Giant Bomb Presents: Persona 5 Spoilercast

I don't have any issues with the plot like they do, EXCEPT, I do agree about Morgana's disappointing reveal. I thought Morgana would turn out to be a creation by Futaba's mom designed to ferry people safety around the Metaverse. But no, not even that, and no payoff with the treasure or Ann obsession

I agree with Ben and Alex on their assessment. I was really happy with Makoto's story and her characterization, and I wish the rest of the cast could have gotten as much development as she did. It's still the most "fun" Persona game I've played with all of the great quality of life improvements to fusing and the battles.

It really concerns me that folks are conflating the disappointment expressed by some fans and critics with genuine dislike. P4 is one of my favorite games, and there are many people in the games sphere who share that view. That's a hard bar to meet. That doesn't mean that they dislike it-- it just means they don't like it as much as they thought they would. I feel, however, that a lot of people were just never able to overcome the hurdle that this isn't just P4 part 2. I'm sorry guys, but they had to mix it up. Persona 5 is better in almost every single way. Maybe folks just need to backtrack and try playing P3&4 again so they can really appreciate what this game does. The quality of life and aesthetic improvements are so severe that I don't think I'll ever be able to go back.

In my estimation, the only thing that lags behind P4 (and, granted, this is among the most important aspects) is the main cast of characters. That crew isn't as well rounded as P4, but it still has some real bright spots like Makoto and Futaba. The extended cast, however, is leagues better. I couldn't name a single non-story critical SLink from 4. This game? Most of them are already sticking with me longer. The other important stuff (music, dungeon-crawling feel, combat, etc.) are all better here.

Persona 5 is undoubtedly a better game than 4. Do I like it more? That, I'm not sure of quite yet. I have the same nostalgia for Inaba that a lot of folks do, but I'm not insane. I realize that P5 is what this series looks like when it's running on all cylinders. Sure, there are some loose screws in the story department, but it all still works in the end. Different strokes and all that, but I just don't see why the game has to get dragged for taking a different path, especially when it does so to great effect. (Not saying that Alex and Ben do this, just a general comment.)

I felt he could have been utilized better. It's like the writers had four different ideas on what type of character Akechi should be but didn't have time to develop any of them. First he's set up as a foil and rival to Joker, but then doesn't do anything that affects the crew or overarching plot in any way. He just kind of exists, as potential. When he announces that he's going to become a regular customer to the coffee shop, you'd think it would be the start of a cat-and-mouse game in the vein of Death Note, but again nothing happens

Then he's suddenly written as a fellow underdog and aspiring ally, but it happens so suddenly that it's never really believable.

The bomb crew generally have these weird moments with some games that are almost universally praised. Witcher 3 and Persona 5 are obvious examples. It's all good, it's not like either of those games or other such examples are in need of yet more praising, but it is still kind of strange.

@corvidus: I only used metacritic as an example to refute Alex's statement that the game generally had mixed reviews. It didn't. I'm not arguing whether the game is actually good or not, but the reaction of the game.

@elmorales94@fugoy: What about the much weaker translation? The sometimes TOO stylish hud? And the main story (a pretty big draw for JRPGs) being not that great? Don't get me wrong, I put in about 110 hours into this game and thought it was pretty good. But it being objectively better than P4 or even "one of the greatest JRPGs of all time" is complete bullshit.

Subjectively you can think whatever you want, happy that people enjoyed it as much as they did.

Makoto is pretty good, but I'm still partial to Kawakami, with Haru and Futaba coming in a close second alongside the aforementioned student council president.

Rivers in the Desert best song though.

@asmo917: Not only that, he's always the one rushing right into trouble. I gave him a pass the first time, but he kept on doing it over and over again.

Kawakami is easily a top tier girl. I love Sojiro's reaction to her when she walks in on Valentine's day.

This is basically where I'm at.

So I liked P5. Liked it a lot. I'm listening to Layer Cake as I type this. But you nailed it with he lack of charm. For me, P5 has a fundamental flaw that it never really gets over: almost the entire main cast is unsympathetic and awful. Everyone is shitty, and especially shitty to Ryuji (who exists, both within the game world and without, in a quantum state of "gets a bum rap" and "maybe deserves it?"), but up until Makoto showed up I was ready to throw this game out a window because, despite really digging the combat and thinking the first dungeon was the coolest thing I'd seen in a Persona game (and I'm Captain Persona 2, I'm down with fighting Rumor Hitler and destroying the universe to save it)...hating everyone in my party was really bumming me out. Makoto was great, Futaba was fine (though the dating thing was profoundly creepy and I avoided it with a quickness), Haru was literally not characterized enough to remember her and I had Psio already so she never saw play. I couldn't stand Ryuji (though I eventually felt bad for him), Ann (eugh), and especially Yusuke.

