And I was just thinking I might like to check out Nocturne. Back to where we were at the end of SMT4 then: not in a thousand billion years. Not if I can't control my party.
In Nocturne you can control your party. It's just overall more difficult than more recent Persona games like P4G, in my opinion.
The MC has 'equipment' replaced by something called Magatama, which gives stat boosts, teaches you moves at certain times, and resistances. This means that until quite a bit later in the game, you can only go with the preset resistances/weaknesses, which means you'll generally always have a weakness, (unless you use the 1st one you get, which gives you kinda bad stat boosts) and you cannot switch in the middle of battle (can switch your demons though). I suppose you could consider it BS since, for the first part of the game, you're always in danger of getting insta-killed by specific enemies without much of a way to stop that.
Also, as mentioned, there's the ambushes that gives enemies crit boosts (I think) and they move first. And some enemies, one in particular, have moves called Beast Eye/ Guardian Eye, which takes up one move and provides them with 2 or 4 more, and if you're unlucky one boss can potentially abuse this and literally beat you on their first turn (or never use it in the whole fight if you're lucky).
But overall, the game was still fun for me. I didn't get Megaten'd TOO often, maybe a few times.