I downloaded the demo - loved it, and immediately purchased it. I played up until 3am. I was so impressed 10 hours into it, I began to add Persona titles to my wishlist. A week later, and I've decided to 'finish' the game by simply watching the story unfold on YouTube after no longer able to cope with the repetitive, monotonous experience. In hindsight, I have wasted 40 hours, and come away wondering motivation the developers had.
- The quality of the dungeons and caves worsen significantly into becoming mazes, some riddled with enemies that seem to respawn as you try to retrace your steps finding an exit.
- Your HP and health draining rapidly, you resort to using MP to quicken the battles.
- Running out of MP, you begin to farm XP and money just to purchase MP, just to quicken those battles, so you can exit those dungeons.
- You eventually consider lowering the difficulty just to earn XP faster, to do the above, just a little faster.
- The mazes then become even more absurd and monotonous.
- By this point, the last cut scene becomes a memory and you're skipping dialogue.
- Then the calendar puts 10 days ahead of you, forcing you to interact with secondary characters just to pass the time. At best, you can try to find a bed, but you'll need to do it twice for each day, meaning about 10 minutes of purely repeating a cycle of you walking upstairs to a bed, sleep, sleep, upstairs to a bed etc. For players who aren't aware of that, you'll be interacting with people, doing Royal Virtues - things you're not interested in - for about an hour.
- This calendar issue is repeated at various stages of the game.
- When interacting with people, by this point, you're skipping even their dialogue.
- Then you begin to notice that cut scenes involving your Party chilling out in a tavern comes with a music cue, so you begin to skip even those cut scenes, potentially missing key details of the story.
- Then you have to interact with follower - you try to skip those as fast as possible, because you've no interest by the 30th hour.
- Now, you begin to use the Story Mode, and even the battles just go on, so you're pressing auto-battle, and even then it isn't fast.
Just before the final boss fight, you're given 30 days on the calendar before you can progress. I'm playing on STORY MODE. I can't even die. Yet it does not give the player the option to just skip to the main battle. I began just finding a bed and sleeping. It took me about an hour between two cups of coffee and checking Reddit just to get through that shit.
I have never come across anything like this in a game before, and I'm baffled as to why it was barely mentioned in any review.
