Persona 5

I love Persona 5... I think. One thing I'm certain of is that this title was, for years, the one game I was most anticipating, so to say hopes were high is gross understatement. And maybe that's the issue right there, my dreams were too grand to ever be reasonable. There was a popular formula that the series had adopted since the third game that Persona 5 was always going to stick heavily to, and stick it did. There was also room for growth and change in this template, and there were changes and expansions on some of these ideas that totally worked. It's basically everything I wanted, so I'm left very conflicted and confused as I wonder why I ultimately feel like Persona 5 should have been something more.

Like the previous two games, Persona 5 begins with your nameless and (mostly) silent protagonist moving to a new city for an entire school year, except this time your teased by the game beginning hitting the ground running with an action scene, only to be followed by the same 4-5 hour learning period holding your hand. The frame narrative of the game is a great tool for building suspense and foreboding, but this opening chunk of the game is indicative of one of the most frustrating parts of the game: everything is so slow. Whole conversations often felt like they could have been half as long or literally had the characters repeating themselves and going in circles in a way that ranged from baffling to infuriating.

Those characters are good mind you, but they weren't always so enjoyable that this plodding dialogue didn't start to take a toll. Soon after getting into town, your character is mixed up with a talking cat (just roll with it) and a couple other kids from your school as the Phantom Thieves, stealing the hearts of corrupted people in the metaverse, a different reality based on the tainted desires of others, to try and cause them to change their ways by force. As your group goes through it's ups and downs more people join up with you for one reason or another as you set out change society for the better. While most of these characters feel like they contribute to the group and add something to this dynamic, by the last third of the game at least one of the late game characters came into the fold with so little time to really grow or leave their mark that I repeatedly forget she was even there, including being momentarily confused when she would speak during major story beats.

This mission works as a double-edged sword. On the one hand it's almost refreshing to have a Persona game deal with some dark subjects - even admitting that Persona 4 was inherently about a serial killer murder investigation, it sometimes felt pretty twee about the whole thing - and Persona 5 doesn't really pull punches, especially with the early goings-on. On the other hand, this structure causes a strange imbalance between the abuser and the abused. As we learn more about the abusive - and heavily implied rapist - Kamoshida in the first section, we stop examining the people he's actually hurt. This continues throughout the game as we dive into the hearts of these villains, expanding upon their wicked desires and the genesis of those thoughts therein, at the cost of learning about the victims. There's no shortage of characterization for these characters elsewhere, but that stuff is technically optional and I wish more of a spotlight had been placed on them in the core story, at least as far as showing their recovery from being abused. This is especially unfortunate as the theme of the game - in a similar vein as the Persona team's previous game Catherine tried to get into regarding the declining birth-rate in Japan - is that of a generation gap. For the way that the game beats me over the head with it's "kids rule, adults drool" mentality, I wish we'd put more time into making each side seem even instead of the cartoonish feelings of resentment each has for the other. It could have been biting and poignant but is instead a little clumsy and awkward.

Series staple social links return - now called "confidants" - and for the most part they feature the real meat of characterization for the party members as well as the people around town you'll encounter. Also like the previous games, this is the best part of the game. The time management of balancing dungeon crawling with everyday life has never more been in service of getting the combat out of the way for more hanging out. It's also here that perhaps the best addition to the game is found, that being there are abilities and buffs gained from hanging out besides just getting a boost of experience when creating new Personas. This creates more of a drive to complete each story-line and also allows you to spec your character a little bit. I liked the washed up politician, but his bonuses to negotiation became less important to me than the straight up EXP multipliers of Mishima, your fellow classmate, or the ability to swap party members on the fly given to you by the pro Shogi player, so that's where I focused my time.

