Persona 5 got shortchanged in goty

I love the game of the year coverage on giantbomb but I was really disappointed how quickly it got discarded in the top 10.

Did people forget how amazing the style and music where?

How great it is to mix the life sim and dungeon crawling?

How amazing the dungeon design and rpg gameplay were (at least all but the last one)?

Anime Bernie Sanders?

The hard hitting themes,how rebelling tied into the story and visuals?

In a year of great games that weren't always fun to play (Nier, Horizon) Persona was an amazing amulgum of JRPG gameplay

Best Style was the award it really was a shoe in for and that's all I really feel was left out.

I was mostly annoyed how it just got discarded without much discussion at all.

And the response to the comparison to the devil in cuphead, is that in Persona he joins you as a Persona!

Also 2 people played it to completion, and they were not 100% on board either.

Not the end of the world, but thread title is GOTY spoiler for anyone who has yet to make it through the 25 hours of content. If such a thing as GOTY spoilers exist...

Yeah it was an uphill battle for sure,I guess I just felt out of all the games this year Persona had the best gameplay (within the parameters of an RPG) and so many other games even Zelda had gameplay problems.

@htr10: I never thought of that,good point and sorry about that.

P5 didn't really connect with them the way other games did in this year of certified bangers and honestly I'm kind of with them. If it had come out any other year I think we'd probably be sick of them talking about it by now.

@htr10: I guess that they would... but it's a very exhausting thought.

I get why it fell off. Persona 5 was the biggest game I was looking forward to in 2017 and I never got close to finishing it. I got more out of the soundtrack than I did playing the game.

It was the only game this year I didn't grow to hate the gameplay of before the game finished,Zelda did a pretty good job of maintaining it but there were some frustrating aspects to it.

Compare Persona 5 to other jrpg in recent years, Tales, Star Ocean,Final Fantasy and the gameplay is like comparing a perfect steak to microwave turkey bacon.

In the Eurogamer deliberations someone said Persona 5 just, "wasn't that good," and they might have liked it more if it was a handheld game. Others on the team barely played it, and it was placed 47th on their list or something and never brought up again. (ARMS was their 6th best game of 2017, conversely...) That bothers me more. The GB crew discussed it, praised it in various ways, critiqued it with some depth at least, plus it was considered for two awards, and I'm fine with that.

@arcitee: I wouldn't go that far, those games are all very different.

Tales does really good combat in that style, Star Ocean (traditionally....) did very good combat in that style. I wouldn't say Persona 5 goes beyond that.

I'm glad you liked it so much, but I hope you realize how personal those opinions are. It's just not going to affect everyone the same way.

Also, consider how often JRPGs even come up as a topic for Jeff and co. It's not really they're thing, for the most part. And that's fine!

@efesell: @brunothethird: oh man that eurogamer deliberations sounds way more frustrating!

I havnt played Beseria,but so many Tales games are meh to me. Star Ocean has pretty good battle system gameplay but doesn't tie it all together.

Persona's social links influencing combat was a great way to tie it all together.

Different people have different opinions. Personally I ended up feeling about the same way Ben and Alex did about the game. The story feels inconsistent and all over the place tonally in a way that doesn't work. The start of the story is extremely heavy with the Kamoshida sexual assault stuff, but then later the male cast members and even the game itself will ogle all of the female characters. The game thinks it's way too clever with its whole interrogation room plan, and actively halts the plot so it can explain in excruciating detail how it all worked and making sure to point out all of the hints the game had along the way so you know just how smart it was. Combat quickly became a chore for me, and I had multiple instances of the main character just randomly getting crit'd and then killed on the follow up, causing sometimes upwards of thirty minutes of progress to be lost. The game constantly feels hostile towards the player with the way it prevents you from doing anything at night after any scripted daytime story event.

The only thing Persona really nailed this year was style, and as great and sleek as it is you can't just downplay how amazing Cuphead looks. Even within the realm of just Japanese games Nier Automata's plot beats the hell out of Persona's in terms of telling a meaningful story with rich themes and well realized characters, and I also think Yakuza 0 is similarly a much better realized game that doesn't feel like it's just wasting your time nearly as often as Persona 5 does.

As someone who really likes Shin Megami Tensei games and places P3 and P4 pretty highly among that series... P5 isn't so hot.

