They make you waste so many days.

@ll_exile_ll: Friend, I hear what you're saying. I'm agreeing with you. That's what I'm saying in my last edit point, to chill and enjoy the ride. But I'm also expressing why someone might be frustrated by certain aspects of the pacing. You're coming off really forceful here, and I can't say I appreciate it. Just a heads up.

I do agree with most of what you said in your edit, but that is completely in contrast with what you wrote in your main post, so it's a little confusing. I was being a bit sarcastic with last sentence, no offense was intended. Still, I think my point still stands, if you or anyone else truly feels as you describe in this quote:

I was definitely swearing whenever another festival or event was happening, because it meant I had to lose a day, at least once a full week, before I could get back to social links and dungeon crawling

I think asking the question of why you're playing Persona in the first place is a valid one. I'm not trying to say anyone frustrated with the way the game handles free days vs. story days is "playing wrong" or anything like that. It's genuinely a complaint I don't understand at all, and it just makes me question what someone with this complaint is even looking for out of a Persona game. That's where I'm coming from.

@ll_exile_ll: It's not crazy to get a little irked about a schedule-simulating game constantly making up lazy reasons to not let you do what you want to do. This entire thread is dedicated to that annoyance so he's not alone in that thought.

I don't get your tone here.

@ll_exile_ll: But you don't find it kind of weird and frustrating at all that an entire days worth of events can be locked out just because like the team had a quick chat about the mission after school?

The entire premise of the thread is based on a false equivalence. A day where scripted events happen =/= a wasted day. It's not like those days are part of your allotment of free days and the game is then deciding to take them away at random. There are set number of free days in the game, and they provide enough time for to do everything with good time management.

The amount of free days you have are part of the game's design. Complaining that some days aren't open to you is like complaining that you can't leave the play area in an open world game. Sure, it's a little silly that you have to go to bed early some nights when all you do is stand around and talk the next day, but that's a nitpick about contextualization, it has nothing to do with the actual game design.

I just feel like you are assuming that it's super obvious that you'll have enough time to do what you want to do and it's totally not at all.

Well, it is super obvious. That's how they design these games.

If two prior games of evidence isn't enough to convince you, I don't know what to tell you. I'm not saying it will be easy to do everything in a single playthrough, but it is possible. They design these games so min/max enthusiasts can complete everything on a single playthrough, and normal players will reasonably be able to do most of what they want.

They would rather most players have a few things left unfinished at the end of the game than it being super easy to do everything and having players left with a bunch of days at the end of the game with nothing to do but go home and sleep because everything is already finished.

Okay but maybe consider the person who is not neck deep in the sausage making process for a Persona game and how the perception of a time slot that could be used for something you need at the time being taken away from for trivial reasons might be very annoying.

I realize not everyone is fully aware of that. But my very post first post in this thread addressed this specifically. I said:

The game will give you enough free time to complete all the confidants and max all your stats by the end of the game (even if requires very optimized time management, which is true of the past games as well). A day where story stuff or mandatory activities happen does not mean you're losing out on an opportunity to do other things...
Get out of the mindset that a day where scripted things happen is somehow a lost day. Enjoy the story and character interactions, that is presumably one of the main reasons you're playing the game in the first place.

I think that's pretty good advice for someone not aware of how these games work. I hoped that would allow people enjoy the game more and worry too much about not having enough free time. It's frustrating to see a bunch of complaints based on a false premise. Especially in a thread where myself and others have tried to clear things up and people are either ignoring that information or not accepting it.

I grant you that some of the reasons given for why you can't do something at a particular time can be pretty thin, but like I said in another post that's just an issue of bad contextualization. You're not actually missing out on something because Morgana told you to go to bed early.

But to the person just playing the game normally it totally feels like you are, and the same goes for any other day that is taken away from you if you did not feel that what you got instead was worthwhile.

It is very small comfort to be told after the fact that the thing you were annoyed about probably didn't actually matter in the grand scheme of things.

