I have a lot of problems with this game

I adored Persona 3 and 4, and I'm enjoying P5, but it is a much more qualified thing this time around. I'm 70 ish hours in at this point and I'll keep trucking, but I find myself holding triangle a lot more than I normally would, and the general structure of the thing is just losing its luster for me:

Dull characters

I really struggle to care about these fools. As opposed to P4, there really isn't a character among the P5 team I care much for, and the confidants have the bluntest, dullest clichèed stories to follow. Ohya's plotline is essentially solved by listening to her bullshit a lot. Mishima is fucking intolerable. Shinji is just a brat. Fuck these people.

Too much style

Never thought I'd say this, but while those awesome menus and animations and transitions are neat the first dozen times or so, by hour 70 you start to realize you'd probably be at hour 60 if your playtime wasn't constantly being padded out by these laborious unskippable sequences. I read somewhere that the italicized/angled text was actually toned down during development, but reading angled text is still unpleasant enough that I can barely catch the names of side characters I talk to unless they actually speak them. If there's a rumor-loving girl in there somewhere, I wouldn't know.

Too much loading

Loading times on the PS3 are really too much. I'm eternally thankful the fast-travel system is so rich, because the load times actively dissuade me from wanting to explore the world very much and I'd never really get around. Load load load. Spinny head. Spinny head again.

Shut the hell up Morgana

Morgana's constant insistence that I should just go to sleep makes me want to kick that cat out the goddamn window. If you took the time to load me into this room, i'm standing in the middle of it, and LITERALLY the only thing I can do is go to bed, why not just fucking cut to me being in bed already? What's with these false choices? P5 is aggressively handholdy in what you can and can't do every day and it's maddening.

What did they do to 3-way fuses?

I really miss fusing Persona in P3 and 4, I felt like I had way more choices. The 3-way fusing in P5 presents you with a list of possible results and a to-do list of Persona you need to have to fuse them. It's just lame. Fusion in P5 for me so far has been really underwhelming.

It's just too damn long for NG+

I'm 70 hours into my first playthrough and I have too much of a life to live with other games to play than to bother with this ordeal a whole nother time. The first 30 hours or so I was looking forward to finishing and replaying with better stats so I could try things differently, and there really are enough situations and choices in P5 to make you want to try different approaches, but at this point I just could not be bothered. There is an absolutely crazy abundance of padding and fat on this game, with loading times and unskippable animations adding up to making the whole thing, truly, an endurance run. It did not have to be this long or slow, it has the density to support 2-3 NG+ playthroughs with half the runtime. When this game is over it is highly unlikely I will ever play it again unless they do some PC Golden version or something, and that makes me sad.

I'll keep going, gotta see this thing through, but I really wish they'd made this whole thing punchier and not been so endlessly self indulgent with their animation work. It feels absurd to say about a game that is so generous with content, but the game they made deserved a little better.

Funny I'm 70 hours in knowing I'm about to be done and I'm feeling sad that I will no longer have anymore experiences with any of these characters. And I stopped playing P4 because I didn't care for any of those characters. To each their own eh?

I liked P5 better than 3 and 4. I think the confidants are more fun than before. It is a bit of a trade off not making the dungeons BE about the characters you are getting, I see where people might care a bit less about their main cast when they don't explore their insecurities to the extent P4 did, but I stayed up later than usual trying to bring down the villains of this game because I really wanted to shut them down. In the end, I'm glad that they just didn't do the same formula as P4 just because it was popular. Tho you do get a bit of a call back to that with Futaba's dungeon.

Also ps3? I imagine load times would be long there...

The morgana pauses and not cutting you straight to bed are there so you can save and take care of the plant if need be.

I'm really really really glad they got rid of 3 way fuses. Really really really glad.

