Says someone who hasn't played them.... The setting might be different, but the actual game's core and themes are similar. You have two opposing forces pulling the strings behind the scenes (Philemon vs. Nyarlothotep - implied in Persona 3 and 4, characters in Persona 1 and 2 - or YHVH vs. Lucifer.) You have dungeon-crawling (albeit it is a little bit different in 3 and 4.) In most games the characters are teenagers/young adults, yes even in SMT. Shadows and demons are practically the same thing. The magic and attacks are the same. Combat is somewhat different, but even in the SMT series combat is different (SMT I & II don't have press-turn.) And when I spoke of overlap I was talking about the overlap of consumers. The majority of SMT fans like Persona and vice-verse.
The differences are literally superficial, as Outlawauron said. It is the equivalent of Windwaker vs. Twilight Princess.
Half of the following would fit right at home in SMT:
17:00 - 25:00 would fit in perfectly in a mainline SMT game tone, story, and theme-wise, for example.
No, I haven't finished one. I have played enough of P4 to understand how completely different the two series are. They share common gameplay elements because they are part of the same franchise, but they are much less like WW v TP and much more like Pokemon Games vs Pokemon Nobunaga's Ambition.
If we are to use the pokemon franchise, I think a more apt comparison would be Pokemon Colloseum/XD vs. mainline Pokemon, if Pokemon Colloseum/XD were of equal quality to the mainline series.
