And the duology is complete.

Definitely a big step up from the original Metal Gear. The story feels much more like the type of story Kojima would become known for, it's a lot more twisty and spy film inspired than its predecessor. Also really neat to see the introduction of a few characters in MGS, especially fulfilling to see Gray Fox's debut. The soundtrack is also pretty great, the original game had a few decent tracks but this one has some genuinely memorable themes (the first building's main theme especially). There's also a pretty big difficulty jump in this game, guards have excellent sight and peripheral vision, so you need to play extra careful to avoid getting spotted. It's still obviously a product of its time and a few mechanics are dated (albeit the checkpoints are more generous than the first game), but it's still a genuinely good game that is worth playing for longtime fans who haven't played the originals like myself before last night.

7/10

the erasure of an era. whereas the original title thrives off of the glory of its 2000s commercialized suburbia, here we get…. yakuza 0’s kamurocho copied and pasted. even the gameplay is unfortunately a victim to this flagrant plagiarism. to give credit where credit is due, it’s still fun to play with the additions to 0’s combat, but sadly i can’t praise kiwami any more than that. bosses that were once quick and somewhat painless are now quadruple-health-bared damage tanks, with annoying health regeneration to boot. i would be more lenient if the special heat actions you can perform on the bosses were unique to each one, but nope. it’s the same moves every time. even more 0 pandering forces its way in with majima everywhere and the soundtrack. majima everywhere is a huge tonal disconnect from majima’s character narratively, because apparently we needed to cater to… actually i’m not even sure who would claim majima’s only defining characteristic to be his silliness. who is majima everywhere for exactly? also quite honestly him showing up at random times frequently ruined my pace, and it doesn’t help that you fight the same majima styles over and over. to add insult to injury i was flabbergasted that they locked an entire style behind this randomized time waster. last but not least is the soundtrack, which decided to inherit the techno-dubstep overlays of 0. the remixed tracks aren’t bad per se but they lack any distinctive personality that the original tracks had so much of.
what a strange game. kiwami is stuck between the crossroads of whether it wants to be its own thing, a sequel to 0, or retain the integrity of the original game. i don’t think there’s any malicious intent here, but what makes it worse is that this suppression of the original title was essentially done by accident. the laziness is rampant in how much is stolen from 0. i wouldn’t call it a bad game, however i would most certainly define it as a poor remake.

this one is completely disjointed and unhinged; at its core, past all the bloat, you can see what a sharper version of this title could have looked like, and that pervasive vision lingers in the foreground of all the games antics. but all the same you can feel the fervent passion of the development team in each minute of its runtime and their unrelenting, inelastic vow to push the bill and expand the scope of what is possible, sometimes unnecessarily. in all the ways that makes yakuza a titan it is fantastic, in all the ways it makes yakuza tiresome it is paramount. still some of the best side content in the series though, understands the core of what makes this franchise endearing with sniper precision

i'll cut to the chase and spare you some prose and witticisms you'll read either through glazed eyes or gritted teeth: six and a half years ago i was in a real bad way and i wasnt enjoying a single one of my hobbies the way i had used to. i had made plans to try to get into this series from its inciting incident just to have something to do that day, and it was around that time that yakuza 5 was serendipitously announced for localization, an unprecedented miracle that blindsided its then-largely isolationist and niche fanbase. felt like a sign, to me - i was playing this game the very next day, and within four months had completed all hitherto localized titles in the franchise, eagerly anticipating the fifth game. i was having fun with games again.

since then the series has received widespread recognition, often for better or worse (usually for very cynical reasons, attracting a specific kind of crowd that i would like to stay very, very far away from, and yet still needlessly spurring on several inane culture wars because no one knows how to react to media with good sense, tact, or nuance anymore) but im still here playing this franchise for reasons im not sure i'll ever be able to adequately articulate. and despite all this - this is the entry i return to the most. it's a kind of ritual homecoming. certainly, yakuza 2 is the more refined title. it's a successor which embraces its cinematic lineage and nagoshis directorial flavourings; it is pulpy and jettisons any sense of restraint, it sports a combat system arguably better than the roughness of its predecessor, it is more cognizant of how to utilize its living and breathing world and array of denizens to capture the frivolities of the human experience. but it's also the establishment of something formulaic, a pattern. a mold for a franchise aided by the careful supervision of fan-feedback and by the business acumen necessary to pilot an initiative that transformed yakuza into a yearly asset-flip series (this is undoubtedly in addition to a shitton of crunch. there is no doubt in my heart that y2 worked its employees to the bone.)