I don't know what you want from me.

Is it my fault if someone gets annoyed based on inaccurate assumptions? I'm trying to inform people so they don't continue to be annoyed and can enjoy the game more going forward. If someone's righteous indignation based on how something feels rather than how it actually is so important to them, I guess I'll stop trying to spread helpful information.

No offence taken, just giving you a heads up.

It may look at odds, but I don't really see it that way. On the one hand I'm enjoying the plot and characters immensely, and could not get enough of them. On the other, I wish I had more time to interact with the other parts of the game, the social stat and Confidant grind, and impediments to that provide an immediate frustration. I hold both of these opinions, because not everything is super logical or consistent. This thread is about that second part, so I focused more post time on that. I mostly added the edit because I didn't want to come off like I wasn't having fun or enjoying the game just because I have some criticism.

And I want to emphasize, I am loving this game, everything about it. But I do have some criticisms, particularly in how it compares to Persona 4. You just happened to find me in a thread about one of my criticisms.

That quote was describing my second playthrough of Persona 4 when, like I said, I was focusing less on story and more on maxing out the social links, because I was in college and had nothing but free time. First playthrough, I was all about that investigation team, and wasn't too worried about maxing all of the social links. Especially since it was my first time playing a Persona game (I played P3 later, followed by P3P. FeMC BestC come at me).

And it's not like I hated Persona 4 because of it. That is one of my favorite games. But in the moment I did get frustrated, which is what I was getting across. (We could talk about how my frustration was a product of me not planning properly, because at that point I had the experience to know that those events gives social link points, but that is waaaay off topic). The point I was trying to convey with that part of my post is that these games have always (well, since 3, but 3 had it's own set of pacing problems that I won't go into detail on here) had that balance of free time vs. plot committed time. It's just that it feels like P5 leans more heavily on that, which can be off putting at first to both a vet who's coming off of 4, and also to a new player, as evidence by the discussion in this thread (though I would not go as far as to say the game is hostile to new players. I feel that if you just let yourself go with the flow and not worry about it, you'll have a pretty good time).

@ll_exile_ll: I still don't get what the big deal is or why you can't understand why someone would complain about it.

Yes, the problem is contextualization. It's an invisible wall. There's nothing wrong with complaining about a game poorly justifying its design. "Your days aren't actually being wasted, it's designed this way".....yes, we get that. You don't need to explain that.

This thread is complaining about the game justifying the barriers on its schedule. Every now and then you'll have a quick chat with your group, go home, and then Morgana will tell you you can't do anything. Why? No good reason. That's the complaint people share.

You kinda made it into a big deal by saying stuff like "It's genuinely a complaint I don't understand at all, and it just makes me question what someone with this complaint is even looking for out of a Persona game." It's just an issue some people have with the game, dude. Doesn't mean we're not loving the game. Morgana locks you out of doing stuff at night sometimes for no reason. The end. You seem utterly baffled by this complaint and there's no reason for that. It isn't hard to understand.

I really only found it annoying when the game dedicates an entire day to a five minute conversation, only to then say, "Hey, let's go tomorrow.", therefore wasting another day. I actually screamed at my television, "No! WHY NOT GO NOW?!"

It really sucks when you know all you are going to be doing is talking the next day. Lock me out of social links. Im fine with that. But why can't just make my goddamn lockpicks or watch already my late dvd?

On a side note, why does brewing one cup of coffee take so goddamn long that it actually makes sense to call a maid over and pay her 5000 yen brew one cup of coffee for you?

I think the story taking over control in what is essentially a life/management sim can be pretty annoying, especially when they need to use several days going in and out of palaces. If they're looking at quality of life improvements for Persona 6, just make the protagonist a buff dude who doesn't get tired from sending out a calling card or whatever. I only ended up maxing, hm, maybe ten social links in Persona 4? For people not following a guide or optimizing everything with personas and gifts, that extra time wouldn't ruin the time management aspect, it would just make it more possible to actually rank up more in the confidants. Let me be clear here: I'm probably not playing the beginning of this game again until like ten years in the future, because the tutorial and exposition is just massive. New Game +-ing my way through every confidant isn't going to be a good time.

