Started Persona 3 this past weekend, and I thought I'd go ahead and throw up some initial thoughts after spending about 8 hours playing it so far.

I like it.  Quite a bit.  I haven't played an RPG in a long time that's made me want to keep going since... Super Mario RPG, I think.

The characters are good  and seem like ones I could definitely see spending ridiculous amounts of hours with.  Although, it seems like almost everyone I've S-Linked with so far has had crappy things happen to them and/or hates their life... So that's kind of a bummer in light of what I've seen of P4's characters who, so far, seem to have some more subtlety to their personal issues.  One nice touch so far is being able to have an S-Link with an MMO player.

Story... Seems to both make sense and not make sense simultaneously.  I feel like I know exactly what's going on, but then I get thrown something that's not necessarily a twist, but just something that seems like it's an inconsistency.  Maybe it'll come together later on.

Combat.  I'm sort of on the fence.  I really like having three different types of physical attacks along with all the elementals.  Kind of makes me want to keep all three types of weapons on hand just in case.  Having the computer controller allies I think really helps to the speed up the battles which is welcome.  My problem with it is that it places a lot more unnecessary effort on the main character.  So in situations where I know I can get a full knockdown of the field and get an all-out attack going, I have to make sure I can do that all by myself, because my party won't bother to think about that if I happen to miss.  They'll just kill whoever's the closest to being dead.  Pretty minor gripe so far, though.  If it winds up getting me killed a bunch of times, though... It'll be a larger gripe.

Other minor gripe is the tiredness system.  I can barely get through 3 or 4 floors before everyone's like "oh, I'm lé tired now!" and since the access points only appear every 5 floors (I assume... I have one at 5 and 10 now) I kind of don't want to push further and get killed.  But then again, when I do fight, it's hard to even tell what's been affected.  It seems like attacks miss a little more often and damage dealt and received goes down and up (respectively) a little bit.  Am I missing something?  Is there anything else that should make me stop when everyone is tired?

I also like the variety of "activities" you can do around town.  Although, I kind of feel like they almost took a little bit of a kitchen sink approach and put way too much in.

Overall, as I said before, I like it a lot and I can't wait to keep blastin' through it.

Honestly... I enjoyed it.  I think that it's completely dumb mindless fun and that makes it awesome in some ways.  Might pick it up if I can find it a bit cheaper.

Yeah, old game.  Whatever, I don't have a 360.  I played the demo today at the store we shall not mention. (Hint: It starts with Game).

That's a really dumb game.  It's like, they took this idea of a really mindless dungeon crawler, which is awesome, and mashed it up with this super pretentious story that I could care less about.

The parts of that demo where I was killin' dudes, I actually wouldn't have minded playing more of that.  But the other little parts that seemed totally useless (like the 45 cutscenes I saw in about 20 minutes of "play") made the game seem really stupid.

I was able to find a way to skip MOST of the cutscenes, though.  Mash every button until it skips the cutscene.

8 Robot Masters down... Not a single urge to throw my controller out the window.  I'll tackle the Wily Stages tomorrow.

Why are people so frustrated with the difficulty on this?  I'm not the greatest gamer in the world, but I'm already through 4 Robot Masters in about an hour and half.  None of the stages have been particularly difficult to me.  Even the boss fights I've had so far, I've usually only had to use one continue to beat 'em.  And I beat Hornet Man on my first try.

Why all the hullabaloo about the difficulty?  Is everyone really that soft now, or am I the only guy that's kept playing platformers after they stopped making platformers?

Wow.  Loading that up for the first time was like coming home to an old friend I haven't seen in years and I'm kind of nervous about seeing him, but then we show up, bro hug and pick up right where we left off.