I've always felt as though the success of Giant Bomb has come, at least partially, from the original Endurance Run, which is still among the very best pieces of content the GB team has ever produced. Here's hoping they'll find it in their hearts to do one for P5 as well! Now, given that this site is filled with P4 fans, I figure there must be at least a couple of people who are playing the fifth one in Japanese, like I am right now. So let's share some early impressions, shall we! I'll start off with some general comments, and then put spoiler tags over stuff that I consider to be spoilers.

So I'm 3,5 hours in at this point, which will probably end up being only a fraction of my total play time. I am absolutely loving it so far. The game has yet to settle into its main gameplay loop though, I figure. I've just had Ryuji gain his persona (the design of which is just great) and it feels as though the game is ready to open up into the dungeon-crawl-and-social-link pattern that we all know at this point. I might be mistaken though: as you can tell by the number of hours I've already put in, this game takes its time setting the table, and it's entirely possible that the introductory sequence will continue when I pick it back up tomorrow. I haven't been bored for a second, however.

The game is just dripping with style, like you wouldn't believe. Every screen is a joy to look at, and the music is just fantastic. I'm glad I got the special edition version that comes with the "greatest hits music of all the Persona games", because the battle music and the post-battle experience screen song are already amongst some of my favourite tracks of the year. Aside from that, Persona has skipped a generation of consoles, which has given them time to actually animate most of the cutscene stuff. In previous games, the artwork and the dialogue was so good that you didn't really feel as though the game was missing a high level of graphic fidelity, but there's no denying that the "action" scenes were always crude.

Persona 5 makes the actiony parts of the store flow much better by having the character models acting them out. That's not to say there aren't some rough edges still, but they mostly come off as cartoony and totally work within the context of the game, I think. The whole game is just a joy to look at, and if you're like me and have spent hundreds of hours in Persona 3 and 4, the changes are very welcome as to make the whole thing feel fresh.

The characters have real potential. The Persona 4 ones are amongst my favourites of all time, and it's too early for me to say whether or not these new character stack up favourably to Ryosuke, Chie, Dojima, Nanako and co, but I could see the new players becoming very dear to me as the story goes on as well. The dialogue is as good as it's ever been, and the cast is nothing if not colourful. I specifically like Sakura Sojiro, the café owner who acts as this game's Dojima by being the one to take you in after a certain event forces you away from your hometown. He's been very grumpy so far, but I expect he'll come around at some point.

The fundamentals of the combat are unchanged, but the whole fighting system feels much snappier now on a control level, and the fights are more cinematic for it. The dungeon crawling itself also feels much more engaging. The dungeons in P3 and P4 never really hooked me. They often had great concepts behind them (e.g. the Bad Bad Bathhouse) but the graphical limitations of the PS2 made them rather bland on the inside to meander through. The new P5 dungeon (I've only been inside one of them, to be fair) oozes personality, and the concept behind it is great. Kamoshida is a great character, and his volleyball club antics being reflected in the castle dungeon was cool to see.

One of the reasons I liked P4 so much, is because it captured the feeling of living in a peaceful rural Japanese town so incredibly well (I've lived in such a place in Japan for a year, and was constantly reminded of Persona 4 while I was there.) P5 takes place in Tokyo, and captures the feeling of the metropolis very well. One of the things that makes Yakuza great is the way those games emulate the feeling of walking through a Japanese street so perfectly. P5 accomplishes this as well. At the start of the game, you're required to navigate a Tokyo train station and get on the Ginza line by navigating with the signs on the walls, and this (small) gameplay sequence captured the feeling of doing this exact thing in real life so well. You can tell these games are made by Japanese people who know how to encapsulate what makes their country tick into a video game world.

So yeah, those are my thoughts so far. For people wondering how this game stacks up to the previous game(s), I can tell you that I think Persona 5 has been an absolute winner so far for me. There's likely to be 50 - 80 hours still to go in which it could easily falter, but I have been loving it thus far. It's hard for me not to view the elements of this game as parallels to Persona 4, though. For instance, the first thing I thought when I saw Ryuji was: "ah, this is a mix between Kanji and Ryosuke, the character that will become my best friend early on." So far, I've been right on that front. Morgana seems like a Teddy stand-in, though clearly she has a better idea of what's going on than the bear ever did. Takamaki struck me as a Rise type of character, what with the whole model thing, but I've yet to have real story moments with her, so we'll see. Either way, it's been great fun so far!

So, anyone else playing with thoughts to share? I might write a new post once I've gotten further in, and may at some point write a review. Provided I manage to find the time to finish the game, that is. I have a free week right now, but my available time will decrease dramatically starting from next week, so I'm not quite sure yet where I'm going to fit in Persona 5. Ah well, we'll see!