Definitely agree with this point. It's almost unfair to compare the two when they're going for such different arcs for the characters. I can see the primary casts of these games being a subjective thing depending on the player but I think so many of the Confidants blow the S.links in P4 out of the water. Like even just looking at Sun, Moon, Temperance, Tower, Hanged Man, and the Velvet Room girl in P4, they are dull as dishwater by comparison. Not saying their counterparts in P5 are all downright amazing but they are leagues more interesting both in terms of personality and the utility they bring to the main character beyond just being yet another Arcana boost to fusion. I also think a lot of them represent a wide variety of societal roles people in the real world have to play as opposed to just being "troubled student X" or "depressed adult Y" who you inexplicably lend your help to in 4. I don't mean to speak ill of those support characters in P4 but I had to literally look up a few of them because of what little of an impression they left on me after all this time. I can't speak to the load times because I'm on PS4 and it's fairly snappy.

Too much good stuff, I agree.

I feel the characters are on par with Persona 4, I think the setting might not be as quaint. I don't know, but what I do know is that I really liked the personality diversity and I felt somewhat sad when the game ended, but after 90+ hours I'm definitely satisfied.

Persona 5 isn't that great. I was disappointed for a lot of the same reasons. Kinda wish I hadn't bothered beating it but I kept hoping it would get better. It just got worse.

I disagree entirely with you about the characters being boring. Granted, this is my first Persona game, so I don't have anything to compare it to, but they certainly have a lot more personality than most other games.

My disappointment actually relates to the dungeon design and the gameplay. The dungeons look great, but the fact you need to rush through them so fast in order to do any of the social link stuff really screws with the pacing in a bad way. That's exacerbated by the fact that despite looking really cool, the dungeons are usually just a linear set of corridors that are pretty boring to navigate.

I'm also bummed by the combat system. They pretty much took boring-ass JRPG turn based combat and slathered it with style. Looks great, but the actual gameplay is still pretty tedious. I think games have evolved past characters and enemies standing in a line and attacking in turns.

I'm curious which S. Links you would rank so much higher from P3 and P4? (Lets ignore party members here.)

In P3 the only real standout S. Link from my memory is the dying young man Sun S. Link and Tanaka. (And honestly Tanaka gets a lot of slack here for just being Tanaka. His actual S. Link is nothing that remarkable.) But other than that the Magician was an annoying garbage person, I wanted to smack the Emperor upside his stupid head for almost the entire S.Link, and in general almost all your school mates had pretty bland and one-note story arcs. Almost none of them had half the complexity of even Mishima or Shinji.

P4 did better, but how many of the non-party member S. Links were really that memorable? Dojima and Nanako were solid, but then there's Tower, Moon, Temperance, Hanged Man, or Death that were pretty damn forgettable. Even some that started out interesting, like Devil, kinda fizzled out a bit later. (At the very least, if we're comparing medical practitioners, Tae Takemi beats out Sayako aaaaany day.)

Not all of P5's Confidants were winners, Shinji and Ohya were kinda lame, but I felt much more of a personal connection with even them compared to so many of the throw away S. Links of games past, thanks to how they were able to tie them more directly to the plot and theme of the game. And don't act like Ohya was the first to have her problems resolved by you simply being there to listen to her bullshit. That's almost exactly what Tanaka's S. Link was, and almost a half dozen others.

It's weird, I think as an overall package Persona 5 is the best one yet. I really loved the overall theme and some of the confidants. But by the end I was so sick of the plot getting dumber and dumber after that really strong start and the actual gameplay deliberately wasting so much of my time I quit completely at the last dungeon and looked up the ending. I still want to do a NG+ of Persona 4 eventually, but I never want to touch this game again.

Those stylish half second menu transitions are "laborious?" You seriously think taking those out would shave off ten hours?

The last issue is just not even an issue with the game. These games are long. Always have been. That's just how it is. It's not the game's fault that you don't have enough time in real life to play through the game a second time. You got stuff to do and that's ok.

As for the rest of your points, I just simply disagree. Characters are great and the side confidants are the best in the series to me. I'll give you the thing about Morgana, although I got over it.

Different strokes for different folks I guess. I found Persona 5 to be better than P4 in pretty much every category with the exception of the main story that I think is about on par.

I think the game certainly has its problems, but many of your complaints are pretty ridiculous.

(I do think Morgana sucks ass)

If you find the game so tedious why did you play it for like 70hours?

You should just stop playing it coz you seem to not like it at all and find a game better suited for your tastes

Can't like them all,I like FFX does not mean i gotta force myself to like 13.

