Persona 4 thoughts
I had this game recommended to me from a few sources, so I bought it and played it. I won't try to describe it in detail since it's been reviewed everywhere.
The game has basically two parts: the dungeon crawl part and the high school sim/murder mystery plot. I played through in hard mode; this made the dungeon crawl and character building elements more interesting, but I think their hard mode should have scaled enemy health and damage instead of just damage. As it stands, the random encounters were too offensively oriented--more about "how can I use the minimum amount of resources to kill them while giving them very few turns" than anything else.
The high school simulation was embarassingly addictive. Ultimately I found the time limit element more stressful than I would have liked, and wound up relying on external information in order to see more of the social plots. The main storyline was thought-provoking and made more sense than I normally expect from a Japanese RPG; elements I would ordinarily have expected to remain unexplained were revisited, reanalyzed, and eventually made clear. Towards the end, the game designers get a little mean, shutting you out of several story arcs if you don't find the magic dialog choices which let you continue on.
I spent something like 130 hours playing, which I think makes this the single-player game I've played for the longest since WoW launched. That was with just about every excuse taken to repeatedly crawl dungeons; I suspect on regular difficulty with a less completist attitude the game could take half as long.