Persona 5 Review
Played on: PS4
Available on: PS4, PS3
Developer: Atlus
Time played: 110 hours
I have played countless RPGs in my 20 years of gaming, but never a JRPG. Persona 5 has been out since September in Japan, so when I heard that it was coming to the US and it’s one of the best modern JRPGs out there, I figured I had to play it. However, I was scared for a couple reasons.
First, I had just completed Breath of the Wild which was so good that it’s changed how I view video games. The bar with which I determine if a game is worth playing has gotten significantly higher. Second, I had already heard Persona 5 was great, so my expectations were through the roof. Anything less than being one of the best modern RPGs was going to be a disappointment.
With all this working against Persona 5 I dove headfirst into a 110 hour adventure I will never forget.
What’s this game about?
The game takes place in a fictionalized current day Japan where you play as a high school student that was convicted of a crime you didn’t commit. Forced to move to a new city under the care of a distrusting guardian, you navigate the everyday life of a high school student with an already bad reputation. Eventually you discover an alternate dimension called the Metaverse where you are able to view the distorted desires of evil adults and change their heart. You do this by fighting through their palace, which is a physical manifestation of their distorted desires, and stealing their most prized possession. Once you’ve stolen their treasure in the Metaverse, they confess their crimes in the real world and face the consequences. You’re a normal high school kid doing high school things during the day, but you’re an alternate reality crime fighting badass by night.
Persona 5 does a great job getting you invested early. The story moves quickly and despite being a fantastical place, the logic behind the Metaverse and its palaces actually makes real-world sense. This is one thing Persona 5 does very well that a lot of other games don’t. The amount of context the game gives you to justify each gameplay mechanic and character motivation is incredibly refreshing, and it makes the story that much more believable and impactful.
As the story progresses you tackle some very adult themes. Child abuse, suicide, depression, greed, mass media and its effect on the general public, sexuality, generational gaps, and many other topics are all tackled head on. This was surprising to me because of the game’s vibrant and light-hearted appearance. However, it ended up being one of the main reasons why this game is fantastic. The story can feel heavy but it’s also very relatable. Being able to connect with this game over such serious topics means it had a very significant impact on me, and was engaging in a way that most games aren’t.
By the end the story had massively escalated in scale and taken a handful of twists and turns that left me dying to find out what happens next. But it’s not just the eventually epic story that kept me energetically cruising through this 100+ hour adventure. The boring parts were just as much fun.
What do you do?
One half of Persona 5 sounds exciting — entering an alternate universe, battling monsters, and stealing treasure. The other half, not so much — talking to your friends, attending high school classes, making coffee, working a job, running errands for people, and being a normal high school student. However, the less exciting sounding part ends up being more fun because of the presence of time.
Almost everything you do is limited by time. Each main objective must be completed by a certain date or else you fail and have to start over. Within each day leading up to that deadline you usually have 2 opportunities to take actions that consume time. The problem is that you have a seemingly endless amount ways to spend that time and can’t do everything, so each small decision ends up feeling meaningful.
You could complete the main objective which consists of infiltrating a palace, battling enemies, and stealing the treasure to enact the change of heart. You might have 3 weeks to change someone’s heart, and you could get it done on your very first day or your very last day. It’s up to you. However, stealing a heart takes anywhere from 2 to 5 days to complete. You don’t really have any idea until you enter the palace, so you have to plan accordingly in the real world. Because of this time pressure I felt compelled to the steal hearts as soon as I could, but that meant combat was more difficult since I wasn’t spending any time leveling up my characters beforehand.
If you’re not quite ready to tackle the main objective yet, you can always spend your time in the real world. This is where all the boring, everyday activities come into play, but luckily they all serve a point.
As a high school student, you have a variety of skills you can level up that help you navigate the world. You have Guts, Knowledge, Charm, Proficiency, and Kindness. Leveling up each skill allows you to unlock new objectives, items, and storylines. Want to talk to a pretty girl to start a romance? Better spend a day at the spa or help a local politician to increase your Charm. Looking to help a particularly sensitive friend out of a tough spot? You’ll need to spend time working at the flower shop to increase your Kindness. Worried you’ll fail midterms and flunk out of school? Time to hit the library to study and increase your Knowledge. Even though you’ll repeat a lot of the same tasks over and over again, you’re always met with an appropriate reward to make the activity feel worthwhile.
In addition to your personal skills, you also have relationships to develop with your confidants. A confidant can be a member of your party or someone you meet who has agreed to help you in some way. Spending time with confidants to increase your bond is important for a handful of reasons. First, the characters are incredibly interesting and increasing your bond means you get to advance further into their storylines. You can’t expect them to dish out their deepest darkest secrets immediately, right? Second, increasing your bond unlocks special abilities like a new move in combat, discounts on items, and the ability to craft better items. Lastly, a higher bond to a confidant allows you to create stronger personas, which are the creatures you use to fight in combat.
Although you’ll want to spend time with confidants for all 3 of those reasons, by far the most rewarding reason is to advance their storyline. Persona 5 has some of the most memorable characters of any game I’ve played. The relationships you form with them become very real as you unravel their complex and impactful stories. You’ll experience many heartfelt moments and have quite a few laughs along the way. Also, the dialogue is well written and voice acting well acted, so it’s very easy to feel like you’re interacting with a real person.
