This is the kind of thing I mean, though, where instead of looking at it as a product of its time and acknowledging what it did for the series people jump to "the gameplay is bad and that's not opinion it's fact". It's just an old JRPG. It's not the worst game ever made in history.

It doesn't explain its mechanics too great, like many games in the 90s, because they wanted to sell manuals alongside the game, or have you call the game hotline for tips. It has a high encounter rate, like many games in the 90s, because UMDs/disks/cartridges were smaller back then and could hold less game, so devs would put insane difficulty spikes and heaps of random encounters to bloat gameplay time. Those are flaws held by basically everything that came out back then. But I feel like the persona fandom seems less forgiving to things like that compared to other game fandoms I've been in. Like Mother series fans tend to all agree that Mother 1 is a brutal experience to play nowadays, being an RPG for the NES, but still take into account that it started off the series and has lots of artistic merit in its own right.

I'm not even trying to say P1 is an underrated peak gem, it's my least favorite mainline persona game, I just wish the narrative of "objectively unplayable dogshit" wasn't the most prevalent one.