Is Persona 5 worth buying for a brand-new-to-the-series-player?

Hi all,

Would love some group think opinions. I'm thinking of purchasing Persona 5 but I'm on the fence since I've heard waffling opinions on the bombcast. I've watched the persona 4 endurance run many times but never played that game myself. Other than that, I've no experience with the series.

Now that we're a few months separated from its release, do you think it's worth a try?

Thanks duders!

Probably the most important thing to know going in is that Persona 5 is long. Maybe 20% longer than Persona 4, to the point where I’d characterise a 90-hour playthrough as brisk, with 100-120 being a rough average.

As for the quality of the game, well, you’ll hear a range of opinions though it does seem that the Giant Bomb community prefers Persona 4 overall. I guess that puts me in the dissenting minority - I think that 5 is a significant improvement in all respects other than localisation quality. Faster gameplay, non-randomised dungeons and stronger social links with more tangible rewards did a lot for me, and I think the cast works better overall.

Try to get a feel for the style of the game. Not just the music and the menus, but maybe watch a bit from the game’s opening. The combat, the structure, the writing - do you see yourself enjoying that? The fact that you’ve watched the endurance run more than once makes me think there’s a good chance you will.

If you liked what you saw from watching the Persona 4 Endurance Run it's definitely something worth checking out. The Persona series works in a similar vein to the Final Fantasy series where, despite being numbered as sequels, they are self-contained plots with little to no relevance to anything prior. So if you're worried about not being able to follow the story, don't. However, the game play is very similar to that of Persona 4 so if you weren't a big fan of it, this game isn't going to do a whole lot to change your mind.

Speaking for the game itself, it's arguably my favourite entry in the series (still not sure if I can put it above three, since that was my first), and easily my favourite game of 2017.

Absolutely worth it, just know you are dedicating 100+ hours if you want to finish it. The best game in the franchise, it's impossible to go back to the sluggish gameplay and bland monotonous dungeon design of the previous games after you've played 5.

I'd say go for it. Easily one of my favorites last year, and I'm not a big jrpg guy.

Absolutely! As people have mentioned though, know what you are getting into. It's a longer game than P4, but if you watched the Endurance Run and enjoyed it, I think you're going to enjoy P5. The localisation is a bit rough in spots, but I think the combat, dungeons and world are a lot more fun to get around than P4. Take your time exploring (when you can, Morgana is very concerned for your sleep pattern in parts ... ) and I think you'll have a great time!

Yes of course. It's also one of the best rpgs ever made. Go for it and get lost in its brilliance

I would argue Persona 5 is even better if you are new to the series. My only problems with Persona 5 involve diminishing returns from already playing Persona 3 and 4.

Thanks all, this was exactly the kind of feedback I was looking for!

I too really enjoyed the Persona Endurance Run, and jumped at the chance to try Persona 5.

I hated it, and didn’t even finish the third dungeon. I just thought it was boring. Didn’t like the characters, liked the melodies of the soundtrack but hated it when the singing started, and the little bit of the story that I experienced was bad in my opinion. The combat is good, and I enjoyed the different personas, but it just isn’t my kind of game. Really regretted my purchase.

Yes. People have some problems with it. However, the bulk of those issues happen towards the end and I think most of them are pretty minor. All things considered, it is still one of the best RPGs ever made.

As others have said, it's a long ass game. My first play through was 123 hours, and I didn't start a New Game+ last year because that game consumed a month of my free time, and I thought about how I should play something else. So know what you are getting into at least from that perspective.

I think even at full price it'd be totally worth it. It plays the best of any Persona game, though I will say I preferred the S. Links in P3 and P4. I still think P4 is the best in the series once you factor in all the story stuff, S Links, and all that - it's not like it plays bad.

I'll just chime in to note on top of what has already been said that the tone of P5 is fairly different from P4, being a bit more serious and, in my opinion, spending a larger amount of script examining its themes. Neither a positive nor a negative, just a difference.

I'm not sure exactly what the issue is that people have with the localisation. Is it the voice acting or simply the translation?

As far as the voice acting goes - I played it with the Japanese voices. It's DLC but it's completely free. So.. if that was the issue, then problem solved. If it's the translation (ie the subtitles you'd be reading while listening to the Japanese audio) that people have an issue with, then that may not help. I will say that I didn't particularly have any problem with the translation. There's quirkiness to a lot of what people say, for sure. But perhaps when reading the dialog while listening to Japanese audio, it doesn't tend to grate as much?

