I Personally Loved Persona 5

That’s read like Persona-lly. A hard O.

Persona 5 is a delightful entry to the series. It’s been smoothed down from its previous, more brutal, predecessors and is incredibly more accessible and modernized for the gaming world today. Oozing with style, the game is rife with visually stunning menus and scenarios that make your eyes water from its stylistic design. Quite frankly, it’s a wonderful game.

The game shows off it’s rather outstanding stylistic design right from the word go with it’s opening title sequence being a classy musical number with minimalistic colours and smooth musical number, straight down to the title select screen itself with silhouettes of the characters lazing around a train station as the camera spins and rotates around with each selection, revealing the hidden words and menus around the room.

It’s this level of detail that shows off one of Persona 5’s strong points, it knows it’s a JRPG and thusly you’ll be spending a lot of time in combat and rooting through menus so the game just makes them rather beautiful to look at. Selecting one item from the main menu causes the cut out main character to move around into a new position to maybe get a look at his gun as you’re changing your equipment or moving towards his mask and face to observe your persona. Even the main shops have this similar level of pizazz as the merchants in the background shift around striking a new pose, whether it is the punk doctor moving her long legs into a new slouching position or the cool, mafia dad hiding his face with his cap.

Loading times are all hidden behind these stylistic turns that involve a brief animation of people hustling and bustling on an underground tube train and these small touches make the game so wonderful. I realize I’m over three paragraphs into a review and I’ve exclusively talked about menu screens. Odd, I understand, but you need to understand how pleasant these things are.

The meat and bones of the game is living the life of an average Japanese high schooler, studying with your friends by day, helping a politician out by night then maybe breaking into someone’s mind with your magical powers to change their personality and their heart. Does that count as the generic “All Japanese schoolers fight magical monsters, gosh how do they cope?” joke? I hope so, don’t dismiss the game being based around kids in school, surprisingly little of the game actually takes place in the school, for better or for worse.

The most you’ll see of the school building itself is in the opening segments of the game which introduce you to everything at a blistering 3 hour introduction (roughly). While the introduction does have some gameplay and dungeon crawling to it, it is a lengthy turn off events before you’re allowed to properly play the game. That said, the turn of events that transpire in the game are both shocking and gripping. The introduction of an abusive gym teacher who takes capital punishment to all new levels, even going so far as to try and elicit physical relations from one student and when that fails potentially rapes another, all leading to the attempted suicide of a student, which you watch happen.

The fun high school romp with colourful hair that you thought you might be getting quickly burns away to dark stories based around abuse and corrupt authoriative figures, which is why playing as high schoolers is so important to the game. Living your rebellious nature and taking on the world that acts constantly against you, as those in a position of power abuse it to live like kings, with the idea that those of the younger generation can do nothing but accept it. The main characters are those who fight back against this system of being told what to do by those in assumed positions of power and the theme of rebelling against unwarranted authority permeates through a lot of the social links as well.

There are stories of doctors who were almost forced out of the business due to their seniors throwing them under the bus or child prodigies being exploited by their guardian for money. Persona 5 continues in tradition of the rest of the series in that it is filled with these dark and odd stories as you meet people and learn about them and their problems eventually helping them out in your own oddly silent way.

But what about the meat of the gameplay? Well, that’s it for the most part, your day to day is a mixture of talking to your friends, working with your social links, maybe going to the local café to study and drink coffee. Perhaps you spend the day fishing, working at one of your part time jobs or maybe spending some time at the batting cages trying to hit some dingers. Time management is the game and bling panic is your name, is that how that saying works? There’s a lot to do in Persona 5 to the point where you’d be hard pressed to complete everything in a truly blind run, honestly I’d suggest to just make a go of it, see how you do as there’s always a second playthrough which you carry over a fair amount of progress in which you could always follow a walkthrough on.

When you’re not hanging out in beautiful Tokyo with the lights and the people, you’ll be thieving your way through dungeons, thieving in style. Persona 5 has decided to have structured dungeons instead of randomly generated ones that its predecessors had and this works wonderfully. Dungeons can have great design behind them as they now represent the inner psyche of your targets as they warp more and more as you go deeper into the palace. With stealth added to the mix for traversing around shadows and monsters for safety and getting the drop on them for a wonderful ambush. Dungeons are now full of great set pieces and even oddly surreal segments like jumping into paintings in a gallery to traverse the land between pictures, like it’s something out of Harry Potter.

Turn based combat makes a comeback and it’s not a slog. The various elemental weaknesses that you can exploit and can be exploited adds a lot more strategy to the battles than you may think would initially be there. Swapping between your personas to vary up your tactics as the need arises as well as changing your party members around in the middle of a dungeon to allow them to recover or make use of their undepleted, or is it pleted, mana pools. With a sprawling multi-tiered randomly generated dungeon, Mementos, to act as the extra dungeon for you to explore inbetween your main targets you’ve also got a host of smaller side targets with the requests that you get, these all have a little bit of story that can be as simple as evil person is evil, but even then you get a slight look into their inner weaknesses that may drive someone to bully through their insecurities or failure in other areas.

Persona 5 obviously has a few small flaws that could potentially annoy you a large amount, depending on how quickly you can get into the game or not. Combat lines are repeated with an upsetting fervor that, added with the single general combat music, things can become a little grating at times. This mixed with instant death skills that still persist to this day, despite the inclusion of normal magic skills to take advantage of the light and dark weaknesses, can still cause an unavoidable death and game over that’ll leave you rather annoyed, it’s less punishing now with regular checkpoints, but defeat that you could do nothing about is still a pain nonetheless.

Finally one of the biggest issues just comes from time management. Time management is a big deal in this game, every segment of time is precious, every day can be vital to your teenage life, let’s ignore my wasted years playing MMOs in my pants as a teenager, that during heavy story segments you can find yourself rocketing through days like there’s no tomorrow, although still finding yourself stuck in your room at the end of each day with your cat telling you you’re too tired to do anything so may as well go to sleep. The story is still wonderful and in traditional Persona style it ramps up quickly and you begin to fight gods or something, but having the reigns taken from you for so long in a game that’s designed around using each day to its fullest can be a little annoying. You’ll be sat there sweating as you think about how you’ll ever fit in time to hang out with the best character, Yusuke, while everyone keeps on forcing you to hang out and investigate the next target. I just want to hang out with my main gang dammit!

Overall, Persona 5 is a wonderful game. It has a few niggling annoyances but to say I put in over 100 hours into my first playthrough and don’t really remember any major moments that I’d regret playing it is a massive testament to its variation and griping nature. With enough style to make Paris Fashion Week blush and a soundtrack that’ll have you tapping your foot to most segments I can greatly recommend Persona 5 to just about anyone. Don’t be put off by the length playtime, it keeps you driven enough that there’s always something to work towards and keep you moving. Delightful characters and there are moments in Persona 5 that I don’t think I’ll forget for some time, the themes of rebellion and society are great and the constant dabbling in Jungian psychology and the collective unconscious that the Persona games are known for continues to be a major strength.