Persona is a series I had only played once before with Persona 4: Golden on Vita. Persona is one of a myriad of spin-offs of the Shin Megami Tensei series. Personally, I have little expertise or exposure to the parent series and I suspect this is true for a lot of Western gamers. Persona on the other hand has slowly built itself into a much more mainstream global success. The general premise of the Persona series is that you play a high-school aged protagonist and battle demons in an alternate world while keeping up with people in the real world.
In terms of hardware, the real western entry-point was Persona 3 for PS2. As such it’s generally been seen as a Playstation-centric series, with enhanced ports Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4: Golden being a headliner games for Sony’s PSP and Vita respectively. However, there was a lot of expectation that with the handheld success and the lack of a Sony handheld device that Persona 5 would eventually appear on Nintendo Switch. This was further fueled by the main protagonist, Joker, being a DLC character in Smash Bros Ultimate. The whole thing eventually reached meme status as people waited. Surprisingly, it took nearly 6 years to happen with the late and enhanced release of Persona 5: Royal, which itself came out several years after its original debut. Subscribing to this meme and not really caring to play it on PC, I decided to pick it up for Switch and give it a go long after release.
I think the first impression is how visually striking the game is. UI especially has a lot of work put into it to feel what can only be described as “stylish.” The game too has a lot of artistic flair combined with a decidedly anime aesthetic. Cut-scenes are done in both 3D and 2D with bold lines, colors and patterns. It gives a strong impression even if a bit cluttered to navigate. Specifically, the main palace areas where you spend most of your time actually controlling a character require the aid of the “third eye” a togglable declutter-vision that highlights objects, enemies and things you can interact with. I was actually a bit surprised this was necessary at all. Usually visual clutter is the result of realism, but here a very bold an non-realistic game needs it to highlight interactable things. I think if there was one place they really could have done better it would have been here. Otherwise its one of the most visually striking games around and has excellent visual design all around.
Along with design is the “feel” of the game. Not so much the gameplay but how dialog, interaction and pacing work. It really sells the vibe of being a Japanese high-schooler and interacting with your group of friends. Part of this is down to locales (modeled on actually Tokyo neighborhoods), each day you travel to school by train and have a lesson, talk with friends and then do something after school. These scenes start manually and eventually become more abbreviated and automatic later to keep the pace moving. It’s a very smart choice and well done. Those initial setup scenes help place you into the context of the world. The game is played out over a number of in game days. Each day you get to take several actions with your free time. In this way it plays very similar to a dating sim, with the bulk of the action being in how you plan your limited moves and the reward being advancing bits of plot between characters. It really nails that aspect of feeling like time advances. Wardrobes change when the seasons changes, the loading screens of people walking by might hold subtle changes based on where you are and what time of year it is. Sometimes even special little nods on certain holidays.
To me this part of the game was truly excellent. Also having lived in the Tokyo area you can feel how they tried to give you a narrow taste of different neighborhoods, and even how the commuter pass system works (if you stray off your school route you get charged a fee). There’s so many little details that build the world and make it into a cohesive place.
The other half of the game is a traditional RPG. You can choose to spend days exploring “Palaces,” dungeons filled with enemies and puzzles that slowly sap your resources until you are forced to retreat and try again another day.
Compared to Persona 4 these are a huge upgrade from randomly generated dungeon floors. Enemies are deliberately placed with stealth elements, there’s some exploration for treasure, and some puzzle solving and character interaction. These are all good things but I felt it got dragged down by enemy encounters. You can avoid most enemies but this can be a bit slow. Eventually you get to the point where you are much stronger than the surrounding enemies that battles just feel slow but you’re still dodging enemy encounter to partially speed things up. Other RPGs also suffer from battle fatigue but one of the key things with Persona 5 is how large the dungeons are. Exploring one can take hours. The idea here is that you take breaks when you run low on stamina and do more social activities and come back. The problem is this is at odds with optimal strategy, which if you know that you need to make every day count, you don’t want to waste multiple on the dungeon. So you do them in a single go if you can. Occasionally you hit a story break point and are forced to leave, I really think they should have done that more often to pace the optimal game around smaller bits of dungeon.
The battle system itself is…okay. It’s very similar to other Persona titles which I believe take after the main Shin Megami Tensei series. This uses an elemental system with tier spells. Each enemy will have weaknesses that if exploited will cause them to become stunned. If you stun the entire group you perform a hold-up. This is a signature feature that allows you to either perform a powerful group attack, recruit the monster to your team or get money and items. Much of the normal battle flow is building up to a hold-up so you can end the battle quickly and with more benefits. For stronger enemies this isn’t easy as they may not have any weaknesses and force you to rely on technical strikes which are performed after certain status effects or critical hits. For regular enemies the battles can be pretty quick and the hold-up mechanics give you some strategy on what sorts of rewards you want. Though when it comes to bosses the system is much less interesting as they feel like tanky resistence-less enemies. It’s not nearly as dynamic and involved as something like Octopath Traveler which shares similar battle system DNA. Palace bosses can sometimes be a bit more interesting because they have unique mechanics to the fight but even these tend to lean hard on respawning enemies.
