It's been a long time coming, but at long last, after much pushing from friends, I have played to completion Persona 5: Royal. It was a big deal. I had never played a Persona game before, and was always curious to give one a try. All my work friends love the game, and when one offered to lend me his copy, I jumped at the chance. I love JRPGs, it's my favorite genre, and I've played more then I can count. I constantly think about them. When many think of JRPGs, they think of Persona 5. After all, P5R (Persona 5 Royal) is the highest rated JRPG on metacritic. It really kicked the Pesona series into mainstream appeal around the world. So it must be special, right? This is going to be amazing, and I'm going to love it to death, right? Everything's going to go great!........right?
.......
Head on down for my full review. Don't worry, I don't dislike the game or anything. I had a great time with it. However, to say I didn't have big problems with it would be lying. This ended up being a complicated game for me. Head on below to see my thoughts on everything I loved to death about Persona 5, and everything about it that drove me crazy.
Part 1: What is Persona?
Since this is my first Persona game, I should give a brief overview on how the game functions, since I spent a lot of time learning its mechanics and systems. Persona 5 has two styles of gameplay that you will be jumping between. The first is a social simulator. You have a calendar, and a limited amount of days to spend in Tokyo. So the primary choices you'll make is how to spend these days. There are an abundance of activities to do throughout the city. You can hang out with a character of your choice, work jobs to make money, or do various activities, such as seeing a movie, working out, or playing games, all of which will boost your social stats in some manner. There is a lot to do, and by the 30 hour mark, the amount of ways you can spend each day are almost overwhelming, and not in a bad way.
The second half of Persona 5 can be likened to a traditional dungeon crawling JRPG. During these segments, you will primarily explore palaces, large dungeons that require you to battle enemies, solve puzzles, and navigate through an ever expanding series of rooms. You will battle foes with a turn based battle system, and can also find various treasures and items to equip on your characters or sell for money. Bouncing between these two gameplay styles, one in the real world, the other in mind palaces, makes for the Persona gameplay loop. Some play sessions you'll spend hours exploring dungeons with your party members, others you'll spend hours hanging out with your friends in the real world and building stats together.
I'd like to discuss the different parts of Persona 5 one by one, in order of my favorite parts of the game to my least favorite. So, let's starts with the first half of the game: your daily life as a high school student in Tokyo.
Part 2: The Social Simulator
Persona 5's story begins with you as a high school student moving to Tokyo. Your character (Joker) was unfairly blamed for a crime you didn't commit, forcing you to move from your hometown and spend a year rehabilitating while attending high school. You live in the attic of your temporary guardian, who doesn't take a liking to you, enroll in a school surrounded by students that judge you, alongside faculty that are more interested in advancing their own careers then helping anyone out. It is a cruel situation to be in, and when all seems lost, you find access to mind palaces. Through these you make your first friends, and from there begin to befriend residents both within your school and throughout downtown Tokyo, as you attempt to move on from your past crimes and forge a new healthy future as a high school student.
Thus you spend each day choosing how to spend your time, while also trying to ace your high school exams and befriend the citizens of Tokyo. While you can do anything during your days in Tokyo, if there was a main objective to these segments, it would be maxing as many social links as possible with the time you have. When you befriend a character and agree to hang out with them regularly, you establish a social link with them. On certain days throughout the year, you will have the opportunity to hang out with them and increase your social link. These grant you special abilities to use throughout the game, and also offer great character moments as you befriend the cast of Persona 5.
Of course, while they are the main reward, social links aren't the only things you will spend your daily life on. Various social links will reach a point in which you must have a certain level of your social stats to continue, motivating you to occasionally spend days doing activities to raise those. Going into palaces to advance the main story will also cost a day, and most social links will reach a point in which you must go to a specific part of a dungeon to defeat an enemy and progress their social link, costing another day.
The social links you see are are not easy to advance, and given that characters are often only open to hang out on certain days, you will find yourself bouncing between various activities each day. One day you'll be playing darts and billiards with your friends to boost your team abilities, the next you'll be studying in the library to raise your knowledge stat, the next you'll be eating dinner with a street vendor while discussing their parental issues. There is a lot to do, and the more time you spend in Tokyo, the more it starts to feel like a real place. You'll want to try each activity at least once just to see how it is, and getting to know the many inhabitants of downtown Tokyo really helps it to feel not just alive, but like a nice fun place to live in, a comfy place to return to. The world of Persona 5 is one I grew attached to, and it's not hard to see why.
Moving on, it's unlikely you will be able to max every social link on your first playthrough without the help of a guide. There are a lot of them, 21 to be exact. As each has 10 levels as you rank up, that makes 180 cutscenes involving you hanging out with these characters, getting to know them, exploring their backstory, and helping them with their life struggles (3 of the social links are mandatory and will naturally level up as you progress through the story, so you don't actually hang out with them, which is why I said 180 cutscenes rather than 210).