And as others have said, it's definitely worth playing. I also never played any of the others. I did watch the P4 endurance run while playing P5, though. (I was enjoying P5 and I had heard good things about P4, so I wanted to check that out too. I would tend to to agree that the P4 story is probably a little better. But I think the gameplay in P5 is far superior - with hand-crafted dungeons, more/better options for thimgs to do in daily life and social links that give benefits to combat.

@andrewj71: http://www.personaproblems.com/

You can gloss over it, but the translation is undeniably mediocre.

Everyone else has already made a lot of good points, and most of what you need to know already.

The only thing i'd want to add is that even though they did waffle on about it in the podcasts, the people who played it to completion did put them on their top 10 lists in the end. People tend to have a lot of problems with the game, but i still havn't heard of anyone who didn't enjoy it.

I knew nothing about Persona before watching the endurance run. When I played Persona Q I found I didn't have to parse or memorize things like "bufu" and "agi" and I had a base understanding of Persona abilities. Having seen the endurance run, you'll have a leg up as far as that stuff goes when going into P5. You'll have a better understanding of the s-link system and equipment. Jeff's offensive approach in combat, also, is something I took with me into those games.

It was my first Persona game as well. My vote is "no."

Granted, the game has a lot going for it, like a great visual style and a great soundtrack, but ultimately the game is too conventional for its own good. For all the visual style, underneath it is an extremely traditional JRPG, and not a very good one IMHO. The battle systems is mind-numbingly repetitive and every encounter pretty much plays out exactly the same way - you ambush the opponent, hit them with an elemental weakness to knock them down and launch a team attack to win. That would be bad enough normally, but given the game needs to make everything "stylish" it means practically you are sitting through the same two or three attack animations over and over again.

Ultimately, I really liked the parts of the game where you were just hanging out and not having to move through the story. But once I actually needed to play through the plot, the gameplay got extremely tiresome very quickly. It might have been really awesome if they'd made the gameplay as varied as the art style but as it was I stopped after the fourth dungeon and just watched the rest on YouTube.

There's only a handful of references to earlier games, but yes, you can go into P5 without having played earlier Persona titles, and you should.

I had never played a Persona game before and ended up putting 160 hours into it. It was definitely my game of the year.

Hate to piggyback on someone else’s thread, but would this game be palatable for someone who bounces off most JRPGs? Outside of Chrono Trigger/Cross, I’ve never finished one and routinely skip out after a few hours. I love so much about what I’ve seen from Persona, but I’m worried the combat might ultimately turn me away (I am pretty bad at these games and typically quit because I reach a battle and discover I haven’t been grinding enough).

Yes, it's definitely worth it! Almost all games in Persona series are separate stories, so you can jump in without knowing anything about previous games! Give it a shot, especially on sale :) P5 is great, my top 3 in 2017 and one of my favorites ever. I still listen to the OST everyday.

@disco_drew22 If you're pretty bad and you're worried about combat there's a difficulty called "safe". It gives a ton more exp and money than even "easy" and losing a fight is extremely unlikely on that. I have never had to grind on that difficulty and very few fights were hard.

I started playing it over the holidays, and completely fell in love with it. I tried playing P4 in the past, and it never got it's claws into me the same way that 5 has. I'm about 50ish hours in and seem to be about halfway through?

Going back to 4, and checking it out, it seems that 5 has a lot of really fantastic quality of life things that make it actually quite easy to jump in. Plus I think talking to demons is way more interesting than randomly getting them as cards.

@disco_drew22: I'm not going to say that the combat is not repetitive, but it is super dynamic and it's all about finishing it in the least turns. More like a puzzle than a traditional jrpg where you just simply do and mitigate damage. It is still a JRPG, but it's so fast paced that the biggest complaint people have is that the end battle section slows it down too much.

The social aspect of it keeps you engaged in an almost firaxis "just one more turn" kind of way. The biggest complaint that people have about it is that it feels like too much pressure. And guessing from what you mentioned, too little might be what makes you bounce off.

It IS a long game. Worth repeating, I think .

