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LRT: I've said it before, but one thing folks often miss in mainstream western games discourse is that Japanese games are often willing to at least temporarily forgo "fun" in a traditional gamey sense in favor of other types of emotional engagement with a longer term payoff.
Sometimes the short-term goal in a lot of the types of Japanese games critics and devs rally against immediate player satisfaction. Sometimes it really is about going through the motions of exploring mechanics and systems and their implications within the context of a narrative.
Such games are very much so making a social contract, asking players to trust them up front that even if maybe not everything they're experiencing is "enjoyable" right at that moment, eventually there will be that payoff and the justification will feel clearer in hindsight.
It's a contract a lot of mainstream western games in particular are afraid to make. Even ones that emphasize achieving satisfaction in long term goals still often prioritize moment-to-moment, traditional fun to sustain engagement and Japanese games just aren't always about that.
The execution of those ideas can be not to your taste. But to flippantly throw other successful games under the bus, especially those that had to overcome language barriers overseas, is to discredit the design work that goes into weighing the plusses/minuses of such approaches.
This game in particular seems to be a response to just one game and a very popular one that's been dissected thoroughly in both English and Japanese. If you're just responding to one game, then in my mind, frankly, you're not participating in genre discourse in a meaningful way.
And hey, FYI, if you want the relationship bits of Persona without going through the motions of an entire RPG, there's a whole genre out there with unique systems waiting for you to discover. They're called dating sims, they're not synonymous with VNs, and the good ones are rad!
Let me clarify one thing folks have asked about: I'm not saying you can't market your game by saying "it's like X, but different in Y" or that every game *has* to be actively contributing to some higher level discourse. What irritates a lot of types like me is this:
In framing their comparisons, for years, many western devs and press have had a habit of punching down the Japanese games/devs that work is building upon. At best, it feels presumptuous, at worst it's condescending. "I, the western dev, will fix this problem in JAPANESE games."
As I like to think my posts on dating sims show, often the things we find opaque or mechanically unappealing have deliberate design intentions and historical contexts and once those things click, they become less "just a Japanese thing" and more something made with real intent.
I obviously think it's fine to make games in response to Japanese games even if you aren't from Japan or Japanese. But there *is* a power dynamic at play in terms of who gets to participate in such comparative discussions and I wish western folks would be more cognizant of that.
Also, final food for thought: part of it is a cultural thing, but in my experience, it's extremely rare for Japanese devs to publicly show similar aggression when discussing western games or comparing their games to them. They won't shy away from it, but tend to be more relative.
On some level, barring the other baggage, personally, a big hangup is when I see western devs/press frame their comparisons in such imposing terms, it feels like western goading for winning overall dominance from the Japanese industry in the 2000s and that makes me uncomfortable.