Your enjoyment of the social links will depend on how much you like the writing of Persona (which can be quite anime). I am happy to report that, even after 100 hours of playtime, and viewing over 100 of these social link scenes, I never tire of them, and always looked forward to unlocking a new one. The writing of Persona 5 is exceptional, and I was pleased that by the end I was able to max all but four social links.
The social links do such a great job at fleshing out the many characters of Persona, giving them interesting histories, goals, and conflicts, all while keeping the dialogue amusing and fun to read. It's always a treat to hang out with a character and see if you'll either end up in a silly hijinx, or having a deep conversation about their lives. You never know, and it always has a nice ending as you slowly grow closer with each character and gain their support.
Part 3: The Story
Speaking of the writing, let's move on to the main story. While social links are primarily side activities, exploring the mind palaces is where the main storyline takes place. These palaces are dungeons that form from the distorted desires of those that rule the palace. Essentially, when you enter someone's palace, its look, structure, and underlying systems all come from how the owner views the world, and what unrealistic perspective they take.
So for example, in the first mind palace, you enter the mind of a powerful teacher at your school. He physically abuses his students and sexually assaults certain female students. His palace then is a castle with him as a king. The students are his slaves and do whatever he says, and certain female students dress in revealing clothing and follow him obediently. Within this palace, you discover the means to change the teacher's desires, setting him straight and causing him to reveal all his crimes in the real world and vow to repent for them.
Thus your journey becomes clear. You and your new friends join forces to find and change the hearts of corrupt adults that have made your lives hellish, while also attempting to live a normal school life that will allow you to return home with your criminal record cleared. This is why you will be both trying to live a good normal life as a high school student, while also venturing into mind palaces to challenge and change the wicked adults of the world.
P5R's story is very strong. It left me with a lot to think about. I don't want to talk too much about it to avoid spoilers, but I would like to say a few things before moving on. First, I noticed initially that the story reminded me a lot of Death Note. In that anime, its protagonist lives a normal school life in Tokyo, while discovering a magical book they can use to kill anyone they want. They use it to change many lives, and soon their disturbances are brought to the attention of the police and those in a power. The anime then becomes a game of cat and mouse as the protagonist attempts to avoid getting caught while continuing to use their power to change people and the world at large. I found this similarity funny, but I was surprised at just how many similarities the story of Persona 5 continues to share with Death Note as it progresses. There's a grand cat and mouse chase, and it shares similar themes about changing people, our current society, and how to deal with the injustices of the world.
The other thing I'll say about the story relates to its structure. Since you spend the game infiltrating mind palaces and changing the hearts of adults, the game operates on a "villain of the week" structure. Once you defeat a villain and save someone suffering under them, there's some downtime, the villain being defeated has story implications, and there are plot developments alongside these. New characters get introduced, and a new villain will enter the picture as your next target. Thus you can view the story as a series of separate arcs, with each arc featuring its own mind palace of the villain, as well as starring particular characters and new developments in the story. This is actually pretty similar to the chapter based structure in the Paper Mario games, with each chapter having new characters to focus on, settings, and stories. The strength of this structure is that it creates a lot of variety and you don't know what to expect, keeping things exciting.
On the other hand, this changing structure also means that some arcs will really resonate with you, while others won't, and can even annoy you at the plot developments that happen or characters that are introduced. This is to say that, of the nine arcs I would separate P5R's story into, I enjoyed five of them, while four I had some issues with. If you were to ask me this same question with the eight chapters of Paper Mario 2, which I recently played, I would say that I enjoyed five of them, and had issues with three. I hold Paper Mario 2 very highly. So let me say with certainty that I think Persona 5's story is overall quite strong, certainly one of its best qualities. I was continuously engaged and generally enjoyed the path the story and its main characters took.
The real strength of Persona 5's writing, seen in both its story and social links, is its confidence with which it tackles mental health issues. I have played many JRPGs that aren't afraid to go into darker topics or really explore its characters. But I'm not sure I've ever played one that goes so far in showing the actual suffering a lot of people go through in our current world when it comes to sexual assault, suicide, societal pressures, trauma, loss, social anxiety, etc. It likely has to do with the fact that this is the first M rated JRPG I've played, but I was shocked at how mature and dark the game got. It isn't afraid to show how messed up people can be in the real world, how badly it can mess with someone's mental health, and the means of getting over and living with it.
I really appreciated this. I love games that have a raw political, emotional, and personal sense of stories and characters. The kind of stories that you can't really talk about without revealing something about yourself, due to the personal nature of their narratives. It's why I hold the story, characters, and overall writing of Fire Emblem: Three Houses in such high regard. I love the personal nature of that game, and Persona is also a slam dunk in that regard.
