Game Journal#67 - Persona 5 Review

Hey guys! Got yet another game journal for you. This time, I've just finished playing Persona 5 Royal, so I'll leave a review for it like I did with the other games I played. Main consensus though? It wasn't as good as the other entries in the series. I'll explain why below, of course.

Before I get into the review, I'll show ya something I got recently. Remember my favorite character from Persona 3, Shinjiro? Amazingly, there were figurines of him, so I bought 'em. There's both an 1/8 scale and a chibi one. Hey, that's pretty good!

The 1/8th one comes with Koromaru, too.

I was really surprised that there were figurines of him. I don't know how much you know about the Japanese figurine industry, but they prioritize making designs that will sell the most. You know what that means in layman's terms? 99.999999999999% of figurines made are of female characters. So it's actually pretty rare to get any of guys. There have actually been times that side character females get figurines while the main character (guy) does not. I mean, c'mon...

It's the same for the Persona series. Outside of Shinjiro, there aren't really any other figurines of the guys (besides the player character of course.) I wanted an Akihiko one too, but there was only one design and it was kinda eh. Of course, Yukari has 50 billion gazillion figurines of her in different outfits. But no, God forbid I want one of the character that was actually useful on my team. Big sad, big sad.

Okay, enough about Persona 3. Let's get into Persona 5! Yay...

As usual, I'll have you guess my favorite character from the main cast. ...This time, it's extremely easy. If you don't get it, you must be new here.

All the main characters.

Did you guess? I'm just gonna assume that you did.

Ok, did you guess the blue haired guy? I really hope you didn't. Lol. My favorite character is the blond haired guy, Ryuji.

Ryuji is my favorite character for a ton of reasons. He has high attack, high defense, AND can be a technical character. So he's like Yosuke and Shinjiro combined into one! Plus, his Persona looks so awesome. I think it's actually my favorite one. Just look, it's so cool.

Captain Kidd, the world's coolest party member Persona.

Gotta say, the Persona designs in this game were really good. While I was 'eh' on the party members, the Personas kinda made up for it. Speaking of which...

Persona 5 is yet another entry in the disturbing (for me) trend of men in JRPGS becoming more and more feminine looking. Just look at Akechi here. JUST LOOK. I put Yukari from Persona 3 on the right, and him on the left. What's the difference?

The resemblance is uncanny...

I don't really understand why this is happening. The protagonist from both Shin Megami Tensei 5 and the new Persona X game also look scarily similar to women. What's the point? Is Atlus trying to get more female players? Man, just give me a girl protagonist at that point. At least then I can get an otome game at the same time.

Character wise, I liked the cast. Akechi (despite his bishonen looks lol) is pretty cool. There wasn't anyone I hated (though I thought Makoto was mildly annoying so I didn't do her social link) and I love Ryuji, of course. Joker (the main character) is also pretty cool. I love his goofy-looking glasses and messy hair. They also sorta gave him a personality in the story, which was... hmm, I liked it, but at the same time it was a little awkward. Lol.

I will say that the social links in this game were the weakest. There wasn't really anyone I wanted to date (as Joker.) Eventually I settled on Hifumi (shrine girl,) but even then I didn't feel much from it. Of course, I'm a girl so this is from a girl's point of view, but most of the female characters felt rather bland. To me, they all kinda seemed like the generic "kind girl with a slight edge" with a slight variation to call them different from each other. All of the men were much more dynamic in terms of personality and character design, I think. There were short guys, tall guys, bald guys, ugly guys, attractive guys. But for the grills? Lol, take your hot grill with a different haircut 10 different times and ENJOY IT! Smh.

...As a side note, there's surprisingly a lot of handsome guys in Persona 5. I think they just wanted to dab on the female players and say "HA, YOU CAN'T DATE HIM, SEETHE!" Can we get another female protagonist, please? I think this is the only series where I actually want one. Lol.

I cry every night knowing that I cannot date Iwai.

You can't date Mr. Free Snacks, either.

There's no figurines of Iwai btw, despite him being the blacksmith and y'know, super important to the story. But you CAN get one of the female doctor and your female homeroom teacher! OOH, SO EXCITING! We truly live in a society.

