Adorkable: Eriko "Elly" Kirishima. On the outside, she appears to be prim-and-proper lady, but is in reality a Closet Geek with a fascination with the occult. After awakening to her Persona in front of everyone, she absorbs her very own supernatural powers in stunned silence as they look on. She then proudly declares herself to be an angelic bringer of victory, and that she'll be their protector. Mark brings her back down to reality pretty quickly.
Base-Breaking Character: Yuka Ayase. Some love her for her shamelessness in being frank, others hate her for it.
Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Most players recruit Reiji in the SEBEC route and Elly and Brown in the Snow Queen route so that they can have each potential playable character present for one full playthrough.
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-Onna 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 (easily), 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.
Rusalka when first encountered. You're not ready for a Mabufula at that stage in the game and unless you've fused up Urvashi or have some ice resistance, your party can get wiped easily.
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.
Mark's Race Lift in the localization has become surprisingly popular, often mentioned in the same conversations as "Mark danced crazy!".
Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: It's not unheard of for people to recommend reading the manga adaptation instead of playing the game, since it allows you to experience the story without having to deal with the clunky, unrefined gameplay.
Game-Breaker: Mastering the fusion system, which is as simple as knowing to always aim for a blue circle/blue arrow fusions. What you're not told when you make those fusions is that not only do you get an additional power boost initially when you make the persona, but a blue fusion keeps gaining more power and stats as it ranks up. Some persona such as Deva, a level 29 priestess can easily reach 200 OMP with a fusion. For comparison, Masao's ulitmate persona starts at 197 at level 59. Proper mastery can also teach your persona some diverse skills early game, or you can opt out and just throw in bullets for even more magical power or easily purchasable tier 3 stones that give you a Dyne spell as early as black market.
"Mark danced crazy!" is the only thing kept from the horrid translation in the remake. Truly the "spoony bard" phenomenon of the 21st century.
And the silly password Elly recites to get back inside the school ("Roses are red, zombies are blue, but my face is white, so you know I'm true"), which has been improved greatly by changing the third line to "...but I don't want brains...", since Mark wasn't white in Revelations.
Brown: "You can make a tofu taco, a tofu burger, but you can't make a tofu cow!" What?
Personas of the Fool Arcana are relatively rare, with only three in this game and all available solely through fusion accidents. As of Persona 3 onwards, the Arcana is reserved for the protagonists and the Social Links associated with the Arcana are that of their teams. One of these Personas, Narukami, is associated with Electricity in the other installments of the SMT franchise it appears in and shares its name with the initial English rename of Elizabeth's Electricity spell El Jihad, which was renamed back to Jihad in Golden more than likely because P4 The Animation cemented the protagonist's canon name as Yu Narukami, whose main Persona Izanagi's spells generally revolve around Electricity attacks.
Low-Tier Letdown: Mark. For some reason, most of his Personas have really crappy weakness setups, poor speed, and minimal multi-target abilities. Since experience is calculated by how much damage you do, and that's amplified by hitting multiple opponents, he'll lag behind the rest of the party very quickly. He also tends to take an assload more damage than the other characters. It's possible to counteract this if you are skilled in fusion, give him another speedy Arcana like Magician, or simply let everybody else defend while he attacks, but the fact that you need to put extra effort in to make him workable doesn't speak well of him. At least his ability to dance crazy is surprisingly useful in negotiations.
Magnificent Bastard: SEBEC Mikage-cho branch head Takahisa Kandori creates the DEVA system intending to use it to become God. When Kandori accidentally ends up manifesting Maki Sonomura's mind into the entire town of Mikage-cho, he manipulates Aki, the manifestation of Maki's rage, into trusting him and using Aki to reach his goal of becoming God. Getting resurrected to help with the plans of Nyarlathotep in the sequel, Kandori becomes one of the highest ranking members of the New World Order despite his lack of interest in advancement. When confronted by the heroes, Kandori allows himself to be beaten so that he may "experience" death, graciously accepting his fate. A mere human who managed to become a God because of his own intelligence, Kandori stands out as a true genius in the Persona franchise and is easily one of its most diabolical.
Narm: Since this game originally came out in 1996, the characters only have one sprite in the game and it's their official art. This can be jarring if a character's emotion doesn't line up with their expression. For example, Mark is one of the more emotional members of the party. He'll show sadness, anger, and distress throughout the game. Yet, his facial expression will always consists of a big goofy grin.
In the PSP remake, it sounds a little like the characters are flushing a toilet whenever they summon their persona.
Never Live It Down: Probably the best-remembered aspect of the game was the infamous localization of the original's North American release in a shoddy attempt to cater to western players, particularly Masao Inaba's Race Lift.
