Wake Up, Get Up, Get Up There
I enjoy a jRPG every now and then. I’m mostly interested in their mechanics – Japs have an uncanny skill of building fun, complex-ish gameplay systems. Some of them use it to do evil in form of skinner box mobile games, some are fighters for good, developing such shining examples of easy to learn, rewarding to master rulesets as Sengoku Rance, Fire Emblems, Kamidori Alchemy Meister, etc. I’m usually not a fan of their stories, and especially not of the overly dramatic and wordy dialogues, but I don’t mind them all that much. Fun mechanics are enough for me to enjoy the game – which I guess is the main reason of why my final impression of Persona 5 is positive. It was the first game from Atlus I ever picked up, and to be entirely honest it was entirely for the simp reason of its aesthetics promising something really special.
I know that Persona games didn’t historically have huge budgets, and it feels like the influx of money was used to train the biggest and most powerful anime story-san around, who then proceeded to bully the sweet and innocent mechanics-chan with some help from its heartless sister, onee-aesthetics. Still, the guilty pair has the power of grabbing you by your hair and helping you bop to more poppy parts of the soundtrack as you cream yourself looking at the stylized all-out-attack screens. Once you get tired of it though – you really get tired. I guess that was what happened to me.
PERR-US-ONA
The moment introductory clips stopped, and I got to the game itself I felt somewhat disappointed. I’ve seen the engine P5 uses (or at least some other, very similar engine) in action when my wife gave Tales of Berseria a try, and I’m not fond of it. I guess it’s good for animating anime-style graphics, but the general jerkiness and the fact that it can’t handle three dimensions gives a pretty poor starting impression when you use it for TPP visuals.
The chaps done what they could, though. Engine limitations are masked by beautifully drawn portraits and Tartakovsky-like style of “white and black on red” imagery. The way gameplay graphics meld into these screens lets them punch way above their budget. Got no eye-candy here, though, but that was not what I was looking for – so I wasn’t disappointed.
Music is pretty good! There are a few standout tracks (the usual – Rivers in the Desert, Beneath the Mask, Wake Up Get Up Get Out There), but most of the ambient is on the OK-ish level. Creators understood they have some auditory gold filigree to decorate the wooden carvings, but done the worst possible thing – used it wherever they could, so I got somewhat sick of the few poppy tracks while getting to the end. Still, after giving myself a year-long vacation from the game, coming back to the few good tunes felt good.
Also, hearing glorious samurai mangle the few English words in shoutouts was a constant source of joy.
Rivers in the Desert
Japan is the cyberpunk nation – style over substance. You see it in their games, in their cheesecakes (and other sweets), in their animation. People get excited about how stylish the game is – hell, I was there as well. Thing is, the style does not withstand the test of time. You don’t ever start feeling as much of a criminal mastermind, so it rings hollow. I wish you could do some real planning on the jobs that you take, do something like sending members of your team for side-jobs which would make then unavailable during exploration of a Palace but gave you some other boni, I wish you could stake-out the locations to gather some intel on them, or that the stealth was less important in combat and more important in the overall exploration.
This hollowness had the unfortunate side-effect of making all the dialogues that tried to make me feel like a smug, gentleman thief somewhat annoying, as I felt a huge disconnect between the game congratulating me on coming up with a master plan, and jumping from cover to cover to ambush another wandering monster. With the wide array of foes that Phantom Thieves try to change the hearts of, it seems like it’d be fun to at least attempt to formulate the jobs as various confidence schemes, break-ins, and hustles, but what you get is murderizing everything and moving forward while occasionally looking for some items. It would make as much sense if the whole thing was framed as anything else – a newspaper delivery guy trying to deliver his mail while trying to avoid rabid dogs, or policemen trying to get to the bottom of a case while avoiding criminals. The game is a shapeshifter, has no face to show, and if you take off the mask you reveal dark.
The game is entirely held up by something else.
Beneath the Mask
I was pretty lukewarm up until now, time to say something positive: combat system is extremely solid. The weakness mechanism makes sure that fights with randos usually turn into quick, one-sided slaughters, keeps you on your toes, and gives some nice challenges, especially on the hard difficulty. This alone could carry the game from start to finish. I think I’ve seen some people refer to this style of play as Pokemon on steroids – and I completely agree. The moment I stopped treating persona captures as something I have to figure out and started treating them like a Pokeball throw, my enjoyment of the game increased greatly. Persona proves you don’t need a bazillion modifiable stats to make you think about what you do about your character/ Persona lineup.