As someone who has their share of mental health issues, and has met a lot of people with depression, social anxiety, and trauma, it was easy for me to resonate with some of its characters. To get personal myself, Makoto was the first party member I felt a great connection with from my own experiences. I could absolutely see elements of her, Haru, and Futaba and their struggles in myself and many of my friends. Futaba in particular was a real standout. Of the extended cast, I resonated with the struggles of Mishima, the fortune teller, and the politician the most.
While I loved Persona's ability to dive into mental health through its story and social links, there were a couple issues I had with it. One major problem that's not hard to miss is the game's portrayal of Ann. Ann is so tragic, she spends a lot of time taking care of her appearance, and as a result, a lot of people view her as nothing more then an object of sexual desire, reducing her to her physical body, rather than treating her like a person with their own wants and needs. This is brought up as a big reason the villain of the first palace is a bad person and needs his heart changed. Treating a person like an object of desire removes their humanity, and that's just evil.
Despite this, throughout the course of the game the male party members will occasionally make comments on Ann's body and treat her like an object of desire, just as the first villain did. They are never challenged for doing this, and rather than explore this in any meaningful way, the game simply lets it happen, creating a huge contradiction with the themes of the first palace and really cheapening some of the games' core themes. This is especially the case with Morgana, who is easily my most disliked character in P5R. I had so many issues with his progression and writing, and his treatment of Ann was a big part of that. I hope a future Persona game is more willing to engage with themes of sexualization, misogyny, and objectification more meaningfully, rather than give a very surface level, if not bad take on the whole subject: that being when some people do it, it's bad, but when we do it, it's all right.
The other issue I have with the writing is that, for a game that's willing to explore the complexity and darkness of mental health, and is willing to have so many different types of characters, it sure is shocking that there isn't a single LGBTQ+ character in the extended cast. In Persona 5, you can only play as a male protagonist. When you get characters to rank 9, you can get into a relationship with one of them, which I'm always a fan of. However, you can only get in a relationship with the female characters.
If I look at Fire Emblem Three Houses for comparison, this is not a hard fix. In Three Houses, you can play as either a male or female protagonist. While you are mostly limited to marrying characters of the opposite sex, there are a couple characters you can marry despite being the same sex as them. If Fire Emblem can do it, there's no reason Persona can't, and it's disappointing the game doesn't seem interested in the female and LGBTQ+ fans it is alienating by not allowing those playable and romance options.
Nonetheless, I still greatly enjoyed the story and writing of P5R, and I have so much respect for the themes it explores and how willing it was to try to paint a realistic picture of what living in modern Tokyo with a struggling mental health is like. Kudos to the writers. There's a reason I was excited whenever I unlocked a new social link rank.
Part 4: The Dungeon Crawler
Next, let's talk about the other half of Persona 5, the dungeon crawling. I should preface this by saying that I don't have much experience with the dungeon crawler genre. My own history with it is two Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games. Both of those I had fun with, but dropped after 10 or so hours because I found their gameplay quite repetitive and boring. Going into randomly generated dungeons quickly loses its fun when the designs of the dungeons are so basic, and the combat wasn't interesting enough to keep me invested.
So, as someone that isn't fond of the genre, did Persona 5 change my perception of it?
Not really. Thankfully P5R's palaces aren't randomly generated. They are each individually designed, so they aren't the most boring to navigate. They each have their own style of puzzles to solve and enemies to battle, which is fun. What I really like about them however, is what they bring to the game thematically.
As I said earlier, each palace is designed to show how someone has a distorted view of the world. This means that the palace can reveal a lot about the character through showing how they view other people and the world around them. This is cool. I love environmental storytelling, and I loved how each palace revealed more about the character's beliefs and personality. It led to some really neat moments that left me thinking. It's a great way to reveal more about a character, and conceptually I love the idea of mind palaces.
That being said, I did have some issues with them. First, while using dungeons to reveal more about a character is cool, it loses its novelty when said characters have similar views of the world and personalities, leading to similar themes. Because most of the palace owners in Persona 5 are the villains of the game, you will notice common themes between them. They are the leaders of their palace, everyone else is below them and follows their orders, and they have the right to exploit others however they want. This is unfortunately how most of the palaces are, meaning the thematic element of them gets predictable.
Thankfully not every palace is like this, and there are a couple that aren't led by the villains of the game, or are led by more morally grey villains. For that, those few palaces were easily my favorite in the game, simply for their novelty.
This repetitiveness wouldn't be a problem if there was more variety between each palace on a mechanical level. Unfortunately, when you take the look of each palace away, you navigate each one in nearly the same manner. Unlike JRPGs like the Mario RPGs and Golden Sun, in which you unlock new abilities throughout the game that let you interact with your environments in new ways, Persona never grants players any varied means of interacting with the palaces you explore. For nearly every item of interest in every palace, you walk up to it, and press A, and that's it. This is how you interact with environments in the mihoyo gacha games like Honkai Star Rail, and those are notorious for being simple games. The only other tool players are given is the grappling hook, which can lead to some fun obstacles of finding where to use it. However, it quickly loses its novelty by the third palace, and it means palaces get quite boring to navigate, given you traverse them all the same way, and given how long they are.
