Persona-lizing MaOCT

/Persona-lizing your Monsters and Other Childish Things Game
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I feel like MaOCT is probably the single best Persona system that could be created simply because it has a "relationships can be damaged" mechanic that the games themselves don't deal in and therefore don't prime homebrewers for.

Static social links only work with scripted scenarios.

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Monsters and Other Childish Things can be turned into a form of Persona with basically Vanilla rules. Just change "Monster" into "Persona" and you've pretty much got it. But there are some interesting hacks you can do to add more Persona flavor to the game.

In MaOCT, every character has a Monster that can only be seen by them or by other characters with Monsters. A monster can be basically anything-- the rule is that you literally draw the monster and then circle bits on it to say whether that part can be used for attack, defense or has some useful function (like flying or being able to smash through walls). Your Kids also have stats, ones that are very applicable to playing in a school setting (such as the Put Down skill for insulting people). It should seem fairly evident that this patches to Persona nicely.

Also, the rules are such that social combat can be just as effective as actual battle, so someone being humiliated, bullied or teased into submission is a valid strategy or problem to overcome (which works very well for a Persona 5 type game)

It also has a built in relationship system, where you establish contact with people and then can cash in those ties for additional dice, but at the cost of introducing strain to that relationship. Strain is repaired just by spending time with the relation, and improved by gaining new understandings and drawing closer to that person, so again, maps very nicely to Persona.

Beyond that, there's not much else that the game says you HAVE to do. It's quite open ended, to the extent where it works even without the Monsters part; Roleplay Public Radio did a Five Nights at Freddies actual play using the system and it was pretty great.
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To adapt more closely to Persona, here's what I'd suggest:

1. Adding Elemental strengths/weaknesses. This can be done simply by tweaking how damage works (Normal damage is Scars; vs Resistance is Shock; vs Weakness is Shock and Scars).

2. Adding combat flourishes. Since Persona 3, the fighting system has been all about the One More mechanic, so to add that in would give the game a real Persona feel. The way I'd suggest to do it would be to let a player who Knocks Down a target use a second set he rolled as another attack against a different target. This means you won't get One More 100% of the time, but I feel like that's a decent balancing mechanic since it prevents every fight from becoming a rote repetition of moves, which works fine for a video game but is dull as dishwater at the table.

3. More Personas. If everyone has a single Persona, then you're fine. But if you want to introduce a Wild Card mechanic, I'd suggest that you NOT make every single persona you can summon have its own stat sheet, since that's a lot of work to do and it detracts from the "main" persona of each character (which is my big complaint from each game-- the MC's persona is always very cool and distinct looking, but you never get to use it beyond the first dungeon). Instead, what you could do is make them Support Personas-- instead of having a full suite of abilities, give them one or two things that you can call them out to do, like letting a High Pixie throw out some Zionga or titillate an unwary shadow, but not much more. That way a character's Persona roster can expand while they can still say "this one is MY persona."
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The way I would hack MaOCT to run Persona with Wild Card characters while retaining as much of the vanilla mechanics as possible would be to let people buy monster dice with experience and let them build personas with them.

I'd allow them to sacrifice two or more personas to get a refund on monster dice and just treat them like a resource to build monsters during downtime. If you relax the restriction on the minimum amount of hit locations a monster needs, they can build their own support personas with ten dice or so, and save you the trouble.

The main issue I can see is people will eventually make something broken, so letting them experiment like this requires some oversight.
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To add structure to the idea you can make each character a Wild Card within a specific Arcana, so the Magician character can make trickster Personae like Jack Frost while the Chariot character makes physically powerful warrior personae.
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This also allows you to introduce Arcana mechanics into the game. If you set up a limit on the total dice a persona can have and give them an arbitrary arcana, you can give a relationship that same arcana "tag" and relax the limits as the relationship grows stronger.

You could also tie the arcanas to specific extras, so maybe you can't get Sweet unless you have a Magician relationship with an NPC, or you're limited to 2 Gnarly extras until you meet that Chariot girl's parents and up the relationship to 3
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one thing you'll have to keep in mind is that MaOCT isn't really a dungeon-crawly game, though you could make it one if you really wanted to. As a result, that aspect of Persona doesn't quite work. You're much better off creating strange, unique supernatural spaces that the characters have to deal with than sprawling networks of hallways patrolled by shadows. The One Roll Engine handles combat a lot quicker than most, but it's still slower than how most Persona random encounters resolve (like within the first two measure of the battle theme). So make it more about exploration and dealing with the unnatural than about fighting everything you see.