One word about Yusuke. Seriously, aside from the lobster scene, which made me laugh out loud, that dude is awful. Aw-ww-ful. This game already leers at sexual violence towards women while it's saying that sexual violence towards women is Bad and Wrong (though this chills out by midgame, fortunately, mostly, except for Haru oh crap maybe not). I thought it was kinda cheap but at least earned with Kamoshida, and super cheap but threw down some oh-of-course stakes with Kaneshiro, but Yusuke? That kind of coercion makes you a bad dude. I wanted an option to throw him out of my party forever. And it never even gets mentioned again. Rockabilly Fox is a really good look, but I left him on the bench and barely raised his Social Link because dude is gross.

P2--both games--had a bunch of characters I downright liked, end to end (Ulala, Ginko, Maya, Baofu, Eikichi, Jun, I think I just named almost the entire cast?), and a couple who did a lot of work to surprise you when you switched games (Katsuya comes to mind). P3 had Tanaka being a real piece of work, but earning some "...yeah, you're all right" at the end of it, and most of your party (shouts, Junpei) at least clears the bar of "would I put up with these people?" In P4, even the characters I didn't like were compelling, at least among the "main path" characters. It's striking to think about, because for my money, Yosuke is dumb and a jerk and I don't like him. On a Waypoint podcast Austin said something like "Yosuke is the friend you take-a-break from, maybe forever, because you've grown up more than he has" (man, that'd have been way more interesting of a Social Link) with regard to the rampant homophobia--but he feels like he's earned the leeway to be that asshole, that he's enough of "the friend" to get away with it, in a way the P5 cast never really does while they awful at you. As a lesser example: Teddie was one annoying dude, but he was my annoying dude. Chie is cool and Naoto is dope, and forget fighting people who say otherwise, I'll just let them do it.

When P5 is firing on all cylinders, it has some tremendous stuff. Mechanically it's near-perfect, and Makoto and Sojiro are two of the better characters I can remember in Persona games specifically and JRPGs generally. And, with all the complaining about the story, mechanics being able to carry a JRPG isn't something I've seen in years so that's h*ckin' cool on its own. But...man. I remain disappointed. Maybe it was impossible for P5 to reach expectations, and maybe my expectations would've been lowered if I played Catherine (which I hear is good and cool but a step down in itself).

If they'd somehow wrangled it so the game went into an endgame after the Futaba dungeon, I think I'd feel more fondly towards the game. Not often I want less game, but there you go. I finished it a lot faster than most people I know, too--I clocked at something like 75 hours. There was stuff I definitely missed, but it was also stuff I decided I didn't care about at that point because at some point in the Haru dungeon (which I didn't find hard but boy was it tedious) I just sort of made the decision to make like I had a review due and just crunched through the end of the game in a weekend. I needed to finish it, I was bought in enough that I needed to, but it's the first time I ever felt resentful because a game made me do that. One thing I did really kind of dig: when I got to the finale, I was legit wondering if we were seeing Persona smash back into SMT. That was some quality weird.

Anyway--thanks @alex, thanks @benpack. Was a great listen. ?

I am one of the people crazy enough to identify Persona 4 as my favorite game ever. I am probably the opposite of most here as I only found out about Giant Bomb because I love Persona 4 so much, and found out about the Endurance Run as it was winding down. And I can tell you that Persona 5 did not top Persona 4.

That definitely doesn't make Persona 5 a disappointment. Persona 5 is fantastic, and it's weird how hard it is to tell people that without writing 3 pages of conflicting messages. This game threads some weird needles involving nostolgia and expectations, evolving your gameplay and staying faithful to your roots, and giving people what they want vs. giving people what they think they want. This game came real close to being the best in the series, and this is a crazy compliment to give it, but I definitely respect it more than Persona 4. This game is nuts because they reeeaally went for it. Sure it stumbles in places, but from top to bottom it is amazingly consistent in its misfit outcasts turned rebels aesthetic. Turning away from the happy and light tone of 4 that brought so much success to the series to pursue this darker punk tone that keeps the story true to itself both in and out of fiction is insanely bold. So while I don't consider it a disappointment, I can see how it happens.

