Persona questions from someone who hasn't played

[Mirage]

Yeah I'd move to Canada if I just had the money.

[Slothy]

Yeah I'd move to Canada if I just had the money.

Start saving. troutty government aside you'd be making an excellent choice.

[Mirage]

all countries have troutty governments

[Wolf Kanno]

Number one, I can think of very few Atlus games I like and most of the ones I've played have mildly scared me. This one also seems to have that "dark" atmosphere to it. Is this an actual concern? Are some of them "lighter" than others?

As others have stated Persona is the lighter softer side of the MegaTen fracnhise along with the Devil Summoner series. Of the Persona games, P4 is easily the lightest and happiest entry. I mean its bad ending is a bit depressing but both its normal and true ending are largely super special awesome happy-go-lucky compared to earlier installments whose endings often ranged from bittersweet to tear jerker. There are a few eerie moments in P4 but nothing like the stuff from P2/P3 or heaven help us, the mainline Shin Megami Tensei titles. Despite being a murder mystery story, its more like Scooby Doo crew doing it. The game also has a heavier emphasis on the building up the party as a group of friends, so between social links and dungeon crawls the game is filled with story scenes just showing the cast hanging out and having fun.

The different persona things interest me, but the system seems a bit complicated. Like you can merge 2 together and make 1? Are you killing them? Can you every get them back? Does this stuff actually matter?

It is much easier than the mainline games which have more complicated rules but it doesn't take long to get used to the ins and outs. One of the Social Links is also largely designed to make you learn the ins and outs of the fusion system. When two persona are fused together, they often make a stronger persona who inherits skills from both its parent personas. The main thing I will stress for new players of the MegaTen series is to not treat the Personas like it is Pokemon. Fusion is vital and you will need to learn to let go of your attachment to certain Personas and fuse them to create newer and stronger ones. On the other hand, P4 does a better job of giving better longevity to using certain Personas (Jack Frost comes to mind) so feel free to love them but understand that you will eventually reach a difficulty jump which will force you to fuse and create new Personas. As also mentioned, the game does give you a special book early on that will allow you to record your Personas into it and allow you to re-summon them later for a fee so it is not like they are gone for good.

This game seems really difficult. Like you have a time limit and you have to juggle school and... whatever weird dungeon thing they seem to be doing... I don't do well with time limits, they're stressful and I'm bad at them. Is it a strict limit? Is it difficult?

You generally have a month in-game time to rescue people which can be a few hours or a few days in real time depending on your playstyle so don't worry about time limits as much especially since screwing up just means you get shot back to a few days before to try again. In truth, you have plenty of time. The main challenge of the game is to find a balance of dungeon crawling and dealing with the real world stuff but its honestly not hard, I am just going to tell you now that you should not expect to complete everything in one playthrough and you really shouldn't bother to try, the games make good use of NG+. If you keep that in mind and simply stick to what you find enjoyable, then you'll find its not too difficult to make a workable schedule. The dungeons are also mostly really simple so don't worry about getting lost or difficult puzzles.

The gameplay can be tough, luckily it has difficulty options and the Easy mode is pretty generous. The main issue I found with P4, was that money could be a pain to get especially when trying to outfit your whole party and persona fusions but its also not like the game is so difficult you need to be outfitted with the best stuff to survive. I find that P3 is actually the easiest of the games in the series but even there its not too difficult to find yourself listening to Igor reprimand you for getting killed off. Easy mode offers some nice freebies to make those moments less stressful like direct continues.

How many playable characters are there?

Not counting the Navigator characters...

Persona 3 has 9 playable characters (though one is a temporary character)

Persona 4 has 7 playable characters