The other half of the game is the metaverse and the dungeons found within. The dungeons - referred to as Palaces - are wonderfully designed as far as their aesthetic and themes, even if they weren't always the most fun mechanically. Like everything else that feels too long, many of the Palaces just seemed to go on forever with lengthy puzzles that were more tedious than they were challenging. The bespoke dungeons are a welcome change after two games of largely procedurally generated levels, and the environments are all wonderfully vivid and unique, but I still wish I'd spent less time in them. Procedurally generated dungeon floors do return in the form of Mementos, a dungeon based on the dark feelings of the general populace that aren't strong enough to form their own Palace. Although there's no real time limit as it lasts the length of the game, having a place to go and grind for EXP when there are no Palaces is a must, and the total lack of puzzles found there is nice.

That's not to say that the combat is bad, far from it. A new UI comes along with several smart changes and tweaks, including separating physical damage into melee and gun damage (because everyone is packing!), adding more magical elements to make enemies more varied, and being able to talk to and negotiate with the enemies. Obtaining enemies can still be done via fusion as collecting different Personas with different abilities is still the name of the game, but now you can try and convince the enemies (who are the Personas themselves now) to join up with you, as well as having option to intimidate them or money or items.

It are these options in both combat and walking around that give Persona 5 it's charm, even if what you can do feels terrifyingly overwhelming at the start. The first time the game told me I could run around town I spent far longer than I should have just looking at every single thing that was open to me. People to form relationships with, multiple jobs to try and land to increase your vital social stats, other activities like batting practice and movies to go see, it's almost too much. Thankfully, what you could be doing on any given day has never been surfaced as cleanly as it is here. Clicking the touchpad on the controller brings up - if you opted into the online component you will be asked about every time you open the game - a breakdown of what other players have done on this day as far as metaverse activity, confidants to visit, or daily life to engage in. While it's not a comprehensive guide of what to do with your time, the little bit of structure and suggestion it gives did wonders for me as I got my legs under me and started to form a routine. The ugly side of this, however, is the sheer amount of times that you are told you can't do anything because of flimsy story reasons. That cat - named Morgana - told me to go to sleep more times playing this game than my actual mother ever said to me. For a game about time management, having that control taken away is never fun.

These activities would be significantly less fun if the game didn't have a unique style to it, but if there is one thing that Persona 5 should hang it's hat on the most, it is the look of the game. Both in motion and in relative stillness, Persona 5 just looks amazing. I genuinely can't think of in-game menus that have ever looked better than those found here, and the way that information is given to you makes it fun and exhilarating to watch your stats go up. Combining that with the rebellious attitude of the whole thing makes a striking package. I particularly liked the way that your objectives would be written out less like directions and more like orders. As well, of course, the music is top-notch from start to finish. Having been maybe the most celebrated aspect of the series as a whole, the acid-jazz inspired tunes are catchy and jammin' when they have to be, or chill subdued when needed. For a game that's probably close to if not exceeding a hundred hours of your life, having music that doesn't get grating to hear for that long is a necessity.

So having said all of that, I'm still left feeling like there's something missing that's preventing this from being the best entry in the series. The amount of style and refinements to the systems would make it hard to go back to the older games, but there was something there that stuck out more. I spent just over a hundred hours myself, and even I wasn't sure what it was that I wanted. Maybe if the characters had been a little more compelling, or if the story had landed it's themes a little more succinctly, if it had all just been a little tighter, I'd be happy. It's not even that anything is missing, perhaps, it's that what's there just wasn't enough.

Look, Persona 5 is fantastic. It's great... it's great! To say otherwise would be foolish... but I wanted more. I don't want "hype" or "anticipation" to factor into my feelings on the game as much as they maybe have, but even with that removed, Persona 5 was great when it should be amazing. I didn't want to get Persona 3-3 the way Persona 4 felt like Persona 3-2, but I don't think we can go back to this well without an even more drastic change going forward, not that I think we'll have to worry about that for a while. Whether it's being frustrated with the dungeons keeping me away from the more relaxed school life, or principle characters being marginalized in their own story, there was always some little thing that I bristled at. Everyone who is a fan of JRPGs should check out Persona 5 - and all of the Persona games, really - that's obvious. Just make sure you're expectations are grounded ever so slightly.