The bottom line is that it's too "old school" for today's market. This means that it's an EXCELLENT CLASSIC RPG!

should and will pic it up anyway

I'm loving the game so far, very good story!!! to any persona fans out their get!!!

also why didn't Atlus continue the whole "contact" feature for their persona 3&4?

I should have the game in the mail pretty soon... it came out on the 20th...

about 7-9 hours

Why would you start the Persona series with this game. It's probably the worst possible entry to start with.

Didin't played the PSP version, but i played the PSX version and it's a great game.The story is great, at times it's difficult to follow but it's great anyway, the characters at first seems shallow but as the story develops the characters becomes more deep and you empathize with them.
The battle system it's regular, at least for me it became boring after a while but I was near the end of the game so i wanted to finish it regardless the boring battles. Also you have a couple of sidequest and the "world map" it's the map of the city and you can go to bars, shops, a Spa, food locals, etc which each one act as shops depending on the rumor system.

The rumor system it's a nice feature, basically you choose rumors from a list like "The cashier in X shop sells weapons" so you spread this rumor, go to the previously innocent shop and voila! you have a new black market weapon dealer :D

The problem with this game it's the battle system and the difficulty of the game which is really challenging at times and add the frequent random encounters and you have a -sometimes- frustrating game.

Overall it's a really GREAT game, but it's not for everyone, you have to love old school RPGs in order to love this game, I recommend you to buy it if you like old rpg.

It's part of the story to spread rumors, because in that world the rumors becomes true and it's a part of the plot. However the "functionality" of this system is completely optional to turns things in favour to you, sadly it only applies to shops, so a shop can either don't sell anything, sell really expensives weapons or sells cheap weapons, the same happens with armor and items if i recall properly. You always spread succesfully a rumor via a building that is in charge of spreading rumors, for a fee you can spread the rumors you want :)

PD: I forgot to mention, you have to discover the rumors talking with people called "Rumorongers" or something like that.

Wasn't able to finish the original due to my psone dying midgame, need to get this now.

The whole setting was just fantastic for me at the time, especially the rumor system. Don't remember coming across something like it anywhere.