There's very little middle ground in my experience. It makes the game pretty dull to go through because you either have to conform to one of these broken stategies or just not enjoy the game by challenging yourself to magic only, which ends up being you constantly going back to heal and grinding for Yen so you can keep recovering. Physical skills heavily outshine magic skills because SP is such a rare commodity and HP can easily be recovered (with characters like Fuuka who has an ability to auto-regenerate your health at the end of each turn, alongside an ability that does the same thing, you can easily manage your health with health items also being cheap and money not being too much of an issue), and don't get me started on using skills like Poisma and the sheer idiocy that is Hama and Mudo skills. I'll start with the negatives: The gameplay is pretty dull and counter-intuitive, mostly because of the game having terrible balancing.

Now that I've properly beaten the game and over half way through my second playthrough on the P4 route (my first run was P3), I can say that the game isn't as bad as people make out, especially on this subreddit. If you asked me about Persona Q a year or two ago, I'd say I absolutely hated it and wanted nothing to do with it, reminder at this time I was underleveled AND underprepared for the 4th boss, and because I was rushing through the game and by the time I got to the 4th boss I was fed up after the dungeon crawling.

Persona q rose puzzle