Anyway, onto the gameplay. First of all, it was WAY too easy. I've played some good JRPGs in my time. I love grinding (but not too much) and having my party get stronger over time. Now that is hot stuff. But in Persona 5? I didn't grind a single time. Not once. But you know what? I still ended the game at like, level 90. Partly because it's reaaaally long (more on that later) but mostly because of this thing called Mementos.

Mementos is an area where you get to fight monsters that you previously encountered. So instead of the random dungeon-type layout for the main game as in previous titles, they separated them here and have the random bit in Mementos, while the main dungeons are one-off places that you can only visit a few times. I'm not a fan. One of my favorite parts about Persona was the random dungeon aspect. In Persona 4 especially, Kanji's dungeon was downright awesome. I never got tired of grinding in it because it was a different layout every time, meaning that I could always find some new items, different monsters, etc. I was actually in that dungeon for the majority of the game because the golden hands gave around 600 exp, which was a good amount to level up while still being easy to fight. So if the next dungeon was too difficult, I could go back to Kanji's and grind until I was strong enough.

Anyway, that being said, Persona 5 has Palaces instead. It's a fixed-layout dungeon, basically. You can only visit them for a certain amount of time and then they disappear. Items are placed, so if you want something new you'll have to continually fight monsters. In Mementos and the Palaces, there's an option where you can instantly kill a monster if you're a high enough level, and you get all their EXP and items. It's cool in concept (in fact, I was planning on putting that in my game, too) but they implemented it REALLY badly. In Mementos, you're in a car, so you can literally run over monsters while you explore. And because of the random layout, monsters keep spawning over and over... you see where I'm going with this?

DAB on those monsters' graves!

Yeah, it's stupid easy to level up in this game. I think Altus took the feedback from Persona 3 that it was too hard to level up and went too far in the opposite direction. Seriously, 5K exp for doing nothing? I literally got less exp from Persona 3's final boss. Lol. I played on the hardest difficulty too (Merciless) and yet I had no issues with difficulty. The bosses were all easy (the final boss was a good challenge though) and I died maybe... six times over the course of the entire game. Considering it took me over eighty hours to beat it, that's kinda... well, underwhelming. Let me die, dangit!

Let's go on to the battle system and UI. It's ok. Everything is mapped to a button, so while it takes some getting used to, you can complete battles really fast when you get the hang of it. I thought it was cool. Baton passing was kinda OP, though. Basically, if you hit an enemy's weakness, you get the chance to make it another party member's turn, and they also get bonus HP and attack power. 95% of my battles ended in one turn because of it. And to make it even easier, you can equip items on party members that give them different moves. For 99% of the game, I had Ryuji (who knows electric skills) equipped with a Breeze ring (which gives you Garu, the weakest Wind spell.) It was actually crazy how useful it was. Normally in Persona games, you'll need to use an item or change party members to get a different element, but not here! And even though it was the weakest spell, it would consistently do over 500 damage. Yeah, I'm thinking Ryuji is the best. I'd hit an enemy, baton pass to him, Garu everything, win. It was like he was two characters in one.

I do like the button layout, but I think I still prefer the traditional selection with the control stick. A couple times I accidentally pressed attack because I was pressing A too fast, so yeah. I also miss the unique monsters that you'd fight in dungeons. No more dancing hands and EXP fodder hourglasses, now you just fight regular Personas. Eh. It takes a lot of the hype away from getting to new dungeons, since I've seen most of them already in previous games. Plus, remember how it used to be really expensive to buy Personas in the compendium? Like, millions of yen? Guess what. The highest level Persona's cost is 77k. 77K! WTH?! I can literally make that in 5 seconds in Mementos. I don't know what they were thinking when balancing this game, really...

The ui in this game is really good. It's stylish, but functional. There's some things I hate, though. For example, that monster's health bar. LOOK AT IT. Because of its size, it's really hard to judge just how much he has left. If the monster has a lot of HP (like a boss) it can even seem like he isn't losing any at all. It's just really discouraging, and I hate it. Cool concept though.

