This is a game I very much wanted to love. I'd count the mainline Persona games as 6 games near the top of my favorite games of all time list, and I love Americana and pixel art styles, but I really can't recommend this game to anyone. There's several reasons, but I think the most core is: This is not a finished game.

Basically every system in this game is clearly incomplete and often lacks basic features. There is no save option in the game, If you want to quit the game and have progress, you need to walk around to trigger an autosave.

There is no status screen on the menu. If you want to examine the party's skills, you have to enter combat and look at them in the skill menu. If you want to see how much experience you need to level up, you just have to wait until you do level up so you can see the experience for the next level, and then I guess write it down on a piece of paper and update it every battle.

There is a persona-like time management system, but there are no deadlines. Summer lasts until you clear the third dungeon. You can work the part time job as many times as you want to get unlimited money. You can go to the gym as many times as you want to hit the health cap before you clear the first dungeon. The first store that sells equipment sells endgame equipment right away, so you can just grind the job and get end game equipment instantly, and there's really no incentive not to.

A huge number of - maybe most - quests don't have rewards. You complete the listed task and it's checked off, and that's it. Nothing changes, to the point that NPCs don't even acknowledge that the quest was completed. This gets even more outrageous toward the end game where there will be dialog explaining puzzles, but then you're just given the rewards instantly.

There is a "social link" style system, but because you have unlimited time, you can basically do them all immediately. There are only 4 social links, and they're... eh. Hugo's has some cool ideas, but they're not really explored. Chester and Ramona have something of an arc, but they're pretty by the books. Ruth's just feels like filler. There is a gift system, but it does nothing except unlock like 2 lines of dialog.

The combat system feels extremely luck-based. This has a Persona 3-style one more system, but it's random. You knock down the enemy, and then maybe you get another turn. It makes it feels like there's no real planning to be done. The miss rate is also high enough to be honestly funny. I've seen runs of 10 consecutive misses on both sides. This is after the patch where they said they lowered miss rates, I can only imagine what the people who played this earlier sat through.

The combat system puts a lot of emphasis on status effects, which makes the coin-flippy nature even more severe. Only 1 party member learns direct damage spells, while 2 learn nothing but status effect spells. There is a system sort of like Persona 5's technical system, but it's much less developed. And bosses and elites are almost always immune to all status effects, and resistant to all magic, meaning those fights become nothing more than a punching match with healing as necessary.

The story feels... phoned in. This is a genre where deep themes and interesting character arcs are kind of expected, but the best this really gets is that there are funny lines. There are semblances of themes that feel more like they copied elements they saw in Persona games, and didn't recognize those reflect themes in those stories. There's a few moments toward the end of the game that seem like they're trying to have themes, but they are sort of 5 minute chunks that come out of nowhere, and then vanish completely. Only a few characters have arcs, and those are pretty typical. Chester learns bullying isn't cool, and Ramona's step father learns that sometimes you should talk to people if you want them to know what you think. That's basically it.

The 60s setting really doesn't play into things at all. Lots of anachronisms in both the world and the characters. There is a point where you get walkie-talkies with effecively unlimited range, because we can't have a game in 2024 without cell phones. The characters have very 2020s sensibilities, and show little understanding of 1960s culture beyond that Elvis and Bob Dylan existed.

This is all a shame because there's a lot of solid basis. The pixel art is pretty great, and the music is solid, if not really cohesive (why does a 1960s game have modern pop music?)

And I could go on a lot longer about things that are incomplete, but I'm running out of characters. This honestly feels like a cash grab trying to use nice art and a resemblance to better games to rope players in. The issues are deep enough and widespread enough that I don't hold much hope this will ever really be fixed. You're better off playing something else.

The game is beautiful and the soundtrack is amazing but the game just does... so much wrong.
There are going to be spoilers for the first 2 hours ahead here because I can't explain my problems with the game without it.

First of all the story starts of pretty standard and it might evolve as I play further so I won't judge it.
The characters are awful though. So far Chester isn't even a character. He had a few lines in the prologue but he suddenly just became mute. When we were introduced to the talking dog he didn't even say anything about how weird it is that they're talking to a dog. Chester just seems like an additional character added to fill the 4th party member slot.
The dog character is also really weird. I got to his second social link and apparently he's an immortal dog who talks to ghosts for some reason but he didn't know about the underside (so what was the point of a magical dog in the first place???). His battle sprite also looks like he can transform into a human like form in the underside similar to Morgana in Persona 5 (which this seems to be heavily inspired by) but nobody mentions it. On the overworld he's just a regular dog sprite and nobody said a word when he transformed (or atleast his sprite did).
They also just became a demon fighting group way too fast for my liking, the MC just kinda came out of a solo experience in the underside and then told a random stranger, her brother and a magical dog and from that point forward they became a fully formed team. They also just all got personal demon guardians from the get go and didn't have to do anything to get them or learn how to use them.

The combat is really good and I appreciate that you can see all the weaknesses of enemies from the start of the battle because that was the most frustrating and least fun part of all the Persona games. What I hate though is that it's completely random whether you get the demon you're trying to capture. It's based on a stat that you build through day time activities like in Persona but it still comes down to a literal dice roll. This is a mild example of the feature but in conversations you can be locked behind rewards even if you have a really high skill level because of the dice roll.
The game is way too forgiving though. When you level up your mana is completely restored. When you guard you restore mana. You can even unlock skills that make you less likely to use mana. In Persona you have to carefully plan ahead which spells to use and if they're worth using on that particular encounter. Here you can spam as much as you like because as long as you remember to heal and block you can keep your party full HP and full mana functionally forever.

Also NPCs are awful. Had a quest where two random ladies somehow knew what demons are, assumed Emily knows what they are and had a demon in their basement... OUTSIDE of the underside. This wasn't explained in the quest and it was not questioned by Emily. Another time I walked to my neighbor and this person had never been mentioned at any place before at that point. Emily walked up to him and asked "you're a psycho therapist, right?" and with very little pushback she got him to sell her (a child) various medicines privately from his own home. At that point I gave up hope that this game would try telling a serious story.

My last complaint is that instead of being like Persona where you have daytime and evening activities time just flows like it would in a farming sim game. Social link events take a certain amount of time that the game doesn't tell you. This makes it hell to plan out your day because there's just no way to know without trial and error which should not be a factor when your game has a very limited amount of time you can spend. I was also not told when I'm allowed to enter the underside. In Persona you're very explicitly told that if you want to go to the metaverse you have to do it on daytime because you need to get home in time. This game has the same kind of parental figure who gives you a curfew but you're not given a timeframe on when you can enter the underside and get home in time.

What made me want to stop playing and write this review is that when you enter the dungeon for the first time you go to a safe zone and are forced to go home. After that I went back and progressed as much as I could but I was hit by a big wall telling me that I need to practice my life skills in the overworld before I could progress further. This really made me upset because I would have done that if the game has made it very clear to me that I needed to before my second visit. Time is scarce in this kind of game so every single day matters. That means that I was forced to leave the underside and that day had ultimately been wasted.

The game just has too many small things that add up and not enough great things to make up for it. I'm really disappointed because Atlus kinda has a monopoly on the RPG/lifesim genre. Some things could be improved through game balances but whole cutscenes probably can't.

I really tried to like it but just can't get over the endless number of mundane puzzles, pointless drawn out dialogue, and repetitive griding.