I been watching streams of the game (Waiting for the Feb release) and it been pretty impressive. There a lot more design to fights with how party members are set since their all balance between physical and elemental attacks with a few having more support skills.

This is also a pretty dark Persona with elements of social abuse, conspiracy, stealing, and social problems that are pretty current.

Characters are pretty deep despite having a bad impression to them at first. Example: Makoto starts out as this high and mighty Student president but you found out she feel useless when struggles with outside forces and trying to compare herself to her sister.

I'll post more later when I get some time to write.

Are there english subtitles or do you speak japanese or read it fluent enough to get the story? I'm glad this game is good, I may go back and finish my persona 3 playthrough. The style of this one reminds me a lot of that game more so than 4, which seemed a lot more toned down on the style to feel more like a real everyday place.

@oursin_360: There are no English subtitles, I think. I'll check the next time I boot it up if you want. Anyway, I speak Japanese, so that's how I'm playing it.

And I agree with Metalsnakezero, the game does feel decidedly darker than P4. Of course, when you think about it, Persona 4 was about a killer viciously murdering townspeople and hanging them from television antenna's, which is dark enough when you think about it, but the game always took a rather lighthearted view of these events, and the game had a happy tone in general, I think. P5 tackles some much heftier themes, not least of all the very reason the MC moves to Tokyo, i.e. because he was witness to an attempted kidnapping (and rape) and was subsequently framed for it. Everyone in Tokyo also thinks he's a sex offender, and frequently references this fact.

Oh, jeez. I've got my fingers crossed that they handle this material thoughtfully. A lot of winking and nodding in the dialogue, or story turns on "We were fools to doubt you!" could take the teeth out of it.

This is a silly question because I'm most likely not going to learn Japanese for the game but how much Japanese would you need to know to understand what is going on?

By the time I would actually learn Japanese enough to play it would be available in English.

Wait, is Yosuke pronounced with a "R"at the front in Japanese? What is going on?

The non-stop blinking in character portraits is freaking me out.

@matatat: It depends. I suppose you would not necessarily need to know all that much Japanese to understand the big themes in the story, but there are no furigana (which tell you the reading of kanji) so your kanji knowledge would have to be at least decent. Then there's the fact that plenty of the characters speak in contracted Japanese (because it sounds more natural) and your understanding of the language has to be pretty deep to be able to follow that easily. You'd first need to learn the rules of the language, and then learn about the ways Japanese people (and anime characters) break those same rules.

However, a great deal of the quality of these games also comes from the very well-written conversations and the interesting characters, and the Persona 3 and 4 localisations have been so good that they manage to deliver on this aspect in spades. I prefer playing the Japanese version because a localisation, no matter how good, can only ever be a shadow of the original work, but in the case of these games, you're not missing all that much when you play the English version. If you want to play these games purely for your own enjoyment, you're probably better off playing the game in English and enjoying it fully, as opposed to struggling through the Japanese, getting frustrated and missing many the impact of the well-oneliners and the fantastic conversations. That said, I do think the Persona games can be a fantastic tool to learn Japanese, provided your proficiency is already high enough to make it a non-frustrating experience to play the games. The characters speak, but you have to manually skip to the next line, and everything is subtitled (in Japanese) so working your way through one of these games can do wonders for your vocabulary, kanji and so on.

To your point of learning Japanese before the English version comes out; if you're starting from zero, I think it would be virtually impossible to attain the fluency needed before spring 2017, unless you have incredible drive, have enormous amounts of free time and/or live in Japan. But if you'd like to study Japanese, it's never too late (or too early) to start, of course!

@probablytuna: At first I didn't realise what you were talking about, but then I find out I misspelled Yosuke as Ryosuke, haha. Ryosuke is a pretty common name in Japan, so it must've just slipped out while I was typing. My mistake, I apologise. :p

So I just beat the game (I've been playing the Japanese version since September, I case you haven't read the rest of the thread) and I'm really satisfied with it. I think the game has a very strong ending and is just fantastic in general. I actively disliked two of the party member characters (spoilers for their names: Futaba and Haru) for a while, because I thought of them as whiny, but I came around on them by the end and now love the cast almost as much as the P4 one. P4 had Nanako and Kanji though, so it's almost an unfair fight in that regard.

Anyway, Atlus knocked it out of the park with P5 as far as I am concerned. I've seen quite a few people saying they don't like the dark tone the game takes in the opening hours, and I can definitely agree that at first it seems as though the game tackles darker themes than the previous game, but this sort of changes as the game progresses. As in, P4 also had dark themes, in a sense, with heinous murders and sexual predator Morooka and all that, but it had a very light touch about these things as opposed to being heavy-handed about them. I think P5 is very much the same as P4 in this regard, though it takes a few hours for this to become apparent.

