Part of Shin Megami Tensei's infamous difficulty stems from a lot of game mechanics that many players find frustrating and unnecessary.
Persona 5 has its own page.
Multiple games
- The main character being KO'd resulting in Game Over (Although being a brilliant example of Gameplay and Story Integration, since your demons are basically free to do what they want once you're dead and there's nothing to force them to fight anymore). Combine this rule with The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard with regard to critical hits and you have the potential for lots of tossed controllers because the game decided to punish you just for being unlucky.
- Consider the fact that you don't actually control anyone in your party but the main character (except in the PSP version), and Persona 3 can be hair-pulling, eye-gouging, controller-throwingly infuriating on this front. Especially considering that two elements of enemy have strictly OHKO attacks that both go from targeting one to multiple to all party members AND gain a higher chance of being effective as the game goes on. You can eventually develop Personas to make you immune to these attacks, but the first 3/4 of the game is spent in fear of a lucky shot taking out the protagonist and erasing a good chunk of progress with it. Combine this with the fact that the dungeon levels are randomly generated and thus give only random chances to go back to the save point until you get a special spell to do it whenever you like, and one cheap shot can take out an hour of grinding. Or, on an alternate path, there's a random chance of finding a special area with enemies that give huge rewards if you can kill them before they run, some of which are necessary to complete quests.
- Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 is significantly better about this, as party members can and will save your character from taking a mortal blow...but, only if you're about to be hit by a single target attack. If an attack hits everyone, you're still screwed unless you've completed Rise's Social Link. And Golden moves this ability from the first Social Link bonus to the next-to-last, so you won't benefit from it in the early game where defensive options are more limited. Also you can decide to take manual control over the whole party, or often times just the person with the best healing skills. The original Persona and Persona 2 are also significantly more lenient, as the main character dying doesn't end the game.
- The main character dying in Digital Devil Saga also doesn't result in a game over, it just means one less press turn to use. This also applies to Shin Megami Tensei IV and some later games, though they may also present options to re-enable this trope if the player desires. This is replaced by a caveat in SMT4: your demon compatriots cannot use items without a special skill, so if your team doesn't have a demon with a revive spell or the aforementioned skill, the main character is essentially down for the rest of the fight. They also can't switch places with another demon who has one of these skills unless they have a different spell.
- The inheritance mechanic. To clarify, when fusing two Personae/Demons, what they could inherit is based off of inheritance and the Persona's/Demon's type (like fire Personae can't learn ice magic, for example). Normally, this isn't a issue unless you had games that had cross, pentagram and hexagram fusions. When these occurred, players found themselves creating a demon/persona with four different types of spells through the same tree (Agi, Agilao, Maragi, and Agidyne, for example) because of, again, inheritance and type. These unwanted moves used to be called "noise" or undesirable spells for inheritance if only because of redundancy. Many late game fusions such as P3's Thanatos required players to refuse all of their death persona just to avoid having to sift through reloading screen after screen after screen after screen just to get the right movesets with minimal noise. Devil Survivor introduces the ability to choose what the demon inherits, finally alleviating sitting through and refreshing menus repeatedly, and this ability has been retained in future games like Persona 4 Golden and Shin Megami Tensei IV.
- During negotiations, Demons can just decide to leave. With all the Macca and items you just gave them. This is completely random and there is nothing you can do to predict or stop it. To add insult to injury, this also removes some of your Press Turn icons, so you can't take as many actions for this turn.
- Harder difficulties like to introduce a subset of Fake Difficulty: Jacking up the prices on the features such as the demonic/persona compendium to ludicrous amounts, so much so that it's supposed to force players to keep talking to demons and constantly recruiting or re-fusing the demon/persona you want; ignoring a lot of problems that mechanic has.
- If an enemy uses Macca Beam on you, you'll lose half of your hard-earned Macca. The rage that may, and probably will, ensue is showcased well in this video
. - In the main series, if a demon gets KOed, bringing it back takes two actions- reviving it and then switching it back in(although the latter only takes half of a press turn icon). To make matters worse, you'll begin the turn with one fewer Press Turn icon, so having a demon be KOed is much more of a setback than a party member being KOed in most other turn-based RPGs.