This game is probably going to go down as the MGS2 of the Persona series.

No discussion regarding the Igor plot twist? Really? Disappointing.

@chibi_kaji: HOO BOY

Mishima had a better storyline than any other character + the main game FIGHT ME

Makoto>everyone

everyone>Yusuke

OK, that makes sense. I just personally never trusted Morgana.

I think my feeling towards P5 is very similar to what I felt about INSIDE. I love the previous game by the same team, think the new one is better at pretty much everything when compared to the older one, think that both P5 and INSIDE are probably the best ever at some specific things (art direction and animation, respectively). And yet, I enjoyed playing P4 and LIMBO much more, and it's hard to come up with a rational explanation for that other than charm and expectations.

You know what's up.

Replace Makoto with Haru and replace Yusuke with Futaba and you have a correct opinion.

Neat. I agree with everything they said.

I do think the social links in 5, especially the ones with people outside of your party where far superior than anything from 3 or 4, but overall 5 didn't hit as hard as 4 did to me.

Also, yes. Romancing Futaba is weird and creepy, and has absolutely nothign to do with her age.

Thanks a bunch for doing this duders. I feel better after hearing the genuine gripes you guys had with it. The first time I played P5 I loved it, maybe because I mostly took my sweet time. However it was the first of these games where I got through a full NG+ and it has sort of soured my opinion on the pacing and dungeon design specifically. Also because I've now seen all the side content available to you and find a lot of it superfluous and not really worth pursuing in a lot of cases. I feel like these games are much better when you play them once and only once but that's just me.

Despite my issues with it this is a series that I love so much because every subsequent one becomes my new favorite. I totally get why people get precious about the previous two games but to me it's simply a great series of JRPG-ass JRPGs. Ultimately I came to this game as a throwback to a genre I use to like and don't really play anymore and it gave me exactly what I needed. I mentioned this elsewhere but I feel like a handful of things in the game felt like call backs to the first Revelations: Persona game that people might have not picked up on unless they played it. For instance having a more classic SMT demon negotiation, there were unique guns in addition to the standard melee weapons for every party member, there was one party member with pigtails and a whip weapon, and at some point you are fighting a corporate sell out Persona user.

When it comes to the music, it's too hard to pick a favorite considering almost every track got my neck moving to the beat. I want to say Beneath The Mask but then that track is tied with like 4 other tracks for best composition. All I know is that the drum and bass parts were the dopest they've ever been. My main concern is that this soundtrack is going to get some push back from Jeff since he seems to dislike music with actual instrumentation.

That transforms into a robot. Her Persona is actually a Transformer!

@msta: Persona 5 isn't the highest rated game of 2017 on Metacrtic, Zelda BOTW is, but I understand your point. However, there is a difference between the critical analysis of a game within the community and an aggregated collection of review scores that primarily serve as buying advice.

Every time I boot up my PS4 I'm greeted by "Beneath the Mask" and Makoto holding a revolver and I am happy.

Best song was the coffee house winding down song with the lyrics. You know the one where the lady is singing to smooth jazz.

Shido dialogue during the flashback during the beginning of the game actually implies

1 He was drunk so he was not thinking about his image.

2 He also wanted to force the woman to do something for him work related, the rape was also part of the threat.

He is a manipulative bastard that only cares about himself, but is also a petty and vindictive manipulative bastard that even his cognition admits delight in squashing countless of people, so I imagine that sometimes he doesnt mind getting his hands dirty directly.

@jpope: Beneath the Mask?

She makes you curry and saves you so much time, this shouldn't even be a discussion.

I felt the Morgan's being excited for Treasure and the amnesia was their attempt to parallel Teddie's story via trying to make you think off the bat that Morgana was just a shadow like Teddie. Even though it totally doesn't play out that way I still feel like it's well enough given a reason to why he likes treasure so much, what being the feelings of humanity's hope. The dreams are just the dreams though. Hey not everything had a good reason behind it as I continue to listen and kinda nod through 75% what you guys is saying

Very excited to hear this

Makoto best girl. It is canon.

I generally agree with a lot of the thoughts you two have on the game, except for the combat, dungeon design, and Yusuke. Well, okay, yes, the Shido dungeon definitely dragged a lot and left me feeling burnt out. And even though I'm not a fan at all of the 5th dungeon, I didn't have any trouble getting through it.