On the whole I really liked Persona 5. Certain confidants, like Makoto, Sojiro, and Takemi rank among my favorite in the series, and I liked having Morgana as a constant companion (although that could be because he reminds me of my cat Waffles, but I digress). The story arc was really good IMO, with some interesting thematic parallels to current sociopolitical events.

The one part that does feel in need of an overhaul is the combat and dungeon crawling. It's still the same "find the weakness" crap you had to do in previous games, only now the number of possible weaknesses is greater. As @lawgamer mentioned, despite the cool setup for the palaces, they are pretty linear and braindead to get through. And don't get me started on Tartarus 2.0 Mementos, ugh! The last stretch starting with Shido's palace through to the ending exacerbated all these problems and made me walk away from the experience on unpleasant terms. Of course, that doesn't erase the 80+ preceding hours that were quite enjoyable, but I don't know if I have it in me to play through a Persona 6 with the same style of combat and dungeons.

Sorry you felt that way duder. Behind BOTW it's probably goty contender for me. I've experienced both 3 and 4 and think the cast is at least on par with them. To each their own though. The "fat" as you say in the game, is a pretty normal thing with jrpgs. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but only that it's a decisive factor for the genre. The morgana thing is a little maddening at first glance, but when you realize the parameters around what you can and cannot do each day you realize he's just there to remind you. The same time gates were there in 3 and 4. If you go to a dungeon the only thing to do when you get back home is sleep. (In the past they justified it by saying the other world drains your stamina.) There are times when plot stuff is gonna happen the next day and you can't brew some coffee, work out in your room, make tools, etc. That can be annoying to me, but I don't feel like it happens enough to be too upset about it. The fact is the activity management had always been there.

Really sorry to hear about those load times on Ps3, but when you get the alternative version that's to be expected. As I mentioned before, I played breath of the wild earlier this year and I did so on the Wii U. Caveats suck when getting a previous gen alternative, but ya kinda just got to grit your teeth and bare it when you opt into that. I'm not excusing a shitty port, just that there are going to be limitations you have to expect with that kind of thing. Also, those scene transitions probably add up into the minutes by the time the credits roll (not hours).

My recommendation: Take a break from it. I hit the 50 hour and have taken about a week off. (Overwatch season 4 ends soon and I'm focusing on that for now.) Afterwards I plan to get back to it. Distance creates perspective. Sometimes things that were problems for us in the moment can be different with enough space to consider them. That's just my two cents though.

It's hard to compare I feel. Since this is the third game in the series with this sort of framework, I think maybe some things that have always been a weakness of the series, that were maybe easier to forgive in the earlier games, are starting to irritate some people more now. Like the "you are tired" thing. Also, maybe the concept is just less fresh now, it's sort of like Dark Souls III or Fallout 4 to me. Both games improved a lot of things from the earlier games, but had less of an impact because they were still very similar and in Fallout 4s case had a lot of the same issues still. For the record, I liked Persona 5 a lot, but to me Persona 3 is still the one I like the most, since it was so fresh to me at the time.

That one made me laugh. Maybe next you can list how the music is too varied and good or how the combat feels too fluid and refined? I'm sorry you're not enjoying it. I completely disagree with basically all the reasons you listed but eh, to each their own.

The only thing I agree with is that Morgana needs to staaahp. I DONT WANNA GO TO BED DAMMIT!

Other than that though I just disagree completely. I think this is the snappiest the series has been in combat and menus and the character writing has had a bump in quality across the board with no bad social links. For me this is a real high point in the series.

That said, I think Mementos is terrible. It's like Tartarus but worse in pretty much every way. It feels as pointlessly lazy as the chalice dungeons did in Bloodborne. And that comparison carries further in being blemishes on otherwise excellent games.

And I stopped playing P3 because most of those characters were just barely on par with Yukiko, so let's internet high five having different interests and opinions! :D

To each their own, but I can't agree with ya. This game is so fvcking fun and stylish, I can't imagine having issues with the menus and the gameplay. The main cast enjoyable, and the S links are better than ever. And the plot is pretty much on par with P4, P4 got duuuuuuumb at the end. Like, really dumb. Like, Final-Fantasy-last-boss-out-of-left-field kind of bad/dumb. This one actually makes more sense.