when so many of yakuza and yakuza 2s strengths in atmosphere and design tend to overlap, it's not hard to see why im kind of enamored with the guts this specific project displayed in a way that yakuza 2 does not. and when looking at the overarching path the series has taken - in which entries felt increasingly hurried and fraught until learning to respect restraint in 0 - this becomes especially clear. it's bold, it's risky - researching it, it becomes clear that it required a lot of attitude, finesse, trust, and collaboration to see a unique vision like this to the end and there are still flashes of that experimental tendency to be found in this specific entry. i love how punishing the games central heat mechanic is because it forces you to expend it desperately which often resulted in greater xp gain, i love how abilities are often tied to exploration, i love the overhead camera angles of this gritty and noirish red light district as opposed to the bog-standard third-person view the rest of the series employs, i love how its heat actions are absolutely brutal but orchestrated around brevity so as not to interrupt the flow of combat (something which later entries completely miss the point of), i love how its perhaps the only yakuza that doesnt necessarily characterize kiryu as a rogue paladin or a saint, i love that the substories are all grunt-work, assisting normal-ass people who often dont have much vested interest in you, the player, or kiryu, the supposed paragon of humanity, i love that there are cursory glances of what the series could have become in its structure had it not been turned into an asset-flip series, hell i even love the awkward english dub which tried to endear itself to the cult of rockstar and GTA. it's not very good, but much of that is attributable to script rewrites and voice acting direction as opposed to the fault of the actors themselves, and even at its very worst it is infinitely preferable to parse when contrasted against some localization decisions in the recent remastered collection which, at least at launch, frustratingly changed instances of dialogue in substories to include insular online lingo as the punchline. these are minimal in number, but they tie into what i stated earlier about how i fear this series is perceived, and it's often not in a very sincere or affectionate way. say what you will about the english dub wherein kiryu uses a slur or two, but he actually sounds like a former gangster, at the very least. keep in mind that i'm more than a little bitter that impassioned fans could not get people to play this series, but a single screenshot of a chicken did, no doubt influencing the direction of marketing, teaching profit-driven suits the value of the snapshot and altering franchise perception for the rest of time.

and while the series has continued to take risks, trying their hands at ideas various other studios would never consider because of RGG Studio's unique developmental approach (spin-offs as experimental grace periods developed for reprieve or to test new technology, each mainline entry's narrative being set in the year in which it was released, a greater than the sum of its parts design approach largely centered around content density), no title has ever been as uncompromising experimental as this one. its janky and its rough, but its unapologetic and totally committed - that's why im such an ardent fan, and probably at least subconsciously why i return every now and again. helps that 'tis the season, and it's a peak christmas game too.

in fact, even with the series transitioning to the turn-based genre, when so much of the post-0 output is so utterly reliant on incessant callbacks and fanservice relating to that one moment the western discovered this franchise existed in 2017, i'd without hesitation wager it still hasn't been anywhere near as risky as the first yakuza!

living with yakuza for as long as i have, learning the ins and outs of its development process, appreciating it from afar and growing to love this specific entry in retrospect has oddly enough honed my creative ability and imbued me with a sharper edge, a specific sense of what endears me to any given work. it's forced me to challenge convention and to be confident in conveying my thought process - to say with defiance that this is what i, singularly, admire and respect about a work. this is undeniably a strange and alienating response to have to a 2005 JRPG brawler laden in machismo, but stranger things have happened. that's the power of art as it relates to the individual, i'd say. goes without saying but if you havent gotten the picture from the tone of this review yet i think kiwami is awful

when you first encounter dr. naomi in NMH3, she's eking out a kind of solitary existence in travis's basement, resigned to her fate being entwined with a 'creepy-ass otaku' and promptly aiding him through all his savagery and debauchery. there's obviously still a lingering a mild undercurrent of disdain in their interactions, but dr. naomi is otherwise shown to be genial enough to continue to upgrade travis's gear. although it's not like she had much of a choice in the matter - her unexpected transformation into a cherry blossom firmly anchors her in the game's primary base of commerce, allowing her to fulfill her pre-established role as a fixed vendor from the convenience of travis's motel.