Personally I don't have much of a problem with the way P5 occasionally has sections of a month predominantly taken up by plot developments that railroad you from day to day, but even if I were to be super upset about a lot of time being "lost" (which is a mistake in peoples' mindsets - if the time taken away is mandatory, the game is being balanced around that, nothing has been "lost" in actuality) I feel exactly the same way re: thinking back to how I felt when I played Persona 3 and how much more I prefer everything about the way this game handles time management instead. Very long sections of P3 happen with no major developments going on to break up the monotony of the day-to-day, and as much as I still do love that game, I would pick the way P5 handles it every single time.

The story sections, or the gang-getting-together bits, are so interesting, told so well, presented so well, that at most my only problem is "Morgana get off my fucking back, I'd just like to make some coffee once in awhile." Looking back on how P3 practically had a couple days of interesting plot per month, this is the best they've managed the balance yet between telling a story vs. the day-to-day grind of life simulating.

In the future, ironically, I'd like them to take inspiration from P3, in spite of everything I just said above. In that game, you could choose to sort of push yourself to get things done even if the game would occasionally warn you "Look, you can do this, but you run the risk of getting sick and if that happens, you're going to regret it." But you could still do things. You could keep going over and over into Tartarus, even if your party would moan and complain about it, and you felt like shit the next day, but you could do it. Instead of having a babysitter next time in someone like Morgana, let me do it myself, even if there are risks.

I've played P3 and 4, but I gotta say there's something about how front-loaded the 'tutorial' days are that's kind of frustrating. They keep teasing you with all this cool stuff you could do in town but then heap on another couple hours of rail-roading just when you think it's gonna let you loose and check that stuff out.

I gotta say, I've hit the end of July/beginning of August and I have more free time than I know what to do with. I'm exaggerating of course, but they do give you plenty of free time to do whatever. I think a lot of the frustration comes from how many options there are of things to do at night. In vanilla 4, you could read, study, go do Devil Nurse, fish, or hang out with Nanako or Dojima for the majority of the game. In 5, there are just as many S. Links at night as there are during the day (if not more), not to mention making tools, making coffee, reading, studying, hitting the bathhouse, working numerous jobs and a bunch of other useful things. So it seems like when Morgana just says go to sleep, it feels wasteful cause there's so much to do.

I do think that when the game forces you back home and to bed, it's really just giving you an opportunity to save. It's just annoying cause your desk is like...right there. If you could make tools every time you were forced to bed, you'd have max Proficiency by June.

Doesn't anyone find it weird that exams are 1 question a day and they make you waste an entire week on a mere 6 questions? How does selling a single medal make you só tired that you need to sleep right away?

Why do I need to sleep early for a social study trip?

Why so many japanese-specific questions in class? Persona is e-sports now.

Persona really should have implemented a time-structure, like hanging out will take you 3 hours but listening to the speach of a politician only takes 30 minutes. Cleary our protagonist uses his transit to read half his book, so why can reading half a book take the entire evening at Leblanc?

Probably because it's a japanese game that takes place in japan.

I thought the questions have had a pretty good variety too.

Even the ones that are very Japanese centric seem focused on relatively famous things.

I'm passed July at this point and I had an entire month to dick around. It was eerie and almost overwhelming to suddenly have all this free time and contacts to hang with.

I feel like a Mass Effect Andromeda apologist when I say this, but the game really does open up as it goes on. The more characters the game introduces you to, the more time it seems to give you to get to know them. The last story Palace I had to do gave me almost an entire month.

The best advice I can give is crush those Palaces immediately. Get as far as you can get in a day to the point of almost whiping. Trying for the minimum amount of days you spend fighting gives you loads of time.