Damn! Really? Thats harsh guys. :b but yeah to each their own. Though I find it kind of funny how often gamers latch onto one game in a series and then by default seem to hate aspects of all the others. I feel like in each and every persona game a lot of effort have been put into the characters and it always shows. Though I can't speak for the first two games, but all the games I've played I've gotten to like the cast in the end.

Sorry, I don't agree any of these takes. I really like the initial moments when you meet new people in P4 seeing as how dungeons are tied into the main characters of the game but otherwise most everything is a step up... Well except for the music. Love the soundtrack for P5 but P4's music is simply burned into my memory.

@casepb: how did you finish so quickly? I'm at 125 hours and I'm nearing the end of the sixth palace.

The only real complaint you've listed that I agree with is the 3-way fuses, it would have been great to get them back, but it's not too much of a loss. Everything else you've mentioned though, I completely disagree. I love the cast in this game, and the examples you've listed - Shinji and Mishima do actually grow as people and stop being the bratty kid and the annoying guy respectively (Mishima is debatable, but come on, who wasn't cheering with him at the end?).

Too much style? What? If the transitions were like the horrible traveling times from Mass Effect: Andromeda, I would completely agree with you, but these split second transitions don't really take that long. Furthermore, the text is difficult to get the hang of initially, but I feel like as it goes on, it's not that hard to read at all.

Too much loading - I can't comment on this. I was playing on the PS4, and the load times were fine for me. I heard the PS3 load times are like twice as long though, so that would definitely suck to play through.

This Morgana complaint drives me up the fucking wall. If he weren't saying that to you, then an in-game narration would be doing it for you, JUST LIKE IN PERSONA 3 AND 4.

The final complaint though, about it being too long? It's pretty much just as long as the previous games. And are you saying Persona 3 and 4 didn't have padding?! Remember January in Persona 3, literally the most boring month in the game because there's nothing to freaking do? Remember constantly meeting with the investigation squad in Persona 4 to go over all the details about the crime over and over again, trying to figure out who the killer was, even though you figured it out way back in July? These games have ALWAYS had a lot of padding, it's not unique to Persona 5. Furthermore, the animations can be skipped, at least on the PS4 version.

@tothenines said:

If I may elaborate since I at least watched a let's play of P3 in its entirety very recently; I'd be lying if I said that Persona 3 is trash. It's a great game, even if I qualify it with "for a JRPG." I just think it's a little too heavy hitting at times with it's over-arching theme and combining science fiction with magic breaks my suspension of disbelief, along with other nitpicks that I have about it. With that said, as much as I can hold Persona 4 on a personal pedestal, I'm not going to say it's flawless and easily recommend it over the other games, since as much shit as I can give Yukiko, Chie has her less than stellar moments as well. I'd tell someone to play both games and flip a coin between which to play first. Going through P3P as the female lead is still on my to-do list along with trophy cleanup in P4G.

@facelessvixen: P3 is a very great game. The problem is 4 and 5 are masterpieces

I could live inside of the P5 menu screens forever.

Nah, the post battle screen alone makes this game fantastic.

I disagree on basically everything but Morgana.

I think P5 beats P3, and absolutely demolishes P4. This is easily my favorite of the last three games.

@sunjammer: Gotta say I disagree with some points. I like a bunch of the characters, and some I considered annoying grew on me over time. Easy to see how you would feel differently there though.

The animations taking a bunch of extra time? I don't quite get that one. I mean, there is stuff like the all-out attack being unskippable, but that's the only obvious "time spender" animation stuff I can think of that you can't skip, and that's exactly the same as P3/4.

Also playing on PS3 and I've found the load times to be pretty acceptable, so I'm curious if you're playing a physical copy? Mine's digital (didn't want to wait a week for international shipping) so maybe that explains that? If physical load times were much slower I can agree it would be a bummer.

I feel like for the most part P5 is just an excellent update of the Persona formula. Quality of life changes (thank god for the way they now handle inherited skills!), rewarding you more for getting your confidants to higher ranks, etc.