the question of how exactly dr. naomi became a disfigured and hardy tree given artificial life isn't necessarily central to NMH3's narrative, but i find it worth thinking about because it continues NMH3's perpetual tendency to allude to works of all kinds unceremoniously. in this case, the easiest analogue would be twin peaks: the return; in the 25 years between season 2 and the return, a character slowly and inexplicably evolves into a fleshy and gnarled tree pulsating with electric currents. this is nothing more than an incidental tribute - and not unexpected after something like 2018's the 25th ward references to twin peak's third outing - but an homage to the return will always make me reflect a bit because it is such an extraordinarily well-structured, thematically cogent, and thoroughly excising metatextual work that it still is every bit as arresting and affecting as the moments i first watched it some four years ago.

NMH3 poses as a ‘return’ of sorts as well; in reality, however, TSA, with its title literally referring to travis’s absence from the throne, is more likely to fit that bill. TSA was also a metatextual work – about travis and GHMs absence from the limelight, about what had changed over the course of close to a decade, about GHMs works, fears, and their future. in several respects, TSA may as well be NMH3, bringing a close to travis’s character arc and positioning itself as a vector for GHM’s next project.

these elements effectively make NMH3 a lot more like a big-budget reunion than a fully-formed closer to a trilogy, something comparable to a no more heroes: gaiden or no more heroes: the after years. i say this in large part because, in contrast to TSA and especially NMH1, NMH3 is markedly straightforward and almost juvenile in its affectations. i don’t envy anyone attempting to continue a series which defied continuity and explanation the way NMH1 so deftly did, but this is our third time returning to this nexus, so the hope would be that there’s an actual reason to be with these characters again, to inhabit this world. so to briefly sum up: to an extent, i think even NMH2 toyed around with the idea of franchise iconography and the role travis had foisted upon him in that world. TSA was, as was previously said, a game about absence, reflection on and mild interrogation of the indie space, about games themselves and the feuding ideals animating their development, about artistic love and loss.

what’s NMH3 about? we’ll get to it, kind of, but for our purposes it’s worth establishing a few things first, namely that this is a pretty significant departure from NMH1’s jodorowsky and seijun suzuki-influenced blend of inviting contradictions and abrasive lampooning (although it’s worth noting suda apparently has never seen branded to kill lol). if anything it’s kind of the opposite which makes it kind of wild that it released after TSA, NMH1 is very pointed about the intersection between stifling economics, dead end americana, and fan obsession with foreign work, whereas 3 is kind of like, ‘im travis and im 40 and kamen rider is still so fucking cool’ (not that hes wrong, just that that kind of adoration and those adolescent proclivities go totally unchecked here). still, it shares less in common with the kind of vulgarity-without-sincerity romp that NMH2 produced and honestly a lot more in common with suda’s short fiction, especially post 2010? im thinking very specifically about ranko tsukigime and kurayami dance, both works that are ‘closed-off’ or ‘shuttered-off’; they have a very definite beginning and end but everything that happens in between is a dense mix of dream logic, parodic undertones, perverse ironies, ‘i say it like it is’ genre statements – very much storytelling as irresolvable and inconclusive. shared between all three, there’s a strong narrative centering on non-sequiturs, an emphasis on artistic collaboration, and torrential floods of absurdity and surrealism fueling the game. hell, so many artists, such as animation teams like AC+bu, are common to both ranko and NMH3, even.

and i think for sure a lot of these constituent elements are present in other GHM/suda titles (that inability of narrative to resolve itself is a staple of NMH1), it’s just the explosiveness and the frequency with which you get barraged by these specific traits are at a fever pitch in those works. kamui shows up here in NMH3 and he basically does as kamui is wont to do, offering a bit of a skeleton key for understanding some of these works:
“[Things] had become quite the confusing mess. But somewhere inside that confusing mess hid the truth. What is real, what is not? … There is only one thing that is real. I am here in front of your very eyes.”