- Exam weeks in the Persona series. When they happen you get no free time for almost an entire week, and the reward for doing well on them is minimal, nothing you couldn't have gotten several times over with the time the game decided should be spent on exams instead. And unlike most times when the game decides you get no free time for a few days, that time isn't used to develop the party members' relationships or to progress the story. You just get a pointless mini-game rife with Guide Dang It! since the questions require remembering things that were briefly mentioned up to 10+ hours ago.
- You cannot use mornings as free time in the Persona series. While this makes sense on days during the school year, as the protagonist would be in school, you still cannot use it during the summer or on Sundays, for no explained reason. The protagonist wakes up at morning, only for the time to skip ahead to daytime (the equivalent of after school) to grant the player control. As such, many players find it strange that they only have one free time period on days off.
- In the Persona series, if you leave home- the Iwatodai dorm in 3, the Dojima residence in 4 and Leblanc in 5- during the day on a day off you cannot return until evening, although you can come and go freely in the evening. There aren't many options that are available at home, but it can be inconvenient.
- The change of having physical skills use MP as opposed to HP. Originally, physical skills used the characters hit points as a resource as a means both to add a risk vs reward factor and to take into account that physical attackers will have less magic and thus less MP available. When this change was enacted to no longer use HP, many physical focused demons and builds took a massive hit to their viability.
Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne
- Players of Nocturne despise a certain part of the Labyrinth of Amala. Unless you know how to traverse a certain floor in a certain kalpa properly, you will drop down onto a lower floor that is an early introduction to damage floors. Thankfully the dungeon is optional. There's also the Cursed Corridor, an area of the next kalpa where a red gas that slashes your party's HP in half every four steps is present and has powerful enemies. Defeating a specific boss in another kalpa removes the gas, but going through the gas before beating said boss nets you a quarter of a million Macca.
- Mystical Chests give different loot depending on the phase of the Kagutsuchi when you open them, with a full Kagutsuchi always giving the best items. Once you figure that out, opening them becomes a massive waste of time as you run around in circles and endure Random Encounters until the time is right. And you're bound to have at least one occasion where you see a Mystical Chest, but have the Kagutsuchi phase change from full to 7/8 just before you can open it. Or, even worse, have this happen while you were wasting time, because you accidentally stepped a bit too far while running around.
- Every time you save at a Terminal, you have to watch an unskippable animation. Given this is a game where you want to save as often as possible, this can quickly get grating. The fast travel animation is skippable, so it's strange the save animation isn't.
- White Rider's spawn point is in front of every major Terminal after reaching Asakusa and completing the Second Kalpa.note Pray that you'll be able to escape or beat him in one go...
- Beast Eye/Dragon Eye, or any other move that grants the opponent free press turns. Mostly because it's one of the few things in the game that is blatant that The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard, with them using a move that is unavailable to the player, that costs only 1 MP, and sometimes even abusing it to outright win. And worse, depending on the enemy and the moves they use, it can be impossible to counter with demons that can nullify attacks.
- Sometimes, a demon will refuse to join you for no apparent reason even after you fulfill all its requests for money or items. It's completely random, and while certain demon skills can prevent demons from leaving for certain reasons, it's not guaranteed.
- When you learn a skill from a Magatama, you must either take the skill, or give up on learning it forever. This can be problematic for blind playthroughs, especially if you give up a skill early and end up wanting it later, or you need to equip a Magatama for its stats or resistances but don't want to lose its next skill. You can only view the next skill a Magatama learns, so you might not realize one has a skill you want later if its initial skill doesn't look appealing.
- While exacerbated by starting the game on Hard Mode, this page has a comprehensive list.
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey
- While this game lacks the inheritance mechanic (any demon can inherit any skill), it brings another issue: skill inheritance is completely random. Fused demons have their own specific skills, plus random skills from their components and D-Source (if you choose to use one). If you want a Demon with a specific combination of skills, prepare to spend a lot of time coming in and out of the fusion result preview screen until you get all the desired skills.
- The lack of a defense stat. As you progress through the game, damage values can only go up, quickly outstripping the progression of your party's HP, and the game will quickly evolve into Rocket-Tag Gameplay, so unless you spam buffs and change your body armor and team makeup repeatedly to exploit elemental resistances, a single wave of enemy turns can be enough to completely wreck your team. An enemy ambush will often spell a Game Over.
- Fighting the Fiends. While David and Mother Harlot are found in Challenge Quests and Plasma is obtainable through DLC, the others all have 1/256 spawn rates and only appear by standing in a very exact spot. It's possible to search for a single Fiend for days with no luck. Special mention goes to Red Rider, who can only be fought in the Neutral Route by completing a specific Challenge Quest and having at least 100 Luck.
