Atlus Persona 5

[Abu Antar]

The game will contradict its own themes and messages in such a way, that it makes P5 my least favorite story in the series. This is at least true for original P5. I can't speak for P5R.

 

[d1r]

Man this game really falls off a cliff after Kamoshida. Every villain and palace seems more boring and irrelevant than the previous one, and you get some really contrived moments like Morgana being emo or literally anything involving Kasumi Yoshizawa. Hopefully the game can end as well as it started, but everything past Kamoshida has felt like filler.

This game will introduce a lot of new cast members now. Most of it is filler. Sorry fam!

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

Man this game really falls off a cliff after Kamoshida. Every villain and palace seems more boring and irrelevant than the previous one

A high school gym coach is the high point villain-wise to you then, eh?

Each villain after Kamoshida is meant to introduce the various additional characters, as well as to further the group's actions outside of high school kid stuff. Where as Kamoshida was your own introduction, and tied into several of the characters instead of just one or two.

That's why they feel less relevant to you. There's simply fewer personal motives to take them down.

If you don't care about Yuske or what Maderame did to him or his other victims, you won't care as much about Maderame as a villain. Kamoshida had a lot more buildup as a villain: personally attacking you by starting the rumors about you, trying to have sex with Ann, having attacked Ryouji, abusing his students, raping Shiho. It all was explained to you slowly and personally.

So it's not that the others are filler villains, it's that they're less personal villains due to how they're presented in the story. Things become personal again later in the story, but it takes a while.

Kasumi Yoshizawa

If you didn't get that she was going to be a Mary Sue from the intro, I don't know what to tell you.

 

[Shinji]

Man this game really falls off a cliff after Kamoshida. Every villain and palace seems more boring and irrelevant than the previous one, and you get some really contrived moments like Morgana being emo or literally anything involving Kasumi Yoshizawa. Hopefully the game can end as well as it started, but everything past Kamoshida has felt like filler.

It never gets better after that.
This game has too much filler. I seriously had to fast-forward text-messsage conversations because they dragged on for too long. It really felt like I wasn't missing anything important.

I also couldn't care about the characters either, something that was really well done in Persona 4.

I don't have high hopes for Persona 6.

 

[Kjaska]

Having a blast so far. Coming relatively fresh off of P4 makes some comparisons unavoidable. They finally made some actual dungeons! The palace design is much more interesting than the previous monotony of p3/p4 dungeons. Those still exist as Mementos, but even Mementos have more spin with the weird shota who wants flowers, the navigation by car, the weather effects and the less cramped layouts. I'm also loving all of the QoL improvements since P4. That was something that was getting really on my nerves during the later stages of that game.

I'm not too far yet into the story, but so far I think the country bumpkin setting of P4 was a superior fit for this type of game. In P4 it made you feel like your rag tag team of misfits were actually doing something amazing compared to everybody around you. At the same time the stakes weren't retardedly skyhigh. With this game however I already met an ex-yakuza who seems to be a major underground weapons supplier. I've only done 2 Castles so far, but stopping the yakuza from obtaining weapons seems much more impactful than stopping one guy from molesting high schoolers and one guy from using a couple of gifted art students to further his own goals.

 

[TheSoul]

My main issue with 5's writing is that it thinks it's a lot smarter than it really is and doesn't improve on it's more interesting ideas. Most of the issues it raises like power imbalances and mindrape get replaced with beach trips, akechi, and morgana never shutting the fuck up. I also wish atlus made the link between the real world and palaces more in depth, but then they drop it after madarame.

Half the cast becomes irrelevant the further into the game you get. P5 is my favorite soundtrack of the three though.

 

[Duraframe300]

My main issue with 5's writing is that it thinks it's a lot smarter than it really is.

For me that's most apparent with its twists. Continues on from P4: Golden by badly foreshadowing the shit out of everything, when it doesn't just use lame narrative tricks. The pure execution of them may be amongst the worst I've seen in any medium. And they happen so fucking often its a circus.

