| SegaHeart said:
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The metascore for this game is insane. I bought Persona 5 Royal because Nier Automata turned out to be a big disappointment, and while there are some very notable improvements over Persona 3, this isn't a game that deserves a score above 85, let alone 90.
I don't consider P5R disappointing, mainly because I went into it with merely modest expectations. I keep playing, but I must say that its pacing is a major issue. It's less of an RPG and more of a visual novel with some RPG sprinkled in. The gameplay loop gives you roughly one month of game-time to clear a palace which takes around two hours to complete. Then there's Mementos which only necessitates one visit per month too, but each new stratum can be cleared much faster than a main dungeon. The velvet room included, the RPG portion takes at most four hours per game month. This is in comparison to around eight hours per month of basically just reading dialogue after dialogue. With four palaces down, I don't think this pacing is going to change down the road.
P5R will take a very long time to finish which isn't a problem per se. But that the majority of time is spent on elements where you aren't doing much as the player is a huge issue. About the only other RPG series that takes this much time to finish is Xenoblade, but Xenoblade takes this long because of the huge game world that can be explored and the myriad of sidequests. In other words, you are actually able to play the damn game during the ~100 hours you spend on the game.
I can't help but think that this yet another instance of Final Fantasy being used as the benchmark for what constitutes a good JRPG. Because in comparison to FF, Persona 5 Royal sure does deserve such a glowing score. But in the bigger picture where you consider all JRPGs, it does not.
The social interactions of Persona remind me of support conversations in the Fire Emblem series. You get to know each of your allies in a series of multiple conversations spread across the course of the game. This is a fine method, but imagine you'd have to read FE support conversations for five consecutive hours until something else happened in the game. This is what Persona 5 is.
About the only choice I have as a player to correct the pacing is spread out dungeon visits more and go to each one a few times per month, but that would be a giant waste of game-time, so that's even worse to me than the extended stretch of social interactions.
Legend11 correctly predicted that GTA IV will outsell Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I was wrong.
