I have never been so simultaneously relieved and sad to finish a game before. At 100+ hours this was a behemoth, and I’ll say it’s no small feat for a game to keep my ADHD brain occupied for that long (ignoring the fact it took my around 8 months to actually complete it).

The strongest aspect of this game for me is the social aspects by a mile. In the long (long long long) time I spent in Persona 5’s world, I got to see nearly every character develop and grow through struggles and dilemmas unique to their own story paths. By the end, it did in a way feel like I was saying goodbye to new dear friends.

The story, though predictable at times, was almost always engaging and charming. Some arcs were stronger than others, but at any moment I found my attention drifting, something new and exciting quickly came along to snatch it back up. The first arc and the final Royal arc are easily the strongest chapters of the game.

I think my only complaint against the game is the combat and palace design. Almost every palace overstayed it’s welcome to the point where upon reaching each dungeon boss I felt more relief in knowing I would be wrapping it up than I did in any of the story beats the encounters provided. The boss designs also tended to completely ignore the complex combat system of weaknesses, statuses, and ailments which made the fights feel more one dimensional and monotonous than they should have.

Overall, one of the best games I’ll never play again. Could have been a lot shorter, but I don’t regret a second I spent immersing myself in its world and relationships.

Retiring this at a little over halfway. This is one of the most charming games I've played. The character design is fantastic, the dialogue is funny, the level design is interesting and unique. The actual gameplay is lacking quite a bit and the combat system is absolutely atrocious. There are way too many collectibles that are mandatory to progress and at a certain point I just stopped caring about doing anything but zooming through the segments to get to the next. With a bit of polish and modernization, I think this could easily be a 10/10.

I don't have a vast history with Pokémon games, so I think that prevented me from being too disappointed with the many bugs and unsatisfying aspects of this title.

I honestly thoroughly enjoyed playing this game. The world was ugly, but I found roving around the empty land on my motorcycle Pokémon through hordes of wild creatures very charming. I thought the gym leaders were all interesting design-wise, but I found the gym challenges frustrating and pointless. The Team STAR anti-bullying PSA was lame, and I hated the dorky characters the storyline focused on. The terestalize gimmick was AWFUL. Tera raids are excruciating and horribly designed. You can tell there were a lot of good ideas here that just didn't have the time to become fully fleshed out game mechanics.

The highlight of the game was definitely Arven and the Titan arc. I never would have imagined finding his character so endearing, but by the end he was really the only aspect of the game I cared about.

There's still endgame content like legendaries, competitive PVP, shiny hunting, etc., but I think my game ends with the story. Had a fun time!

Kinda forgot I was playing this. Shelved it for about a week, realized I hadn't thought about it even once, couldn't convince myself to go back to it.

It's just boring. The little gameplay it offers (because for some reason every single piece of dialogue in the game requires a 10 minute cutscene) is derivative and dull. The enemies are repetitive and either mind-numbingly easy or still easy, but with a massive health pool that requires you to button mash the same 3-4 abilities off cooldown until it dies.

The story and setting were interesting and the world building was definitely there, but I reached a point where even that wasn't even a strong enough motivator for me to sit through another couple hours of drawn out cutscenes to progress the plot by an inch. Quest design was awful in a way I haven't seen since like early level World of Warcraft. Comparing them to MMOs does even MMOs a disservice as the quest design in FF14 is leagues above this.

Sucks because the characters are very charming and I did become invested in their stories, but I just cannot force myself to keep playing. I'll watch a cutscene compilation or something and maybe come back to it at some point in the future.

I don't really know how to feel about the game. I finally finished on my third attempt at the game. The combat is shallow and boring (the reason I quit the first time), the world is hyper-quirky to a fault (the reason I quit the second time), but I still managed to enjoy my time playing... for the most part.

The Otherworld segments are long-winded and filled with unnecessary padding. The game could have benefitted from being A LOT shorter. The combat system is dull at best and incredibly frustrating at worst. The saving grace here is the story and the characters. The main four are very cute and the emotional setup in both the Otherworld and Faraway Town was very good. I cared about them, I cared about their fraught real-world connections, and I suffered the actual gameplay to see their stories through.

Then the game completely lost me in the last hour or so. The "horror" segments were always more silly than anything, but the finale cranked it up to just total edge-lord, shock value bullshit. The big reveal isn't just unrealistic, it plays like something straight out of the mind of a 13-year-old Wattpad trauma porn writer. It completely ruined the entire game for me to the point I now regret having put any amount of time into it.

(On top of that, the creator of the game is apparently a sweatshop-running pedophile, so it doesn't feel great knowing I put money in her pockets, but whatever!)

Overall, a mediocre game brought to an even worse level by a stupid plot twist and awful characterization.

I think the early Final Fantasy games might just not be for me and that's okay!

I definitely liked it more than FF7. Some of the characters are really interesting (mostly Vivi, but I liked Freya before the plot forgot about her) and the art style is super cozy, but beyond that everything just seems really generic and contrived. Sub-plots are picked up and then dropped without warning to the point where I had no idea what I was actually even doing.

The battle system is so boring. ATB is awful, Trance is awful, the loading screens before battles are awful; combat was just genuinely unenjoyable as a whole. I slogged through it for the narrative, but even that reached a point where it just became stale for me.

Maybe one day I'll eventually find a mainline Final Fantasy game that I like as much as FF14.

The developers do an outstanding job at building a captivating environment, the plot details and circumstances just ambiguous enough to keep you going along. Unfortunately, the environment and storytelling are the only aspects of the game I actually enjoyed.

The inventory management aspect of the game really did ruin the experience for me. While understandably being an homage to classic survival horror games, this is probably the most annoyingly restricted inventory I've ever encountered in a game. Having to constantly backtrack to deposit or retrieve items from the storage boxes ruined immersion, pacing, and just became an overall chore.