I enjoyed the initial parts of the game not only because the story is most interesting then, but also because it adds another issue to the mix – resource management. You probably won’t be able to complete first two castles in a single try (the second forces you out, but I’m not talking about this) – the limited amount of SP (mana) and the fact that it’s very difficult to retrieve it, make you really careful about using your special abilities. This becomes much less of an issue as the time goes on, and the final dungeons have infinite rejuvenation sites and that’s a shame. Figuring out whether you really need to drop a magic nuke on your enemies, or if maybe you can sacrifice some much easier recoverable health to attack physically/ withstand the enemy’s attack after wearing them down with regular attacks was a really fun part of the game.
If we’re talking about attack types – I’m on the fence about GUN. I mean, it’s super fun to use the power of the bullet to blast mythical creatures, and I giggled like an idiot when the final, godly boss pulled out a golden revolver, but I’m not sure what’s exactly the idea behind making it a separate damage type, limited by ammo, but also generated via some persona powers. I’d be much more comfortable with making it some kind of an “oh shit” button, with it allowing you to spew a few of almighty-type attacks if needed.
The rest of the mechanics are not so hot. Real-world is somewhat disjointed from the dungeonsphere. Social links help you out in combat, and you kind of need to balance your time between studying and hitting Mementos/ Castles, but it still feels like a VN with a loosely attached dungeon-delving module sometimes. There are a lot of wasted opportunities – the game really asks for mementos that’d work in another way. What I have in mind is something that would loosely correspond to real-world world map, where you could affect one plane by doing something on the other. It’d feel like a good idea to alter the training mechanics so that you could, say, use the experience you gained while fighting monsters to level up these knowledge/ smugness/ whatever stats while studying and use there attributes in the Metaverse in some way.
I ended up skipping most of the text, spending most of the days eating burgers, studying, and meeting with pals, with 2-3 visits to Metaverse per month – one to handle all the sidequests, and the rest to rush through the castle. The game still took me almost one hundred hours. For most of this time, I actually had fun.
Life will (not) Change
I’m not going to write a lot about Persona 5’s story. I got disenchanted pretty early on, but then jogged forward without really paying it all that much heed. The atmosphere of being a small fish in unfamiliar, big pond you feel at the beginning is top-tier, but it quickly dissolves as the bad guys move from being small-scale asshats to mafia bosses to evil gods. The exploding popularity meter at the end was my personal cherry on top.
I didn’t enjoy interacting with most of the characters as well. Out of your teammates Makoto was written pretty OK, and I actually found Yusuke endearing – not only because I hang out with socially-inept artists for quite a while, but also because his arc heavily hanged on him learning a bit of humility and trying to add some substance to his works. Ryuji was OK, but became a comic relief after the first third of the game; feels like he should’ve been offed somewhere to motivate the player back when he still cared for him. Anne was a moeblob, Morgana was a constant annoyance, Futaba was a bottle-pissing hikikomori, Haru was so forgettable that I actually forgot to raise any social links with her for a few weeks after she became available. They get their moments, but they’re few and far between. As for the secondary characters, there are three I’d like to mention – Sojiro and Yoshida were OK, but my personal favorite was Hifumi Togo. Her down to earth arc actually resonated with me, as we all probably had a few moments in our lives when we realized we aren’t as good as we’d like to be.
I initially planned to hook up with Makoto, because really, how can you not hook up with a school council president in an anime game, and Sae was p. hot, but due to attribute constraints I ended up with the perfect, Japanese waifu – Hifumi. Warpig would be proud (I hope).
Big Bang Burger March
Honestly, if I were to give the game a bad review after spending almost one hundred hours with it, I imagine it’d show me in a worse light than the game itself. It’s a surprisingly solid game under the layer of garnish you are likely to quickly discard.
These last few hours with it kind of made me want to play it again, as I got the jRPG itch recently – but I’m kind of torn on that. Persona 5: Royal is out, and while I hoped that it’s going to be an expansion pack, we all know how it ended. Awareness of its existence will make it feel like I’m not playing the full game going through P5 again, but on the other hand, I’m not going to buy Royal on principle. Thought about buying P4 – but since it seems like I’m not going to have all that much time for myself for the next few months, I think I’ll wait for SMT V and try that one out, as, from what I understand, the series has pretty similar mechanics.
Last time, with me: PERR-US-ONA!!!