My son and I talk a lot about "How can the game industry get out of its doldrums" and the Persona series is a great example of what's wrong with it when it is at its very best.
For one thing, the game does not make you make any hard choices when it comes to the VN content. It is so freakin' long that playing it on New Game Plus is unthinkable so you feel compelled to max out everyone's social rank in one run, which isn't that hard but makes a long game even longer.
I have the same complaint which I have with most turn-based games (a genre I love because I really enjoy having a big party) in that there are many mechanics, such as status effects, buffs and debuffs, that really don't matter. It doesn't have the feeling that a different resource is scarce (money, SP, items) at different times in the game or that different things make the game hard at different times. There are plenty of turn-based games that do something interesting (where you make a deck and get 3 random action cards, where you have to be careful not to cast healing spells on your enemies or attacks on your friends, where a lot of your scaling comes from customizing combos in Neptunia, where you knockback enemies and they carom like pool balls in DER:Q) but you can make an AAA game that doesn't add anything to FF7 and gamers and game reviewers will accept it.
An answer we've been chewing on is an anti-Persona answer in the sense of a much shorter (30m-12h) game where you really do need to make multiple playthroughs with or without NGP to really experience it all.
For one thing, the game does not make you make any hard choices when it comes to the VN content. It is so freakin' long that playing it on New Game Plus is unthinkable so you feel compelled to max out everyone's social rank in one run, which isn't that hard but makes a long game even longer.
I have the same complaint which I have with most turn-based games (a genre I love because I really enjoy having a big party) in that there are many mechanics, such as status effects, buffs and debuffs, that really don't matter. It doesn't have the feeling that a different resource is scarce (money, SP, items) at different times in the game or that different things make the game hard at different times. There are plenty of turn-based games that do something interesting (where you make a deck and get 3 random action cards, where you have to be careful not to cast healing spells on your enemies or attacks on your friends, where a lot of your scaling comes from customizing combos in Neptunia, where you knockback enemies and they carom like pool balls in DER:Q) but you can make an AAA game that doesn't add anything to FF7 and gamers and game reviewers will accept it.
An answer we've been chewing on is an anti-Persona answer in the sense of a much shorter (30m-12h) game where you really do need to make multiple playthroughs with or without NGP to really experience it all.