I never once grinded in this game, and I still managed to finish the dungeons in either one or two sittings after they make you go through the preamble of casing them. So apart from the Shido dungeon, it never felt to me like they took as much time as they did for you two!

Yusuke also felt gross to me in the beginning with how the game dealt with the whole Ann thing, but I came around to him once I got into his Confidante story. What a fucking hilarious goofball he is. I love the scene in the lake, and I cracked up during the scene in the church. It pained me that I didn't get to max his link. Also, during the entire mid-game, he fucking destroys enemies and dodges plenty of attacks. He outperforms Ryuji on melee damage at that point and certainly doesn't miss as often. Endgame, yes, Ryuji has better skills and stats in dealing raw damage, but Yusuke was my man for most of the game!

Haru is one of the few genuinely bright spots in this very bleak game. I adore her, and I'm usually not a fan of the archetype. Her Confidante story also subverts your expectation in a way that I really appreciate. Lastly, she also demolishes enemies in the late game with her gun skills. She was the biggest contributor in plowing through most of the bosses in the last third of the game.

Weapon shop music for most underrated track in the entire game! Layer Cake is fucking boss, and Iwai is also a boss. Also sad I didn't have time to max his S. Link.

might be more my own canon, but I thought Sapphire was Rise. I mean at some point I chose to believe she's Rise

Edit: Makoto is the best girl

I actually thought Shido's dungeon was far and away the best one by quite a margin. The mouse mechanic was not excellent, but it was decent, and the whole dungeon felt interconnected in a way most of the others weren't and you got the feeling that you were actually on a boat with a working design.

But the best part was that they sprinkled story throughout with the reveal of Shido's closest men, all capped off with a battle with Akechi at the very end, before the boss battle with Shido. I played this whole dungeon in one sitting and felt it only gained momentum all the way to the end. I hope they keep this exact dungeon in mind for P6 and try to do more storytelling in the dungeons than they usually do.

Also; Makoto best girl.

@emphulio said:

might be more my own canon, but I thought Sapphire was Rise. I mean at some point I chose to believe she's Rise

Edit: Makoto is the best girl

Is Sapphire not just an album title or something? I thought that was 100% Rise and Sapphire was just the name of one of her works, but maybe I missed some dialogue.

@ghoststalker: yes yes.

@afabs515: I have no idea... I just thought sapphire was her name, didn't even do research because I was so sure....

@emphulio: yeah i have no factual basis either. I just saw it and assumed it was like a movie poster or something

@afabs515: everyone I've seen who's noticed it and played P4 figured that it was the name of Rise's next album or single or whatever, especially as the next image on those advertising screens is Kanamin (with a song or album called Dropkick).

Admittedly, LTTP, but - Makoto is Love. Makoto is Life!

Looking forward to listening to this a work today!

Regarding the Igor twist, I thought it was super strange, because the only way it actually hits you properly is if you're familiar with the game's development, and how Igor's Japanese voice actor died after P4. I love it personally because of that meta layer, even if it probably doesn't actually mean much in terms of the game's plot. I do find it disappointing that, somehow, they didn't get the old English Igor voice actor for the handful of real Igor lines, despite them just reusing old lines in Japanese. Lump that in with the spotty localization issues I guess.

One of my main problems with P5 (although this applies to a lot of JRPGs) is how much they hand-hold and over-explain everything to the player. You'd watch a scene with everyone talking things out, then the next day in school they'd have a whatsapp conversation about the exact same thing again just to make double sure you got the gist of it. It not only drags the game out needlessly but also makes the characters seem like complete idiots. The worst one for me was at the final confrontation with Akechi where someone points out he really WAS the masked guy and I was literally screaming at the tv about how we had established this whole thing (in-game) HOURS ago.

Another thing I wish the team would improve upon is having your actions and choices impact your daily life more. Having everyone freak out when I study at the library was great the first time, but when I'm top of the class again during midterms, it's time they dropped the whole "delinquent" thing. The gameplay falls into this routine where you see the same scenes playing out over and over rather than feeling like you're living your school life and time was passing. There are some amazing things in there though, such as the yandere girl in the hallway actually developing into a sidequest or the first time I spotted Makoto following me around town.

Overall, I still very much enjoyed the game, it has the "best styyyyle" category in the bag and gives NieR: Automata a run for its money in the music department, but I feel like it's held back by holding on to its formulaic approach.