i think this is where my problems with NMH3 come into focus. i think NMH3’s invocation of that dizzying mess kamui alludes to is half-baked and barebones. unlike ranko tsukigime, NMH3 isn’t an absurd sidescroller that can be finished in 40 minutes. unlike kurayami dance, NMH3 isn’t a sub 30 chapter manga. NMH3 is a 12-20 hour adventure game. so while it shares much in common with these narratives, just the protracted nature of it results in maybe the last thing i expected a NMH title to be – just kind of boring? it’s a profound skeleton of a game in so many different ways, there’s not really a full-bodied texture so you’re left with a lot of entirely separate and only somewhat interrelated elements. how you feel about the game is left up to how you feel about any one of those constituent elements. for my purposes, i think a lot of this game has the seeds of something really special, but comes up pretty short.

when we catch up with travis touchdown again, he’s in the middle of doing something i think a fair amount of us do and are unwilling to admit – he’s looking up footage of a game he’s already finished, looking to vicariously (and perhaps voyeuristically) re-experience some of those same emotions, to temporally connect himself with a younger, more idealistic version of himself. i recommend watching it here, if only because in the same way NMH1’s intro frames the game, i think this is meant to be NMH3’s primary invocation of all its themes, running parallel to the game, and i like the remake angle the opener plays with because it feels like an implicit acknowledgement that so many sequels are really just remakes if you unpack them a bit.

in the proceeding cutscene we learn quickly about antagonists FU and damon’s origins, lovingly animating an ET-esque tale of nostalgic childhood tenderness gone somehow wrong. FU promising to return no matter what is a bit of cheeky writing, and the transition seamlessly shifting between aspect ratios as the scene shifts to the modern day is a great touch as well. damon (based on known shit-for-brains john riccitiello, a can of worms im not really interested in opening in this review), has apparently used FU’s powers to position himself in a place of executive power since the days of his mirthful childhood, and signals FU back to earth, where he pretty much immediately sets out on planetary conquest. in the original reveal trailer this is revealed as its own fakeout IP in the form of goddamn superhero, right before travis crashes the party. the kind of IP conflict this opener promises – between a resuscitated old franchise built on subjugation of nostalgia and clearly alluding to the MCU, in conflict with the brazen punk nature of NMH – is the kind of fertile ground NMH3 is built on, but fails to really capitalize on.

after that, the two plotlines intersect. travis is interrupted and called to action before he can figure out who deathman is, sylvia immediately begins fulfilling her designated intermediary NMH role, some dire shit happens, and the game kicks off proper with revenge serving as the impetus for taking down FU. it’s here where we’re introduced to the systems of the game, harkening back to NMH1. we can explore an overworld on foot or on bike again, participate in side activities like gig work, and hunt for small collectables and trinkets. structurally, however, it’s difficult for me to say this was worth it. performance is taxed to a degree in the open world and it’s barren in a way that feels unacceptable, fragmented across different islands, some of which are inaccessible from beginning to end. but even on spicy difficulty where i played, you only need to check out some of the barebones gig work a couple of times just to see what’s there, and you’re more than comfortable to just engage with the designated matches to advance in the narrative. they’re there because they worked in NMH1 and people like it, but they don’t recognize how interwoven those elements are into NMH1’s thesis. perhaps there’s a read in which you can argue it’s fun work for work’s sake – it’s nice to see travis turn the act of lawnmowing into stylistic expression – but it just feels noncommittal and compartmentalized.

which is another problem imo…NMH3 doesn’t have levels, you travel to points in the map to engage in little designated battles that take 2-5 minutes to complete on average to deflect from the fact that there’s no substantive content and to give the combat system some meat and heft. and i do think the combat is kinaesthetically really appealing, in a way kind of the artistic statement of the year, it’s so garish, the way the voxel art and weird low fidelity environments and excessive blood and splatter effects all coalesce into conveying an off-kilter unreality, but it sucks that the combat is what’s on center stage and nothing more. even if the enemy designs are generally serviceable and the gamefeel is solid, i found myself wanting more than contextless skirmishes. midoris one of the better fights in the game purely because there’s actually a level here with good ideas and imagery relating to her character and background fueling the stage before travis’s competing subconscious infects the scene and they fight in a tokusatsu rock quarry.

