Persona 2 Innocent Sin: I unfortunately played the PSP demake so I'll explain my problems outside the pacing
So I got my clown license a few days ago when the sub reminded me that the PSX version is better, considering I'm a massive PS1 fan I'm quite gutted, I played a bit on the PSX version and yeah it's a lot better with the strategy. I want to address this before any other complaints regarding IS but in a nutshell, I don't think it mattered much to my gameplay experience on PSP anyway.
The attack succession outside of the UI on PSX still feels slow (how long the attack round lasts after inputting orders).
Yet, I don't feel like I can hold this against the game, as P1 on PSX was also like that: there wasn't a skip option back then, so I guess it's an old-game thing.
I feel like the Auto and skip option in the PSP ver. kind of make up for the sluggish UI.
AND SHALL I BE WRONG ON THIS, in any case with modern emulation it doesn't really matter if you want to get the P2: IS experience, you can easily skip combat with turbo options on PPSSPP and using auto combat, so I can't say it bothered my gameplay. Use turbo options and Estoma and you should be good to only enjoy the story.
The fact that the gameplay wasn't engaging is tied to a lot of other things except the sluggish gameplay. To make a fair comparaison I'll use P1, so no excuses.
FUSION (not really) and CONTACTS
The Velvet Room's system is horrible. Nuking fusions honestly removes all the fun relating to gathering cards.
Instead, you have to grind contacts and especially free tarot cards to summon Personas in an incredibly boring way. I don't know if any other MT games do this, but fusions seem to be omnipresent for a reason, because it's just so fun man. Even though getting cards ain't that hard it's still boring.
In Persona 1, I was getting everyone's cards to build this massive pool to choose from. In IS it's already there waiting for you to grind the cards of specific arcanas lol
It's like they knew how unfun getting new Personas is, as there are no Velvet rooms inside dungeons and the game just apologizes by giving you busted personas instead of having to get them.
The contact system as in P1 as in P2 gets old quick to be honest, it's frustratingly specific. It's made a lot better in EP so I'm very happy about it.
PERSONAS, PERSONAS, PLEASE GET YOURSELVES GOOD SKILLS
This is just a feeling for me, but I always found most Persona within the game to have boring skills overall and have one flagship skill. I guess this is offset by Fusion Spells which are cool, but in Persona 1, I had to keep my old personas because of their pertinent skill assortment even towards the end of the game, which was incredible design imo.
For example of bad skills, Me Patra is completely neutered, physical skills are not worth the hassle with everyone that isn't Eikichi, but they were still decent in P1 on everyone.
Personas in P1 were more versatile with their skills and were made so that there was a bigger pool of skills to choose from, especially and mostly because of the effect the grid positioning has.
Buff/debuff skills suck, whaddya mean only applicable on one party member??
It's a pretty big problem if most of the Personas I found pertinent by the end were those given on a silver platter by the game (Primes and Durga, lol)
My driving force behind my enjoyment for the Persona grind of P1 was that I used to check the skills of the new Personas and be intrigued, to want to diversify the build and optimize the gameplay with a good skillset. I didn't feel that for most of the game in P2:IS, I felt the drive towards the middle but the Prime Personas came and just outclassed the rest.
I don't know if this relates to how much the grid in P1 changes gameplay dynamics though.
DIFFICULTY
Everyone knows about how easy IS is, and apparently the PSX version was better on that aspect so I can't comment.
I can't hold P2:IS accountable to P1 in terms of how crazy and ridiculous P1 is in terms of balance: P1's balance was messed up, although fun it's not a good idea to make the base of a franchise from it. It's good as a one off.
GOOD STUFF ABOUT IS (that isn't the story and all)
- Dungeon crawling in third person is a revolution and the game deserves all the respect for being the first one to introduce it, and for a first attempt in the MT franchise it does its job very competently, many segments were very entertaining.
- The Persona pool every party member can choose from instead of assigning Personas to specific party members is very fun
- Fusion spells are dope man, I hope they're reintroduced later
- Mutations were very well implemented compared to P1's weird Darwin-accurate persona mutation system.
- The game still sets what I feel is a solid core for the rest of the franchise, even though it might be lacking in intensity, I can appreciate the foundations it established.
CONCLUSION
No matter how negative I sound, the game is still a blast for the huge majority of it. P1 obviously has many flaws too.
I did say I think Persona 1 is a better video game experience because of gameplay, but I retract that statement.
Everything outside combat are all part of the video game and to pretend you can just extract some vague gameplay essence from it was naive.
Can't wait to play EP, and thanks for reading my hopefully definitive experience with the game, feel free to comment.