Persona 5

I think it's important to say that I fucking love Persona. Persona 3 and 4 are up there with some of my favorite games ever, and I think that's important in order to contextualize my state of mind going into this game. Normally I genuinely try to level my expectations for any game I play, but with Persona 5 that was impossible. My longstanding relationship with the series coupled with being in love with every trailer shown for this game shot my expectations through the roof. And believe me when I say I am completely ecstatic to say that Persona 5 fully surpassed those expectations.

Persona 5 has you taking the role of a silent protagonist who transfers to a high school in Tokyo after being falsely convicted of assault when he protected a woman from being raped. Initially the premise seems strange, as it is made very clear that the protagonist saved this woman and did nothing wrong—although it is expanded on and justified as the game progresses. Even then, the game takes a while to actually explain it to you, and I think it would be better suited for immersion to expose some of those details earlier to the player. The protagonist ends up staying in the care of a family friend, who throws you in the attic and by all appearances doesn't seem to want you in his life in the slightest. Additionally, exaggerated rumors of your criminal record have already spread throughout your new school.

All in all things are pretty rough for our protagonist. The game starts in a rough place and things kind of only get rougher from there. Unlike Persona 4, which had a relatively light-hearted tone, Persona 5 is dark, and those first several hours really just smack you in the face with it. I figured this game wouldn't be the same sort of whimsical adventure Persona 4 was, but this game goes into some dark places. It was unexpected, but completely welcomed, and feels like an appropriate direction to take.

Shortly after moving in, you awaken to the power of your rebellious spirit—the power of Persona. Joining together with others who awaken to this power, you start the Phantom Thieves, a group which steals the hearts of corrupt adults, forcing them to atone for their crimes. This involves infiltrating the target's “palace,” a manifestation of their cognition contained within a mysterious world known as the metaverse, accessed through a convenient smartphone app! The palaces take various forms, from a castle to a bank to a tomb. Unlike previous games in the franchise, which featured randomly generated dungeons, these palaces use a predetermined layout. This serves to create far more memorable dungeons than previous games, mostly because there is actually something to remember more than just a texture set. Most of the dungeons are well-crafted and fun to explore, progress is marked by safe rooms that you can fast travel between, and any backtracking is automated in a forced, but very appreciated way (“Hey, remember that place we can go to now? Let's just go there!”).

Fans of the randomly generated dungeon crawling of games past will be appeased by a single, multi-leveled dungeon known as Mementos. Mementos has a random layout and it unlocked piece-meal throughout the game, similar to Tartarus in Persona 3. Optional bosses are unlocked and littered throughout, and though I never exactly loved my forays into the depths of Mementos, I still enjoyed my time there. The random layouts has never been my preferred dungeon style and was always one of my main gripes with Persona and Shin Megami Tensei games in the past. That being said, Mementos is pretty easy, I played on hard difficulty and never had an issue traversing the dungeon. On that note, this game—at least on hard—was actually pretty tough. I died several times throughout and some of the bosses took my several tries. Speaking through second hand I've heard the game wasn't much of a challenge on normal, so keep that in mind when picking your difficulty.

The combat is very a fairly standard turn-based RPG. It's element based, with 8 magic elements as well as two types of physical damage—normal attacks and gun attacks. Each character and enemy has their own affinity, strengths toward certain elements, weak to other elements, and combat generally consists of attempting to find these weaknesses and exploiting them in order to knock all the enemies down and an “all-out attack” for a great deal of damage. It's speedy and flows well, and once you find out the weaknesses of the set of enemies in the dungeon each encounter will go pretty fast. The main draw for me is the protagonist's ability to wield multiple personas and switch between them at will. Think Pokemon but with mythological demons. And rather than the generic monsters you fight in Persona 3 and 4, this game has you fight against the very same demons you control, which is in line with the mainline Shin Megami Tensei games. Also from the mainline series, to take control of these demons you engage them in conversation, convincing them to join your side by answering their questions. To be completely honest I've never enjoyed the conversation mechanic. It's always felt strange to me, like some kind of guessing game to figure out which of these responses this particular demon will enjoy. Once you figure out the kind of things they like to hear you can kind of gather what to say, but it wasn't very rewarding and felt completely arbitrary.

