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A common complaint is the game railroading the player and going into a few days of story while the game just exposits to the player. Alternatively, the player could choose when the story happens but that might ruin the overall pacing. In a way the player can plan around exams, which causes the player to lose about a week of days, but other important story moments cannot be broadcasted on the calendar. Having a bunch of days unavailable will immediately clue the player in into what is going to happen. The Persona team probably just decided that no matter what they did, they’d rather keep the pacing of the story. After the first two palaces or so, the player starts to get into the rhythm as to what’s going to happen. Though it would be good if story moments not involving the main character didn’t actually consume time.
One of the things I really disliked when I found out is that progressions with certain characters are actually time and/or progression gated. But there is no way to know ahead of time. If you miss a certain date to progress a character, their specific event never happens again. In a way this sort of reflects real life, but the easy out is to just have the characters go ‘We’ll reschedule’ but still play the same event. A player that plays the game once will never know. For example I wasted a lot of time progression a certain character even though there was no chance to get progression until later in the main story. Once it happens, it makes sense why I wasn’t able to, but I just figured that particular character would require a lot of interaction to progress. Perhaps certain palaces could be swapped around to mitigate this. Also Sojiro’s confidant should be locked until Futaba is introduced so the player understands the relationship. I thought I could avoid spoilers but it would be too confusing without names.
It also seems that ending main story beats (clearing palaces, getting out of long story days) is occasionally less appealing than the player’s freedom. Going about your daily life, bathing, drinking juice, spending time with characters is more valuable to the player. The result of these activities are tangible, characters power-up and the player gains social stats. The main plot should reward players with equally tangible rewards. Engaging with the Persona and combat systems are the only real incentives for progressing the story; Which are fantastic systems, but even I who loves gameplay would rather do the social stuff. Most characters do the bulk of their arcs through the side story, rather than the main story. In a way the player should be given quite clear palace days and then the story should progress as soon as a palace was done. Before you finish a palace, every party member will talk about how they wanna do the palace. Afterwards, they will only remark about all they can do is wait until the deadline. In a way having set palace days would let developers plan truely proper pacing and players could plan around with the information. I think it is fairly common to want to clear a palace in a day just to be optimal with time, which the game heavily emphases players to do; Not necessarily to clear the palace in a day, but that time is the resource to be managed. This would also solve the problem of Futaba sleeping for 2 weeks / Haru’s father stuck in his study for 2 weeks / Etc.
Delinearising some of the mandatory confidants would add more things to do if palace days were to be reduced. Fool/Magician/Judgement/Justice/World are the confidants that progress automatically with the main story. World does not exist in the game as gameplay but Igor tells the protagonist that he has obtained it at the end, completing the major arcanas; Even if the player has not reached rank 10 with everyone. Fool could be seen as the reward for progressing the main story, but this arcana doesn’t really add many exciting rewards compared to the others. It seems more tied to balancing than anything else. Of course there are many days in the game that are unused, and adding more confidants would increase production costs, so maybe it was planned. Otherwise, it was a decision that Sae would be Judgement even though that confidant has no gameplay purpose. Having these linear for the sake of the plot is fine, but I’m not sure who actually felt good about reaching Rank 10 with Sae. The Sataneal that the player obtains at the end of the game requires Lucifer which has Rank 10 with Star as a prerequisite, and Star is an optional confidant. It would’ve been interesting if the mandatory arcanas awarded the personas necessary to acquire Sataneal to finish the game, but that isn’t so.
Finally, there is no post Rank 10 story with any Confidants. My girlfriend was Takemi who is the Death Confidant and I did go out with her a few times after getting her to Rank 10. But it seems weird to become such good friends with these people (to get to Rank 10) and then not interact with them anymore. Friendships require maintenance. If there were additional story moments/rewards for spending time with Rank 10 Confidants, it would be a nice feature. My other thought was having the Rank 10 degrade over time (Maybe to Rank 9 or 8) but that means it also makes sense to have them degrade at lower ranks (i.e. Rank 5 to 4, Rank 7 to 6, etc) but this would severely inconvenience the player as well as be nigh impossible to maintain everyone at high ranks. Though having more story would also be a strain on the writers and whoever does the dialogue system, costing more money. Especially the writers.