Morgana telling you to go to sleep though... I definitely agree on that one. Especially the weird moments where you like... try to leave and he's all "Hey, you should rest up for tomorrow!", so you check to see if you can't maybe make tools or something... Nope. Oh well, to the bed. "Oh, you're going to sleep already?" You just told me to, what the hell, cat?

When I started writing this, I didn't expect it to be quite this long, but oh well. Here's my rambling, crazy-person opinion of P5:

Well, it seems like I'm one of the only ones, but I generally sorta agree with you. I ultimately loved P5, but I had some serious issues with it. I'm surprised no-one in this thread has brought up the translation, either, which is particularly rough (in comparison to P4, to be clear, not in general JRPG history) in the early game. It either got better as the game progressed, or I got used to it. Honestly not sure which. There were some lines in there that I thought "not only would a human being never say this, they wouldn't even THINK it". A ton of people have written stuff about the translation of the game on the internet already, though, so you don't need me parroting it. If you don't notice it/ it doesn't bother you, great! But BOY there were some parts of that game in the first 20 hours or so that drove me NUTS.

I also got a bit annoyed from time to time with the general over-stylish look. I don't know what it was exactly, but I just got really tired of it if I played for too long (I marathon game. Played P5 for 19 hours straight once). I think it's a good thing in general, but there were times I was wishing for P3/4s more spartan but still pretty stylish presentation.

FUCK MORGANA. Well, at least at first. I ultimately ended up liking him (thankfully, since I own a damn plushie of him), but he was annoying as hell for a good long time. I think that has to do with the repetition of his lines, especially when he's still your "handler" in battle, or whatever you want to call it. If, for example, I used zio three times in a row, hitting a weakness of three enemies, Morgana would say the EXACT same piece of dialogue EVERY TIME. He has one line for it. I spoke with someone recently who said "doesn't P4 do that too?" and no, it super doesn't. I was literally playing P4 today, and the same situation occurred. Teddie said three different things for each weakness I hit. There was a point in that game that I thought if I heard "Oooh looking cool, Joker!", one more time, I was going to tear my hair out. Literally 3-4 times a battle, every battle, for pretty much that entire first dungeon. It got better once I got more teammates, at least, but I still think only having one line of dialogue for battle stuff like that is insane. I think that's where a lot of my initial annoyance with Morgana stemmed from.

One of the things I thought P5 did better, though, was non-teammate S. Links. They were, for the most part, stronger than they're P4 counterparts. I also liked how they actually made them matter, especially with your teacher and the Shogi playing girl. They gave you some dope fucking abilities, man. I vastly prefer the teammates in P4, though. I liked everyone in 5, but the only ones I REALLY liked were Yusuke and Makoto. Futaba is pretty cool, too.

I think P5 is a really, really fantastic game, all said and done. It'd probably make top 20 of all time for me, but I'll be damned if it didn't feel like a slog sometimes. There were definitely stretches of that game where I just wasn't having much fun, as opposed to P4, which I'm playing my fourth go-round on right now, and I'm having a blast 100% of the time. Hell, maybe my opinion will go up once I do a NG+ of it, but right now, it's only in my top 20 games compared to P4, which is my second favorite game of all time (also- I played it for the first time last year, so no real nostalgia factor). Playing P4 right after P5 just reaffirms my opinion that P5 sorta pales in comparison for me; I barely think of them in the same league. P5 is a game that I'll play again in NG+ pretty quick, then probably come back to it in a few years once or twice. P4 is a game that's going to join Final Fantasy Tactics in the "games I play at least once a year but usually more" squad. But hey, different strokes and all that. I really hope (and from the looks of this thread, it is the case) that other people don't have the same problems I had! In a better world, all games would be perfect, but P5 just didn't quite hit "perfection" it for me.

I don't fully agree with your points but, personally, the more I play P5 the less favourable my opinion on it is (especially since I started on other games like Yakuza 0). I'm 100 hours in and very late in the game (Mementos after Shido's palace), but I feel like I've reached a point where I don't even care to finish the story.

