I wasn't going to do this because I'm aware that everyone else who cares about Persona has beaten me to it, but I can't help babbling about things

I'm only a few hours in, Ann has just gotten her Persona

so, thoughts so far:

- I AM SO HAPPY DEMON NEGOTIATION IS BACK

not that it ever left anything besides Persona specifically but still

I love demon negotiation

except when I hate demon negotiation but I haven't gotten badly fucked over by it yet

I mean, they don't seem to demand items/money in this one so it's harder to get fucked over, but I can envision the possibility of me making many fruitless attempts to get a particular Persona and losing out on all the XP I could be getting if I were just killing them

- I'm also glad that they seem to have remembered that dungeon design is a thing instead of just going with the endless procedurally generated snoozefests

- speaking of the last Persona game with demon negotiation and non-procedurally-generated dungeons, Ann really does feel like Lisa 2.0 a little, but not necessarily in a bad way?

I mean, I do feel like the handling of the "creeped on by an older male authority figure" aspect of her plotline was kind of... more polished than P2, though so far the "ostracized/isolated due to being perceived as a foreigner even though she's very much Japanese" aspect has so far only been briefly alluded to

so it remains to be seen how well that one works

or if it even gets as much focus as it did for Lisa, I guess

- meanwhile, Morgana looks suspiciously like Teddie 2.0 and I do mean that in a bad way

like, I just got to the part where he's all like "I don't actually remember my true form or where I come from!" and I'm just like this had better not be the same fucking plot twist from 4

he also seems a bit girl-crazy but so far in a slightly less obnoxious way than Teddie? but we'll see how long my patience for that lasts

Negotiations still give you experience depending on how many enemies you have knocked out/killed

I mean, if there are four and you kill three and negotiate with the last one, you get experience for the four

creatorofathousanduniver...: good to know

I'm not getting encounters with that many demons yet

anyway, re: Morgana, maybe he just really likes Ann specifically, which might be more tolerable than if he does that to every girl who shows up

but so far she is the only girl who's shown up, so hard to say

why can't we just have more mascot characters like Koromaru

Koromaru was a good boy

- Ryuji's not Magician?????? Way to break the mold, P5

I mean, their association of Magician with bro-y characters has always been sort of unrelated to any existing Tarot symbolism,

but still...

Ann is still Lovers, so I guess some things never change