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.
Persona 5 Royal might be a good place to start. It's the easiest one to get into and it doesnt have the bland hallway problem of P4 because the dungeons arent randomly generated anymore. That should give you a taste of the franchise without going too hard into it to see if you even like that kind of game. Then you can go on into mainline SMT with SMT 3 4 and 5. Just keep in mind that most mainline SMT games are not as story focused as Persona is and instead focus more on the gameplay and battles and the post apocalyptic atmosphere. Also mainline SMT games are often brutally hard.
Also if you are looking for another JRPG franchise to sink your teeth into try the Trails franchise from Falcom.
For future reference if you ever shop there again and need customer service, wait until later at night and do the chat option. You're more likely to get one of the Indian guys, and they tend to honestly not give a fuck about policy and just give you what you ask for no questions asked as long as you give them that good rating.
We should be glad we have a hobby where it's entirely possible to quantify who actually takes part in it and who doesn't and can't bullshit their way into the sphere.
If that were entirely true gamergate would not have happened. We're only still here because Japan has, by luck or xenophobia, been thus far resistant to the woke virus bringing the west to societal collapse.
To be fair to Atlus, the only reason the female protag happened at all is because they cut so much from p3 to make it portable that it became almost a visual novel so it was much less work to add another playable character than in something like p5 which would require a ton of animation and cutscene reworks as well as ton of script rewrites of the story just to make it barely function.
The Persona fanbase is full of a special kind of retard because alphabet people thought two characters in p4 were part of the rainbow mafia (completely missing the actual message of their character arcs as usual) which brought in a bunch of woke fans to the series because they think it gives representation when in actuality it doesn't.
That's why so many retards bitched about p5 not letting the male protag date guys, or why so many people insist that there should have been an option to make a female protag playable despite the fact that the mc being female in p5 would completely break the story and would require a crap ton more work for something only a very small percent of the fans would even give a shit about. The only reason p3p has a female protag option was because they cut back on so many features so it could run on the psp (game basically became a visual novel outside of dungeons) that they gave the female protag option to try and make up for it. Outside of crossover games she's basically almost non canon anyway.
That's backwards. The people running the elections have to be able to prove to us that it was legit. The burden of proof is on them. They are ones making the claim that it was secure. The fact that they keep playing it off as conspiracy theories and distracting from the issue instead of just easily showing us the receipts to say "here is the proof we're secure" and eliminating all doubt, thereby proving us to be the fools they claim we are, tells me EVERYTHING I need to know about the kind of banana republic bullshit that is going on. About 10 years ago, the BBC released an article about election tampering in third world countries and the signs you need to watch out for. The 2020 presidential election had ALL of those signs.
Hiring ugly fat feminists to consult on how to make Aloy as unattractive as possible.