Specifically the Okumura boss has multiple waves of enemies that must be dispatched before you can actually fight him. However at one point there’s a random change that requires that you beat all enemies within two turns. Without a proper setup this is not possible as you must use the baton-pass mechanic, which will likely also require harder to get items to allow all party members to use weakness elements. But on top of that the battle is timed so you also don’t have a lot of leeway to get unlucky either. This was such a bizarre boss, I had to actually back out after spending a couple hours leveling because I couldn’t do it with the materials I had. Not a great experience to hit that sort of wall.
The other really weird things is guns. Guns are a main action along with attacks but you only have a little bit of ammunition and then you’re done until the next fight. Guns are supposed to be more powerful than attacks but it’s only a little bit, certainly not enough to warrant it being limited use (apparently in the original the ammo reset once per days instead of battle, I can’t fathom why they would do that). There’s a little more point to them once you get some customizations as they can add status effects but still, they just don’t seem implemented correctly and are so limited as to not be useful except for the rare enemy that is weak to them.
The other place you can go to fight things is momentos. This is a random dungeon which gives you lots of rewards. It’s ideal for grinding and with certain abilities to insta-kill enemies much weaker than you, you can stay here pretty much indefinitely leveling up and getting items which is what I did. It’s always locked to enemies from the previous palace so it opens up gradually but this is where you go to get into Persona fusions.
Fusions are another primary mechanic and I never quite figured out how they work. It has something to do with levels and arcana types but it’s never explicitly explained and pretty obtuse. For the quest line that requires getting certain ones I felt no shame using a guide and some of the online calculators were helpful getting some of the strong Personas. The systems here are interesting but really needed to be made a little more understandable.
Anyway back in the “real” world, your daily choices if you aren’t exploring palaces and momentos are to do activities most of which will raise a stat slightly. By building enough points you level up in that stat and these are used to overcome stat gates that prevent certain storylines from progressing. You are also automatically presented with quizzes in class. These will give you small bonuses if you answer right but you also need to pay attention to the information because it will be rephrased during mid-terms. But everything is for the purpose of leveling up social links with confidants. These are your team members and other significant characters. Leveling them up reveals more story content for them as well as unlocks powerful abilities for you related to the character’s specialties. These stories can be interesting but usually follow a pretty standard progression. One of the bigger rewards is to get a girlfriend. Any of the female confidants are date-able if you rank up enough and this unlocks a few special scenes throughout the year. You can also cheat and have multiple girlfriends which would lead to special scenes (though I don’t think any gameplay setbacks) but who would do such a thing?
I chose the character Yoshizawa as the love interest. Unbeknownst to me at the time this character was added in the expanded content for Persona 5: Royal. This unfortunately means that she is mostly locked off until the very end of the game so you miss several of the scenes because she’s not available.
The game really seems to expect multiple playthroughs, not just to see these different scenes but also because even good planning doesn’t fully work. Sometimes the game takes control and doesn’t let you utilize certain time periods and you won’t know until it happens. You are always given ample time to finish the palace but trying to max some of your social links requires very precise planning to make the most out of choices you have whether it be if that confidant is available or if you have the appropriate stats or momentos bounties. Some choices will give multiple rewards and are clearly better moves and making sure you get all of the free extras is important. I didn’t do a second play but there’s a lot of things I wish I knew earlier.
The final thing I want to touch on is the music which like the graphics and design are wonderfully done. The music usually take a jazzy style and some synth that is very distinctive and includes a lot of lyrical tracks especially for the bigger story sequences. It fits really well and adds to the identity of the game and bridges that sometimes hard to cross gap of environmental but at the same time with a personality.
I really enjoyed this game. It’s one of those when you finish you don’t really know what to do next because it’s unlikely the next things will be as interesting. I liked Persona 4: Golden too and I wasn’t so impressed with 5 at first, especially given how it throws a lot of mechanics at you quickly. But it’s really the characters and the feeling of place that grow stronger over time. It’s not my favorite RPG in a mechanical sense but it really nails the “role” part. Everything is at least competent but the parts that truly shine, shine really bright, some of the absolute best of any game. I makes me much more interested in being closer to the front of the line for the next entries in the series.
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