the time. I played through that part, then later found out that this choice determines the game’s ending! So I got locked into the bad ending because of this, great. Had to restart the game as I only had one save file. This shows the importance of keeping multiple saves, especially after making a choice which may or may not be important. I definitely suggest reading up on the ending requirements for this game.

The characters were ok, but without social links it’s hard for them to be truly memorable.

Since this version has the Snow Queen quest unlike the original NA PS1 release, it would be a shame to not play both storylines, so after beating the main story, I tackled the Snow Queen route as well.

The final dungeon in the main route was o_O, love how enemies just cast instant death spells and screw you over. Ended up suspending the game often, then backed up the temporary save file to my computer so that I could copy the old save if things went south. If only Atlus wasn’t so stingy with save points!

Thanatos tower in the Snow Queen route was also o_O. It’s fine, who needs to use Personas anyway. Here I also abused the suspended saves, shrug.

Persona is a fairly old school, as such I don’t recommend playing it unless you really want to see how far the Persona series has come.