After spending some time away from the game, I realised that none of the characters were particularly memorable for me (I honestly don't get the hype around Makoto, she's intelligent yes, but overall kind of bland) and the story felt weaker as it went on (despite becoming more complex) although I did enjoy the big November palace trick. I remember really hating Kamoshida and became REALLY invested in kicking his ass, but every boss after that (with the exception of maybe Futaba's Palace) I felt little to no investment and was just going along with the ride, fighting bosses because the story dictated I had to. Some of the later characters felt kind of half baked too (Especially Akechi, his whole redemption scene fell completely flat for me)... for a game this long, it's surprising how rushed the later months feel.

I still think it's a good game (the music is freaking great), but I feel that this might be my first and last Persona game if the other entries in the series are similar. The rest of the game just doesn't engage me as much as the first few hours did.

I also strongly disagree with the point about Mona, I think his voice is cute (I kind of miss him after Futaba takes over, although I like her's too) and his story is the most intriguing of the bunch. Him telling you to go to sleep is simply a game mechanic which is easy to get used to once you understand what actions take up time. I find it pretty lame that people complain about a character due to their inability to get used to a relatively simple game mechanic.

I have a few problems with the game as well, though I think it's still pretty great overall. My biggest issue is with the pacing, because the game encourages you (or at least it did me) to blast through the dungeon right away, wasting the least amount of days possible. What this did was essentially ruin the pacing of the story by splitting the game into 2 large alternating chunks of "days doing dungeon and story" and "days doing Confidants and Stats". Those respective parts being split into large chunks like that ends up ratcheting down any story tension while also stretching out the players accepted amount of tedium like a rubber band, to a point where at times it comes close to snapping. In other games, this "snapping" would result in me taking a sizeable break from the game and possibly forgetting to ever come back to it.

Now, you could say that that is my own fault for playing the game that way. But, because the game forces you to waste time by going to bed whenever you visit a dungeon, it encourages you (especially early on) to not visit the dungeons too often. While this can be mitigated by maxing out a certain Confidant, that's still not a good excuse because what Confidants a player maxes out are specific to their playthrough, so the general rule will still hold for most people: Spend the least amount of time in the dungeon as possible. Which will result in the player front-ending or back-ending the entire dungeon all at once on their calendar. What they could have done to fix this was place more roadblocks to completing a dungeon, forcing you split up the time spent in one. Perhaps a calling card could take more than an afternoon to prepare, be sent, and received? Something like that.

My other gripe is more of my own fault. Which is that none of the characters hold a candle to any of the P4 cast, especially Chie, Yosuke, and Teddy. This is probably more nostalgia driven bullshit of my own, so not the fault of Atlus.

Oh, and the fucking music. Is fucking fantastic, raises this would be 8.5/10 game for me to a 9.9/10. Shoji Meguro is my jazz-funk music god. Easily the best Persona soundtrack, P3 can eat it.

I stopped after the second dungeon. I don't know, man. This game is not for me.

Shame to hear it's not great on PS3, but I think it's the best game I've ever played.

I think this game has serious issues, which I'm writing a real long essay about currently actually, but apart from the characters, I disagree with you entirely on what they are. In fact, I think most of the things you point out are the to the game's benefit. Without its style, it would be a good JRPG at best and no one would care; getting rid of three way fusions meant that I could use the fusion system without being intimidated and actually complete the compendium for the first time; for the loading times, I can't argue other than saying that on PS4 they're fine; to me, this game felt shorter than Persona 4; people complaining about Morgana telling them to go to bed seem to be selectively forgetting that P3 and P4 did this just as often, it was just an unseen narrator doing it instead of an in game character - it was annoying in Persona 4, and that's my favorite game ever made. So while I do consider Persona 5 to be pretty disappointing, especially when compared to its predecessor, I think the reasons you listed out are mostly wrong. But hey, opinions.

Also, "I'm in a room, and I can't do anything in the game other than go to bed. Why don't they just skip me to the next day?" is a question with a very simple answer. So you can save your game.

I'm not as down on as you are but I do have a similar emotional response. I like it a good deal but I don't LOOOOVE it like I do P3 and P4, and that almost entirely comes down to the characters and story beats feeling very similar to previous games. Ryuji literally feels a remix of Kanji and Yosuke; Morgana has almost the exact inverse of Teddie's quirk ("I'm a bear!" "I'm NOT a cat!") and both have existential anxiety about what they are; Ann is the pretty female classmate that's actually kind of aloof and doesn't have a lot of close friends, etc. Yusuke and Futaba are more original and I like them best, but not to the extent I do about half of the casts of the previous games. And Haru straight up doesn't bring much to the table (should've made Hifumi a party member instead Atlus!)

