Persona (video game)/YMMV

• Awesome Music: Several, particularly "School Days".
• Base-Breaking Character: Yuka Ayase. Some love her for her shamelessness in being frank, others hate her for it.
• Broken Base: The new soundtrack for the PSP release, done in the same style as the post-Persona 3 games. Some people aren't fans of the change and preferred the somewhat moodier soundtrack of the original. Oddly enough, many of those tracks ARE in the PSP version with some great remixes to them; but only in the Snow Queen Quest. If you have no interest in doing that quest; that's tough.
• Complete Monster: Michiko Matsudaira, one of the bosses of the Snow Queen Quest. The other two guardians have fairly sympathetic reasons for working for the Snow Queen, but Michiko? She's just a Spoiled Brat and awful bully who is so self-deluded she thinks she's the victim because nobody liked her (mainly because they saw her for the irredeemable Jerkass she was). Her two victims weren't even part of the "bullies"-she just thought they were ugly, and ugliness deserves punishment (never mind the fact that she's rather plain herself)... And those punishment are Ironic Hell in High Octane Nightmare Fuel levels...
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Grimies, purposely placed where they are in the final dungeon to make you risk the 40 minutes it takes to actually reach the final boss in one fell swoop. They are also The Unintelligible (literally, their words are numbers and deciphering them is a pain), which means that they're hard to negotiate with.
  • Any demon capable of spamming multi target ailment attacks like sleep and guilt, such as Nightmares and Arpachis. Imagine being powerless and mesmerized to attack each other.
    • The above is remedied by equipping personae which reflect or null their magics, but the trope is still upheld due to the rarity of those personae, plus the need to move onto better, more capable personae.
    • What's even worse is those who only put status effects on you and nothing else. It's actually possible to have to manually turn your game off due to getting stuck in a loop against some enemies.
  • Kuchisake-Onne is extremely hazardous against those who do an SQQ max Ambrosia run, in which the gamer at level 20 has to go into Thanatos Tower first. In there, she's commonly fought, she can't be talked away, and she spams Mamudo, which will most likely off any member not fortunate enough to have a dark type Persona, which at that point in the game, is extremely limited.
  • The toilet demons!
• Ensemble Darkhorse:
  • Following her return from Shin Megami Tensei if..., Tamaki Uchida has become this. While she's nowhere as strong as she once was, she proves her worth with the amount of knowledge she retains from her days at her old high school.
  • Among the Personas, there is Vishnu, the ultimate Persona of the Emperor arcana. Despite Amon Ra being the protagonists ultimate Persona, it is Vishnu that is frequently treated as such instead. Even official material get in on it, with Vishnu appearing in art and the covers whereas Amon Ra doesn't even have official art in his Persona design, a sprite is all he's got. Finally, in the manga adaption, Naoya receives Vishnu instead from his other self while Amon Ra is absent.
• First Installment Wins: Averted/inverted. The original Persona game is easily the worst of the lot, with clunky mechanics and obtuse fighting systems. Indeed, the series has evolved nicely since then, with Persona 2 being a cult hit and Persona 3 being a total smash hit.
  • It does have an incredibly diehard fanbase though, mostly made up of fans of the PSX version. Some fans see it and Innocent Sin/Eternal Punishment being truer to the idea of what a "Persona" is.
• Freud Was Right: Mara is a recurring phallic-shaped demon in Shin Megami Tensei. Considering the context of Toro's possession.... ew.
• Memetic Badass: Reiji gets built up as one. This gets taken apart in the sequel.
• Narm: In the PSP remake, it sounds a little like the characters are flushing a toilet whenever they summon their personae.
• The Scrappy: Tadashi Satomi, Author Avatar of the writer of the same name, is heavily disliked due to being lazy and primarily existing as a self-inser love interest for Tamaki, who is based on an idol the real Satomi admires named Yuki Uchida.
• Seinfeld Is Unfunny: This game has not aged very well, and a lot of the criticisms for it were basically this.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks: The PSP version switches up the chest items by removing their original items and replacing them with booby trapped chests. Those who played the PSX version beforehand were irked by how many useful weapons (some of which were found from the Casino if the player didn't know which personas to refine) and items were taken out just so Atlus can mess with the player. They're also just a nuisance. They may drop HP to 1, but you have Mediarama really early which makes it a non-issue.
• Woolseyism: The PSP script compared to the original North American release. Atlus' NA localization team goes to great lengths to grasp every last nuance of characterization and mythology.