It's not bad, it's a good game, but in the grand pantheon of SMT games, it just isn't so hot. I never finished it, but in twenty hours it didn't really hook me.

It's a 120 hour anime JRPG, in a year full of amazing games something had to give.

And I'm used to the feeling, the soulsborne series always get shortchanged in the GOTY lists here.

In the short time that I have watched Giant Bomb I've noticed that games that require 50+ hours of time to complete tend to get left out simply because most of the staff either doesn't have time to finish it or there are other games, they'd rather spend that time with. A prime example would be The Witcher 3 in 2015 getting 10th place or Divinity Original Sin 2 not getting mentioned hardly at all this year. A lot of people get upset over these types of things, but I see them as the staff not anointing a game simply because of other critical praise a game has gotten.

Don't see how it was short changed. Most of them didn't finish it and the two that did liked it but not that much. They barely talked about it after launch apart from the spoilecast. There are much better games that came out this year that I would say got snubbed but whatever, it's their top 10.

This is also very much me - love SMT, love P4 - except I'd say I probably put in around 60-80 hours and just one day dropped it and never went back. It got it's hooks in pretty deep for a while, but the longer it went on, the more that grip lessened.

Similar feelings here, except I finished it, and still was pretty meh on it. Longtime SMT fan, etc, and the music and style were great, but the rest... meh. Great opening with the Kamoshida stuff, then a giant downhill roll.

I honestly place P5 at the very top of the Persona series. Going from P4 to P5 was a huge improvement in almost every area - Gameplay, visuals, music, style, dungeon design.. I also loved most of the party members and most of the social links. I guess the Story is not really quite as good as P3's, and the "twist" isn't quite as good as P4's, but I didn't think the story was BAD or anything. I know there was some small grammatical errors and mispellings and such in the localization but I don't place that stuff as more than a minor distraction.

The other complaints about the localization I didn't really experience, but maybe that's because I played with Japanese voices and not English voices so I didn't have to hear English people saying something not-really normal for English people to say out loud. Which is fine by me, tbh. I've been watching subbed anime for over half my life now so I'm kinda used to Japanese-isms in subs maybe? So when someone says something like I've heard like "People don't talk that way" I just think "they do in anime"

They echoed my thoughts on it. It's an average game in a fantastic year.

The game is amazing.

You could say Persona 5 got robbed

@TechnoSyndrome: Big difference between Kamoshida, a teacher, sexually abusing his students (a very interesting and gritty place to start the game) and teenage boys ogling their attractive team mate.

I don't think there is any narrative inconsistency there at all.

I think some people liked the characters in P5 less because they were more authenticly angtsy teens than P4 were they were closer to adults in their emotional development. (some localizing who is aside.

It's a good game, but you knew how the staff felt about it when it came out. I think it got more time in the discussions than I expected.

@justin258: I finished P5, it made my top 5 games this year, but it definitely wasn't as good as P4 or P3. The graphics and gameplay were much better, but if it was all about gameplay, I would just go with something like Nioh.

The music and the style are absolutely incredible, but they're literally the only reason I want to play it. I've put 21 hours into it and I'm already bored to tears with the dungeon and turn based gameplay.

Their allowed to be wrong, tons of people have wrong opinions. Some people think Kawakami isn't best girl, or that P3 and P4 are superior to P5. There are a lot of wrong opinions out there, man, you just gotta accept it.

I am not sure about persona but I think everyone agrees injustice 2 got robbed! ;-)

The same thing happened to Divinity Original Sin 2, a game much better than P5 imo.

Only two of them finished it and both of them had reservations about it as a whole, while still giving it props in certain presentation categories, so it did about as well as I would've expected. I liked it a bit more than Alex and Ben, but have a lot of the same qualms as they did generally. It just isn't as tight a narrative as it should, and does feel its length a lot more than P3 or P4.

I keep seeing this various places online and I just have to ask: What the heck did you guys see that made you think it would place that I didn't?

Ben and Alex were the only two to put time into it, and from the get go they both had a lot of issues with it. It places on both their personal lists, but not without quite a bit of caveats. The spoiler-cast was more "what we don't like" then "what we do like"

P5 is a fine game but it has so many glaring issues with pace, characters, story, etc that thinking it ranks among some of the amazing games we've gotten in 2017 seems bonkers to me. It has amazing style and music but those can't save it from it's many issues.

