Despite Luis Antonio's outspoken desire to push the medium forward, he wasn't able to conceive of a game that would give form to deeper meaning, instead making a story dominated by it's game mechanics — which resulted in uninspired puzzle box storytelling and shock value —, while the cinematic framing actively crippled the satisfaction of play by adding too much poorly conceived friction in the player's interactions with the game.


(also, there's a bit where the protagonist looks at a window while it's raining and says "heavy rain" and you can't convince me the director is not your average david cage enjoyer)

The final form of the musou based on existing franchises, in which their always escalating efforts in translating mechanics from other series to the this genre straight up reached the point of simulating an entire game.

This genuine sequel to Persona 5 does not exactly retain all of the systemic level interactions from the RPG, but always tries to reproduce its intent, mostly in a more scripted way, while the presentation does the rest of heavy lifting. The most palpable differences are in the fights, where they hid all the musou bits, but even in this less graceful aproach to combat the game cleverly captures the feel and distinct motions of Persona battles.

All of that to serve the bigger purpose of giving you more time with these lovely, lovely characters. To have many group meals, cheerfully play on the beach, travel across the country in a cozy van and confront how in the interconnected age our fear of living unfulfilled lives can lead to outsourcing our happiness to apparently successful figures that are just as broken as any of us and wield that validation as an unhealthy shield against their own traumas. Just as freinds do.

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"Imagine choosing what I want to be?"

Open worlds are consistently constructed with power fantasies in mind, so to take this genre — that excels when you're adrift, guideless, confronted with daunting expanses of a world unknown and the frightening amount of options that comes with that — and frame it as an introspective coming of age story feels revelatory despite being the most fitting narrative choice to make with that mechanical foundation.

And, yeah, the game takes a lot from the Breath of the Wild school of design, but it a has a deep understanding of what made that great (it guides you almost entirely by landmarks silhouetting the horizon; is confident on its vistas and history as a reward in itself; understands the value of empty areas as negative spaces; and never center stages repeated activities), so it can stripe away core aspects of that formula and not only make it work, but find its own essence.