CG: Great game, unsatisfying story.
The story will keep you hooked, wanting more, and then it'll slowly become apparent that there's not much of a story when the mystery starts to clear up. All the plot twists occur at the end and near to nothing, character introductions aside, happens before that point. And, of course, the ending kinda sucked.
As a game it's brilliant. Atlus were cheap, spending very little on graphics, meaning there wasn't a huge amount of backgrounds and no facial animation (graphics are zoomed out too far - there are avatars instead.) But that didn't impact on the game itself because, as we all know, graphics don't mean much when it comes to RPGs.
I recommend it but wouldn't say it's the best game ever. The same goes for P3.
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I've just beaten it, getting the true ending. I could've beat it days ago but I wanted to mess around doing the Mr. Pringle trick and fusing all the personas I could during my first playthrough.
Aside from a few additional lines of diaogue, the ending wasn't different from the good ending. Not worth the effort. The entire final dungeon could've been skipped if Ameno-sagiri was replaced with Izanami. I don't really see the point of there being two good endings that end near enough exactly the same way...
I wasn't pleased with the spiritual support that was required from all the silent leads maxed links for him to use plot no justu to defeat a Goddess, on his own. When a dream sequence is used to push forward a story, you know it's not great. The cheesiness of it all, together with the bad dialogue ("Let's beat Ms. Root of all Evil, a Goddess, to give our leader a happy send off!!!") left me with a "Meh" feeling when I saw the true ending and the credits roll.
I'd give it 8-8.5/10. It was highly addictive and lots of fun to play, let down only by the disappointing story and lack of effort/cheapness of Atlus. The best thing I can say about the story is that the lack of any details whatsoever during the middle kept me interested until it all started to go downhill at the death. I could've forgiven the story flaws to a certain extent if the social links stories were interesting, but most of the scenes last for only a few lines of dialogue and most scenes repeated themselves over and over in slightly different ways.
Like P3, it's a weird game because I could play it for over 100 hours and still not rank it in my top 10. The story and fusion issues get to me, preventing me from ever rating the games too highly. It almost feels wrong to rate such addictive games only 8-8.5/10 but I can't bring myself to go higher when the problems they have bother me so much.
If the next Persona does away with the bad parts of the fusion system and includes better social link sequences, if not a better overall story, then I'll be happy. If not, expect to see me back here in 2011, repeating the same things and hoping for changes to be made in P6.
Now, what to play next? I'm thinking of giving P3:FES a go because I dropped P3 after 70 hours and dropped FES after 10 hours. Maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to handle FES this time? I'm worried I'll not have the energy/motivation to finish P3 right after putting a lot of time into P4...
