Persona 5 is the newest entry in the Persona franchise, a spin off of the Shin Megami Tensei games. It’s my first time playing a game in either this or the core series and I knew nothing going in aside from the fact that it combines a life sim with a dungeon-crawling RPG, so the concept sounds intriguing. And it came with this neat controller skin without even needing to preorder the game. Imagine that! But this is a long game. I cannot overstate how long it is, so let’s see if this 25 year old franchise is worth the acclaim it gets and the time commitment it requires in my mighty review of… Persona 5!

In Persona 5 you play as a player-named high school student who we’ll refer to by his nickname, Joker. Joker’s recently been relocated to Tokyo after being found guilty of assaulting a man who was going to rape a woman in the streets. Joker defended her, but due to the assailant’s ties with the police here you are- living the attic of a coffee shop owned by a family friend with your fellow students fearing you and the adults looking down on you for being on probation. 

After a couple of strange dreams Joker begins life at his new school. On his first day he and another student, Ryuji, are late and they get sucked into an alternate world with a castle where the school once was. After being captured, it’s revealed that the castle’s ruler is a teacher at the school guilty of beating and sexually assaulting students. When faced with execution, Joker decides to defy the ruler and unleashes his persona, granting him the power to escape. 

On the way out you meet a cat creature named Morgana who explains what happened and where you are. This world is a palace, a corrupted alternate dimension created by the twisted heart of its ruler. Your persona is a physical representation of your inner defiant self, to be used in battles while in this world. 

He explains that by using personas to get to the center of someone’s palace and steal their treasure, you can cause them to have a change of heart and confess their sins out of guilt. Over the course of the game you’ll gain more comrades in arms and form a group known as the phantom thieves dedicated to fixing the corrupt people of the world.... When you’re not living your normal student life.

The thing that makes your character special is his ability to control multiple personas instead of just one, granted to you by Igor, the man from your dreams, and his assistants. He tells you you’re about to go through a vague rehabilitation process and they’ll assist you in developing and managing your various personas along the way.

So yeah, the story’s a little complicated and it involves a lot of twists and turns. It’s not always 100% clear what’s going on, but still manages to be a compelling work of its own. Its biggest strengths are the characters. Most of the characters in Persona 5 are interesting and lively with a lot of depth due to well thought out back stories.

As the plot continues you’ll grow closer to them and have plenty of stand out moments both comedic and touching. It never really reaches the level of something revolutionary, but it does a serviceable job. The villains are also great, partially as cartoonishly evil characters that make converting them a satisfying endeavor, but also because each embodies an evil that anyone can recognize as all too present in the real world. They all feel like people who could really exist, making the act of completing the game an enticing power fantasy.

Still, with a story this grand there are bound to be some issues. First, the dialogue sometimes comes across as what old men think kids say than actual teenagers talking, such as how they blame adults for everything wrong and the use of internet slang. While the characters tend to be well written, some of them can rely a bit too much on their own archetypes as the stupid guy, the ditsy blonde, or the quirky homebody. It can sometimes feel uninspired.

Getting to know everyone is usually interesting, with unique stories for each character, but each story tends to follow the same formula of getting to know someone, finding out about someone bullying them, defeating their bully in the game, then returning to them and getting to their final confidant level. Not to mention during the main plot almost all of the dialogue comes in the form of some sort of overblown exposition dump.

You can also enter into relationships with one or multiple characters during the game and while this is a nice aspect to add in, I am really annoyed about the lack of an ability to break up with your current partner. There’s no warning for you to back out either so if you accidentally click on the wrong dialogue option and start a relationship, you’re stuck with this person unless you want to be labelled as a cheater. And of course this game relies on the old dating sim trope of buying girls things until they love you. Overall, it’s nothing new.

    The visual symbolism in Persona 5 is poignant and generally well done, but for some reason the characters feel the need to explain everything going on, and the meaning behind it, in way too much detail. It’s monotonous and gets really old after only a short time. I get it, this guy is the king of the castle, and the castle is where the school is, so he must think he controls the school. What would otherwise make for decent subtext is ruined by Scooby-Doo-esque exposition. I can’t stand when a game talks down to its players.

    Lastly there’s the character of Joker. He feels half baked both as a character and as an avatar through which you experience the game. For some reason, he isn’t voice acted for most of the game, but does have a few lines, making it seem awkward while he’s silently standing there while your teammates are yelling things out during a battle, especially since he’s supposed to be the leader. 

So maybe you’re supposed to accept this and embody him as a player character, but this fails as well because of how much is pre-defined for him. You can’t change his look, gender, or voice, and most of the optional dialogue is either used to just continue the discussion or choose an activity for the day with little to no lasting impacts on the story. Besides, just one look at the all out attack splash screen and the gorgeous cutscenes shows that Joker has a character here, I just wish they fleshed him out instead of trying to have the best of both worlds and giving the player control. It may seem like I’m harping on this, but it’s just that for a game called persona, you’d think the one thing they got right would be personifying the main character.

