Synopsis: a teenager (codenamed Joker) is screwed over by the criminal justice system after saving a woman from being sexually assaulted, and is put on probation and moves to live in at a cafe with a friend of the family. He later discovers that he is able to transport himself into the minds of people with twisted conceptions of the world. He then starts a gang that is tasked with fixing those minds to change the world for the better.
TL;DR: it’s a good game. Dodge if you intensely dislike turn-based combat, lib-coded games, long games, or real-life RPGs.
The good
I first started playing Persona 5 around 2018-2020. I thought the story was fine, had some fun playing it, but stopped playing midway through the story. Then, I picked it up about a year ago and started again from scratch.
The game is split into two parts: the cognitive world, where you inhabit somebody’s mind and fight with enemies and the real world where you hang out with friends, buy stuff, eat, study, read — what a normal high school student would be doing.
The cognitive world will be fun if you like turn-based style combat like pokemon or final fantasy. Personally, I am not as into that style of combat, so I snuck around in the mental world to avoid being detected by enemies and abused running/items to get away from them when they found me.
The real world is kind of like a slice of life/drama anime where you do random stuff and hang out with people, who often have a personal problem or challenge that you can help them with. You can romance some of the girls. It doesn’t feel tedious and whenever you level up a skill or progress in a friendship, it genuinely feels rewarding.
Visually, it looks good. The cutscenes have anime-tier visuals.
The tracks are nice — both vocal and instrumental. Not Skyrim-tier, but close.
It’s been a long time since I played Persona, but there was a really cool story twist around the mid-section of the game that was pulled off quite well.
The bad
It’s lib-coded. Not woke — it does not see gender and race and sacred categories, but it has the same anti-police/anti-corporate vibe that you saw in liberals between the 80s and 00s — the game is even vaguely homophobic. Unlike in the case of Ergo Proxy, this coding is not subtle and even somebody who is not politically adroit might pick up on it.
The individual story arcs were mid.
The ending was forgettable.
The ugly
It’s too long. I think this game took me over 100 hours to complete; that would be fine for a highly complex or thematic game like Pathologic, but for persona 5 it just feels rather dragged out, especially at the end.
You can't keep playing these games. You're wasting your life