Persona 5

THOUGHTS

I loved JRPGs growing up. It felt like that SNES -> PSX -> PS2 era of consoles - with fantastic console RPG lineups - during my formative years were perfect for channelling teenage angst and mental wanderlust into something that felt epic and tangible. Although my enjoyment of the genre has waned since then (around the time Final Fantasy started losing its way), I'm still always up for a good JRPG if it's executed well. So I dived into Persona, having never played any of the entries prior (and with limited experience with the Shin Megami Tensei universe as a whole), with high hopes and an open mind.

The first thing that hit me (and seemingly everybody else who played the game) was the unabashed sense of style the game had, with an absurdly slick user interface and menu lineup coupled with a strangely compelling anime/cel-shaded/realistic modern Japan hybrid for the characters and locations. This extends to the music as well (which is great, but could have used a couple more tracks). Hell, even the loading screens look great. Characters are super vocal in battle and in the field, flashy cartoon footsteps and pops of colour litter the areas you explore. It's all really exciting to look at and play, with the added bonus that despite the many systems and features at work there's never a feeling of overwhelming complexity due to the deft design work. 

Story wise, the game is pretty spotty. The character interaction is a lot of fun and the translation is solid (I saw a lot of complaints - to be honest outside of some overly formal turns of phrase it never bothered me), but there's no shortage of lingering or poorly executed plot threads here. There are certainly still compelling moments and it works well enough, but the game has a momentum all of its own without the story driving it as the main force. 

Part of it is the timed manner in which the game is played out - dungeons are present as large 'palaces' in the psyche of undesirables (as well as a large, procedurally generated dungeon named Mementos) - and these all have a time limit in which they have to be completed. Days are split into three main parts - you go to school, then you fill the other two slots with extra-curricular activities, whether that be hanging out with friends to increase their confidant ranking (granting you abilities), increasing stats, shopping, creating tools for the dungeons etc. I'm not a fan of time limits in games but I found these to be forgiving, while just providing enough impetus to stop you dawdling around the world. 

These dungeons play out somewhere between a heist movie and something like Inception, with stealing the treasure of your target causing them to repent all their sins. Or something like that. It's explained through a hazy word salad of things like 'cognition'. But it does work, and the basic concepts make enough sense that they're forgivable for the sake of great gameplay. The nature of these dungeons mean that each is completely separate, with wildly varying quality levels in terms of level and puzzle design. It's nice to have the split of dungeon gameplay and real world gameplay as the latter is consistently pleasant and enjoyable to serve as a counterpoint to the up and down quality of the palaces.

 

There's some really clever world-building stuff in here. The game is clearly set in modern Japan and comes with all the cultural and technological trappings you'd expect: you have a fan-club on a forum, with polls that are surprisingly endearing and important, you converse with group members via group text, there's some hacking and geek culture stuff. It's all great fun and makes the entries into the dungeons (via an app, because of course) feel like a hidden secret you're uncovering and solving. 

Plus/Minus

+ Wonderful sense of style 

+ Top notch soundtrack

+ Compelling combat and RPG systems

+ Clever duality of the game world

+ Good characters (Morgana/Makoto 4eva)

+ I dig the anime cutscenes 

- Story never really reaches grand heights

- Dungeon quality is up and down 

- A few characters feel a bit broad and predictable

Overall

It'd be easy to talk about Persona 5 all day (and I've no doubt missed a fair bit), but it should be fairly clear as to whether you'll like it or not based on what I've written. The story quality was my biggest issue here - it goes in some interesting places and has plenty of cool ideas, but just never really takes off into unmissable territory. Going any deeper would be too spoiler-ish but while it's (mostly) more decipherable than, say, a Final Fantasy VI to X story, it lacks the emotional heft and leaves the charm more to the gameplay side rather than the writing. Which is fine. This is a cracking RPG to play, with really enjoyable systems from the titular Personas, to monster negotiation, to the one more/baton pass mechanics. It's complex but easy to get into, which is pretty amazing considering the length (oh yeah, it's long) and scope of this game. It's the most accomplished Japanese RPG I've played in a long, long time. 

 

8.5/10

Technical Stuff: Played on a PS4. Copy purchased by myself. One full playthrough, a bit of side stuff, approximately 85 hours spent.