Aesthetically, the game is mostly phenomenal. The menus all have a slick style and they pop and dance around, meaning none of the screens look boring whether you’re in the middle of a battle of just out buying some medicine. Right from the opening animation it’s clear just how much style this game has. The character and persona designs are great and the environments have been masterfully constructed. 

Still, despite the intelligent art direction, it’s far from perfect. The 3D character models don’t emote during gameplay and just stand around like mannequins until it’s their turn to speak. I know the character art next to the text is supposed to display their expressions, but it feels lacking, especially with the awkward, robotic animation. Also, switching from well-rendered 3D cutscenes to actual gameplay and then over to anime-style 2D cutscenes seems to happen at random and makes me ask why they didn’t just stick to one consistent style, even if both do look fantastic, with lots of little details sprinkled in to make the world feel real.

Lastly there’s the length. Normally, the amount of visual variety in the game would be plenty, but for a game that’s 85 hours long it can get a bit monotonous. For example, I love the all out attacks and their splash screens, but seeing these overly lengthy cutscenes over and over again gets tedious after a while. I really wish they had given the player a choice and offered a mode where battle animations don’t occur. Just to speed things up a bit. Still, the wonderfully convenient button layouts and quick battle transitions do keep things kinetic and prevent the game from being flat out boring. It’s just a bit too repetitive.

Then there’s the music. It’s fantastic. Each track hits all the right notes at the right times to really add to the atmosphere, but while the game has about as many tracks as any other game, much like the visuals they suffer from the game’s length. And towards the middle of the adventure they actually become a bit repetitive. Which is a shame given their high quality. Still, the masterful compilation of smooth jazz, pop, and rock tracks causes the feeling of repetition to fade every now and again.

The gameplay of Persona 5 is split into two sections. There are the corrupted palaces that play like a dungeon-crawling RPG and then there are the life sim sections where you hang out with friends and do things like go to school and work a part time job. These interact with each other in various ways, but first let’s talk about the combat.

In this game you use your team’s personas to defeat enemies you come across in the palaces. Attacks consist of physical strikes, ranged weaponry, and special moves used by personas that can heal, cause status effects, or do elemental damage. The special moves are limited by stamina and your guns are limited by their ammo. There are also options to use items, run away, and give specific commands to your teammates.

On top of that, if you find your opponents’ weakness and manage to down all of them in a single turn you can hold them up with even more options at your disposal. You can demand money or items to boost your battle prowess or try to find some common ground to get them to join your team as a new persona. The negotiations were pretty confusing at first, but once I realized that a formula used to successfully negotiate was explained in a tutorial never shown on screen, they just became mundane. Still, collecting these little guys can be just as addictive as catching Pokemon, and I was determined to get as many as possible in my playthrough. Of course, if you don’t want a certain persona you can execute a devastating all out attack to deal bonus damage to all opponents at once.

Combat abilities can be enhanced both by gaining experience from battle and buying new weapons and armour from the shop. Each battle rewards experience and cash and each new weapon can be useful in dealing extra damage, but it would have been nice to see more unique weapon, armor, and magic abilities instead of just stat boosts and resistances.

One major downside to the combat comes in the form of a bug. Normally when fighting an enemy, for every new type of attack it’s hit with, you store information on whether that kind of attack was strong or weak against it. Unfortunately the game has a habit of glitching out and forgetting these weaknesses between battles, leading to frustratingly using unnecessary stamina to discover them all over again if you forget. 

Also, the personas you fight in one palace tend to be different from those in others, meaning that if you missed one before beating the boss it’s very difficult to find it again. Then there’s the fact that some enemies have the ability to attack twice for no reason and with no warning, which is either a glitch or an unexplained aspect of combat. As well as the cheap insta-kill attacks some enemies are capable of, leading to a frustrating death when performed on Joker because when he drops, you lose. Everybody else just… gives up I guess.

Lastly, not all of your combat abilities are well explained from the start and some aren’t explained at all. I still only have a rudimentary understanding of what different persona stats mean, how they affect battle, and how experience is distributed after a battle. Given how much time is spent trying to manage stats during the life simulation sections of the game, not knowing how certain stats affect you in battle makes all of that effort feel less rewarding.

That being said the combat is really fun. The sheer number of options present is staggering and makes for a good amount of strategy. The boss fights in particular are great, with each offering unique twists on the formula. I won’t say this is anything unbelievable, but definitely a rewarding challenge at the end of a palace.

The other parts of the palaces involve exploring and solving puzzles. Exploring these unique and twisted locations is a delight with creativity exploding from the world around you. And knowing that you’re going through the morphed heart of your target makes each location even more intriguing. 