It really did, which is such a shame. Its one of the most stylish, maybe the most stylish, games I've ever played.

This game's translation really rubbed me the wrong way. I never finished it, but the fact that it didn't get much nods at GOTY time is understandable.

I love P5 but it was never going to make it into the site's top 10 and that's ok with me.

That being said, P5 losing Best Style was a bigger heist than anything the Phantom Thieves ever pulled off.

P5 is a fine game. Game of the Year winners and top 10's need to be populated with games that are better than fine. Doesn't make it bad, it just doesn't hang with the rest.

P5 has a great aesthetic but does it have the best styyyyyyYyLe? Most likely...

Tbf, I'm more flabbergasted by the choice of GOTY this year, but that seems to be the case most years. Opinions are a wild thing.

I'm currently in the home stretch of P5 and I'm getting pretty fed up. The final dungeon is overly difficult compared to the rest of the game and I've lost an hour of gameplay 3 times in this dungeon. I just crossed 100 hours and I'm so close to wanting to walk away from it.

I'm happy it got a few runners up at least. I think it at least should have won for best styyyyyyyyyle or music but it was very good year for both categories so I can't be too upset.

For me, it was my second on my personal top 10. For Alex and Ben, they were lukewarm on it to begin with in their spoilercast and were way more motivated to fight for NieR as the game they felt much stronger about. It's their list, subjective, etc.

Abby ended up arguing for it harder in the end. I'm guessing Ben and Alex didn't want to waste another hour sitting there arguing against her as she brings up irrelevant points or showing complete bias against anything anime. Ben can show that the world appreciates the menus in P5 so much that they cosplay them. Abby can talk about how cuphead is a hard game and somehow that translates to mean style. They talked about how every screen in Persona 5, no matter how mundane is abundant with style. She talks about how killing bosses makes her want to kill more bosses. The debate ended up turning to hot garbage.

Granted I'm only 40 hours in and have only finished the first 3 dungeons, but so far all of them have been very bland, uninteresting to explore and kinda boring when it comes to design and puzzles.

I like everything around the game (social stuff, characters, music, battles), but not the actual dungeons.

That's how I felt about Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Such a beautiful, powerful game with a fantastic ending and message, and it just wasn't discussed at all.

But whatcha donna do. :)

I played it and had it in my personal top 10 but it certainly wasn't the strongest game in my own top 10, and could see it having dropped out if I had played more games. I enjoyed it but didn't love it.

I'm glad that Alex and Ben saved it to at least making the top 3 in the Best Music category though, as I think it's the game with the best music (that I've played) of 2017 anyway, even moreso than Cuphead.

@kinokee: What are you talking about? I recall pretty clearly that it was Alex who brought up P5 to be cut pretty early in the GOTY category. I don't recall either him or Ben being overly adamant about it being on any of the lists like they were for some of the other games they liked, nor do I remember Abby really saying much about P5 at all.

Different strokes for different folks. I never expected it to compete for top 10 given Ben's and Alex's soft reactions to it. I couldn't dream of making PUBG my Game of the Year this year with all the problems it has (if it was published by EA instead of Bluehole and GotY happened maybe a week later so the full force of that botched XBox release was felt, it could have been a contender for Hottest Mess top 3). Also the staff is way more on board with Destiny 2 than either I was or most circles I hang out in are. But it's their list at the end of the day.

I will say this is the first year in some time my GotY list comes much closer to matching Gamespot's than Giant Bomb's did. I really like their top 10 despite the lack of Cuphead. I also appreciated Peter Brown's great writeup of why they handled PUBG the way they did.

My personal two favourite games of this year were Horizon & P5. Both made the 5-game shortlist for The Game Awards GOTY category, but neither made Giant Bomb's top 10. Doesn't make sense to me but I've learnt not to bother questioning GB's choices, listening to them deliberate is fun.

I loved Persona 5, my third favorite game this year, but this was a crazy year for awesome video games and somethings were bound to be overlooked. Plus as its been said I'm sure countless times that only Alex and Ben beat the game so there is that.

I remember when I use to get upset when a game or movie I loved didn't win awards. Now it's like whatevs I enjoyed it and if people ask for a recommendation I'll share it. I don't need some accolade telling me a this thing I enjoyed was good because I already know it is.