The press turn combat system is my favorite turn based system, the visual and music are a banger as always, and the story is pretty interesting. Overall I didn't really enjoy the execution of a lot of the game, however. Trying to raise your appeal is pretty much just tied to the story and nothing much is going on there, I'm not big on the calendar system but I understand how it plays into some mechanics, the weather system taking away your ability to take advantage of weakness is still annoying because it stops you from interacting with the combat system like old SMT bosses having no weaknesses even if you can plan around this, and even playing blind on hard the game felt very forgiving and kinda mindless to run through at times. The dungeons overall felt somewhat bland, not too much was really going on with the ones I experienced besides just some twisty corridors and maybe a vague idea of a puzzle.
Archetypes seemed like a cool concept and I enjoy being able to customize my other party members more than something like Persona. Limiting what skills and archetype can hold to their level up set plus only a few more from other archetypes that character has learned from I think is a good way to allow creative expression while limiting the ability to just stack all of the good skills on one character. The fusion skills can be a lil hit or miss, but overall I think it was fine. There are a few places where I feel this system fails, however. The skills that boost attributes based on archetypes of the same lineage on the team are cool in concept, but it just feels bad to include multiple archetypes on the same team due to a large lack of versatility and the skills not doing enough to make up for it in my opinion. The first three characters are than the MC that you get on your team also feel very physical focused so unless you're going to make your MC magic focused you're kind of missing out on that for a good long while. Finally, late game archetype requirements, especially on the royal archetypes, just kind of go and shoehorn people into certain roles or getting a specific handful of archetypes if you really want to use them that goes against the freedom that the system was giving at first.
If you like Persona a lot or don't care too much on some of the gameplay gripes I brought up you'll probably enjoy this more, but I just kind of found the game to be boring after so long.