The last thing you can do with your time is fight. There is an area called the Mementos which is basically a battle arena for you to complete side quests. You’re rewarded with experience points to level up your personas, which is important because the game can be pretty challenging, even on normal difficulty.
How you spend your time will have a significant effect on how the game unfolds for you. There isn’t enough time to do everything you want, so you have to choose wisely. Although Atlus Games has said Persona 5 is a single-playthrough adventure, I have several friends who started a New Game Plus immediately after their 100 hour run-through because they didn’t get to experience everything they wanted.
How does it play?
First and foremost the world and visual style are amazing, so whatever you’re doing it will always look interesting. The streets of Japan are vibrant and alive, and each palace you enter is unique and energetic. Smaller aspects of the game have also been given their own flair. After completing a battle you are treated to a very stylish battle summary screen, and even menu transitions are atypical and flashy. On top of that, the jazz and funk infused soundtrack spices up these common occurrences in a way most games don’t. Considering you’ll see and hear the same things hundreds of times, I’m happy Atlus went the extra mile to take the game’s personality and apply it to every square inch.
Combat is turn-based and in such a long game it’s easy for this style to feel stale and become tiresome. However, there’s enough variety in Persona 5 to keep you interested and engaged for almost all 100+ hours. Here’s how it works.
Each member in your party has one persona with a special set of stats and abilities. Most important for each persona are it’s elemental attacks, strengths, and weaknesses. The enemies you fight are also personas and they also have these attributes. Attacking a persona’s weakness allows you to knock them out and take an additional turn, and attacking a persona’s strength will do little to no damage. However, the only way to figure out a persona’s strengths and weaknesses is to experiment with a variety of elemental attacks. Once you figure them out you can assemble the optimal party to cruise through an area, but it can take a lot of trial and error to get there.
If you’re able to knockdown all the enemies in an encounter, you have the option to start a conversation with one of them instead of killing them. You can demand money or an item which will also end the battle, or you can take the bigger risk and try to capture it. To do so you’ll need to answer several questions to their liking. Their are 4 different types of personalities a persona can have, and you’ll have to take a different approach to capture each type. Often times the questions are funny and a bit off the wall, which can be an entertaining break from non-stop combat. It was a system I never totally figured out as I would still answer incorrectly 90 hours into the game, but because of that the stakes always felt high when capturing a persona and I liked that.
Capturing personas is very worthwhile since it’s another type of persona you can call upon in combat, but also because you can fuse them together to create even more powerful personas. This part of the game felt very much like trying to catch and manage Pokemon, but the conversation you have to capture them and the ability to fuse them into more powerful variants makes it feel more substantial.
I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best personas to fuse to keep my party balanced, and it was an aspect I really enjoyed. Although it’s completely unnecessary, I created a table to make sure my character had access to every type of elemental damage at all times. Most won’t do that, but it’s something I enjoyed managing and ultimately it paid dividends. Also, fusing personas requires you to execute them, so not only is it a strategic decision, it’s also an emotional one. I found myself getting attached to certain personas I used a lot, so sending them to the guillotine always felt like a big decision.
Finally, Persona 5 is not a walk in the park. Even on normal difficulty level you can die in any one combat encounter unexpectedly. Since your previous save point could a couple hours back, dying comes at a significant cost most times. The game also takes a considerable ramp in difficulty in the final 10 hours, sometimes to a frustrating degree. You can drop the difficulty at any time, which might be attractive to those looking to cruise through combat and advance the story briskly, but I felt normal was the right level of challenge and engagement for me.
What’s bad?
Almost every part of the game I’ve talked about so far has been positive, but there is a big aspect that could have been improved. Palaces became a slog toward the end. Once the novelty of their visual design wears off, you’re left with average level design at best and forgettable puzzles. Although I still liked the individual combat encounters because personas are unique and entertaining, by the end I found myself trying to get through palaces as quickly as possible in order to get on with the story. After 80 hours I was dying for some sort of twist to the palace formula, but it just never came.
Is it worth your time?
The last 12 months has been flooded with incredibly good video games, and it’s impossible to play them all. Making a decision to play this 100+ hour game means you can’t play 2–4 other games you might also really like, so it comes at a big cost. Persona 5 can’t just be good for me to recommend it — it has to be great.
Persona 5 is more than a great game. It is one of THE greats. Going beyond just being an excellently designed RPG with great systems and engaging combat, Persona 5 has created a world I connected with more than almost any other game. It comes from the insane amount of attention paid to every small action and interaction to make them feel genuine. It comes from the heartfelt story of a group of young outcasts coming together to make the world a better place for young people. But it mainly comes from the incredible cast of characters they bring to life.
All of the characters, even the NPCs, feel real in a way I haven’t experience in a a long time. Hearing their heartfelt stories and experiencing difficult life challenges with them comes through in such a sincere way that you can’t help but feel sad when it’s time to say goodbye. Since completing the game and stepping away from it I’ve been overcome with a feeling that I can only describe as “missing my friends.” That’s not a common experience in video games, and the only other place I’ve had it is after reading an epic trilogy.
So yes, Persona 5 is worth your time. Stop playing other games, watching TV, and doing all the other things you do to waste your time. Make room for this incredible and near perfect story-driven adventure. You won’t regret it.
+ Amazing story and characters
+ Every decision matters
+ Challenging combat systems
+ Catching and managing personas
+ Charm and personality oozes from every pore
- Palaces get stale toward the end
- Huge difficulty spike at the end