Another one of my loves of the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona games comes with the fusing mechanic. You take the Personas you acquire in the dungeons and fuse them together to create new more powerful personas. Persona 5 takes some cues from Persona 4: Golden and streamlines the system to make it far more accessible and less time-consuming. Where before skills your fused persona would inherit were randomly assigned, you now directly assign the skills you want to pass on. This makes getting the persona you want with the skills you want much less cumbersome than it was before.

It really just becomes a little puzzle of getting the ideal Persona, few other games have me looking into the available resources (e.g. fusion charts, ideal skill sets) the way that Persona has in the past and continues to do so with this latest entry, and as a whole Persona 5 really takes that mechanic and makes it a hell of a lot more enjoyable.

The most important thing for me going into this game was whether I was going to enjoy the cast of characters. Persona 4 in particular had such a wonderful cast, each one being memorable in their own right. At first, I was worried about this. The first few party members: Ryuji, Ann and the strange talking cat creature Morgana did not immediately jump out to me as standout characters the same way that characters like Chie and Kanji did in Persona 4. Though as the game progressed I really began to enjoy these characters as much as I did the ones in Persona 4. Morgana especially grew on me, a character that I had at first thought was downright annoying, but by the end was one of my favorites.

The Social Link system from Persona 3 and 4, a set of side stories tied to several different characters, comes back in 5, renamed to the Confidant system. The system has you using your limited down time socializing with not only your party members but various other characters, including your caretaker, a back-alley doctor with legs that go on for days, a formerly corrupt politician who seeks to redeem his name, and a grade school kid who has the sickest hat/jacket combo I have ever seen. Seriously Atlus. I need that merch. Whereas some of the Social Links in Persona 3 and 4 were entirely forgettable to the point that I never felt like doing them, each and every Confidant in Persona 5 is enjoyable in its own way. Even the politician Confidant, which at the start seemed like it would be incredibly dry ended up being one of my favorites. Not only that, but they provide much more concrete benefits to you. The benefits of hanging with your party members include allowing them to follow up on some of your attacks in battle to taking a hit that would otherwise kill you. The benefits of hanging with non-party members get pretty insane, from being able to skip demon negotiation to your backup party members getting full experience from fights to being able to start off a battle by DUMPING bullets into your enemies, which is a load of fun.

Oh, and the soundtrack the god damn soundtrack. Composer Shoji Meguro (who I named my character after if that gives you any indication of the respect I hold for that man) once again delivers a phenomenal OST that I cannot get enough of. Filled with groovy funky jams that will. Not. Leave. Your. Head. Persona 5 without a doubt has one of my favorite video game soundtracks of all time. The battle theme, which I must have heard several hundred times, is one that I never got sick of, and the theme that plays when you're storming the dungeon getting ready to fight the final boss... nothing could possibly get you more pumped. The soundtrack is really part of the greater style of this game, and this game has got styyyyyyyle. It's really hard to describe, it's just a collection of little things about the presentation of the game that just makes it ooze style. If you like games with a defined aesthetic, this game has got one, and god damn do I love it.

Without saying too much about the story, it goes to some places. I definitely enjoyed the story as a whole, though it's nothing absolutely remarkable. It's more the day to day character interactions that really makes Persona special, and that is present in Persona 5 to a great degree. The game took me a whopping 103 hours to complete, and I've heard of numbers higher than that. If you're willing to put in the time, Persona 5 is definitely a game worth playing. It's the kind of game that gives me wistful nostalgia when I finally got to the end, and the kind of game that made me think about new game + mere hours after completing it. I cannot recommendit enough, play this god damn game.