On the other hand, the puzzles are simple at best and insultingly easy at worst. They’re also mind numbingly linear, meaning exploration becomes a drag as well. And while it’s possible to sneak around enemies to get in position for an ambush and give yourself an advantage in the fight ahead, stealthing around to avoid a fight isn’t really much of an option because you need to fight each enemy you come across in order to reach a decent level before fighting the final boss.

Outside of palaces there’s also Mementos, an always-available randomized dungeon that can be used to get extra experience, catch new personas, and find more treasure to be sold. It’s also where you’ll find mini bosses of some less corrupt people from throughout the city. This is a nice distraction and a decent way to grind when a palace is unavailable, but it does tend to get tedious towards the end of the game.

Personas can be trained by gaining experience through battle. This works fine for comrades with only one persona, but given the numerous monsters at Joker’s disposal, training each of them would become tedious. There are ways to power them up by sacrificing old personas for small power ups, but in the end the best option is typically to just fuse two personas together into a more powerful monster. It can suck when you have a persona with a lot of resistances that’s too underpowered to fight anymore, but it does a decent job of adding variety to the game by constantly encouraging the player to change up their team. 

Still, even with these forced changes the game is pretty easy and while there were plenty of fun challenges, many just boiled down to finding the enemy’s weakness, using an all out attack, and trying not to waste too much energy in the process. Playing on normal I only died like 6 times and two of those were to instant kill attacks with hardly any way to block them. I just wish the majority of the game’s challenge came from outsmarting your enemies instead of how well you manage your magic power.

When you’re not destroying monsters in another dimension, you’ll be living the life of an average high school student. Each day consists of attending class or completing chores and then using your free time to perform beneficial daily activities. These usually consist of two kinds of actions- hanging out with your confidants and improving your personal stats.

    Confidants are the people who will help you in your rehabilitation. By growing closer to those around you, they can grant special abilities while also making training personas of their specific type much more beneficial. The best part, however, is getting to know these well-written characters and hearing their life stories. Like I said before, the dialogue can be a bit shallow, but that’s usually when the entire group gathers to further the plot. When it’s one on one, the conversations feel natural and are a delight to participate in.

Each individual confidant offers a different kind of friendship and getting to know them adds some replay value to the game since getting all of them to their max level is unlikely in a first playthrough. However, this process is slow, leading to some stories having a lull that feels like filler put in place to ensure each confidant has 10 different levels.

    The personal stats are your intelligence, proficiency, kindness, guts, and knowledge. By improving these stats you’ll be able to get closer with different confidants or experience new things that the world has to offer. Activities include things like crafting new weapons, doing your laundry, taking a bath, working a job, eating a burger, and many, many others. These are an interesting way to spend time but some do fall short as they tend to be just as boring as they sound with little to no player interaction. Some really miss the opportunity to make for a fun mini game, but all in all it’s managing your day to day life that’s the real challenge.

    Each day you have only a couple of activities you can do, with one after school and the other in the evening. You can raid a palace, explore the mementos, hang out with a confidant, or perform an activity. However, managing personas with Igor and shopping don’t take any time out of the day, so the game highly encourages you take advantage of them. Although I do wonder why I’m not able to perform 3 activities on a Sunday or holiday when I don’t have school, considering the extra time in the day.

It’s also pretty frustrating when you have certain activities you want to partake in, but the story requires you do something else that day. And time management is key as each palace only exists for a specific amount of time and when that time runs out, it disappears if the player was successful and if not, it’s game over. I’ll say this much: for the most part, thinking of how to manage your time to achieve maximum benefits over the course of the game is a really interesting prospect, but there are definitely times where it gets a little too close to the monotony of everyday reality.

All in all, Persona 5 tries to do too much at once. And while a lot succeeds, there’s also a lot that contradicts itself. You can duplicate skill cards to teach a persona new moves, but why bother when you’re probably going to end up fusing it away anyway? The story is pretty good, with memorable characters, but the extreme length of the game makes it drag out and have a long boring middle with little happening to advance the main plot. 

The combat is excellent, but you’re encouraged to beat the palaces in as little time as possible to avoid getting a game over, meaning you typically get a huge chunk of combat, followed by a chunk of daily life twice as long over and over until you beat the game. And its style is one of the best I’ve ever seen, but repetition and long, drawn-out cutscenes and dialogue make it feel old after a while.

Persona 5 is a massive experience. It’s a great game and a fun RPG to jump into the genre with, but there are some noticeable problems, especially with the pacing. With a great beginning, a stellar ending, and a middle that’s good, but repetitive Persona 5 for the PS4 gets an 8 out of 10. While I have a lot of complaints about the game, its incredible style and snappy combat make me want to keep playing, even after finishing the incredibly long campaign. And I just want to restate that this is my first Persona game, so I don’t have a firm grasp on how much 5 improves on its predecessors. I reviewed it entirely as its own product. That being said I hope you enjoyed this review. If you did, be sure to like and subscribe to see more mighty reviews, dissections, and other great gaming content. And as always, have a mighty nifty day today!