I do think the nonplayable confidants are the best they've ever been though. Yeah they aren't all winners but that's true of every Persona game. And I do get feeling the UI is almost too stylish at first ("I almost can't hear the music because the menus are so loud!") you adjust and get used to it. Morgana is functionally the same as in head narration, though it IS more annoying when the dialogue box is accompanied by a little vocal yip and the game monopolizing so many story days in a row and doesn't always justify not giving you time (Oh just because I had one conversation in the afternoon I can't return this DVD that's already three days overdue game? WTF!).

As for the length? Meh, seems about as long as P4G to me.

Yeah, Persona 4 "avoided" this criticism by having the saving tied to a calendar on the main floor of the Dojima house and then just saying "You should go to bed" when you tried to go upstairs. Honestly, I think people wouldn't have a problem if P5 did the same thing, the way it does after a day of dungeon crawling, and started you in the evening on the first floor of Le Blanc.

Yeah. This (very common) complaint always struck me as weird. It`s not like Morgana is randomly taking days away from you. The game was designed with these "lost" days in mind. If someone thinks the game has a pacing problem that`s fair, but that is kinda a different discussion.

I think a lot of the feeling of lost time comes from the fact that this is by far the Persona game that has the most opportunities at night, so it feels extra limiting this time around. In Persona 4 (not Golden), the only things I could do at night were hang out with the Dojimas, and the Devil/Tower S. Links (neither of which were particularly great), or some minor social stat increases via studying/part time jobs. In this, there seem to be close to the same amount of S. Links available at night as during the day, you have complete freedom to traverse the city, and the opportunities seem endless. So when Morgana tells you you're giving up an entire day, it feels like I'm missing out on a lot more than P4. Again, I understood that the game was built with this in mind, just as the previous games were, but I think that might be why a lot of people felt like they were constantly wasting time.

I honestly don't remember Morgana hounding me about going to bed. The game is pretty clear about when you can do stuff at night. Is it disappointing that some nights are earmarked for story reasons? Absolutely. But, as others have stated, P4 was guilty of the same thing. And personally, I'd rather have the game clarify that it's time to move the story forward rather than leave me confused as to why I can't make tools or do crossword puzzles.

The only thing I legitimately didn't like about Persona 5 was the Mementos exploration music. The puzzles in the Shido and Mementos dungeons weren't great either, but they're tolerable.

@matiaz_tapia: Yeah, P4 kind of had the Holy Grail in terms of being able to tie character development directly to plot with the way it was structured. That being said, I really dig the formula in P5 because it lets the teammate characters develop on their own more naturally, I thought. As in, rather than "oh, hello, biker-boy who just entered the story after we saved Yukiko. I wonder if you will be heading into a T.V. anytime soon?" Plus, solid villain development is a personal favorite fictional thing for me.

P4 was special because you were stopping serial murders while getting new friends WHILE learning their insecurities and helping them with them. This one feels special because your teammates are bonded by something stronger - to me - than "I almost died, wanna be buds?" The world is shitty and unfair and we're all working together to help fix a little part of it. Yeah, of course, you'd want to catch the dude who tried to kill you, but it just felt the slightest bit more contrived than P5's take. Oh, boy, I'm having major GOTY problems here, feeling like I'm shitting all over P4, which I don't mean to. Still, I agree, if they had done the same formula for team members again, it really would have felt less unique.

It's funny that one of the complaints I've heard is the characters in 5 just have their own molds they fit into and don't go beyond them during the main story; because in 4, this was true as well if you didn't do their Social Links. Chie was independent-but-also-unsure girl; Kanji was tough-guy-with-heart-of-gold; some, like Naoto, can give off an incorrect indication - "okay, so you wanna be trans? That's cool" until you do the SL and find the deeper subconsciousness there.