I feel like i'm coming at this from the other side, at first I did think that instead of mona telling me to sleep instead of say let me make some tools or something would be a good use of time. But now that im at at, presumably, the final palace, i feel like there wasn't enough time spent of you just hanging out with your friends, it seems to be all buisiness all the time. When I think back to persona 4 and 3, I feel like I had more time to just hang with everyone as a group of kids being kids. Maybe im wrong, I dont have the number of days you spend doing stuff like that so i can't really say but i feels like 5 had less, granted i have been playing this game non-stop everyday since it came out so maybe i just blew through it all, but am I alone on this?

maybe they'll change it up in a lupin edition or whatever.

How are your social skills and social ranks looking overall?

@ajamafalous:I'm at the start of december and at this point im going to max every social link except for sun and tower, im at rank 6 with sun and have maxed all other night confidants but I left it to long and you lose access to it during mid november, and ill be at rank 9 with tower.

I spent to much time on other stuff, like i accidently wasted a day washing cloths, praying at a shrine and working out to raise hp/sp. my understanding is you can have something like 2 or 3 weeks left of free time if you work super efficiently.

And I have maxed all social stats.

@rodin: How many times would you say you had to hang out with someone multiple times for them to rank up? So far (early/mid July) it seems like if someone isn't going to rank up on the next hangout, I can just wait a few days and they'll eventually call/text me to invite me to hang out for a rank up anyway. Was that your experience as well?

This is just a Persona thing, but yeah it's super annoying when the game makes you do something and then it's like "welp off to bed". It can be frustrating. It's why I'm glad I play on safe mode so I can enjoy more of the social stuff and just get the dungeons done with in a day or two. The calling cards are the worst thing. You have to leave the dungeon (so that's one day down), send the card (another day down), then fight the boss (another day down). It's a stupid system.

@ajamafalous: Yea early on, you can end up hanging out with people 1-2 times before they will rank up, sojiro was super bad about this, I think i spent time with him 3 times and then on the fourth he would rank up, there are ways around this once you get the fortune confidant, probably along with temperence, hands down imo the two most usefull confidants.

As a rule of thumb you probably shouldnt hang with someone if there rank wont go up, at least dont do it to often, but hanging out with them when they call you is usaully a pretty good use of time. You'll either get three notes/points/whatever plus either 3 points to a social stat (movie, study, or hanging in your room) or sometimes 3 points towards a second confidant, and maybe i guess something to decorate your room with.

Also I recomend not using the shrine to increase points unless theres absoulutely nothing else to do, which is never. But i could be wrong on this.

Do you not have to hang with them to get to that point anyways? They won't always level when you hang, with them so you gotta have those "filler" hang outs (and in the girls case give them gifts).

There are no wasted days when you consider the game is made with those limitations in mind. You are not owed any of these days. The game has a story and you follow it and you can still beat it even though theres a few nights in a row you can't go do whatever you want.

@kknialler: Was just about to say something to this effect. You nailed it. I think people also want to kind of play it like they would an open world game or something when it absolutely is not that at all.

Also, if they really allowed you to have maximum free time in literally any given day, the average playthrough would probably be closer to 150 hours or more. If Morgana's telling you to go to sleep, just move on. That's how the game is designed. It's not a huge deal, especially when you're playing through almost an entire calendar year, day by day.

I don't dislike it as much as some people but "Let's not do that today." is an absolute bullshit way of writing that limitation. It's not Persona 4's "you're tired, you should go to sleep" (though Morgana does say stuff to that effect occasionally), it feels way more arbitrary.

Nope. There's other ways of increasing your bond with them, so it's possible to do those things (which don't necessarily take time) and then only do the hangouts when there's going to be a rank up. Getting Fortune to 7 is among the most important things you can do in P5 for this reason.

