Persona 5's Saving System...or Lack of Thereof

[Super_Boom]

mjk45 said:

Damned if you do , damned if you don't, manual saves are fine but like auto the sticking point isn't so much who's doing the saving but the mechanics behind the saves ,like how many save slots your given, the criteria used to instigate a save if it's auto , where are you able to save if it's manual, I say this because  I have been caught in a death loop by poorly implemented auto saves and have played games where the length between being able to manualy save was stupid.

My only problem and it was my fault, I had playing PS5 was having to repeat the first boss fight because I didn't save after I returned from the metaverse, this was my fault because I assumed that a post boss save was automatic and this was the first such fight.

What people need to do when exploring palaces in P5, is realise that sp will be your limiting factor in how far you can go and to treat safe rooms like you would a save spot in any other jrpg , so your thinking should be when entering a palace lets open the map up and find a map piece and first safe room, there we save, take stock by checking on the group and how much sp we have and whether we think it's enough to get us through the next section and another safe room or head back knowing we can continue from that room.

For the record, I'm not a big fan of autosaving either, due to game-breaking issues it can cause when poorly implemented, I just loathe having to replay the same section over when I lose. There are much better ways to penalize the player for a game over other than absolute tedium like this, especially when the most severe cases are when you get killed by an enemy ambush, which I find more often than not is a result of a poorly typed enemy spawn or me getting caught in some weird maze. Once you get better and start getting Null or Reflect attributes, it mostly solves the issue, but not completely. This isn't a "git gud" scenario, since it's mostly out of your hands once you find yourself in that situation, and abilities mostly grow linearly with the game progression.

Previous mainline SMT games (and also TMS actually) both allowed manual saving anywhere, and neither felt like easier games as a result. The only difference is that I would be able to improve on my own terms without losing valuable progress, rather than have the game force me to build up to back to where I was. Persona 5 is almost there...and I honestly celebrate the fact that save rooms exist this time around, but it still takes the power out of my hands to a certain extent.

Now...I haven't had this issue in P5 yet, but this was definitely my biggest issue with 4 (well, other than the forced English dub). I hold both games in very high regard (P4 is in my top 50, while P5 while likely end up in my top 30 when all is set and done), but I can definitely see room for improvement. Adding in-game limitations like this is a poor way to increase the challenge, and I'll always hold that more options is never a bad thing.