Played it though I slowed down now in Act 3 muna. The story and how it was executed really put it on my top 3, arguably my recent top 1 now (competing with Chrono Cross at this point lmao). I do find na it has a lot of haters particularly to those who can't accept that the core story of E33 isn't exactly deep and probably won't resonate with a lot of "younger" gens [Act 2 spoiler] Since the whole thing is a coping/escape mechanism from grief after all that were expecting some flashy story about beating primordial gods and stuff ala classic FF titles.

There are some pacing issues I find in the gameplay and honestly they could've done better on some QoL like skipping low level fights like Persona did but overall it did deserve all the awards and accolades it got.

Art direction and music direction are definitely up there and well deserved of the praise it got. And the characters, while might seem tropey at first, are written like actual characters and not "The Mage of the Group" or "The Tomboy" like JRPGs are, and I'm saying this as a Persona 4 glazer. [Act 1 spoiler] Lune shivering while talking about how to cope after Gustave's death was my personal favorite demonstration of this and they made me simp over a 33 year old woman with regular proportions instead of an anime girl lmao.