Another element that compounds this issue is how long you can spend in a palace. Persona is at its best when you're jumping between different objectives, exploring a palace a bit for one day, and then going back to the real world and working on your social links. Unfortunately, because going to a palace takes a day in Persona, you are incentivized to clear an entire palace in one day, to save the most time. This means spending 3+ hours to clear a palace in one day. By the end of these segments, I often felt burnt out from the game. Navigating palaces simply isn't an engaging experience when you have to do it for so long, and I wish they were either shorter, there were less palaces, or you have to spend multiple days to complete most palaces.
Well it's not so bad, at least they aren't randomly generated right?.......
So, there's one part of these palaces I've yet to mention. You see, in addition to the nine mind palaces you will explore in P5R, there is mementos. This is a massive dungeon meant to serve as the mind palace for everyone in Tokyo. It is a large series of floors that have basic randomly generated layouts, and you will have to go here to complete most side quests in the game.
As you might guess, I did not like Mementos. I only went in when I had five or more side quests saved up so I could knock many out at once and minimize my time in Mementos. It is simply not fun to navigate, and whenever I was forced to spend a long time there, I could feel my enjoyment of the game drifting away.
It also doesn't help that puzzles in the game are few and far in between. I said earlier that each palace has their own style of puzzles, and this is true. However, there aren't a lot of them. The majority of your time in palaces and mementos will be spent doing one thing, and that is battling.
Part 5: The Battle System
We're finally here. If you've made it this far down, I assume you're ready for anything. I'm not going to beat around the bush here. I do not think Persona 5 Royal's battle system is good. I have played many turn based RPGs in my time. I love turn based battle systems, I love how much strategy they can involve, and the fun chess like boss battles you can have with them. I love the fun gimmicks many games put on the simple turn based battle structure. As someone with this experience, I can say with confidence that Persona 5 Royal has one of, if not my least favorite battle system in a JRPG. I have so many issues with it that I don't even know where to begin. But, we have to start somewhere, so here we go. Buckle up.
Persona 5 has a weakness oriented battle system. This means that key to winning battles is knowing and exploiting an enemy's weakness. This is fairly common in JRPGs. Nearly all of them have enemies with weaknesses: some make it really important in battle. Honkai: Star Rail, Pokemon, and Octopath Traveler all have weakness oriented battle systems.
In Persona 5 however, when you correctly attack an enemy with its elemental weakness, not only does the attack do more damage like in Pokemon, not only does it delay the enemy's next turn like in Star Rail and Octopath, but it also lets your character go again. Furthermore, instead of taking another turn, you can use a "baton pass" to allow another one of your party members to take a turn instead, with boosted attack strength as well.
All this is to say, hitting an enemy with their weakness is really important in Persona 5, moreso then any other turn based game I've played. When you hit an enemy with its weakness, it falls down into a "tumble" state. If you can successfully use the turns you gain from hitting enemy weaknesses to knock every enemy into a tumble state, that is to say, you hit all enemies with their elemental weakness before they can get back up, then the battle transitions into a "Hold Up" phase, in which you have the enemies cornered.
At this point, you can either use a powerful all out attack, which will more often then not defeat everyone, or you can attempt to talk with one of the enemies. From there, you can either convince them to join your party as a Persona, or convince them to give you a lot of money or an item. This leads to a fun conclusion in which you get to choose between more exp, more money, or a new Persona, and it's a neat way of giving players choice in how they want to disperse the resources they gain from battle.
In addition to your characters gaining another turn from hitting an enemy's weakness, enemies also gain another turn if they hit one of your allies' elemental weakness, meaning enemies can do a lot of damage during their turns. This is because each of your party members has a Persona, which is, in gameplay terms, what their special attacks are. Each Persona has a type it is weak too. There are eight types in total, with these being split up into four groups of two, where within each group, it is weak to its other type. So for example: Fire is weak to Ice, and Ice is weak to Fire, Wind is weak to Electric, and Electric is weak to Wind, etc. It's pretty easy to understand.
So, with how important elemental weakness is in Persona 5, with how much damage enemies can do by hitting your party's weaknesses, you would think that there is a simple engaging way to learn the element of each enemy right? Unfortunately, this is the first of the battle system's issues. In Persona 5, there is no way to figure out what an enemy is weak to, or what sort of attack it will use. You simply have to guess by using an attack from every element on it, and hope you guess right.
This is shockingly basic. It means every time you discover a new enemy, you have to go through the process of using every element on it to find its weakness. It gets boring fast, and by the end of the game I would groan every time I encountered a new enemy.