Also, (extremely big end-game spoilers) hearing the real Igor's voice after 99 hours of having had the deep, "evil god Igor" voice was a moment that genuinely tugged at my heartstrings for some reason. I had not made a conscious note of the fact that Igor's voice was different, even though it sounded weirdly off somewhere in the back of my mind throughout the game. To then hear real Igor's "Welcome to the Velvet Room" come out again after the revelation of the real villain was special. It just goes to show how much the Persona games are getting ingrained into me.

So yes, I loved it, and I expect you will too. Vinny mentioned that he isn't sure about the direction the story is taking on the Beastcast, but I can assure you that the story congeals really well after a while. I got really invested in it. I hope Vinny keeps on playing, and I hope you give this game a shot if you're interested in it.

If there are any questions you would like to direct at someone who has beaten the game, feel free to do so here!

I just reached the month of May in-game and boy...

This. Game. Is. Fantastic.

GOTY 2017

@fitzgerald: It's still early to say, but it's incredibly good, no doubt about it. And as with all Persona games, it does get even more interesting the further in you get.

i wanted to pull myself away from the game at 10 hours and come by to say how much I was loving the game, but that was time I couldn't spare because I was too engrossed in Persona 5. This is the most fully featured and highly polished JRPG I have ever played. It's everything I was hoping Final Fantasy 15 could have been. The writing, characters, music, presentation, and gameplay all combine in a cohesive manner that few games manage to capture. Speaking as someone who has felt consistently disappointed by a declining quality in Triple A titles from EA/Bioware/Ubisoft, it fills me with so much excitement and hope for gaming as a future medium to see that there are still developers that can do things right. 25 hours in now and I can't think of another game since this new console generation has started that has gripped me in this way. I don't usually score games or make game of the year lists, but I will be shocked if any other title this year delivers this exceptional level of quality for me.

I haven't played too much of this game, much less than most of you, but I really like this game so far.

I have two questions, if anyone could help me out!

My roommate's TV is broken so there's a section of the bottom right that I can't see, which is blocking some of the dialog boxes that I can't check the log for. So I'm doing fusion requests in the Velvet Room. I just finished the first one (Jack Frost with Mabufu) and I got the second one, but the box blocked it and I can't find it written anywhere else. Can someone tell me what the second fusion request is?

Second: How does the thief's guild stuff work?? I saw the tutorial box about it, but I was speeding through the more basic stuff I already knew so I missed how you can actually put it to work. When I check the menu's tutorial section, it doesn't actually say how to use it. Only that you CAN use it.

Besides this, I'm really enjoying the game so far! I'm in mid-May, about 15 hours in. The gameplay feels like butter compared to 3/4. They fixed SO many of the small mechanics that made me crazy in the other games. I can already tell I'll have a lot to say once I'm done with it.

The second fusion request is Shiisa with Frei. Or it was for me, anyway. I don't know if they're randomized, I assume not.

@afashionablehat: Its not, had that same one also.

I don't really like these games, but I loved watching the ER. Any top-shelf playthrough recommendations yet?

You? I like you.

My only complaints are:

1. Igors voice, but I do know the reason why so I can live with it
2. My cat Oreo, whom looks striking similar to Morgana, is obsessed with my Morgana plush that came with my TYH edition

Other than that P5 is absolutely breathtaking, perfect & awesome!

Man, I've been so burnt out lately with school and work and stuff it's been really hard to get into games these past few months.

That being said, this game grabbed me even harder than I expected. I'm so damn glad I preordered it.

I'm about 13 hours in, and still aching to play more. I haven't played anything quite so much in years (I've been pre-occupied by night shifts the past few days so no chance of that). I never expected to have this much fun playing a JRPG. There exists a borderline infinite satisfaction so far to the end-of-battle experience/money/item -tally that makes me fight more and more enemies even if I don't feel like it. And with the game introducing new combat concepts such as the Totoro-homage bus, it keeps giving me more of those animations!

The problem I've had with it so far is that it seems to apply the same amount of flamboyance it has in it's visuals to the way it has structured the story, as well as the content of said story itself. Though the writing throughout has been solid to say the very least, I would've prefered a more down-to-earth opener instead of the sexual and physical violence on a school wide -level thing they went with. When the suicide attempt and rape came in it just felt like a bit too much too soon, and in a game like this, it feels like a direct continuation of making a game of such vivid style. The colors pop so maybe someone thought the story should do the same.

On the bright side, after defeating Kamoshida's Castle the game has taken on a more investigative, less frantic tone as I move towards the second Castle (which I just saved outside of after finding it the first time). I hope it keeps up this pace for at least a few hours before ramping itself up again.

I'm 10 hours and it feels like business as usual.

Not excited to go back and play it really. I did the first 'memento' so maybe it picks up later.