It was my first Persona game. After beating it I decided to watch the Persona 4 Endurance Run. And then I played through Persona 3 and then Persona 4 myself.

It's absolutely worth it.

My vote is also no. It's a great game, but it has some problems compared to Persona 4, which I had played for the first time just a year earlier. My advice would be, honestly, to play P4 first even if you have watched the Endurance run. That's what I did. I actually found very few things I'd call superior to 4 in 5. The obvious one being graphical fidelity, as 5 is a ps3/4 game, whereas 4 is a ps2 game. I also liked the fact that non-party member social links (or "confidants" in 5) gave you useful perks. That was nice. But the characters, story, and translation are nowhere near as good, in my opinion. I'm also always baffled when people say the dungeons and combat are a huge step up from 4. I couldn't disagree more. I found most of the dungeons aggravating and way too long, whereas in 4, I could basically just turn my brain off for them until the boss. That's not good either, granted, but I still prefer 4's. I also found the combat to be way to SP-reliant. I felt like I was running low on SP ten or so battles in a dungeon, which meant that either I needed to leave the dungeon and come back another day (which I really didn't want to do), or suffer through more of it without being able to use many abilities, which felt like a horrible grind at times. I felt like they were artificially trying to extend the length of the dungeons in a way that just wasn't present in 4. I also think the Persona style combat AND dungeons were done faaar better than either 4 or 5 in a game that came out just a year earlier than 5- Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE. The P5 stuff honestly felt like a pretty significant step down from that to me.

So, despite loving P5, it feels like this weird middle-ground to me. The combat's not as good as TMS, and everything else isn't as good as P4. I still love it, but I really don't think I could recommend it as a first Persona game.

Using the JP audio isn't really glossing over it; it's a step towards making it better. Because you read it as a translation, rather than something someone literally said, the stiff phrasing doesn't stand out as much. You also don't have the issue of voice actors trying to make questionable lines sound natural (and I though the English voice direction as a whole wasn't great).

The visual design is a huge step up, and the way they are actual spaces to explore rather than being a randomised corridor crawl is an improvement, but the way they are used isn't great. The puzzles can make the dungeons annoying (if I'm going into a dungeon, it's because I want/need to fight -- putting other gameplay in there isn't necessarily an improvement), and they go on _way_ too long (the last one being particularly egregious -- five mini-bosses IIRC and a puzzle setup that means you can't fight half the time makes it drag).

P5 is a fantastic video game that does have some flaws. If u have the time I'd recommend it but i will say that it's not as strong as 4 from a character and story standpoint. From a gameplay standpoint tho it's the best the series has ever been

@stordoff: Yeah, fair enough on that point! The dungeons definitely LOOK much better. And yeah, the puzzles and length were absolutely a big part of why I found the dungeons to be a pretty big drag, I think.

I think this is key here. The beginning and ending of the game are great. First 10 hours, amazing. Last 10 hours, similarly great. Middle portion? Significantly less so. And there's way more of that this time. You need to be prepared to slog through some relatively uninteresting material in the midgame of Persona 5.

Granted I haven't played a TON of 4, but it's mostly because I found the pace incredibly slow and monotonous. I find that P5 moves at a brisk pace, especially combat, which is fun. I actually like that the dungeons have more to do because my experience with 4 was walking through identical looking hallways.

@matiaz_tapia: That's reassuring.

My brother is a big Persona fan so I've had some exposure. Honestly, the social aspect is the part that I want, but I've just been so scared away by the fact that it isn't in a genre I typically care for.

As for the "too much pressure" bit, I tend to like it when games put you in situations like that. If I was just left with a big, open space with no passage of time to hurry me along, then I would feel overwhelmed by my amount of options and worried that I would miss something important. I would probably end up doing nothing! A time mechanic forces me to just make choices and get on with it.

Yes. Get it

I'd never played a Persona game before playing Persona 5, I hadn't even watched the Endurance Run. I enjoyed Persona 5, it had its issues and I think there were plenty of better games from 2017, but it was still (mostly) fun throughout and an easy way to get into the series. If you're considering it, it's worth a look.

P5 was my first Persona game and my GOTY, so yes! Liked it so much I played P4 and P3 immediately following it. And then P5 again. I have a problem.

Persona 5 is the first game of this franchise I bought and it's already in my top 5 video games of all time. You should definitely buy it.