Also, Makoto is best girl.

They missed the big plot twist where Igor is not Igor the entire time and that Justine and Caroline is really one person

I used to love it when Sae would insist I had 'fill in role here' to help me. When I made a social link with Sojiro, my first thought was, "Is she going to say I must have had someone to make me coffee and curry???". Then she talked about someone who hid me... oh. I'm so dumb, lol. I definitely was a little disappointed by P5 as compared to P4 but I still enjoyed it overall. I wish the main party had been a bit more developed; that there had been more non-thief time spent with them at school and out in the world. Part of what made P4 for me was the hysterical school antics (Miss Yasogami for instance) and things they did together outside of school (the night they spend at Yukiko's inn) that really bonded the party together for me. I felt so little for the party I didn't date any of the characters, though on reflection I think I would have dated Makoto. Maybe on another play-through when I can be bothered.

Super late to the party, but just listened to the show, so here we go. Too much text and lots of spoilers:

I agreed with many of the complaints these guys had, but they seemed to affect me to a much lesser degree. And there was so much to like besides! I agree with the guy who said they could have spent more time focusing on what they liked; after all, it deeply affected them enough to take the unusual step of making an entire standalone podcast and they liked it overall. Ben keeps describing it in blasé terms, but he gave his real review on the Bombcast: After something like 110 hours, he stayed up until 2am to beat it, and at that moment, super-late on what I think was a work night, after beating this game he'd spent so much time on, he immediately considered starting a new game+.

Various thoughts:

• There were some loose ends, including that some of the random crowd dialog at the end of the game made it seem like people hadn't become all that free from their previous habits. And it's true that the way Morgana's shadow(?) was handled seemed off. My hope is that some things will be addressed in a Persona 5 FES, or one of the weird genre-change games they did after 4. Persona 5 RTS? FPS?
• Agree that Akechi was perhaps too obviously a narc. But did have some suspicion that Ryuji's desire for fame or Morgana's foreboding about really being a bad guy might have played a part in our betrayal.
• No mention of the bosses, who were pretty awesome, excluding perhaps the weird fight against a giant goblet. The end boss and all his mechanics, Shido and all his forms, Akechi's delightful craziness, Madarame's crushingly hard giant painting monster (by far the hardest boss of the game at that point), etc. etc.
• I liked all the dungeons, though I agreed with Ben that specifically the mouse mazes in Shido's dungeon could be a slog. It was an okay idea, but there were just too many of them. Still, all the other portions, The Cleaner, all the other bosses, the music, and the denouement made it plenty of fun overall. Futaba's level could also be a little annoying at times, and it laid it on a little thick at the end, but I liked the initial darkness of it. I liked the portals in Okumura's, and even liked the jumping through the presses (makes me wonder if Ben used the run button).
• There was so much good music, but I like that Ben mentioned Life Goes On. The perfect music for the exams, and the win chimes felt great.
• It sounds like they only chose to date one girl, which is a shame. The Valentine's scene when you date as many as you can is fun, particularly with Brojiro helping you out. I spent the whole game fearing that you would get some karmic retribution for dating multiple girls, the way you had to crush everyone's hearts on V-Day in P4G, but I loved that it was mostly played for laughs here.
• Agree that the cut scenes were pretty weak, and they could have done most of them well in-engine (though it might have been tough to appropriately render Ryuji's post-Shido heroics). They actually seemed inferior to in-engine rendering a lot of the time, particularly in that they had lower frame rates.
• I liked Yusuke a lot for some of his dialog jabs and banter. I was worried at first from his design that he'd just be relentlessly emo. He was, as Ryuji noted, a little too one-note, though, with everything art art art.
• Somebody here mentioned the lack of queer characters, and they did a whole article about it up at Waypoint. I think it's a little unfair, though the hyper-sexual gay guys who give Ryuji gay panic are unsettling. It is a small sample size, and IIRC there are a couple of moments where Futaba hints about being... flexible. I think she startles Makoto at one point with a throwaway line that references her attractiveness.
• The Igor reveal was pretty awesome. He did seem much more sinister this time out, but nothing outright evil, and c'mon, this guy has been helping you out relentlessly for five main games (including both parts of P2) plus side games. I thought it was great that they made the voice part of it, after the voice switch shocked Jeff and Vinny.
• The music track over the end credits was disappointing. Not that bad a song, but it was morose where P4's felt more appropriately cheerful.
• Kind of unfortunate that Ben used the flu-Reaper trick to get OP and take the challenge out of the combat. But if he wasn't enjoying it, guess it can't be helped.
• I was also pretty annoyed by Ryuji's one-hit-kill skill. I didn't need to actually grind at any point, though.
• I liked the hints that the team was on to Akechi (the hazy effect at certain times that was obviously covering some secret plan-making).
• I liked The Twins, but wasn't so much a fan of Lavenza. Not clear why their hats spell 'OXYMORON'.
• It was weird that Shido would be trying to drunkenly assault some women in the backstreets of the protagonist's cow town.
• Makoto's deadline was a little weird. It would be a little awkward, but were they really that threatened that this guy would release pictures of them in a club?
• What were the mentioned "circumstances" that led Shujin to accept this kid against their usual practices?
• They tried to explain it, but it was still a little weird that nobody noticed there wasn't actually a body after Akechi supposedly killed the protagonist.
• It was nice that they had all those different endings for different deadline-missing conditions.
• Having the NPC social links provide dungeon benefits was a welcome change that patched a weakness of prior games, even if they "artificially" altered your slink targets.

