WTH is a "Persona"?

I keep hearing everyone talk about this game series. It was a game on the Vita and now is gonna be on PS4 or something. I looked it up on YouTube because I was interested after seeing it posted so much. I still don't understand.

What kind of game is it? What is the goal? 

It's a JRPG ...

The game is kinda like Pokemon but with a more mature spin on it and it has some social sim elements in it too ...

What he said but it also has dungeon crawling and fantastic characters/story.

This turned me off. Not a fan of those  :C

P4G has a Long story (Really, it's perfect length and very satisfying) and its a JRPG. You are Yu(renamable) and you're moving into a new school. You have to make friends, and keep up relationships with those friends. You find out you can enter another dimension in a TV, and there's a killer in your dimension who's killing people. You have to find the link between the two worlds.

You can choose what to do everyday. Hang out with friends and strengthen your bonds, or work on imrpoving your own personal traits, or go into the other dimension and save whoever the 'killer' is targeting.

You can't really lose or fail the story per se. There are many choices to make, things to do, and it's just a blast.

Persona is a Dungeon Crawler JRPG/Relationship Sim

Its pretty darn cool if I do say so myself

If you've ever watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it's kind of like the earlier seasons

High school during the day, then hunting daemons at night*

But basically half the game is kind of graphic novel, with lots of dialogue and stuff like that. It has really good characters, writing and story. Then about 7 times in the year, you go into a dungeon and you get a nice classic turn based jRPG, with monster training (and then monster crafting)


* Shadows on occasional days, but it's a similar structure

It's a pretty Overhyped Game in my opinion, but it's a good game if you have 20 dollars and want to buy a new game.

I have played PERSONA 3 on the PS2 and PERSONA 4 GOLDEN on Vita. They are dungeoun crawler JRPGs with strong social interaction between the characters and random generated floors in the dungeons.
The combat is turn based and involves PERSONA monsters, pokemon like peons that you acumulate through the game. You can mix personas to create more powerful monsters too.
Aside the dungeon crawling you explore the city and participate in mundane activites like going to lunch with a friend.
It is a very good game.

See. This post explains what confuses me. Does it contain simulation elements?