- During most battles, you have a partner who acts automatically at the end of each turn. Unfortunately, they have elemental magic and zero understanding of Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors in a series where not hitting your opponent's strong points is important. This leads to them using spells that get nullified, absorbed (healing the enemy), or reflected, and granting them a Smirk (massive evasion rate boost and guaranteed critical hit). Notably, Minotaur has earned a reputation as That One Boss due to Walter's tendency to use Agi on him, which Minotaur is immune to.
- The way scouting demons works in this game is that it's not enough to just give the demon what it wants until it finally decides you're worth joining. Sometimes, a demon will just run off with your crap, so it's sometimes necessary to pick the "End talks" option, at which point depending on the RNG you'll either be right in guessing that the demon has all of what they want and they'll join you, or they'll lash out at you for being stingy with your material, potentially even getting a free turn. There is no way to tell whether continuing to give or ending negotiations is the correct choice, so you pretty much just have to pray that the Random Number God is having a good day.
- The alignment system in this game is a major source of headaches for players going for the Neutral ending, since rather than simply rejecting the other options, you need to keep your Karma Meter almost perfectly balanced. This means alternating Law and Chaos choices for most of the game, when a single slip-up could leave you leaning too far in one direction, and the final choice before the alignment lock is worth so many Law/Chaos points that you can end up missing the Neutral route by being too neutral.
Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse
- The assist mechanic. Your partner has a gauge that fills up whenever they act, and when it's full all your partners team up to support you, attack the enemies, give Smirk to random party members, and cancel the enemy's turn. However, the gauge fills up on its own and the attack automatically activates once it's full. This often leads to your partners unleashing their full power on random encounters you were about to defeat anyways, and there's no way to save it specifically for boss battles. It also only fills at the end of your turn, meaning if you defeat a group of weak enemies in one turn, it doesn't count towards your assist meter since the battle ends before the meter goes up.
- Gaston in general. All other partners act on their own at the end of your turn, but he instead acts during it, and consumes your precious Press Turn icons. And if his attacks miss or get nullified, you take the turn penalty. The end result is a partner that just randomly forces you to use specific attacks. To add insult to injury, you later get Toki, another physical-based partner, who doesn't have this drawback, making Gaston inferior in every way. In fact, Toki also has a cut-in mechanic that doesn't use any of your Press Turn icons, making Gaston stand out even more as a Low-Tier Scrappy.
- The way this game factors levels into damage calculation is widely disliked. If a lower-leveled Demon goes up against a demon that's more than a few levels higher than them, it results in damage taken being drastically increased and damage dealt being massively reduced. This is antithetical to the core philosophy of past mainline SMT games, where strategy and team composition is always valued over raw levels and statistics. It's especially problematic if you want to go for True Neutral Ending which requires that you defeat a Super Boss that's several levels higher than the actual final boss, meaning that being strong enough to beat him will render the actual end game trivial.
- Some demons have special interactions with other demons; this can bring new tidbits of lore about, if not extra lulz, but these special interactions happen without fail if possible, meaning the Nahobino cannot recruit the demon through standard negotiation. This means that if you want to recruit the demon, you have to either cast aside the partner in the interaction or go through demon fusion; the two are not mutually exclusive, but it's still a pain regardless.
- Magnetite, or MAG for short. It's a Practical Currency that allows demons to maintain their physical form, but it's often seen as too restrictive by modern players. Each demon has a MAG cost that is deducted from your total for every single step you take, including in safe areas such as Paradigm X, and if you run out they start losing HP. Stronger demons can require hundreds of MAG per step, making their mere presence in your party Awesome, but Impractical. And if you want to bypass the cost in safe areas by dismissing your team and resummoning it later, too bad, because each demon also has a MAG cost for summoning it to your party, making it pointlessly expensive to switch your current lineup (until Nemissa learns the spell Sabbatoma later on, which only costs a small amount of her MP to summon a demon from your stock). The mechanic actually was in the series since the beginning, but it drew most criticism here because this is the first game with the mechanic to be officially localized in the West several years later, making it the most accessible to newcomers.
