I'm enjoying this game more than I thought I would, but the more I play the more the cracks are starting to show.
I like the new combat system. It's a nice variation on both the Persona 3/4 combat and Etrian Odyssey, and they made some smart changes that I hope carry over into P5. For example, it's great that All out Attacks aren't basically any instant win button anymore, and I like that physical skills cost a static amount of HP rather than a percentage that ever increases (but without making the skill any better).
But there's a few I'm noticing that are holding it back from being great. For one, dark and light skills are OP in normal battles. I've only encountered two or three enemies in the entire game (that weren't bosses or FOEs) that have not been weak to light or dark. Once you get Mahama and Mamudo on a few different characters you can breeze through most battles with instant kills. On the other hand, they kinda nerfed the shit out of normal elemental magic. In most recent MegaTen games those spells were arguably the most valuable in the game for being able to exploit weaknesses, but with the exponential increase in SP cost as spells increase in power using them more than a few times in a battle quickly drains through your SP. Worse yet, the damage isn't even that great and with the changes to physical skills (including the addition of elemental physical skills that can crit and exploit weaknesses) characters like Mitsuru feel dramatically less useful. (Also Mind Charge costs a ridiculous 40SP. What the hell.) The combat seems to rely pretty heavily on the boost mechanic, which is a cool idea in theory, but without a reliable way to exploit weaknesses magic characters end up left in the dust.
Also there's just some crazy OP skills in the game, especially on the DLC Personas. Kaguya has one that practically makes you invincible for three turns, and Orpheus Telos has one that heals your whole party by a ton and removes all bind and ailments at the end of the turn for three turns. They both cost a lot of MP, but one boost negates that problem. The only caveat is that it does not seem like those skills are transferable to other Personas, so I assume eventually they will become outclassed enough to not be worth using for those skills alone. Then again, 3 turns of invincibility is pretty hard to outclass...
Speaking of fusion though, I think the Persona fusion system is probably the best the franchise has seen so far. It maintains the ability to freely pick your inherited skills, but puts enough restrictions on inheritence that you aren't just copying all your best skills from one Persona to another. In past games I would usually fuse away my Persona's the moment they learned all their skills, but now I often find myself holding onto them well past that, because they might have a useful skill that won't transfer through inheritence, or a strong skillset that won't transfer completely to a new Persona. You have to actually balance the necessity or benefits of fusion. Part of that is thanks to the game's sub-Persona system. Not tying those fused Persona's directly to your stats (as much) means you don't have to worry about them becoming obsolete as quickly. I'm not sure whether the system would make sense to transfer over to P5 or not, but I would like to see something like it, rather than making the hero the OP "wild card" again.
Also part of me kind of hates to say it, but I think losing those S. Link bonuses makes for a better game. Getting most of your exp and skills the moment you fuse a Persona made actually using them and leveling them a little...underwhelming, or unsatisfying. Leveling Persona's in this one seems more properly paced, and I think this game's version of sacrifice fusion is a more interesting option for bonus exp. It's nice to have something to do with your trash Persona's besides fusing them into more trash.
I enjoy the dungeon crawling. It was basically ripped whole-sale from EO, but that's okay. There's one caveat that sorta ruins it for me though: The chests that require 100% map completion to unlock. It's cool idea, but forcing you to physically walk on every tile for it to count pretty ruins it. One of the main advantages of drawing your own map is NOT having to walk on every tile. If it's a hazard floor, or in the path of an FOE, or even an obvious dead end I can just draw that in and keep moving. But now I have to walk through them anyway so I can unlock those chests. They do slightly alleviate the problem by letting you spend play coins relative to unwalked tiles to unlock the chests, but it's still BS that I feel the need to resort to that even when my map drawing is perfect.
This is already way too long, so I won't comment too much on the characters, but I can't agree that they're all well represented. Some are fine, like Kanji, who is still pretty much as entertaining as ever. Others however are basically reduced to one-note characterizations, like Teddie, who is honestly just kinda awful now. I really liked Teddie in P4, he was probably only second to Kanji. But now literally all he does is hit on girls and get shot down. Over and over and over. It was probably the most obnoxious part of Teddie in P4, but he had enough other stuff going on that it didn't grate. But now that's pretty much his entire character. They've hardly even bothered to throw in bear puns to balance it out.
I think part of the problem is that they're all perpetually stuck at a certain point in their story and not allowed to mature beyond it, because all the significant character moments happen after the events in the game. They're all just kinda there. There are moments where it's fun to see the two casts interact as friends, but this game really would have benefited from a completely new cast.
Anyway, sorry for the ridiculously long wall of whining. I do really like parts of this game, but I can't help but think about how much better it could have been, even with just a few tweaks.
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