Ultimately, I had so much fun with this game, it was really hard to decide between it and P4G, though I can understand that people might have liked P4's core team more as well, and P5's set pieces were weaker. While obviously FF15 was not exactly universally loved, I played it through and liked it, then was amazed by how vastly superior this game was and how much loving care was put into every tiny aspect by comparison, in spite of FF's massive budget. This was very likely my favorite RPG, and I've played quite a few. I am, admittedly insanely, on my third play through and already looking forward to a fourth.

It's unfortunate that it seems it won't stand much of a chance at GotY discussions, though if it doesn't at least win Best Styyyyyle it will blow my goddamn mind. It should also put up a great fight for Best Soundtrack.

Anyhow:

• Best dungeon: Despite complaints, Shido's!
• Best girl: Futaba edges out Kawakami (but Kawakami's perks are the best). And oh hell, Goth Doctor. You know what? Give me all of them.
• Best song: Any boss theme, including Will Power (the persona awakening theme).
• Best moment: At the end, when you leave the cafe for good. Sojiro gives a gruff goodbye, saying basically eh, you'd better get out of here before you're late. Then when the door closes, he takes his glasses off for a second to wipe away a tear. You got me there, guys.

Finally, finally finished this game. Haven't listened to the podcast yet (watching through the final segments/credits as I type this) but I thought I'd try to get some thoughts out while everything's still fresh.

Man, what a game. In a lot of ways, it's leaps and bounds ahead of its predecessor, P4G - and in other ways, it takes a few steps backward. What kind of amazes me is that the core gameplay hasn't changed in too many huge, significant changes, but the sheer number of quality of life improvements make it so, so much more enjoyable to play over P4G (which was already an amazing game).

• Being able to see which confidants are available and where, right from the map screen, as well as knowing whether you'll get to go up a level when you hang out with them
• The obvious big one, the Palaces - each of them is entirely handcrafted and unique, instead of randomly generated
• More variety in activities, including some that are actually interactive
• Better interactivity in the jobs (more than just the binary choices in P4G that determined more/less pay)
• Getting rid of the awful side-quests that required nothing but going through old dungeons and fighting old enemies
• Giving actual gameplay implications for all of the confidants that weren't part of your usual crew, rather than just making fusion better
• Speaking of fusion, just having more options when it came to the Velvet Room and Persona management - really liked having stuff like itemize and strengthening when I needed to get rid of Personas that I didn't need/couldn't fuse into anything interesting (whereas before the only option was to just get rid of it with no benefit)
• Hard cutoff times for dungeons instead of the vague deadline of "after several days of rain"
• Also, fewer restrictions while a Palace needed to be cleared - as I recall, you couldn't actually hang out with your teammates in P4 until after the current dungeon was clear (they would only ever ask you to go into the dungeon). They still kind of pester you about not going into the dungeon, but you are allowed to do what you want rather than needing to deal with the Palace ASAP.
• Mother. Fucking. Baton Pass!
• And this seems like such a small thing, but it really made combat flow much better - mapping actions in combat to buttons, instead of scrolling through menus

I'm sure there are more that I'm missing, but these are the ones that first came to mind. Just a great, great experience to play overall, and even though P4G was amazing, these changes really highlighted some of P4's shortcomings. Which...leads me to some of P5's shortcomings, ones which I thought P4/G handled better.