- The game deliberately induces Loads and Loads of Loading to give you time to read messages and tips on loading screens. Fortunately, there are options to either allow skipping the added wait time by pressing a button, or to hide the messages completely, but the former requires additional input whenever you want to travel somewhere, while the latter will make you miss some interesting Flavor Text. There's also a Help section in the options menu that compiles all loading screen messages, but most people aren't going to go out of their way to read that.
- The Golden Enemies in Persona 3. If you see one, you could attempt shooting it with a bow (or Aigis' gun in The Answer), but most players prefer to use shortswords, longswords, axes or gloves because they hit like a truck - hence having to unequip and re-equip weapons just for one stinking shadow is a real pain in the ass. The only other option you have is to sneak upon the bastard and pray to Vishnu that it doesn't see you and flee; once it starts running and it outruns you, there's no way in hell you're gonna catch it before it goes bye-bye. What's also infuriating is if you encounter one in a dead end-esque area with nowhere to run: it disappears immediately, before you have a chance to react. Thankfully, Golden Shadows run towards you in the sequel, and if they hit a wall, you have a few seconds to attack them to initiate combat before they vanish. And if you're playing the PSP remake of Persona 3, the Main Character is forced to use shortswords (for male MC) or naginatas (for female MC), so you can't take a cheap way out and use a bow to strike from a distance.
- The Social Link system — specifically, its ability to Reverse and Break Social Links; Reversing a Link means you need to spend extra time and effort to be able to start advancing it again (and P3 is already a very touchy game about time management), whilst Breaking one will mean you cannot use Personas of that Link. For the rest of the current cycle, with no way of fixing it. Particularly nasty is the fact that the five Social Links that require interacting with female characters take into account a hidden "jealousy" mechanic, which cuts down the time you have before that Link Reverses by a quarter each and every time you see a different girl. Compounding this is that each of the five female S.Links take a good amount of points to rank up to the next level; which means a lot of wasted time and gifts to get them happy enough to the next S.Level without wasting too much time. Thankfully, Persona 3 Reload does away with virtually all sources of frustration, with link breaks being entirely cut and reversals reduced down to a couple of obviously bad choices in two links, as well as the Nozomi fakeout. Additionally, romances are now optional, start at Rank 9 like later games, and in some cases require picking certain dialogue options in previous ranks to unlock.
- Yukari Takeba, the Lovers Link, for whom major Values Dissonance between Western and Japanese perspective is involved, making her the easiest Social Link in the game to Reverse or Break. More specifically, it's a bad idea to hug her when she's upset (unlike the next two games' Lovers party members, Rise and Ann, in which case hugging them is the way to get into a romantic relationship with them). Reload changes this to a sexist remark which is far more clearly ill-intentioned, regardless of region.
- Chihiro, the Justice Link. Your relationship with her becomes intimate at rank 5 as opposed to rank 7, making it harder to balance the other female S.Links because of it, since she gets jealous more easily.
- Yuko, the Strength link, for having very little free time during the week or having hard to shop for presents (Until FES, the only items Yuko greatly liked were only available on the Shopping Network).
- Fuuka, the High Priestess Link, who opens up early in the game but requires max courage (at a time when money's not exactly flowing from the pockets yet) to complete her S.Link in one run. Luckily, the female route lowered the Courage requirement for her... and then applied a similarly strict check for Ken's Social Link (who's available later on and is a night Social Link).
- Mitsuru, the Empress Link, requires not only maxed Academics, but you have to have achieved first place in at least one exam. There are only two exams left by the time her Link is available, and waiting for the second won't give you much time to finish her Link, especially if you're also dealing with jealousy from other Links. It doesn't help that, due to exams and S.E.E.S. being preoccupied with whether to kill Ryoji, you generally won't have many opportunities to spend time with her until January, meaning she conflicts with Aigis. Reload makes her easier to max out by making her available during the week before exams (where she's your only available school-based link).
- The female route of Persona 3 Portable has different Social Links and offers the ability to keep platonic relationships so that you don't run into the jealousy mechanic. However, the Fortune and Moon Links of this route have a very stringent time frame before they're rendered inaccessible by the plot — missing a single day can screw the player out of maxing that Link. Not even the male protagonist faced such an issue.
- Spending time with party/school Social Links on days off won't result in a rank up; you just hang out with them and get some relationship points. This is especially bad during summer and winter vacation, when your progress with your Social Links grinds to a halt. While the fourth and fifth games had similar mechanics, they often gave points in multiple Social Links (for example, one early May hangout event in the fourth game gives points with Daisuke/Kou, Yosuke and Nanako), as well as other fringe benefits, neither of which applies in the third game.