Let's look at other games for comparison. In Octopath Traveler, enemies have on average four or five elemental and weapon types they are weak to, so guessing won't take as long. In addition, one party member has the ability to reveal one weakness for an enemy, and it can even reveal multiple weaknesses if powered up. In Honkai Star Rail, there is no such system, and you will be shown the enemy's weakness when you get close to it. This would be great in Persona to allow you to prepare and change your party, so you don't happen to have party members weak to the elements of the enemies. Alas,
Pokemon has a means of finding weaknesses that I've gained a new appreciation for. In Pokemon, every creature follows the type chart, in which every type is weak to the same element, and resistant to the same elements. So, if for example you use a fire attack on a Pokemon, and it is not very effective, you have a clue as to what type it might be. Additionally, you can infer the type of the Pokemon by reacting to what attacks they use. If the Pokemon uses an electric attack, and also has a strong yellow color, they are probably electric. You can infer from not just the moves they use and react to, but even from their design on what type they will be, because in Pokemon, all creatures and types follow a consistent logic.
I tried using a similar logic in Persona. I would attack an enemy with wind damage, and they resisted it. Okay, maybe they will be weak to electric then? Nope! Okay, in this next battle the enemy used a fire attack on all my enemies. Maybe that means they're fire, so they will be weak to ice? Nope! In Persona, the rules of what enemies are weak to, what they resist, and what attacks they use, it's all arbitrary. There is no logic to it, and when attempting to engage with the system, I was repeatedly punished. There are a small number of enemies that have a consistency. Jack Frost for example, the most popular creature from the Persona series, uses ice attacks and is weak to fire. Later in the game you encounter a creature that is clearly a larger more intimidating version of Jack Frost, in addition to a stronger Jack Frost. Maybe they will be weak to fire too? Of course not!
Thankfully, once you use an elemental attack on an enemy, the game will remember and let you know in the future if the enemy is weak to it, resists it, or does neutral damage. However, that doesn't make the process of finding the weaknesses any less frustrating. It is monotonous to do. Furthermore, when enemies hit you with an elemental weakness and get to go again, it doesn't feel earned and like you made a mistake. Because you have no way of knowing what attacks an enemy will use, since there's no logic, it feels frustrating and unfair more than anything.
You actually do unlock an ability that will reveal the weaknesses of enemies later in the game, but well.....(cue evil laugh), we'll get to that later.
In the mean time, there is actually another way to put enemies in the tumble state outside of attacking their weakness. If enemies are hit with a status effect, like falling asleep or being paralyzed, then the next attack used on the enemy, provided it's a certain element, will be a "technical hit," and has a chance of putting them in the tumble state. Additionally, characters can, on rare occasions, land a critical hit, which will also sometimes put enemies in the tumble state. This status effect method is nice in that it can be used on most enemies, but it and the critical hit method are dependent on randomness. Whether the status effect attack hits, whether the technical or critical hit actually puts the enemy in the tumble state, it makes it a less consistent method then weakness hitting.
Let's move on to the second issue in Persona's battle system. If the system is so dependent on attacking weaknesses of enemies and getting them in the tumble state, then how do the mini bosses and boss battles work? What sort of interesting ways do they utilize enemy weaknesses?
They don't. In most mini boss and boss battles in Persona 5, the boss either doesn't have a weakness, or the all out attack move you use in response does barely any damage, and you cannot talk to them like regular enemies. In addition, most bosses cannot be effected by status effects. So the weakness system, the entire mechanic the battle system revolves around, is removed from boss battles. This is nuts. This is like if in the Mario RPGs you couldn't use action commands against bosses. Or if against gym leaders in Pokemon, their Pokemon had no types they were weak too. It reduces boss battles to the most basic and plain turn based gameplay: You attack, the boss attacks, you raise your stats and attack, the boss attacks, you heal and attack, the boss attacks, rinse and repeat. I was shocked at how boring the bosses are mechanically. In JRPGs, bosses are often my favorite part, they are when you have to show your mastery of the battle mechanics and come up with interesting and fun strategies while you customize your characters.
Not in Persona. Here, all mini bosses were boring to deal with. But wait, there is something interesting done with the main boss battles! In the first boss, you can't do much damage to the boss initially, and your characters struggle. Then one of them has an idea, why not send one party member away for a few turns to get behind and expose the boss? You do this, defending for a few turns, until your party member achieves their goal, exposes the boss, and then you whale on them. I thought it was a fun and neat way of doing the boss battle. I wondered how they would expand on this in future bosses. Maybe you will have to send multiple characters away, maybe there will be multiple points you can send the characters to, and you will have to plan out where?
Nope. In most boss battles in Persona, the battle follows the exact same trajectory. You struggle, a party member suggests leaving, you send them off, wait a couple turns for the boss to be exposed, and then whale on them. I was shocked that even during the final battle of the base game (that is to say Persona 5, not Persona 5 Royal), that exact same scenario happens in which you struggle, send one party member away for a couple turns, and then strike (admittedly, it is for the first of a two phase battle, but still). The fact that this simple structure is so persistent makes many of the boss battles quite uninteresting. With many of them, I quickly wanted to be done with the battle, knowing how it would progress.
