With regard to the fatigue system and tight SP restrictions (or at least tight-ish), I don't think anyone doubts the design intent: the devs are trying to place some limits that discourage people from doing all their dungeon-crawling in one night, which is otherwise incentivized due to the game's overall focus on efficient time management. I'm just not really in love with either solution to that problem.
I'm going to go into some detail about my reasoning here, but the TL:DR of this is that I'd prefer instead that they added more "hard stops" to dungeon exploration, in concert with making it easier to max all S.Links without the use of a guide; that would ultimately accomplish their design intent for shorter stints in dungeons in a more elegant way.
I'll start by saying that I've come to realize that I'm just not a big fan of high difficulty in turn-based JRPGs in general--and in Persona specifically--and I think the reason is that the difficulty in such games largely comes down to numbers, which no amount of mechanical skill can overcome. E.g., a lot of my favorite games are difficult action games like Monster Hunter and the Souls games, etc., games in which an extremely skilled player could theoretically put together a win against a relatively high-level enemy no normal person could beat, because those games can in theory be played flawlessly, without the player ever taking a hit at all. But with a turn-based JRPG like Persona? You can't actually beat the Reaper with your level 1 protagonist, it's just not possible because you can't avoid damage through skill, it's just a dice roll that you're going to lose, because your level 1 dice suck. The Reaper is gonna get the first turn with his way higher agility, hit you once, and you're dead. Period.
In a situation like that, I can't say I find a high difficulty level all that appealing, and especially not the idea of tuning it up, because I don't like getting beat up any more than I have to in battles that are determined to such a great extent by stats and dice rolls. I just don't see what's fun about that. I don't turn the difficulty down, either, because ultimately I do want some sense of accomplishment. But for the most part in these games I tend to just grind a lot early on to give myself a bit of an advantage that I can carry through the rest of the game. Also, I just like fusing all the personas and seeing what cool combination of abilities I can get next; in these games that tends to be more compelling for me than the combat itself.
I never liked fatigue because it was such a bizarre half-measure. In the end, it didn't actually restrict you from grinding as much as you wanted. Sure, your other party members might all leave and you'd get the "tired" status, but since the protagonist could still be forced back into Tartarus and was the most versatile character anyway with the persona-switching, you could just keep on grinding. It was still very worthwhile even with just the one character, particularly since the protag's stats are determined by the equipped persona, so getting the character leveled up really increased your power hugely by unlocking more powerful persona possibilities. Also, in P3P in particular, the status was really easy to get rid of the next day with "Yawn-B-Gone." Fatigue as a gameplay system was just really wonky and half-assed.
As for not being able to freely refill your SP, I think it's a problem that the combat revolves almost solely around exploiting enemy weaknesses, and yet by having a low SP pool you are incentivized to not engage with that core combat conceit, and instead just do regular weapon attacks. Which is very boring! I should perhaps point out here that if SP was still freely refillable at the base of Tartarus, I wouldn't mind the combat in generally being tuned harder... in fact, it probably should be. Because at that point you've got a lot more control and theoretically should be able to get through most fights with a combination of initiating fights with an ambush and exploiting whatever weaknesses there are to exploit. Doing that with a higher difficulty that punishes you more for mistakes is more active and engaging than tight-fistedly managing your SP pool.
What if instead there was no fatigue, and also you could still refill your SP, and they just did what I suggested at the top: a combination of putting more hard stops into Tartarus exploration, and making the schedule less tight? Think for a minute about what that would do.
As to the first, putting more hard stops in dungeon exploration would simply break up the action more and make it feel less sloggy and grindy. E.g., when you first enter Tartarus you can go all the way to floor 22, with a boss every five floors or so. They could instead stop you at floor 10 or 11 pending story progress. P5 already did something like this with the palaces that required doing something in the real world in order to continue to the second half.
Now, doing that does put even more pressure on players to try to manage their time efficiently, so that they can max all their S.Links before the end of the year and see all of the story without needing to wade into a second play, which I think is ideally what most people would prefer. That's where making it a little easier to max all your S.Links comes in.
Look, I played both P3:FES and P3P and didn't use a guide for either one, and even though I was trying my best to manage my time efficiently, I still didn't come anywhere close to reaching the end of every S.Link. It's basically impossible without following a day-by-day guide. In both cases I then got halfway through a second play to try to see the things I'd missed, but in both cases I ultimately ran out of steam halfway through (these games are awfully long, after all). Meanwhile, P4, as I understand, is not much better in this regard (I never actually played P4, just watched the endurance run... I've tried to start it several times but haven't been able to get into it).
But P5... my absolute favorite thing about that game in relation to the others is that you simply don't need a day-by-day guide to max everything, like at all. As long as you're hip to a few time-saving tips, like exploiting the abilities of the Temperance and Fortune confidants, you can max every relationship in that game with about a month to spare... and a month in one of these games is a ton.
The great thing about that, once you realize how much slack P5 gives you to still finish everything--even if you're not giving ideal responses during confidant hang-outs, or doing everything 100% optimally--is that players who want to see everything the game has to offer in a single play can nonetheless give themselves permission to not use a guide, and to not do all of a dungeon or dungeon section in a single night, and still squeeze all the juice out of the experience. IMO using a guide kind of sucks all the fun out of these games; they're games about time management as much as anything else, and removing player choice from that aspect by using a day-by-day guide makes the whole thing feel pretty dead and rote. But if it's generally known that you've got some decent leeway to be non-optimal, it's more likely that people will actually role-play rather than run to a guide. And that, paired with more hard stops in Tartarus, ends up addressing the design intent of both fatigue and more limited SP (i.e., doing dungeons in shorter bursts rather than lengthy slogs).
Anyway... that was a lot, and there's probably still other things I've forgotten to say about this. But hopefully it makes sense to whoever actually takes the time to read it all. Also, I should probably emphasize that I actually have no idea how much slack P3R gives you in terms of its schedule, only that the original games were very tight in this regard. It's something that will only become known as more people who aren't resorting to guides start to finish it.
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