When I played the original P4 (Golden ruined it), when the choice came up who was the killer I was legitimately stumped for a second and had to get to the answer by process of elimination. The indications that Adachi was anything more than comic relief ally were well handled and few and far between.

 

[Ivan]

What' s a good point where you've seen the whole gameloop? I'm not hooked yet by the game, granted it's still in tutorial land. Just about to start the first day of high school...but I got sidetracked by Deus Ex and some gamepass games.

 

[perfectslumbers]

What' s a good point where you've seen the whole gameloop? I'm not hooked yet by the game, granted it's still in tutorial land. Just about to start the first day of high school...but I got sidetracked by Deus Ex and some gamepass games.

The game opens up after you beat Kamoshida and start ranking up confidants and gets into the standard loop for 40ish hours until you get to the casino you started the game in.

 

[perfectslumbers]

Spoiler

Man the game really goes easy on Akechi considering the hundreds of people he killed. The scene where the protagonists all weep about how he's a victim and how sad it is that he died and how he's a good guy deep inside was so ridiculous. It takes place a minute after the boss fight where he's laughing maniacally about how bad he wants to kill you.

 

[Puukko]

Spoiler

Man the game really goes easy on Akechi considering the hundreds of people he killed. The scene where the protagonists all weep about how he's a victim and how sad it is that he died and how he's a good guy deep inside was so ridiculous. It takes place a minute after the boss fight where he's laughing maniacally about how bad he wants to kill you.

Spoiler

That's just standard JRPG fare. Xenoblade 3 did this more than once.

 

[Grauken]

Spoiler

Man the game really goes easy on Akechi considering the hundreds of people he killed. The scene where the protagonists all weep about how he's a victim and how sad it is that he died and how he's a good guy deep inside was so ridiculous. It takes place a minute after the boss fight where he's laughing maniacally about how bad he wants to kill you.

Spoiler

That's just standard JRPG fare. Xenoblade 3 did this more than once.

Do we want standard fare from Atlus?

 

[d1r]

The game is waaay easier than I expected.

Nothing in this game makes any sense when it comes to the difficulty. They tried so hard to create as many failsafes as possible (Fusion Alarms being the most broken thing ever), but then forgot to lock difficulties, and thus making it possible to switch difficulties to progress with the story, while challenges are still nowhere to be found on HARD. What is even the point of using Fusion Alarms or min/maxing Traits if there is absolutely no incentive to use them, because the game doesn't have any hard story battles? One good Fusion Alarm can trivialize 75% of the story battles.

Will Seeds are extremely OP, SP items are way too easy to farm, Guns don't need ammo, and Showtimes are just the cherry on the cake trivilizating any critical moment in a battle.

This shit is really insulting.

 

[Tyrr]

Hard was perfect for the original P5. Sadly they didn't updated the difficulties to all the extra powers the player got with P5R.

 

[Puukko]

I found Hard on OG to offer a very good level of challenge. No other game has given me as many hour long boss fights that could go wrong at any moment and kept me on my toes, which is why people complaining the game was too easy really confused me. I guess those people may have been playing Royal and I had no idea the difference was that stark.

 

[GhostCow]

I found Hard on OG to offer a very good level of challenge. No other game has given me as many hour long boss fights that could go wrong at any moment and kept me on my toes, which is why people complaining the game was too easy really confused me. I guess those people may have been playing Royal and I had no idea the difference was that stark.

It's not really. The only thing I can think of that made the game easier in Royal is that your ammo reloads after each fight. I can't think of any other balance changes.

 

[Tyrr]

I found Hard on OG to offer a very good level of challenge. No other game has given me as many hour long boss fights that could go wrong at any moment and kept me on my toes, which is why people complaining the game was too easy really confused me. I guess those people may have been playing Royal and I had no idea the difference was that stark.

It's not really. The only thing I can think of that made the game easier in Royal is that your ammo reloads after each fight. I can't think of any other balance changes.

There are many other changes. Like upgradable Baton Passes. Or more/better confidant abilities.
SP items (or money in general) are much more common. Maybe because of the Mementos changes. Managing you SP felt much more easy in Royal.

