More recent entries in Persona focus on the social sim aspect and the story along with dungeon crawling all with equal focus. Smt on the other hand, focuses pirmarily on dungeon crawling with much less story. Thats not to say smt has no story but story in smt games often takes a back seat for long stretches of time in favor of the gameplay aspect whereas persona games tend to have very long story sequences in between gameplay that ties things together. Another thing is thst often smt games have stories that are more open ended than persona games, with an alignment system (law vs chaos basically) that often changes the final stretches of the game and the endings based on your choice, with no real right or wrong, everything is morally grey. Persona games stories are more involved but they are also more set in stone where you dont have as mich player freedom to change how things play out.

As for the difficulty, smt is known for having the kind of difficulty where you are always one bad turn away from a party wipe if you arent paying attention, even in regular encounters. However most of that can be dealt with as you learn the mechanics. Instead, the main difficulty in smt games come from bosses, where you will frequently get walled by a boss until you figure the mechanics of how the boss works and how to deal with the boss's crap. Its not a level thing so much as figuring out a strategy that works on the boss.

More recent entries in Persona focus on the social sim aspect and the story along with dungeon crawling all with equal focus. Smt on the other hand, focuses pirmarily on dungeon crawling with much less story. Thats not to say smt has no story but story in smt games often takes a back seat for long stretches of time in favor of the gameplay aspect whereas persona games tend to have very long story sequences in between gameplay that ties things together. Another thing is thst often smt games have stories that are more open ended than persona games, with an alignment system (law vs chaos basically) that often changes the final stretches of the game and the endings based on your choice, with no real right or wrong, everythingbisbmorally grey. Persona games stories are more involved but they are also more set in stone where you dont have as mich player freedom to change how things play out.

As for the difficulty, smt is known for having the kind of difficulty where you are always one bad turn away from a party wipe if you arent paying attention, even in regular encounters. However most of that can be dealt with as you learn the mechanics. Instead, the main difficulty in smt games come from bosses, where you will frequently get walled by a boss until you figure the mechanics of how the boss works and how to deal with the boss's crap. Its not a level thing so much as figuring out a strategy that works on the boss.