Older Than They Think: It's significantly downplayed compared to the soft rebootandbeyond, but the heavy romantic fixation that the Persona protagonists tend to be the target of really did start here. And that's not even factoring the lack of the Dating Sim elements that permeate 3 and beyond - even compared to both parts of the following game, where Tatsuya and Maya were very much the apple inthe eyes of many, the attraction to this game's Hero is easily the least noticeable. Only Maki visibly shows her affection for him; Eriko's attraction doesn't get addressed until Eternal Punishment, Yuka's attraction isn't even visible in the game and was mentioned in the ''Persona World Book'', and Yukino isn't attracted to him at all, instead falling for her future boss in Innocent Sin.
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-insert love interest for Tamaki, who is based on an idol the real Satomi admires named Yuki Uchida.
Scrappy Mechanic: Battles take place on a grid that determines which enemies you can target with which moves, and vice versa. This drags fights out longer than they need to be, as moving a character takes up their turn, and the odd targeting patterns of most weapons means that you may have only one or two characters capable of hitting an enemy, so you'll either have to pass a lot of turns and take hits or use up valuable SP.
The Experience system works on merit. The more work/damage you did in the battle, the more EXP you'll gain. This will catch a lot of players off guard at first when they realize Masao, the sluggish member of the team is suddenly five-six levels behind everyone else. Proper mastery of the fusion system (or simple counterbalancing a persona/character's strengths and weaknesses) will alleviate this to an extent. Regardless, it can be rough when this happens and you need to grind up your other members for negotiation purposes.
For those more familiar with the newer installments, the random and high enemy encounter rates can easily be this. Unlike the newer installments where players can avoid enemy shadows, here they will be forced into battle and make the game even more dragged out. Doubly so in the original PS1 version, in which there is no Estoma at all.
The original PS1's help menu screens were very...unhelpful to say the least. Some enemies that were "weak against spirit" left players wondering what the hell that meant. The PSP version gives players a more proper analysis of the screens which alleviated this issue.
Unlike future instalments from Persona 3 onwards, you are unable to swap out your party members. In the SEBEC storyline, three party members will be permanently fixed to your roster, leaving you only one more slot to select your final member. Unfortunately, the game does not tell you that the final member will be joining your team permanently, which will catch first-time players off-guard.
That One Attack: Pandora's first form has "Paralyze Puncture", a move that has a high chance of inflicting paralyze on the entire party which will result in a Game Over, making it essentially a One-Hit Kill. If the player is unlucky enough, she can use this on her very first move.
The PSP version switches up the chest items by removing their original items and replacing them with booby trapped chests. Those who played the PS1 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.
Some people aren't fans of the new soundtrack for the PSP release, done in the same style as the post-Persona 3 games, and prefer the somewhat moodier soundtrack of the original. It is also considered disrespectful to the late Hidehito Aoki, one of the composers of the original game. Oddly enough, many of those tracks are in the PSP version with some great remixes to them, but only in the Snow Queen Quest, so tough luck if you have no interest in doing that quest.
There are a few moments which seemed innocuous on release but would give the game have racist undertones when viewed later, like Eriko's password "Roses are red, zombies are blue, but my face is white, so you know I'm true" note it's because the zombies have a different skin color, which caused the third line to be changed in the PSP version to "I don't want brains", and when Masao and Brown are thrown in jail, which causes Kei to remark "You fools look like some caged up monkeys! How did we end up at the zoo?"
Building on Mark being called a "monkey", this was not helped by the fact the localisation made him, a hot-headed Idiot Hero who likes street art and rap music and whose persona is a Nigerian war god, black, which combined with the aforementioned comment makes him look like a racial stereotype of African Americans.
The fact that high-school aged protagonists are able to obtain and casually wield guns. After Columbine, and especially the drastic uptick in gun violence during The New '10s, this would be very, very weird.
At one point, there are monsters who appear in a random encounter, who would use the word “Retard” as an insult. Granted, they’re meant to be rude, but nowadays that term isn't used nearly as casually as it was before the mid-2010s (to the point where many people consider it an outright slur against disabled people).
What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: The initial release received a K-A rating (equivalent to an E rating today) from the ESRB, bumped up to a T rating for the PSP re-release. The original translation had a fair amount of swearing while updated localization has more of it, and both versions of the game feature high levels of sexual innuendo and nudity, including the final boss appearing to have a penis that makes up half its body.
Woolseyism: The PSP script compared to the original North American release. Atlus' NA localization team really has honed their craft in the decade-and-change between the two releases, going to great lengths to grasp every last nuance of characterization and mythology that was in the original Japanese version.
, "School Days"