 

[Tyrr]

An example:

Spoiler

With upgraded item drop, this is what you get by just driving around in Mementos. There is no more need to manage your SP in Royal.

 

[Tigranes]

A lot of it comes down to expectations, I think. Persona ultimately belongs to the growing-up / friendship manga world (or road-trip movies and such, if you like) and pretty much all its strengths come down to that. E.g. the characters are better than most other games at making it feel like they are a group that hangs out together and actually interacts together, amongst themselves as well - we just don't mind it in most other RPGs because we've grown not to really expect it from the genre. But it's not going to have anything particularly subversive, sophisticated, or interesting to say about corruption or power or whatever. I'm not exactly looking for Musil or Camus when I fire this up. (This is easier to see in P4, where you also get the junk food pleasure of a Young Adult mystery book + the romanticised idyll of Japan's postwar dream - it's very, very straight middle of the road stuff). The sim elements & combat gameplay also work as part of the general ~ friendship ~ ride more than as stages for minmaxing or tactics.

If you want more foreboding and dread you need to play Strange Journey, if you want less yapping and more minmaxing then Nocturne.

 

[perfectslumbers]

After 3 weeks and 75 hours I've finally finished Persona 5 Royal. The game has a lot of issues but I still had a ton of fun. Definitely gonna play more Atlus rpgs, any suggestions?

Spoiler

The games biggest flaw is that the writing really falls off a cliff after you beat Kamoshida. Despite the games silliness he was a really compelling and convincing villain, a popular jackass abusing their power over you is especially common and relevant nowadays. And so is bystanders turning a blind eye because it's simply too much trouble to bother speaking up about it. Tigranes talks about expectations but I think the high writing expectations were set by the game itself.

The palaces and confidants were pretty hit and miss, but mostly hit. The biggest problem with confidants is that every confidant who features in the main story had most of their development relegated to the main story, because if their confidant events developed them too much then you could run the risk of their character being inconsistent with the main story (or having to try to account for their developments, which would be insanely complex in a game this large.) Some of the confidants had time gating instead, to ensure their confidant meetings could include good development along the main story, and I think these confidants were generally better.

Sojiro and Futaba and the family dynamic they have with the Joker is one of the highlights of the game imo, with Sojiro slowly come to trust and appreciate you, and Futaba opening up and overcome her trauma. I love the dynamic of three unrelated people forming a family together around the tenuous connections life has forced on them.

Takemi and Kawakami are blatant fetish bait on the outside, but I found both of them to have pretty interesting confidants. I think it's because they're actual adults so instead of "I'm an emotionally retarded teenager," they have really legitimate and difficult external problems to solve, although I seriously dislike how many confidants involve you changing hearts in mementos. It conflicts with a lot of the story beats that show up later in the game. Iwai was good for the same reasons as Takemi and Kawakami.

Ryuji and Ann and Mishima were pretty good because they got so much development in the Kamoshida arc but past the Kamoshida arc they got turned into parodies of themselves which I found disappointing. Their confidants felt like boring filler and the enjoyment I got out of hanging with them was mostly because I felt a bond with them from the first arc.

Haru and Makoto were probably the most boring characters in any video game ever made. They didn't get much attention in the main plot (Haru's had all of hers stolen by Morgana,) and their confidants were extraordinarily boring. Maybe you need to romance them to see what's special, dunno. Yusuke didn't get much development either but he eventually won me over through his sheer autism.

Morgana, Igor, and the Twins were all enjoyable and got development throughout the games main story. Other than the blunder arc where Morgana left the team, I liked all of them.

Maruki and Akechi were both great and extremely relevant characters. Maruki was very believable and I like the contrast between him and the protagonist, in that the protagonist is a strong and willful person accepting the truth whereas Maruki is weak and awakens a Persona specifically to help the world run away from it's problems. Akechi isn't really believable at all but I love the way his actor chews the scenery and makes him come off like a complete lunatic. Unfortunately the way the rest of the cast treats Akechi is pretty weird.