NMH3 in that respect represents NMH at its most gratifying. it just feels good, despite it all. part of this is that your slot machine upgrades don’t grind gameplay to a halt to do some other weird mode of gameplay for a bit but they all naturally come together to form random bursts of unrelenting power expression. gold joe is probably my favourite fight in the game – soundtracks fuego, mechanics are simple, gimmicks unique, and the fight is very readable without compromising too much on difficulty, it fits the style of game NMH3 is trying to be the most. and that’s where that slot machine integration comes in because it’s entirely possible to stunlock these guys into oblivion when all is said and done, combining a smidge of luck with some of the very minor okizeme nuance present in the game – i basically one hit killed FUs first phase because i got luckily enough to trigger mustang twice through errant slashes and he got stuck in my cage of fishermans suplex torment. i still don’t really know what his moveset looks like in the later stages of the fight. that’s a gratifying thing in my books, perfectly in line with NMH’s ideals.

still, it’s a bit uninspired and tame otherwise in how it achieves that expression, and i wish there was a bit more meat on its bones. it’s technically the best NMH combat system, but it achieves this through:
- configuring dark step as witch time
- having enemy types
- boring death glove DPS mechanics
which is really kind of a shame because it’d be nice to have more in the way of formal experimentation, particularly after some of the crazier death glove abilities in TSA. this is basically killer is dead 2 for all that that’s worth, and it’s not particularly interested in tying any of these combat mechanics into a greater core. it’s just a Component in an, again, extremely compartmentalized game, unlike NMH1’s brand of, to this day, really unique bushido/lucha combat. it feels homogenous with action titles i’ve already played, yknow?

that retreading, homogenous feeling, is what’s most disappointing about NMH3s conveyance of narrative. everything in the opening establishes some ideas and themes that lose a lot of their momentum as you engage with the game, throwing in NMH1’s subversions of boss battle identity and coyly alluding to it at times as an unsatisfactory way to shake things up. i think where NMH1 and TSA are pretty unpredictable, NMH3 is firmly predictable and monotonous - there aren’t as many hooks to engage with, not as many quiet moments to reflect on…i imagine there will be some sects of the internet who think NMH2 deserves a reassessment after this and my answer to that is a hearty no, that game’s just absolutely miserable to play, but even that title has something like the captain vlad fight which i really liked! and a fair amount of my positive feelings on NMH3s battles mostly stem from whether or not they were fun to engage with on a more tactile level rather than leaving me with some narrative or aesthetic thread to deliberate on. the multimedia, ‘binge streaming’ format the narrative is conveyed by feels holistically appropriate in this sense, because it really is No More Heroes as unchallenging content, No More Heroes as brand ip, No More Heroes as obligation…in a world where games more than ever unironically resemble NMH1’s implicit criticism of the open world city format, what could or should NMH3 be bringing to the table? because it’s just more of the same here.

if travis feels at odds with it, subsumed by it – i think that’s the fairest way i can read this game, even if it doesn’t feel like something the game is perhaps entirely committed to. sylvia is travis’s partner but you wouldn’t guess it in this game, she’s resigned to her designated role as matchmaker and manager, pitting travis against battle after battle to keep his bloodlust sharp and flowing (which maybe in some perverse sense means someone like her is inadvertently the ideal partner for travis), but that elides that she absconds every time travis attempts to talk to her more meaningfully. and i think maybe what the game attempts to stab at is that complete and total death of meaning in the macro sense as we prefer to engage with things in the micro sense. im pretty sure this is why it ends in the dizzying manner that it does, even if its post-credits scene is something a great many of sudas works already do (ranko, SOTD, etc). travis’s life is now battle for battle’s sake; the game doesn’t think to ask how he feels about that because it’s clearly still duty to him at this point in time, but one of the only other meaningful connections he’s fostered is someone like bishop who he can just sit back and crack open a cold one with, sitting through miike film after miike film having these podcast-esque discussions as this weird place of respite. sylvia even thanks bishop for taking care of travis, so it's clear she's aware to some extent of what he's being put through. still, his inability to connect with sylvia does frustrate him but there’s not a lot he can do about that given she’s been shuttered off into the role his life demands of her. hell, so cyclical is the absurdity in travs's life that characters from separate narrative continuities like kamui and midori (with kamuis malleable and impermanent physical appearance fittingly shaped to appear as a younger otaku in this title) explicitly allude to glamour camping in this universe, because, well, it seems like there’s a vaguely interesting show going on here – why not change the channel for a bit? in that sense i do think some of the spirit of KTP is in this title, but not in a particularly substantive way. i should also probably point out that i didn’t expect any of those narrative threads to be in this game, because that’s insane, and i specifically wanted for NMH3 to be another expression of NMH, however that might manifest. but if these are ideas NMH3 wanted to chase, i don’t think it needed to explicate them necessarily so much as it needed clarity and focus; after all, much of NMH1’s thematic strength is expressed in the margins. i kind of liked ranko, and i greatly enjoyed kurayami, both of which are similarly works defiant of continuity that still feel complete and total, whereas this is just distended for much of its runtime.