As an aside, this linear structure that nearly holds your hand is something I noticed in much of the game, and I was not a fan. For example, palaces, which are meant to be sprawling and maze like, instead all have linear paths you take to go through each dungeon. Even will seeds, the most valuable treasures in each palace, the only items that are off the beaten path, will alert you when you are nearby, removing any means for the player to actually explore and feel rewarded for doing so. When exploring dungeons or fighting bosses, the game is always ready to hold your hand and tell you exactly what to do. For that reason, I'm not sure I ever felt truly tested and like I earned a difficult prize.
I find it so silly the game basically asks you if you want to beat the boss, as if that's a question.
Despite this, I have seen much love for the battle system. Why is that? Well, even if the above structure I mentioned is basic and unengaging, it's fun isn't it? To struggle, be on the defence, hatch a plan, have to defend with one less party member, and then strike when the time is right, that's like a movie! When you have characters all talking about how hard the battle is and how they have to win, it feels fun and epic.
That's the thing about Persona, not just its battle system, but the game in general. It looks awesome. The presentation is stunning, and it makes simple actions feel fun. The menus you navigate when shopping and looking at your stats are so flashy and cool. The All Out Attacks you can use to end battles look awesome, even moreseo because it will end with a special animation depending on which character dealt the final blow. When you finish a battle, there's a great animation of Joker running that transitions perfectly into the out of battle gameplay. There's so much style to Persona that I wouldn't blame someone for saying they enjoyed the battle system. It looks great.
However, the battle system is the definition of style over substance, as there's such little interesting gameplay to engage with.
This brings me to my third issue with the battle system. Let's talk about showtime attacks. These are neat attacks you unlock as you progress through the story, in which two of your party members perform a great cinematic attack to do massive damage to an enemy (Persona is a cinematic game in general, for better or worse). You will also unlock follow up attacks for party members as you unlock more of their social links. These are flashy attacks that can trigger after your main character attacks. Your party members also unlock the ability to cure status effects of allies, and one party member unlocks an ability to boost the stats of your entire team. All of these look fun when they trigger and it feels great to see them in action.
....Here's the thing though. Do you know how you trigger all these cool attacks? The showtime attacks, the follow up attacks, the status effect cures and boosts? It's the same way you trigger the ability I mentioned earlier, the one that reveals an enemies' weakness: it's random.
There is so much randomness baked into so many of the mechanics of battles that at times, you have such little control over how battles progress. In the same way that exploring dungeons and boss battles often felt like I was having my hand held and being told what to do, having so many abilities and moves left to randomness means you often don't have a lot of control in battles. There were so many mini bosses I fought in which they didn't have an elemental weakness, so I was doing my best to damage them. However, they had a lot of HP, and it was taking forever to go down. Then oh, would you look at that, I randomly triggered a showtime attack, which killed the miniboss. I didn't do anything to win that battle, I just stalled and then got lucky. So many times when I won a battle, it wasn't because I played well or executed a good strategy, but because I got good luck and triggered a follow up attack or stat boost or something.
I like turn based systems that give players a lot of control and allow them to really think about what to do each turn, because 1) their choices have consequences, and 2) there are many different choices to make. But in Persona, because so many abilities and attacks are left to randomness, it often feels like the dice roll will have a greater effect on the battle then the actions you take.
I like it when JRPGs have bosses that you can find ways around in multiple avenues, depending on how creative you want to be. But in Persona, it often feels like there's a right way to play (use the correct elemental weakness) and a wrong way, with nothing in between. Battles feel so simple and dependent on randomness and elemental weakness that it isn't fun to engage with. There is hardly any means of creating advanced strategies or customization. It's like the battle system wants you to not care and play passively.
Which I theorize is intentional. Not everyone likes turn based battle systems, and not everyone wants to spend a lot of time thinking and going through menus to devise a strategy. Persona 5 in general is a pretty mindless game. It's easy to pick up and get through, and doesn't require much critical thinking, from a gameplay perspective at least. To its credit, this makes it pretty accessible, and I've seen numerous comments online from people that don't normally like turn based battle systems enjoying Persona 5's. As an introductory battle system, I think Persona 5's is pretty good. But if you want something deep, with complexity, strategy, and a means to express yourself through your play style, you won't find it here.
This brings me to my final issue with Persona's battle system: its customization. There is another way to make battles engaging, and that is through customization. This is how a lot of JRPGs get away with fairly simple battle systems. Honkai Star Rail continues adding new characters that change up how you play and customize your team. The Paper Mario series often lets you customize your stats and attacks based on the badge system in the first two games, and a sticker and card system in later games. Pokemon is the greatest example. It has a fairly simple battle system. However, being able to catch and level up any of the game's 100+ Pokemon and make all sorts of teams makes battling fun and engaging. It gives you a lot of options to consider when facing tough opponents.