Level up the Temperance Confidant and the Fortune confidant to fully optimize your schedule

@kishinfoulux:

Yea, this. I mean early on you dont have a ton of options, and i dont have a perfect schedule for this game, but as i mentioned, try not to go up to say, ryuji at school to hang with him for if you can help it, granted i did this quite a bit up untill i got fortune up and just barely missed out on maxing all the confidants.

Wait how do you give people gifts?

@frostyryan: When you visit them just to spend time and they won't rank up yet. At the end it'll prompt you about a gift if you've got any in your possession.

This game is worse than P3 and P4 about it, and it's really frustrating sometimes. No spoilers but one time it pulls about ONE GODDAMN MONTH from you. It's pretty ridiculous. Felt like I was in the opening again. Hope that this won't repeat itself.

This is an annoyance, because while the story has been paced better, the gameplay-pacing is out of whack. Is there really no middle-ground to this?

@frostyryan: you can only give gifts to your lady friends, also you have to buy them first

Obviously everybody understands that the game's time limits were designed with those days not counting towards your total; I'm not sure why people keep bringing this up as some kind of defense.

The point is that it's taking days that you might've previously thought you'd have access to in a seemingly arbitrary fashion, which feels like it's stealing or wasting days. We went and watched the news with the gang today? Better go to sleep early. You've got an art exhibit to go to tomorrow? Better go to sleep early. Sending a calling card, a system the game doesn't even explain to you until the second dungeon for seemingly no reason except to lead to a 'gotcha!' moment for new players, leading to plenty of posts by people who got fucked and lost 5-10 hours because they waited until the last day for the first dungeon because it's their first Persona game? I'll let you stay up to make infiltration tools, but no reading or watching TV or doing pullups or anything else in your room, let alone going to hang out with someone, even though you seem to be able to manage spending time at night and then going to school the next morning every other day. This becomes even more grating when, after the fourth dungeon, there is a period of 3-5 days that have forced story stuff that takes up your day but then you're free to do whatever you want to at night during those days, so the game doesn't even follow its own logic as far as stealing days or half-days from you.

I'm over 70 hours in and I love the game, but let's not act like there aren't things that it does poorly. Things can be good while still having flaws worth discussing without blindly defending them.

@ajamafalous: Um... not blindly defending anything? It's my defense based on my time with the game, and previous persona games. its not a blind defense. It's my experience that this hasn't negatively affected my time with the game. get over yourself dude.

You are going to eat sushi tomorrow...you should sleep early!

I'm going to dropkick Morgana into the nearest sewage spill.

@ajamafalous: I mean, yeah, I'm not gonna act like it's perfect, but I can at least see the general rhyme and reason for why it happens at times. We're all going to an art exhibit tomorrow for some investigating? Sure, it makes sense to go to bed early in that case. This really applies whenever people in your group are talking about any plans that pertain to the main story; you sort of just have to expect that entire day to be devoted to that thing because it's planned around it! Not super hard to grasp, at least for me, being 20-ish hours in. In-between dungeons, there's just always gonna be a certain stretch of days where you're gathering information for a dungeon and are, as a result, gonna be too busy to do much else. It works pretty similarly in Persona 4, but maybe it's not as noticeable because you really didn't have that much to do in the evening in that game. Maybe it's because I've played a lot of Persona/SMT games, but it's something that really doesn't bother me all that much.

I can see how first-timers could get screwed with the calling card business, for sure, though there's literally no advantage to waiting on a dungeon rather than just getting through it in as few days as possible. The only instance where I hold off is if I maybe want to fuse something and have an opportunity to level up the respective Confidant and get more EXP out of the fusion process, but this is stuff that only takes up one, maybe two days. I'm at the second dungeon and haven't had Mementos available for all that long, but I'll also probably get one solid day of grinding before fighting the boss. If you're already in the deadline sequence and devote, like, 5 days to non-dungeon stuff, then of course it's gonna be down to the wire (I kind of did this with the first dungeon and had 2 days left in the end). It is kinda fucked how they don't let you know about the calling card deadline for the first dungeon until it could potentially be too late, though.

