You know, I am really enjoying how varied the encounters are now. I mentioned before that it's incredibly difficult to have all elemental skills in a party, but the enemy composition has gone further than just hitting weaknesses: the party, at times, needs to actively make their own weaknesses through technicals, or clever attack strategies (e.g. Lucky Punch) to actually get an advantage against these stronger foes. It's a huge change-up from P3P and P4G, which were rather straightforward for the most part.
The party member composition also seems much better this time around, more varied and useful. I've found myself switching out party members more than ever before, for instance. (Partly because of the XP thing.) Their skills are broad enough to be useful in most situations, rather than just like "the wind healer," or "the fire healer," or whatever that previous games had.
I really can't say enough good things about the encounter design. Varied, challenging, and fun. And this is on Normal--as much as I want to, I'm not prepared to play on Hard.
