Persona 5 has my favourite combat out of the modern Persona games, but holy crap is the story so unbelievably garbage, SMT/Persona has always been edgy, but there's atleast been a reason for it ; the game just brings alot of sensitive topics and uses them horribly to fabricate an incredibly mediocre story- it had it's moments, but it's not that great. however, i cannot lie, i replayed, and got all the achievements for this game. it is a guilty pleasure, a persona game i can't stop playing. it is not the most awful thing in the world, but it is def my least favourite persona game, but with my favourite modern persona combat.

I don't envy anyone who has to develop a new installment in a popular, on-going franchise with a passionate fanbase. But I personally believe in the philosophy that "less is more," and in the case of PERSONA 5 ROYAL, Atlus went all in on MORE, to the detriment of a great core concept and strong JRPG gameplay.

Compared to PERSONA 4 GOLDEN, my franchise entry point, P5R offers a longer story, larger cast, actual dungeons with intricate designs, a sizeable overworld, expansive amounts of confidants to befriend, dozens of activities to maximize stats, and an entire RNG mini-dungeon mode for loot grinding. P5R never leaves you bored, but for me, it often left me frustrated at how all this content is so poorly paced or optimized that the size of it all starts to feel less like a wealth of options and instead it feels like bloat.

The chief culprit is the narrative, which shows its best hand in the opening episode and never reaches that height again. The Komishida arc has such high stakes, an intense ethical conflict, and conveys it all through a unique dungeon, that the rest of the game's enemies and heists almost feel tame as a result. It also doesn't help that as the game goes on, it frequently throws up inconsistencies in tone that undercut a lot of the emotion it's so desperately trying to mine.

As this all plods on, the narrative structure gets SUPER tiring. P5R is eager to tell you everything at every moment. The flash-forward cutscenes tell you who the next bad guys are, the visual novel conversation scenes keep reminding you of the stakes and the rules, the CONSTANT in-game text message chains between you and your party keep hammering out the same points over and over. It's no surprise I'm bringing up INCEPTION, which P5R has a lot in common with: Not just its concept of altering one's cognition by invading their minds, but also the fact that the cast never stops dropping exposition, even into the climax of the story.

The turn based combat rules. Baton passing is an ingenious concept. I love the new elemental types and I think there are some fights in here that just go buck-wild once you get a good system of attacks and buffs into a rhythm. The system wherein you "hold up" defeated enemies at gun point to rob them is an ingenious mechanic, and it shows a lot of commitment towards making sure the stylistic and thematic ideas of the game make their way into the gameplay.

On the social simulation side, I enjoyed the new means of buffering your stats: Watching DVDs and reading books to get better skills, being able to work out or meditate to increase HP and SP. The one downside is that the game offers you so many ways to increase your social skills that I never bothered to get a part time job like I had to in P4G. There was no point in my mind: In-Game battles leave you drowning in cash, and playing an NES game will get my kindness up, so why the hell should I serve coffee? TOO MANY SYSTEMS at the expense of others, IMO. Additionally, once certain stats are maxed, activities like Baseball or Fishing just seem fruitless. Wish there had been more incentive to keep going with all of the activities.

There are winners and losers amongst the Confidants and they make the bulk of the side-content worth exploring. But the big anchor around the neck of the side quest system is how a majority of them are tied into Mementos, the RNG overworld mini-dungeon. I truly disliked how you would get text messages about people you've never met having problems, go find the correct RNG floor with the side quest boss, beat it, and then get a text message going "Good job, that person is happy now!" It's so impersonal and boring, despite the game's efforts to add emotional weight to every instance. A more intimate side-quest system where you actually meet the people you're helping would've felt more satisfying.

The amount of critical acclaim P5R gets ultimately puzzles me, but I guess sometimes "more is more." It's certainly one of the most captivating games in terms of design and UI aesthetics; but the ROYAL content feels very shoe-horned in, less like a meaningful extra chapter, and more like an awkward re-do of the first ending (and IMO, the two "endings" going back to back really reveal that they should've just picked one, as Maruki's plan is just the original threat, with extra steps).

I spent 82 hours on this, and I know others have spent hundreds. It's not a bad game, not by a long shot, and for your purchasing value, it's certainly something that will give you your money's worth. But I also think it's a game that's too long and unwieldy for its own good. It’s fitting, considering that the mark of an expert thief is ensuring a mark is so distracted that they never realize they're being robbed.