Goro Akechi

Oh, am I mistaken? I thought I heard something about delicious pancakes...

Hooooo Booooi

After over 100 hours of game play and finally finishing the third semester i can actually join the overall discussion around this game, and i gotta say...I love it

Starting off with the game play aspect, as someone whose experience with turn based combat is essentially just Persona 4&5 so far, the combat here is pretty good. Animations are fast but flashy enough to not get stale after seeing on repeat for 100 hours, and mapping the controls to each individual button on a controller (or keys if your on MnKB) makes fights faster in comparison to Persona 4's approach on scrolling through them with the D-Pad. The 'one more' mechanic not only helps these encounters feel fast, but encourages the player to use different personas in their arsenal as well as their other party members. Theres also the 'baton pass' mechanic, this is such a fun tool use and fits right in with the Persona franchises love with striking weaknesses that its a surprise that none of the other games had it.

While the turn based combat is fun and easy to learn, Persona 5 runs into the same issue I had with Persona 4's combat, in fact its even worse in this case, in that the game is just way too damn easy after the first 2 dungeons. After beating the first 2 dungeons in Persona 5 most of these poor shadows just couldn't even touch me, a big reason for that is partly due to most of the personas that I levelled up and unlocked at the time having abilities that wiped the floor with these losers, and also in part to my boi Ryuji. Its already well known at this point but unlocking Ryujis rank 7 insta kill ability essentially just makes grinding a breeze. Not only do you get to just ram through low levelled shadows, but also get full exp and yen for doing so with no loss. Whilst I appreciated this at first for making grinding manageable, the monkey paw effect of having the difficulty take a nosedive made me question whether the trade off was worth it. Honestly, besides over-levelling issue, there's also the fact that Physical damage is just wayy too good, it practically wipes through shadows that don't have resistances to it and its also the only skill type in the game to have a colossal rank which emphasises just how much more powerful it is compared to the others. The bosses in this are a mixed issue as well, on one hand they have some fun gimmicks and attacks they can throw at you, but they're also far too humble when it comes to dishing out damage numbers (and i played the whole game on Hard). Bosses here fall victim to the ever so powerful physical skills and either needed bigger health pools (not to the extent of P4) or more powerful attacks to really pressure players. As it stands right now they're unfortunately fun but easy to breeze through (with the exception of Okumara).

In terms of the social aspect of this game, there's not really much i can add onto that hasn't already been said before. The day to day activities of living as a high school student and bonding with your confidants as well levelling up your social stats is ridiculously addicting and embarrassingly enough I think I spent more time getting stressed out over deciding which which activity i was to spend on each day than each all the bosses combined. Getting into the flow of managing your social schedule and seeing which days you have free to spend on Mementos & Palaces (combat stuff) and which ones to focus on confidants or part time jobs is the best part of the game and makes up for the lack of challenge through the 1st quarter of the game.

This game also has the best UI I have ever seen like ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ why does it looks so good, seriously more Western devs need to take notes from this game because we need to break out of this 'less is more' mentality with how a lot of their UI's tend to look. The comic book aesthetic combined with the bold red and black colours make opening and looking at menus so satisfying, which is a plus considering menus are most of the combat anyway. It isn't just the UI, the entire game just oozes with style with the way that the characters and world are cell shaded, to the point where at some point I didn't even think this was a JRPG.

Overall, this game was an absolute blast to play through, apart from my critiques on the lack of difficulty I would easily replay this game again on NewGame+.

(also, whoever at Atlus thought it was a good idea for the extremely OP DLC persona's to be free in the persona compendium needs to be fired, like come on this game is already too easy as it i)