The pause menu is also really creative. Each transition screen has a small animation of Joker on it. At first it's rather disorienting, but once you get used to it it's rather cool. But once again, the functionality is what's most important. And guess what? It ain't all there, baby.

Where would you go if you wanted to change your party members? Party, right? ...Wait, where is it? It's missing! Ah, that's right, it's under STATS. How could I have forgotten?

Really, that's the only main gripe I have with the menu. I remembered getting lost in it a lot, but looking at it now it's not too bad. The other issue is that there's way too many items that do exactly the same thing (so they just take up a ton of space and make it hard to find anything) but that's more of a game issue than a design flaw.

Last thing related to battle, along with tips. There's two new types, Psychic and Nuke. Both are barely used (as both attacks and monster weaknesses,) so don't care about them. Shiki-Ouji (a persona that nullifies Physical and gun, AND LIGHT AND DARK) is easily obtainable at the beginning of the game, and makes you borderline immortal. I literally used him for about 95% of my playtime. For the end game, the #DootMeta came back, which made me extremely happy. Trumpeter isn't as OP as he was in Persona 4 (where he could just instakill everything) but he can do crazy amounts of damage and inflict status effects. So I highly recommend making him.

Ok, on to the story and general look of the game.

Hello there, Ryuji.

As you can see, the models and graphics are very high quality. This is both a pro and a con for me. Firstly, it looks great. However, I vastly prefer the low-poly look that Persona 4 and 3 had. There was just this certain charm that you got from the chibi models that you can't from the HD ones. Plus (and this is my main gripe) because the models are so high quality, animations take FOREVER. It's basic math. More polygons, more time needed to move them. There were a lot of times where I had to use the speed up function because the animations were just taking their sweet old time. Like, does it really need to take 5 seconds for Joker to stand up? C'mon.

Not only that, but cutscenes also take significantly longer than before. Everything is 3D animated, so you can't speed them up, only skip them (which you don't want to do, of course.) UGH!!! So yeah, I stand by my original opinion that I had when making my Persona 3 review. I did enjoy seeing Iwai in 4k 60fps DolbyDigital™ Surround Sound quality, though. It almost made the long wait times worth it.

Story-wise, the game was the weakest so far. Each Persona game has a theme to the story. 3 was tarot cards, 4 was the history with Izanagi and Izanami, and 5 is the seven deadly sins. It was ok. I wish there was more brought up during the school lessons. Most of them seemed to be rather random. For example, in Persona 3 there was a teacher that taught you all about tarot cards, what they meant, how to read them, etc. In Persona 4 Izanami and Izanagi were brought up frequently in lessons, so you knew their backstory by the end of the game. In Persona 5, though? Nothing about the sins at all. There was some exploration behind each character's Persona, but that was it. I was rather disappointed.

The story itself was also way too long. Let me explain. I love reading, I used to read tons and tons of books as a kid. Even now, I play visual novels. That being said, Persona 5 is not a visual novel, it is a JRPG. Therefore, I expect a majority of my gameplay to involve battling. Guess what? In order to get to that coveted battling, you need to do 1 hour of story between each section. Yeah... it really wasn't spread out well. Again, I think they took feedback from Persona 3 (which had a short story) and went too far in the opposite direction. Many times I was speedreading because there was just SO MUCH to get through. Not my most fun gameplay experience. I also wasn't impressed with the final boss fight, both in lore and execution. It all felt really underwhelming. The final final boss was cool though.

Overall thoughts? It's ok. 3/5 if I had to rate it. The art is gorgeous, but other than that everything else leaves more to be desired. While I would certainly play Persona 3 or 4 again if I had the chance, I have no desire to play 5 again, ever. Maybe if they added a female protagonist, but otherwise, nah. It's just sooooo long, and there's not much meat for the potatoes. There are ways to keep a long game interesting (I'd play Touhoumon World Link again if I could, and that took me over 120 hours) but making the player slog through paragraphs of dialogue isn't it. Plus, there's almost no challenge to the game, and there's too many scripted outcome battles (yeah... great idea.) Persona 4 is vastly better.

Whew, that was a lot of text. I was originally going to put my own game stuff in here too, but this entry's too long as it is. Oh well. Stay tuned for the next update. Should be coming out sooner rather than later.