• Some bafflingly high social requirements for advancement that kind of screwed me out of finishing certain Confidants all the way. The two that really rankled me were Haru and Sojiro, both of which require you to max out a stat before you can advance them past a point. Haru's is particularly annoying since you can't even begin to get to her teammate abilities (Baton Pass, etc.) until you max out proficiency.
• While I like the more mature tone of the story and characters, I feel like the team in P4 felt like a much tighter group. I agree with what others have already said, there just weren't enough segments where the group just got to hang out and get into trouble
• I was not really a fan of some of the Confidant requirements in general, outside of the social stuff. Having some of the stories grind to a halt until you go deal with the targets in Mementos was kind of a chore at times (mainly because it feels like a waste of time to go in for one target, or it felt like I was wasting time by waiting until I had several targets to tackle at once). But the most egregious one was the requirement just to start the Confidant with the fortune teller - unless I really missed something, it required blowing 100,000 yen to buy the stone, spending 3 separate evenings before the Confidant actually goes active, AND needing to go after a target in Mementos. I didn't get around to this one until late in the game, and since I was trying to clean up as many Confidants as I could, I didn't even get around to starting it.
• This is probably more due to me doing each dungeon in one day rather than splitting them up into multiple days, but I thought the Palaces dragged on a little bit at times. It just seemed like there were a lot of times where I went "Okay, I figured that out, now I have to do it four more times while fighting enemies all the way through."
• I don't know if it would have fit as well, but I think I just missed some of the comic relief of P4. There were odd moments in the dialogue, but as I said before, I wish there were some more spots in the calendar that were dedicated to lightening the mood a bit.
• There were definitely times where the game felt the need to overexplain itself for no real reason. The entire reveal of how you survived the betrayal at the start of the game was spread over way more time than necessary, as was everything around figuring out that Shido was the bad guy (I mean, you, the player saw his face within the first two hours of the game, and he showed up a couple times more during it - but it still had to spell everything out for the characters around the time of Shido's dungeon)
• The last thing I'll say is that I really disliked the entire Kaneshiro section of the game. At least for me, it was kinda the first time where the difficulty really ramped up (aside from Madarame's boss fight), so it was especially tedious going through the dungeon. Beyond that, though, Kaneshiro the character is basically nonexistent, especially compared to Madarame and Kanoshida - he literally only shows up for one scene before you're whisked off to start clearing the Palace.

Edit: This is such a stupid thing to be disappointed about that I hesitate to mention it, but I kind of figured the twist with Morgana would have been that he was actually a girl. Like, both of his names (Morgana and Mona) are traditionally female names, and both his Japanese and English voice actors are women, not men. I thought it would be kind of an interesting twist to find out that he was a girl who had a crush on Ann, but alas.

For all that, though, I'm actually genuinely thinking about starting a new game + right after this, just to try and finish off all the Confidants that I didn't get to (or even start, in a couple of cases). It's a phenomenal, phenomenal game from top to bottom, and I'm extremely glad that I went through it.

Finally, I'll do the usual "bests:"

Best girl: Had to go with Makoto. It's what everyone's saying, I know, but I just liked that the maturity of her character over all of the other girls.

Best dungeon: Tie between Futaba and Sae for me. I loved the theme of both of them, and I really dug how Sae's twisted things up with the gambling theme. The only minor thing that bugged me about Sae's was the light backtracking to find the two monitors, but it was pretty short and simple.

Best song: Without a doubt, my favorite has to be Last Surprise, the standard battle music. It's probably in my top five battle songs ever in gaming, that's how much it hyped me up for combat in this game. I absolutely LOVE the introduction with the strings, and I frequently caught myself calling out "You'll never see it co-ming!" when the chorus kicked in.

Best moment: The moment during the final battle when the crowd finally wakes up and starts cheering on the Thieves, and the approval meter climbs up and maxes out. I'm just such a sucker for moments in games where people are cheering on the hero while they fight the big bad, and it happens so infrequently since the hero usually doesn't have an audience for the final battle.

JRPG's aren't really my thing, but the Persona games look interesting to me. If one ever comes to Xbox, I may give it a go.

Finally finished the game.

#TeamMakoto

Her rank 9, facing off against her friend's boyfriend... God fucking DAMN.

But she a Cop