Star Ocean games are great if you like more action in your rpgs, I love the transition between action packed battles and traditional rpg feel in it. You can open up a menu you heal and use magic or items and when you do the battle screen pauses. Normal skills and combos do not pause the battle, that part is real time and I love it.
You are talking to a massive rpg fan, rpg are my main games, priority to rpg is always first and of course I have heard of Atlus hehe, they are becoming quite big this gen what with sqaure-enix being so crappy this gen, I personally prefer Level-5 over Atlus though, from what I have played anyways. Persona 3 was ok but the battle wasn't that great in my opinion. I would probably like it more now though as I just don't think I was in the mood for it when I played it. I like how different it was to most games over here though...