Persona 5 how far in are you and hows the experience ?

[patronmacabre]

Review time of Persona 5. It is spoiler free.

While I give the game a 10/10, this review will be mostly critical of the game. It is worthy of the score and a fantastic game, but it still needs to fix several issues to truly elevate it above and beyond.

Let's get all the good parts out of the way. The game has the best art style and music of any game ever made ever. The user interface is incredible. The battles are fun, more complex that its predecessors, and incredibly stylish. Collecting and fusing Personas is as addicting as ever. I adore the way that you discover new places in Tokyo and I wish more games would adopt Persona 5's style of world-building. The game oozes charm. The time system is just as addictive and compelling as ever. The social links are interesting with a few real standouts and I adore the new ways in which social links help you in battle. The dungeons are phenomenal and I adore the puzzles, with the fourth and sixth dungeons being standouts. The difficulty is perfectly balanced. The bosses are incredible. The voice acting is generally very good. The climactic moments in the game are outright phenomenal and heart-pounding.

A few nitpicks before I get to the actual criticisms. The camera is a bit wonky at its default setting, but it is okay if you turn the sensitivity up a bit. The stealth mechanics are finicky and you will often shift on a corner weirdly. Luckily, the stealth mechanics are super forgiving, so it doesn't matter too much. There are too few save points in the second-to-last and last dungeons. The second-to-last dungeon goes on quite a bit too long. Finally, the translation is very wonky at times -- especially with the frequent use of the word cognition. It feels a bit unnatural.

Now for the genuine criticism. While Persona 5 is the longest game in the series and I believe many have claimed that the game may be too long, the exact opposite is true. While the game took me 120 hours to complete, the game is, in fact, about 20 hours too short.

First, the game is overly focused on the main goal. As such, the game is sorely lacking in social events that allow the main cast to communicate and interact with each other. Most of the character interactions happen via IM messaging, which does not carry the same weight as having the characters in the same room talking with other and making fun of each other. Persona 4 and especially Persona 4: Golden were replete with these social events and it allowed the main cast to be a lot more 3-dimensional and lifelike and allowed for tons of humorous and engaging moments. In Persona 5, it often feels like the characters are separate entities. I can easily recall Yosuke and Teddie's snarky interactions with each other; or Kanji and Naoto's confused sexual tension; or Chie and Yukiko's friendship; or Chie and Yosuke's belligerent friendship; or Rise fighting Yukiko for the protagonist's affection; or Yosuke being homophobic towards Kanji at first, but eventually treating him like any jerk male friend would. With Persona 5, it seems all the characters are separate entities, and this is, in part, due to the lack of social events. And when there are social events, they feel very short and empty when compared to the social events in Persona 4. Persona 5 is too focused and it is to its detriment.

A second related major issue is that Ann and Ryuji just aren't as compelling as Chie and Yosuke. The more secondary cast of Persona 5 are generally great and entertaining, but the deuteragonist and tritagonist characters just aren't as likable or engaging as their counterparts in Persona 4.

Finally, more time should have gone into the set-up for the last dungeon. It happens rather suddenly and it feels rushed. I feel that if there was more set up and more time between the second-to-last and last dungeons, it would have been really engaging. The fifth dungeon dungeon also has some unusual pacing, but it is not a major issue.

Persona 5 is a game that I fully believe will be the greatest game ever made once the inevitable expanded remake comes out and adds much needed social events and filler to the game. Persona 5 suffers from being overly focused and it needs silly, pointless filler content and more character interactions to truly reach its potential.

I recall the developers fearing that Persona 5 was going to be too long of a game. The game is, in fact, extremely long, but significantly shorter than it should have been.