Ohya and the politician were the only confidants I didn't max so I don't have much to say about them. Hifumi was extremely boring so I don't have much to say about her either.

The game was... weird on Merciless. The biggest problem is that SP and HP management throughout a palace is extraordinarily generous, so the only way to challenge the player is by making fights very swingy. Every time I died after the first palace was me getting burst down in a single turn because I felt too lazy to buff. Vs enemies that could be effected by statuses or had weaknesses, it mostly came down to abusing weaknesses and elemental attacks. Against bosses the combat felt like an mmo, with one support and healer and two dps characters slowly draining a bosses hp. I mostly enjoyed the combat but about 2/3rds through it got stale and I started ignoring most enemies.

Kamoshida's arc was great since he was such a good villain and everything was fresh. A lot of people complained about the pacing but the game was intriguing enough that I didn't mind it, I'm sure I'd be frustrated at it on a second play through.

Madarame and Kaneshiro both had fun palaces but were boring villains. Madarames great crime was plagiarising art, which is a shitty thing to do but feels irrelevant next to the other villains. He also was said to be abusing his students, but the game never really goes into detail on that so all of the hate you have towards Madarame comes from his shadow's behaviour and the reveal that he let Yusuke's mom die. Kaneshiro was even more boring since he didn't have a personal connection to any of the characters, thankfully his palace made up for it with some amazing puzzles and fun design.

Futaba's arc starts off strong with the Medjed and Alibaba intrigue (although it was extremely predictable,) but the execution after that leaves something to be desired. It feels like they just threw a bunch of mental illness neet tropes together, and the changing of her heart doesn't get the weight it properly deserves in my opinion. It was still nice to see them try something different, and Futaba becomes a great character once you get to know her.

Okumura's arc finally gets back to the main story, but this was definitely the weakest section of the game. Morgana has his "I REFUSE TO TALK TO YOU," arc which is made worse by Ryuji acting like a shithead. Haru is introduced but she gets very little development since a lot of what's happening is focusing on Morgana. Around this time the game implements a gap between what the player sees and what the characters see. At the time it's the players seeing an obvious consequences the party isn't aware of (Okumura isn't the murderer, and instead will be murdered to frame you.) This kind of dramatic irony doesn't work well in an RPG where you're in direct control of the characters, because you're forcing the player to perform actions that they know are a terrible idea, unlike a book or a movie where the characters perform actions irregardless of the audience.

Sae's palace is a big step up, and we're finally getting close to the place we started the game at. The concept and design here is really unique, and the music and visuals of her palace are top fucking notch. Everything goes as planned until the big reveal. Here the game has another gap between the player and the characters, but this time the characters are forming a plan without the player knowing and it's revealed to you in the moment that it strikes. There are many moments before this scene where your screen gets all blurry and weird to indicate lost memories, and I genuinely thought that screen effect meant some powerful being was observing me and told the cops. So I actually thought the line about their being a traitor at the beginning of the game was a bait. This made Akechi's betrayal genuinely fucking surprising and got me totally lost in the moment, but it didn't feel cheap since everything was adequately foreshadowed many times, and the plan to keep Joker alive was pretty clever.

Then we enter the end game. You're pronounced dead and you now have the space to take down Shido. Shido isn't a particularly interesting or complex villain, but he was built up throughout the entire game and has encountered the protagonist many times so he was good enough. I really enjoyed the conspiracy angle that was going on, with Shido having killed Futaba's mom and utilising some top secret research, it's just like politicians in real life. His palace was a mixed bag, with some real annoying rat sections but I enjoyed getting the five passes and I loved the boss fight. Felt cool as hell 1v1ing Shido to finish him off.