Persona actually has a system like this. Remember earlier how I said when you get into the "Hold Up" phase in battle, you can ask a Persona to join you? That is how you gain Personas, and you can collect and utilize a certain amount of them. Furthermore, you can fuse two of them together to make new stronger Personas. You can customize which attacks and abilities each of your Personas use, and there's a lot of depth to it. It's a neat system, and I had fun experimenting with it.
But of course, there's a problem. All these different Personas you can recruit, combine, and customize, guess what? Only one character, your main character, can use them. This means that within your party of 8+ characters, all of them can only use their Persona, and only one character can use the many different ones you spend time collecting and fusing. This is bananas. This would be like if in Pokemon, all of the Pokemon you catch and level up, you can only have two of your six Pokemon you use in battles be from them. The other four are preset.
The longer I played through Persona 5, the more it dawned on me that because only one character can use the custom Personas, it feels so limiting and like it might not be worth all the time you can spend collecting, fusing, and editing your Personas. So I stopped. Once I hit a point in which I collected enough Personas to use an attack of every element and had a good healing move, I stopped engaging with the system. I didn't really collect Personas or fuse them, because what's the point if only one character can use them? They hardly have an effect in battle, especially when those battles often come down to randomness.
To make matters worse, once you have over four party members, you gain the ability to switch one of your party members in battle out for one of your backup members. This is cool, it lets you adapt and change your team for difficult battles. The problem is that once again, only the main character can switch party members out. I am shocked at how limiting this feature is when it could make battles so much more interesting.
All this is to say, I had moments in my playtime with P5R in which I grew frustrated and bored with the game, and took a long break between play sessions. These moments always came in long palaces or treks through mementos in which I was forced to battle a ton, because battling in this game lost its fun by the fourth palace. It is a simple battle system with way too much emphasis on weaknesses, makes finding the weakness of enemies boring and monotonous, removes this entire mechanic during boss battles, which are very linear and simple, has too much randomness in its many systems, removing choice from the player, and finally, has a customization that's actually pretty deep, but is then constrained by limiting its usage to one character.
To be fair, you do unlock the ability to have any one of your characters be able to switch out a party member for another when you max out a particular character's social link. But wow, I hadn't unlocked it until the 80-90 hour mark.
What really pains me about Persona's battle system is that for all my issues, I don't think it would be hard to improve it. I think a couple simple tweaks would help the system dramatically. For starters, let everyone in the party be able to use all the Personas you can customize. Be able to pick which characters will use which Personas, that sort of customization would be great! Additionally, make less of the super attacks be randomly triggered. In Honkai Star Rail, characters all have their own super attacks, but they are triggered when you build up enough of their energy meter. Do this for the showtime attacks in Persona and party wide buffs, where you have to choose how you want to spend your energy. Omori has a system like this, where you save up points and can use them for various types of special attacks, including its own form of an all out attack.
Finally, please do something to make discovering an enemy's weakness fun. Give them consistent types they follow like Pokemon so you can figure it out. Give characters the ability to learn a character's weakness like in Octopath, do something so every new enemy doesn't lead to you having to use every elemental attack on it over and over.
These changes would make battles a lot more fun and strategic. It would give you more reason to engage with the Persona system, make finding enemy weaknesses more fun, and make battles more rewarding as you, rather than triggering a random powerful attack, have to work towards it and can know that you pulled it off.
I'd like to leave one final report before moving on. In P5R, there is a massive difficulty spike at a particular boss, who for some reason is harder than any other boss in the game. It is the only boss I lost to. How do you think they made this boss difficult? What did they do while working within the confines of the battle system?
They made massive changes to the battle system of course. The boss sees you fighting a series of enemies, one after another. For some unexplained reason, the all out attack, your most powerful and reliable tool for dispatching groups of enemies, cannot be used here. This is the only battle in which that happens. Additionally, within each wave of enemies, if you do not clear the wave in two turns, the enemies of that wave respawn for some reason. There is no other battle in the game with such a strict time limit. There is also no way of knowing the weakness of all the enemies. In the first couple of waves, the enemies are those you've fought before multiple times, so you should know their weakness. But the later ones you will have fought at most once, so there's a chance you won't know, and won't have the right party members in your team to quickly defeat them. While this happens, the boss continues powering up the enemies, so if you do not defeat each wave quickly, you get to a point in which you cannot win. Does the game do anything to help with this or help you learn their weaknesses? Of course not.
This battle, in my eyes, says a lot about Persona. The fact that they could only make it difficult by making arbitrary changes to it that no other battle has, shows how simple the battle system is at a mechanical level. The only way to make it difficult is to literally cheat and stop the player from doing what they normally do, while adding strict time limits. In most other JRPGs I've played, this is not how bosses are made difficult, not in a way that is clearly unfair.
