This game is the definition of a masterpiece. From the music to all the intimate moments in between, this game is one of my comforts. I could hideaway in Café LeBlanc listening to "Beneath the Mask" forever.

Just port 1&2 or make 6 already, 3rd semester peak though

i have to say. aside from being the first persona game a lot of current persona fans play, i don't understand the amount of love this game gets. i started playing the series with my first entry being persona 4 golden and i absolutely loved it. the characters were charming, the artstyle was unique, inaba felt cozy and so did the murder mystery type of story. the gameplay felt engaging and not too difficult but there was still a challenge to it, it had very fun mechanics that at the same time didn't give you an unfair advantage. on top of that the music was amazing and kept me hooked through the moments that wouldve otherwise bored me.

then i played persona 3 reload, which i still enjoyed, even though it already felt a bit less cozy and the characters a little less likeable, i still enjoyed the music even though i felt like it was musically probably my least favorite. the artstyle was a strong point of the game, it looked very pretty, especially during the dark hour. the story i also enjoyed and its pacing was quite good. the gameplay however was already quite boring. i played all the games together with my friend and we played all the persona games we've played on hard mode yet even then the game was not a challenge at all. the theurgies in that game completely took any sort of challenge out of the game, though i did enjoy the way tartarus was layed out.

then we got to persona 5. i was excited to play it as it was the game i had heard the most positive stories about and was the only game i had irl friends glaze to me, so i went into it with an open mind.
let me start off by saying my favorite part of the game is the soundtrack. though it had quite a different sound than the games before, the acid jazz ish soundtrack carried a large part of the game for me.
aside from that i enjoyed quite some of the more unique level design in the game with actual levels you have to actually figure out how to traverse instead of it just being you running through a dungeon and fighting enemies.

sadly that's where the positives stopped for me. the artstyle was so far the most lacking for me, not that i hate the overall vibe they went for but some of the graphic design in p5 felt a lot more disjointed than the ones in p3 and p4. the combat feels so stale with them handing you WAY too many lifelines to the point where it took us about 30 hours of gameplay to get our first death. from shuffle time being replaced by the hold up system where you can sort of interrogate the enemies and either get loot out of them or a new persona, which sounds fun in theory but gets stale after playing enough. i also hated the fact that every enemy is just personas that you will get in a couple of levels. it effectively cuts the amount of unique creatures in half and it makes the fusion system feel stale, as anything you fuse you'll have seen multiple times already while fighting through your current palace, taking away the element of surprise and excitement from fusing a new persona.

though i like the idea of unique palaces designed around how people view the world there's some palaces that are just straight up poorly designed. places where you'll run around looking for where to go and ending up finding out the way to progress is to interact with a small part of a room somewhere with an interactable that's barely noticable without it being telegraphed. there's palaces that just draw on so long that, even though i like their premise, towards the middle of it i'll be half wishing for the palace to end already. then we arrive to what for me was the absolute low point of the game and what made me 100% sure that this is not the game for me. the okumura palace. aside from being a bland palace in and of itself, the absolute worst part is the okumura bossfight, with repeating waves of similar enemies spawning, increasing in difficulty, that all respawn if you don't kill them in the same round. though bland this works fine untill the (i think) fourth wave, where it's pretty much completely up to luck if your attack will deal the perfect amount of damage for you to not trigger the enemies respawning, but enough to be able to kill the enemies the next round. this bossfight was so incredibly boring, unfair and unrewarding. any difficulty was simple tediousness, not actual good game design. after a game series going for 20 years at that point, with 4 prior main line games and with 8 years between persona 4 and 5 you would think you'd have had enough time to learn how to make a fun bossfight, or at least to know how not to make a horrible one.

then there's the characters. though the persona series has its fair share of unlikeable characters, this one takes the cake for me. there's a few characters that i kinda liked but there were so many more that were borderline unbearable to me with the worst offender, of course, being morgana. i get that japan has more of a mascot culture than we have in the west and that for the devs that makes it a smart move to play into that market, but WHY does every mascot in persona games have to be so obnoxious and WHY do they always have to get a narrating role, making them the characters with some of the most dialogue in the whole series. to me teddy was already one of the worst parts of persona 4, with his sharp, overanimated voice and his overly whiney personality and slightly gross proclivity for girls, but morgana is so much worse. at least with teddy, halfway through the game he would no longer be the narrator of the game, and you can pretty much just cut him out by not having him on your team. with morana however, he is ALWAYS with you. no matter where you go, the leech is always blabbering in your ear, telling you what to do and whining about EVERYTHING. the only moment you get a break from morgana
is when he feels underappreciated and runs away, and even though the game tries to play it off as this heartfelt moment, it was ironically SUCH a nice break from having an annoying little mosquito buzzing in your ear . i do not understand what possesed them to give morgana so much screen time.

the last big negative i have is the story. persona games are often a slow burn. this is very understandable as the games are usually around 100 hours long, which is a very large amount of time to have to fit your story into. in the previous games we played i enjoyed the pacing. It could get slightly boring at times when we were waiting for the next story beat to come up but the time inbetween these story beats usually werent too long. in persona 5 however, the pacing was so poorly performed that we were bored out of our minds for most of it. For the first 50 hours or so of the game, they elude to a story, but any actual story beat is meaningless or insignificant, and had us wondering when the actual story would start. Then at some point the thing with akechi in the interrogation room happens, and they suddenly dump THE ENTIRE STORY ON YOU. i like stories that elude to a bigger picture, with all story beats at some point connecting to make the whole story clear. but when your game is a 100 hours long, with 50 hours of absolute slop for a story, suddenly dumping the entire plot on you just overloads you with information, making it hard to really care at that point.

it's a shame. i really wanted to like this game, but i feel like it tries to do so many different things, that in the end none of it feels truly thought through.
of course ther's still things to like here, but i would honestly reccomend you play one of the previous games before you play this one.