Man, reading through these comments, I don't know if I've ever seen such a wide array of completely opposite opinions - but maybe this is just because of my intense love for the series makes me biased. Can everyone who says they love the game as much as me just shout a little louder? I feel like all the podcasts I'm listening to currently are all firmly in the "it's GOOD, but..." camp, and that's honestly more disappointing than anything in the game: not being able to have my positive feelings reverberate off someone else's. Even if it is just vicariously.

@sunjammer: I think its not nice to assume that there should be a "acceptable" lengh for NG+ since its always a optional thing that you can do. Meanwhile I have clocked in 300 hours into one Mount and Blade playthrough right now and I'm like in the early or mid stage of the game.

So whether or not a game is 4 hours or 400 hours in lengh should not take away peoples incentive of starting a NG+ if they enjoyed their previous experience with the game. Its not forced upon the player, if you get what I mean.

@poobumbutt: I came to P5 specifically as a throwback to an older style of game and for that it very much succeeds at being that sort of novelty while also being masterfully stylish from beginning to end. That being said I can see where some people are coming from in terms of their disappointment in the tedium of the actual game play loops. I probably finished below average in the completion of Confidants in my first run and it was still not particularly challenging by the end. That's a sparse amount of side content I could have been smarter about completing and yet ultimately didn't need to in order to finish the game proper. I've bumped it up to Hard a couple times just to see how it is and all it really does is make fights even LONGER which is not really the draw of this game for me. I personally don't play a lot of these kinds of JRPGs anymore purely because of some of the ways that P5's combat design feels archaic. I still love aspects of this game a lot and think it has become my new favorite in the series but with the amount of time you need to spend on it you kind of have to be in for a penny in for a pound. So people will be subjective about what works and what doesn't in Persona games. To me the most important thing is that although it may not be perfect it feels like P5 maintains momentum of quality for the series as a whole and makes me want to see this studio continue making games with this level of flair whether it's another sequel or something else entirely.

I agree with a lot of these, though as someone pointed out: the Morgana "lost days" are much more a problem of pace than of gameplay (there's a lot more to do in this game, so I barely maxed any Confidants as I liked to experiment) but at 70 hours, it's too long to New Game +? Persona 4 was ~80-90 hours, and closer to 100 on Golden, so that's on-par for the series.

As for the characters, I'm just gonna come right out and say it: I'm GLAD these characters don't undergo some world-shaking arc. They're high school teenagers. They don't NEED to be fully formed adults in a year. I'm glad my character wasn't this walking paragon of all things good in the world leaving only virtuous, changed beings in his wake because, frankly, I am SICK of videogames, and especially RPGs doing that whole "chosen one/greatest of all time" stuff. Maybe I've just gotten older, maybe I'm more secure in who I am, but I don't need my hobby worshiping the ground I walk on.

The characters in 4 were basically shambling homunculi given purpose by Yu/Charlie, which IS an arc, but it's not a terribly satisfying one. I already LIKED the characters in 5 when I first met them, I'm glad my mere presence wasn't enough to inspire them to become completely different people.

I do agree with the spirit of "too much style," I agree wholeheartedly with too many loads, and I also miss the tri-fuse being customizable. I never even got into the charts and what's-what of fusion, I just liked having a ton of options. I appreciate what they were trying to do by streamlining it, but it feels like they went too far.

Note: this is my first real foray into persona, besides playing 10 hours of p4g (lost my save file, then p5 got announced so I decided to wait).

I'm in a love hate relationship with this game. I think the story, characters, world building, everything artistic about it is astonishing. If it doesn't win best style/character/soundtrack/story it will have been robbed.

With that said, the gameplay loop is tedious, and not rewarding in anyway. There's no strategy to the combat, the concept of money being a thing you need to manage is laughable, and a bunch of the activities available to you are completely pointless (I'm looking at you, jobs system).

It's not completely devoid of cool gameplay systems. The whole calendar/day system is rad, and it's surprising that no proper open world game has stolen it. Yes, I know it isn't a new thing.

To me I think this game would be better if they cut out all the jrpg combat, and replaced it with something more meaningful. It feels like 2 different games that are at complete odds with each other.

I feel the same, Sunjammer. I've had the game for over a month and am about 50 hours in. At this point it's as if chipping away at P5 has become part of my daily routine.