Few games exude personality as Persona 5 does--hell, it's in the name! When I say that, I'm not talking about the comic style or the jazz music or the radical theme its narrative is based around. No. It's easy to think of having a personality as having a long list of things that make you good. But at that point, you're more or less listing off affirmations about yourself. Personality, to me, is the idea that you are only human. You have flaws and strengths, and personality is the intersection of both. It's a balancing act on an individual level because if one side has too many cars, the other side cannot live at peace with itself. When you lend that out to a creative project, the intersection can go both ways: you either have a short road that ends in a cul-de-sac or a highway that sprawls into a city dotted with landmarks and littered with boisterous energy. The shorter the street is, the less-traveled it becomes. The less traveled the street is, the less noise there is to worry about. So imagine if that hypothetical city was large enough to be similar in size to the entirety of California. One hundred hours from beginning to end, with minivans and RVs and SUVs all along the way. But you're not in a minivan or an RV or an SUV; you're cruising down the street in a green Del Sol from the year 1996 with its roof sold for scrap. The choice of car is not random, nor is it done for oddly specific reasons. As Occam's razor might suggest, you're talking a small car on a mega-highway packed with big cars for every thrilling and frustrating moment that comes with being closer to something so utterly massive.
That experience is playing Persona 5 in a nutshell.
One does not need to be an aficionado of Japanese Role-playing Games to admire the scale of what Atlus' internal development team has created. One does not also need to be a fan of anime to know the exact tropes it occasionally falls upon. There's a lot to be said about the characters, optional content, and overall plot. Reviewing the game is grazing the side of writing that errs from being enjoyably over-the-top to questionable. And by questionable, I mean "adults dating minors is bad until you're the one pursuing that kind of a relationship, and also some gay stereotyping." The former is a bit weird, though, because the game expects you to project yourself onto the protagonist. With sporadic exceptions, all of his dialogs are voice acted in your head. It creates this strange dichotomy where you're playing as a teenager, and you have a lot of age-appropriate romance options. But then you might also be an adult playing the game, and it's weird for an adult to be lusting after a digital teenager, so there are options to go after adults as your teenage avatar. Both clash pretty harshly, and the best that the game does to make up for it is to play these romances off as bonuses. Get closer with your homeroom teacher, and you get to go outside after dungeon crawling, for example. The end result is that the game wants to immerse yourself in its world but pushes you so far out of the role it asks you to play that you end up seeing yourself more as an indirect player in what's going in. You are not Joker; you are the voice in his head that tells him what words are the best to say in a given moment, how best to approach a situation tactically, and what to do with his free time. This perspective does not absolve the game of its intentional or otherwise ick factor, but it at least helps you enjoy the whacky adventure he and his band of downtrodden peers go on much more.
What makes the best moments of Persona 5 stick with me more than that ick is that, while it utilizes some of the worst that anime has to offer throughout its epic-sized hundred-hour runtime, it also provides the best. The pay-offs in this game are massive, the twists surprising. And the elaborate framing of each dungeon as a heist gives this game legs that it otherwise wouldn't have. But it goes beyond that. It's the music, the visual style, and the extra factor that the User Interface brings to the party. The cars in this game's highway of personality might be filled with incompetent drivers, middle-aged men and women prone to road rage, and teenagers on spring break when things get slow, but there isn't a single one that isn't eye-catching in some way. There's an argument to be had: should style be the pet of substance, or can it carry an experience when the substance starts to drain away? Whether or not you'll find enjoyment out of Persona 5 when it's not throwing ridiculously amusing wild cards at you depends on how you answer that question. If you can't let one or two bad moments past you, I can see why you'd have a lesser appreciation of this than I do. But if you, like me, put your controller several times, facepalmed for several more minutes, groaned, and then went right back in without much of a word--my friend, you're in the right club.
Again, I believe there's a lot to be said about this that can't adequately be covered in a single review. It's like expecting somebody to write a paragraph on why an eight-hour movie has merit. Roughly thirty-three times the length of Ben Hur, Persona 5 is the kind of game that opens up to opinions across multiple different subjects and experiences. If the fact that my covering didn't mention the combat or Mementos or Morgana bummed you out, I am sorry. But you'll find that discussion in fifteen other places.
That experience is playing Persona 5 in a nutshell.
One does not need to be an aficionado of Japanese Role-playing Games to admire the scale of what Atlus' internal development team has created. One does not also need to be a fan of anime to know the exact tropes it occasionally falls upon. There's a lot to be said about the characters, optional content, and overall plot. Reviewing the game is grazing the side of writing that errs from being enjoyably over-the-top to questionable. And by questionable, I mean "adults dating minors is bad until you're the one pursuing that kind of a relationship, and also some gay stereotyping." The former is a bit weird, though, because the game expects you to project yourself onto the protagonist. With sporadic exceptions, all of his dialogs are voice acted in your head. It creates this strange dichotomy where you're playing as a teenager, and you have a lot of age-appropriate romance options. But then you might also be an adult playing the game, and it's weird for an adult to be lusting after a digital teenager, so there are options to go after adults as your teenage avatar. Both clash pretty harshly, and the best that the game does to make up for it is to play these romances off as bonuses. Get closer with your homeroom teacher, and you get to go outside after dungeon crawling, for example. The end result is that the game wants to immerse yourself in its world but pushes you so far out of the role it asks you to play that you end up seeing yourself more as an indirect player in what's going in. You are not Joker; you are the voice in his head that tells him what words are the best to say in a given moment, how best to approach a situation tactically, and what to do with his free time. This perspective does not absolve the game of its intentional or otherwise ick factor, but it at least helps you enjoy the whacky adventure he and his band of downtrodden peers go on much more.
What makes the best moments of Persona 5 stick with me more than that ick is that, while it utilizes some of the worst that anime has to offer throughout its epic-sized hundred-hour runtime, it also provides the best. The pay-offs in this game are massive, the twists surprising. And the elaborate framing of each dungeon as a heist gives this game legs that it otherwise wouldn't have. But it goes beyond that. It's the music, the visual style, and the extra factor that the User Interface brings to the party. The cars in this game's highway of personality might be filled with incompetent drivers, middle-aged men and women prone to road rage, and teenagers on spring break when things get slow, but there isn't a single one that isn't eye-catching in some way. There's an argument to be had: should style be the pet of substance, or can it carry an experience when the substance starts to drain away? Whether or not you'll find enjoyment out of Persona 5 when it's not throwing ridiculously amusing wild cards at you depends on how you answer that question. If you can't let one or two bad moments past you, I can see why you'd have a lesser appreciation of this than I do. But if you, like me, put your controller several times, facepalmed for several more minutes, groaned, and then went right back in without much of a word--my friend, you're in the right club.
Again, I believe there's a lot to be said about this that can't adequately be covered in a single review. It's like expecting somebody to write a paragraph on why an eight-hour movie has merit. Roughly thirty-three times the length of Ben Hur, Persona 5 is the kind of game that opens up to opinions across multiple different subjects and experiences. If the fact that my covering didn't mention the combat or Mementos or Morgana bummed you out, I am sorry. But you'll find that discussion in fifteen other places.