When I lose to bosses, those are often my favorite parts of JRPGs. I said in my review of Bravely Default that one of my treasured memories with it was when I fought a boss, got destroyed, and then, rather than grind or look up a guide, I went back to the drawing board. I switched up my character classes, changed their equipment and strategy, and without leveling up at all, I went back to that boss, and won with ease. It felt so good to engage with the mechanics, learn more about the different classes and means of battling, find the best means of countering the boss, and pull off this new strategy successfully. I had a similar encounter in Octopath Traveler. In my recent replay of Paper Mario 2, I actually lost to a boss, so had to go back and switch my badges and partners up to win. It was fun.
When I lost to the above boss in Persona 5, I grinded in Mementos, and looked up a guide to learn the enemies' weaknesses. Because the battle system in Persona is so simple, there was no way I could change my character classes or come up with a new strategy. You have to use particular characters to exploit the weaknesses of the waves of enemies, and with the game giving me no clue what all those weaknesses are, I wasn't going to take guesses. That to me, is a sign of how bad Persona's battle system is. When you lose, you don't go back and think, changing things up and going in with a new strategy. It's hard to have more then one strategy in Persona 5, because its battle system is so simple.
If Pokemon typings didn't follow consistent logic, if the gym leader Pokemon were immune to super effective attacks, if all the Pokemon you caught could only be used for two of your six Pokemon used in battle, if there was more randomness in its attacks, would you call that a good battle system? I wouldn't, and that's why ultimately, I don't like Persona's battle system. By the end of the game I wanted nothing to do with it, and it's the main reason I'm unsure I want to play the other Persona titles.
Part 6: Conclusion
Look, I know it is not fun to see someone tear into a game, especially if you love it, and I apologize to all Persona 5 fans reading this, and thank you for sticking with it. I will be honest, as much fun as I had with Persona 5 Royal, I can't help but feel disappointed. I went into this game with very high expectations. It is the highest rated JRPG on metacrtic. All my friends that played it loved it and consider it a favorite. I thought I might love this, it might be another Fire Emblem Three Houses, if you will.
However, having now finished it, I would consider it no where near Three Houses. It would be more accurate to compare it to the Octopath Traveler games, which I ultimately like, but have some big issues with. The Octopath Traveler games are actually interesting as a point of comparison. I loved their battle and class systems, they might be my favorite in a JRPG. In my review of the first game, I spent a lot of words explaining the team build I came up with, and the classes and abilities I had to use to pull it off, because it was so satisfying to do. However, I had major issues with their stories and exploration, which meant I didn't love the game. Persona 5 is the opposite, I loved its story and characters to death, but the battle system turned me off loving the game.
Despite all my critiques, there's a reason I put over 100 hours into it, and was sad to leave the game. The ending does such a superb job of ending the journey you and the many characters in Tokyo have been on, having so many great call backs and references to your time with the game, that I couldn't help but be moved. I spent a lot of time as a high school student in Tokyo. I made friends with a bunch of lovable and interesting characters. I worked a couple jobs. I got a girlfriend, which took very long to decide on. I helped a lot of people turn around their lives while learning about the fascinating complex world we live in. It was delightful. Despite everything, one thing I will always remember dearly about Persona 5 Royal is, just how good a job it did at making you feel like you were actually in Japan. The school questions are the sort of things you'd expect to be asked in high school, and it always felt nice to have my real world knowledge help. You will encounter crossword puzzles to solve, which was fun to help expand and test my vocabulary, while also learning more about Japan. The animations used for you riding the train every day to school and back, the many NPCs you can overhear chattering. It made for a unique experience, and I enjoyed that aspect of the game a lot.
And hey, now that I know my feelings on Persona 5, if I do play the other Persona games, I can go into them with lower and more realistic expectations. Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised by them.
Still, thinking about and discussing Persona 5 has led me to one question: What makes a great JRPG? When I see fans confronted with the simplicity of the battle system, the most common response is that it's fine, because you don't play Persona for the gameplay, but the story. This is true, the story is the strongest part of Persona.
But is that what makes great JRPGs? When I think of the JRPGs of old most praised, I think of the old Final Fantasies. What do people often praise those games for? Their stories and characters. I hardly ever see comments about the gameplay being what makes them so great. Has the gaming community as a whole been conditioned to expect JRPGs to deliver on story first, gameplay second? Does my opposing viewpoint, which places me in the minority, come from the fact that I grew up with games like Pokemon and Golden Sun, games which prioritized gameplay over story?
I don't know, it's given me much to think about, and led me to one conclusion: I now want to play the classic Final Fantasies, or at least one of them. I think that might be my next JRPG, because I was so surprised at how disappointed I was by the gameplay of Persona 5. It had excellent writing, but my word playing it could be boring. Let's see if that holds true for the classic JRPGs in my next review, whenever that is!
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