I hate that I don't like this game. I wish I did. For the first thirty or so hours, I did. But then I finished it, and I thought about it, and I realized that I don't like Persona 5. Some things here are excellent, and some things here are atrocious, and they all blend together into something that's only ever able to peak at the heights of "okay".

The writing is my biggest problem, with the way the game handles its characters being the strongest flaw. The trauma these people face is treated as a punchline at their expense far too often. It's not an uncommon opinion that Ann gets it the worst of the lot; she's a survivor of sexual assault at the hands of a powerful teacher, and the game constantly takes time out to make her own party members leer at her and make her uncomfortable. Yusuke's "nude model" scene is talked about a lot, but it really isn't that bad, especially compared to later instances — one scene forces her and every other woman in the party into swimsuits to seduce a keycard out of some old rich lecher, and it's played as a joke until the guy grabs Ann, threatens her, and then turns into a big shadow monster who you kill and take the keycard from regardless, making the whole seduction plan pointless. Ryuji and Joker will try to stare up her skirt when she lays down on a couch, gawk at her thighs when she gets caught in the rain, and peer down her top when she's fanning herself in the desert. Ryuji may just be a dumbass who Ann can easily rebuke, but Joker is the leader of the group, and unquestionably holds power over her and the other Phantom Thieves. He doesn't treat any of the other characters this way, and he keeps doing it in cutscenes that you have no control over. Regardless of how the player treats Ann, your character won't stop creeping on her as soon as you give up control. It's weird. It's really fucking weird. Speaking of Ryuji, it's just as tasteless to have a character who was physically abused by that same teacher to the point of broken bones and ostracization be the butt of so many jokes where the punchline is him getting the shit kicked out of him. He's rewarded for both getting the track team back together in his confidant route and for saving every single member of the Phantom Thieves from a sinking ship with the exact same thing: the people he's going out of his way to protect punching him senseless until he's left in a crumpled, bruised, moaning heap on the ground. Ha ha. It's also implied in a scene that comes completely out of nowhere that he gets molested by two gay men in Shinjuku. All of this is played for laughs. It should be obvious to anyone reading this or playing the game for themselves that none of this is funny. It's fucking horrific. It's made worse that someone (or several someones) on the ATLUS writing team think that any of this is funny. I've heard that the localization team begged to be allowed to make script changes to address these issues, and were refused; whether or not this is true, the script that's here is the one that we've got, and the few changes made don't fix these core problems with the writing.

I'm still kind of confused to see all of the "I hate JRPGs!" crowd (your Dunkeys, your Yahtzee Croshaws) circle the wagons around this game and talk about how Persona 5 broke the mold. Mechanically, it's Pokemon. There's nothing wrong with Pokemon. Pokemon can be fun. But the core combat loop is "fish for the enemy's weakness, use the element that they're weak to, win the encounter". It's every single-player Pokemon game. Sometimes, if the fight goes long enough, you can cast a debuff, or maybe even a party-wide buff if you're really feeling brave. Bosses and mini-bosses are completely immune to status effects like shock or sleep, so any foe that you can't kill on the first turn of combat boils down to a DPS race where you either have enough damage and healing to outlast them, or you don't. This is in stark contrast to other entries in the Shin Megami Tensei series where bosses can have mechanically interesting gimmicks or one-off skillsets with unholy good synergies, rather than just being walls of health and damage; the closest thing you get to a boss that challenges your conception of the mechanics in Persona 5 are Okumura and his waves of robots that need to be killed within one turn of each other, which are in a fight so ridiculously easy to brute force by just having enough AOE damage that it barely even qualifies as a challenge. Futaba's later support skills make the game completely trivial, with her Ultimate Support constantly being cast to full heal, buff, and revive every member of the party. I tried to kill myself on a boss by enabling rush mode and walking away, and it still took six and a half minutes before Joker actually went down and I got kicked to the death screen. The guns — while certainly a unique addition — are borderline useless in most encounters, serving only as a middling damage dump (or as a status applier, which only works on trash enemies that are more easily killed by hitting their weak element anyway) and are utterly outclassed by Persona elemental skills. Many Personas can even deal Gun-type damage, giving you almost no reason to ever use the actual guns.

I've seen it said that this game hates women. My gut instinct thinks that's an exaggeration, but it's unquestionable that the writing handles them like shit. Every female confidant in this game leads as smoothly as a car crash into a sexual relationship, with four (!!!) of them being adults pursuing our underage protagonist. There's not a single woman in this game that you can just be friends with without needing to turn down their advances or dodge making your own, first. The men, conversely, do not have this problem, as the only gay men in this game are the sexual predators who assault Ryuji. Lala Escargot, the owner of the Crossroads bar, is the only character who is both a) not a walking punchline and b) queer. The game never actually confirms if she's a drag queen or if she's transgender, but she's at the very least gender non-conforming. That's it. Nobody else. I realize that this may come off as me pounding my fists on the table and demanding token representation, but the way that the female confidants are treated is already token. Every single woman in Joker's life desires him sexually, because this is a shounen harem game masquerading as a serious adult thriller that explores serious adult themes. It's juvenile. The game likes to talk big about rebellion and putting down the system, man, but it's remarkably intolerant of anyone whose inclusion in any mainstream anime would attract death threats for being "too woke". The writing in Persona 5 doesn't put down the system, it is the system. It should not come as a surprise that a series that's based the past three games around the trappings of Jungian psychology is this achingly stupid when it comes to how it handles social issues.

It is endlessly frustrating that ATLUS has accrued as much money and prestige as they have — Joker got into fucking Smash Bros. — and this is still the best that they can do with all of it. Outright bad writing and middling RPG mechanics that feel like they've hardly evolved since 2006. What's left? The UI and the music? Both are great, but there's not a chance they can carry a game that insists on being this long. What missed potential. It's a shame I waited this long to get a chance to play it. I wish I hadn't bothered.