I can't speak for the parts of the game I haven't gotten to yet, like that part around the fourth dungeon you're talking about, but again, this doesn't seem like a huge deal to me. If there is some story stuff that happens in a day, the process of trying to see if you can go out during the evening or whatever takes literally seconds! If you can do it for that day, cool. If you can't, OK. Guess I'll progress the game by sleeping! Of course, everyone's gonna react differently to that system, but getting used to it really doesn't feel like it should take that long.

Also, yeah, the 'blindly defending' thing's a bit much. I love the game, too (especially since I've waited over 5 years for it!), but that's really how I earnestly feel about that stuff.

There literally are advantages to waiting. You get more personas, levels, gear, thief equipment, social link ranks, etc. The random level 16s running around the otherwise level 8ish dungeon whipped my ass and I wanted to prepare in case I missed an ambush. The game says to spend your time wisely, so I saved finishing the first dungeon until my third day before the deadline, not knowing if I would still get the days after the boss fight to do stuff or not. I even thought I had a buffer in case it did something weird. Then it busts out the calling card mechanic taking a full day and "one day left" actually means "zero days left", so I have no option but to replay an entire week. Having the new mechanic taking an extra day for plot reasons is one thing, repeating over and over (and over) that you have exactly so many days to finish a dungeon and then suddenly revealing at the end you actually have fewer days is shit design.

And then of course right after that, I rent a DVD and exams happen. Then the new dungeon opens. I have late fees piling up, my plant needs food, and the fucking cat won't let me go outside!

@bocckob: That the deadline countdown in the upper right doesn't show the actual amount of days you have left is poop, but you can also check the calendar in the menu for exact dates on when you need to secure the route/send the calling card/etc. Also, using Third Eye will let you see which enemies are tougher (they're color coded), which can be super helpful in evading them (I'm trying to take down the second dungeon in the minimum number of days, and I kept getting into battles with Nue and promptly getting my ass handed to me). These kinds of things are outlined in tutorials pretty early on, so it's pretty easy to forget along the way in a 100+ hour game, lol.

Aside from Ryuji, all of my Confidant ranks are hell of low (my Guts are still too low to actually start even Takemi's Confidant), but I usually go for ranking up Social Links/Confidants as much as I can between dungeons. You're right, though, everyone's gonna manage their time differently!

General rule of thumb, though; don't worry about not being able to do things after a dungeon if you beat it early; the game would never punish you for being expedient on that front. If you do manage to get to the end of the dungeon early, you may as well take care of it instead of trying to dance with the deadline.

you never had those days, from a development story point of view. Just look at it like that, you aren't really being robbed of them.

@pause: So you don't get to roleplay a teenager for a full year, more like 50 days with intermittent amnesia.

ok seriously why do people keep using this defense over and over again...

What this thread is complaining about is basically an invisible wall. Imagine if in an open world game, there was just a huge invisible wall in a place where it FEELS like it shouldn't be. It would suck. I want to go to this place I see but there's an invisible wall here. In p5, a game I absolutely adore by the way, the game forces you to go to sleep on days when you did nothing more than have a "plot chat" with your friends. YES we know we never had those days to begin with. Yes that's how it's designed. The argument is that the game POORLY JUSTIFIES reasons to force you to go to sleep. The day to day portions are a life sim and it occasionally gives poor excuses on why you can't sim your life.

It may not feel great, but consider the alternative. Suppose on all those week-long segments of daytime plot you could do whatever at night. Then the story segments would be constantly interrupted by snippets of night social links or book text or whatever. It would kill the pacing of the main plot, which in modern Persona fashion takes literal days to progress. Sending you to bed early is the game's way of keeping the plot segments tight.

But it would be in the hands of the player at that point. If you were the person who thinks those night activities hindered the pacing of the story you could decide for yourself to take the night off instead of an arbitrary decision from your talking cat overlord.