- Somewhat similarly, when you get phone calls on your days off, you must decide whether to spend time with that person before you get the next call. For example, if you want to spend time with Bebe, but would rather spend time with Yukari, you will only find out whether Yukari will call if you refuse Bebe's invitation. The fourth game addressed this by giving only one invitation at a time, while the fifth game allowed players to hold off on committing to the invitations.
- One minor but still annoying mechanic is how, unlike in the subsequent two games, you can't see whether spending time with a Social Link friend will result in a rank-up. By comparison, the fourth and fifth games had the player character saying "I think my relationship with Social Link will grow stronger soon," or "I don't think my relationship with X will become stronger yet," before you're given the choice whether to spend time with them, and will get similar messages at the end of a holdover visit or hangout event (as a way of showing whether your next session will be a rank up). You can sometimes tell when a Social Link is ready to rank up if their dialogue when greeting you is different (usually a hint for what will happen in the next rank's event), but it's not always apparent, especially not on a first playthrough. Fortunately, Reload adds prompts telling you if a rank up will happen or not.
- It's possible for the enemy to begin combat with the advantage, even if you struck the enemy on the field, and this happens more often on higher difficulties or against rare forms. In the fourth and fifth games, striking the enemy on the field usually averts the worst-case scenario of being ambushed, but in this case, you can still get ambushed and possibly killed even if you aren't careless enough to let the Shadows sneak up on you.
- Sometimes, status ailments will be dispelled at the start of the victim's next turn, which means that they will not affect the victim at all, save for ones that make the victim more vulnerable. This can benefit the player as well as the enemy, but it serves to make status ailments even more of a Useless Useful Spell.
- In both story scenes and some Social Links, some dialogue options are unavailable to you if your social stats aren't high enough, usually Courage. Since social stat increase is slightly random in P4, it's possible to be forced to choose sub-optimal Social Link responses if you're unlucky. The beginning of the game is the most annoying about this, where you're teased with several dialogue choices that you definitely won't have enough Courage for until a New Game Plus. (e.g. Asking Chie and Yukiko for their cell phone numbers straight out rather than making an excuse by saying it's for an investigation). Most of these instances don't affect anything, but there are a few cases in which you lose out on a better dialogue option for a Social Link (e.g. Yukiko is happiest if you willingly eat her food, which requires a lot of Courage).
- Rainy days. Almost all Social Links are unavailable on rainy days, leaving you with very few optionsnote . In most cases, it's just fishing, Aiya's Mega Beef Bowl, or going to the dungeon (which will also rob you of your night time), and dungeons have new, annoying enemies in rainy weather.
- Persona 4 Golden changed the Reaper mechanic. The Reaper drops the best weapons for each character and some good armor as well as the ultra-rare Omnipotent Orb. To fight the Reaper in Persona 4 Golden, you have to open 20-21 chests in a row with one chest possibly holding the Reaper in it. Once you start hearing the rattling of chains, one of the remaining chests on that floor might have the Reaper, meaning that if there are many chests or none, you're not likely to see him. Unless you know what you're doing ahead of time, the odds of actually encountering the reaper are low as you're relying on luck to get the bastard in the chest in the first place.
Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth
- The "Boost" mechanic. If you hit an enemy's weakness or get a Critical Hit, you become Boosted, enabling you to act first and use skills without any HP or SP cost. This is obviously crucial, since skills tend to cost a lot of SP in this game, but if an enemy hits you, the Boost status goes away, meaning that a Herd-Hitting Attack near the end of a turn can cost all your party members their Boost.
- Related to the above, you aren't allowed to choose which skills your party members' Main Personas have, resulting in elemental skills automatically being replaced by their more powerful and expensive versions. For players who want to keep their lower-tier skills around to have a cheap way of hitting an enemy's weakness, this can be frustrating.
- The second labyrinth has tiles that drain SP as you walk across them, and must be traversed to fully map out the dungeon, unless you're willing to pay Play Coins to finish the unmapped part.
- Unlike other Persona games (including the sequel), in which All-Out Attacks take place once all the enemies are downed, All-Out Attacks in this game are triggered randomly depending on how many characters are Boosted, making them come off as arbitrary and unreliable.
