Which JRPG has the worst plot in your opinion?

[forevercloud3000]

Faelco said:

John2290 said:
I dislike everything about Persona 5's plot and how it unfolds ans is set up to comply with the school system and to gamify it. It's such a bad set up and a horrible idea but like most JRPG's once you turn your brain off and ignore the nonsense, it works... my some miracle.

Persona 5's issues are not related to the school system. 

Persona 4 Golden is one of my favorite games ever. I played it 2 hours, put it down for 3 months because the beginning is awful, and then binge played it in 4-5 days.

I was almost dreaming about Persona 5, and it seemed like they fixed the issues of P4G so it should have been a contender for my favorite game ever. But actually, I still didn't finish it (I'm in the last part, just before the true last boss), even after 2 years. Why? Because sure, they fixed almost all the flaws of P4G.

But the story sucks. And it was the main strength of P4G. The game was flawed, sure, but the story and characters were great and made the player want to continue. That's also why they managed to do like 5 spin off of different genres with the same cast. 

But P5 story? Instead of the relaxed, friendly and kinda relatable group of friends fighting a close and personal menace in P4 (you feel like a part of the group and root for them), we got a group of stereotypical one dimensional exceptional high schoolers with no team feeling at all, unrelatable and boring, involved in a shady and far away political scandal that no one cares about. *yawn* No interest. Even the scenes were it seems like characters might seriously die, the biggest reaction I got was "Oh, well, too bad". Can't care less about them. Even the characters of P3, that I played years ago and didn't even finish (the  dungeon was a bore, and I got the ending spoiled) brought more memories and feelings.

 

That's why I still didn't finish P5. I play a few days, then I put it down for a random reason, and then I just don't feel the need or will to play it again, because I don't care what will happen. Even though the gameplay, the OST, the graphics, everything else is a dream come true, the story and characters are a bore. I hope they'll fix that for P6.

 

Otherwise? Fire Emblem Awakening. Won't write a huge block. This game is my biggest disappointment ever, bad on every aspect, and the generic and messy time travel story is no different. Still didn't play Fates because of this one (and Awakening was one of my most anticipated games too, I have to stop anticipating...). 

Persona 4 Golden is still one of the greatest games of all time for me. Persona 5, while tons of fun, misses the mark for a few reasons.

P5 suffers from a similar issue to P3. The middle plot seems to drag for a really long time, and spirals aimlessly.  While P5 improved Social Links with a bevy of cool passive abilities to unlock......they went backwards in story telling. Anne, who had one of the darkest Main Story plots early on, yet her Confidante dismisses all of it for stupid modeling trivial nonsense. Most of the Confidantes were no where near as entertaining in P5 as in previous ones. The Ryuji/Anne dynamic felt like deja vu. They have beaten that trope into the ground with Chie/Yosuke and Yukari/Junpei.  The Yusuke/Futaba relationship is way more interesting. I also totally agree with the idea that P5 team never really felt like friends. They did not seem the type to ever hang out with each other alone, they were just all bound by you. Which effectively made them a weaker cast to Persona 4.

I know I need the developer writers to get a Thesaurus. I couldn't hear the words "Heart" or "Adult" without cringing for some time. Overall dialogue seemed.....off, compared to P4 localization. Lots of cringey phrasing of things. 

I will say that just like P3, Persona 5's plot bounces back hard in a spectacular way in it's final stages. It has an important theme that it wants to get across, just like P3 and P4. I do love some elements of the main story. The idea that the team's ability to "Steal Hearts" is effectively similar to the real world Japan's penchant for confessions induced by drugs and or coercion. They are morally earnest but bankrupt. The game begins to look like a critical analysis of troubling aspects of Japanese life(and some aspects WW). Their criminal justice system is broken, with it's 99% prosecution rate. Sexual Assault seems like second nature and women very openly deal with men of power dictating their personal lives.  It is also a commentary on how we leave our thumb pressed down on those who we feel have done wrong in society, not giving them a chance to rehabilitate and integrate back into society.