nocturne pisses me off because GRINDS ETC but persona games tend to be the only rpgs i can become involved with so heavily in that way, so i don't mind too much, and really it is just a pretty awesome game and at the time it came out i thought it was pretty great to see something with that type of atmosphere on the market!
I haven't hit any brick wall grind-a-thons yet but with the nature of persona fusing and the Magatama system and all that and, more importantly, the extremely rapid pace of battles I'm pretty sure that it might actually be pretty fun to grind in this game (it delivers rewards rapidly and constantly).
Also yeah the atmosphere is truly mysterious and bizarre in sort of a creepy way. The cool thing about it though is that it isn't
IN YOUR FACE creepy like a Resident Evil game. Rather, the game makes you feel like an unwelcome guest in a strange world where the residents are too apathetic to push you out.
Also its cel-shading engine is extremely slick and I'm really impressed with their decision to basically flat-shade everything and use the spare PS2 resources to put self-shadowing on all of the models and everything. The self-shadows actually look better than a lot of newer 360 games and stuff in my opinion because the shadows are in the same resolution as everything else.