The killing god arc was pretty strange. I think it was adequately foreshadowed, but at the same time nothing can possibly make the escalation from killing a politician to killing a god seem natural. The execution left a lot to be desired, the hamfisted "EVERYONE IS A PRISONER OF THEIR OWN MAKING," isn't bad, but I don't believe it was treated with the dignity and weight such a statement requires. I did enjoy seeing the classic Japanese obsession with gnosticism and jewish mysticism, and getting the gang out of The Velvet Room felt like an appropriate moment of re-awakening, wherein the will of the main cast is asserted for a second time in front of their greatest foe yet.

Then you get to the third semester. It honestly felt a little tacked on, but I think it was one of the strongest parts of the game (although it was too short.) Everyone wakes up in an alternate reality, but Joker and Akechi are the only ones who realise it of their own accord and have to work together to find out what's going on. This immediately makes Akechi and Joker's rivalry a lot more interesting to me, since it means they're really the only two "players," in this story. The Phantom Thieves who joined you in rebellion earlier are enraptured by this new reality and you need to shake them out of it for them to realise what's going on. Not only that but it's revealed that the only reason Maruki had the power to create this new reality was because of their wish for it. This really changed my perception of the Phantom Thieves, since they really are just followers who would never have gotten so far without you, although I supposed it makes the power fantasy aspect of the games stronger.

One of the weird aspects of this arc is the way it makes the Phantom Thieves seem like hypocrites. They spend the entire game changing the world by changing peoples hearts, making peoples lives better without those people having to actually do anything. Yet when Maruki does the same thing on a greater scale they criticise him and stand against him for it. In my eyes the early palaces you did were clearly justified in this lens, The Phantom Thieves were using their own power to rise against problems that threatened them (regardless of how much they talked about justice, it was always a personal matter.) And the point in the story where they "lost their way," and fucked up was the very point where they went after someone they had no connection to (Okumura.) Changing hearts in Mementos, on the other hand, is extremely similar to what Maruki is doing, and it killed my immersion that the game does not take notice of that.

You may have noticed I didn't mention Yoshizawa. That's because she was boring waifu-bait and her only purpose was to make the player mad when Maruki tentacle mindrapes her.

 

[GhostCow]

Definitely gonna play more Atlus rpgs, any suggestions?

Was this your first one? If so, Persona 4, SMT Nocturne, SMT V, Devil Survivor, and Devil Survivor 2.

 

[perfectslumbers]

Was this your first one? If so, Persona 4, SMT Nocturne, SMT V, Devil Survivor, and Devil Survivor 2.

Yeah it was my first, thanks

 

[notpl]

I found Hard on OG to offer a very good level of challenge. No other game has given me as many hour long boss fights that could go wrong at any moment and kept me on my toes, which is why people complaining the game was too easy really confused me. I guess those people may have been playing Royal and I had no idea the difference was that stark.

It's not really. The only thing I can think of that made the game easier in Royal is that your ammo reloads after each fight. I can't think of any other balance changes.

Replenishing ammo, technicals now cause knockdown and can be upgraded to do extra damage, status immunities were removed from many enemies including bosses, baton pass was made stronger, XP awards were increased, and every S.Link was turbo'd so you max them faster. Just off the top of my head.

 

[Kjaska]

I was running into some challenging bosses in the 2nd castle on Merciless, because none of those upgrades are available before you beat it. But I was also not very prepared or grinding much. After that it gets easier.

IMO expecting some hardcore difficulty in a Persona game is beyond retarded though.

 

[notpl]

My big issue with it was just that it fucking DROWNS you in experience. In the original P5 release the higher difficulties imposed a penalty to your XP gain, which was annoying to me at the time but playing Royal without it made me see how necessary it was. Trying as hard as I could to avoid every single non-mandatory battle I still ended up vastly overleveled by the end of every dungeon, and I never got a fight a single shadow in Mementos because except for the bosses everything was always so far below me that the battles simply autoresolved.

And while I understand the sentiment about persona not being "hard," any game gets boring if it's too easy. And SMT mainline is supposed to offer a better experience in that regard, but sadly SMT5 kind of whiffed it with this latest entry since they were still testing the waters with the whole "open-world" thing, so it's now been years since I got to enjoy any sort of challenge in one of my favorite RPG franchises.