maybe the other fair thing to point out is that my favourite narrative content in the game is usually in the smaller moments, particularly the optional bad girl arc players can choose to engage with wherein travis attempts to console her by making anime recommendations. classic stuff there. but otherwise things just kind of happen with hardly any sense of importance or dramatic rhythm, and while it’s unrelated, you can sense that the most in the game’s pared back soundtrack – a surprising wealth of these tracks are lacking in pulse or energy, particularly the battle tracks which are composed by nobuaki kaneko. he later went on to form the band red orca – their debut album features so many of the tracks listed in this game that have all been given extensive and lavish production, whereas in NMH3 they’re all significantly pared back cascades of white noise. not as relevant to the discussion here, but feels like an apt metaphor.

i really think it’s admirable that a game like this can swing for the stars, but not every chance at bat will be a home run. i expect that this will become something of an MGSV-type debacle in a few months time, since it’s clear that covid production, budget issues, and technical problems took a butcher’s knife to this game, with it being confirmed that there’s over an hour of cutscenes missing from the game and probably even more content missing as well judging from suda’s own description of what’s absent, such as boss fights and fully developed areas. but, all the same, im really not sure it’s a game that can find life in its wounds like MGSV can be said to accomplish…but it’s all the more frustrating that it’s impossible to say, as well. maybe there’ll be a director’s cut, but it seems highly unlikely given that this is travis’s last hurrah and marvelous has the rights to the IP. it ends up offering an interest contrast to killer7, a game salvaged in a similar edit that brought everything into comparable focus. with NMH3, the dominant sense is that everything is disparate and disconnected. i can say that trying to make any semblance of cohesive statement on this game is hell, which explains my overwrought nature this time i suppose, but then, NMH3 is like that too. meditation on weaponized nostalgia? ouroboric game about audience’s inability to let the past die? a work about the futility of mechanics-oriented design? impossible to say, but i could have appreciated its resistance to any easily read interpretation (in part because i think treating works purely in terms of the message they purport can be a reductive lens) if its parcels of content were more meaningfully engaging, but they unfortunately arent. by the end of all these competing conceptions of media, it's only fitting that they all meet at their 'final destination'. it is what it is. see ya in the next one

that's not fucking fair mannnnnnnnnnnn........ fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck okay ive tied up all the loose ends, seen the conclusions to some of the social links i didnt finish in time.. and i fully beat the game and started a Little of the new game plus for the first time ever...

I THINK i can type my thoughts in good conscience now

warning this review in particular in your eyes will have me getting sappy and sentimental, but ive never played this game before:

This was the first persona game i had ever even Seen or heard about. When I was a kid watching mat and pat from two best friends play this, i retained almost Nothing about it aside from the two being at each other's throats and Mat may or may not actually deleting Pat's 300 plus hour save file
In sophomore year of highschool i had a really good friend that'd show me the openings for both persona 4 golden and persona 3 portable alike, this was almost comically insane timing because it wasnt often id even have the opportunity to get a new game.. hell i didnt even have a ps4 still, my crappy laptop, wii u and my 3ds for the bulk of the 2010s were what i relied on for video games. It was about 2017 when Persona 5 dropped, and Id actually be able to TRY one of these.. id get it for ps3(while just the Existence of this version of this game being released for such an old console was laughed at.. to Me it was another very lucky moment)
and id love it, id be talking about it so often.. and then thatd kinda just! be it! for a bit atleast
id listen to the music when i was alone, id listen to the other games ost's
it was far from my first JRPG but it felt like a lightning in a bottle moment because id never touched anything SMT before and id hold these thoughts and memories and theyd peter(heheh) out as time marched... i wound up playing persona 1 and having my fun trolling my friends into thinking that id play 3 or 4 next, and i enjoyed my time with that too but in a Different way.
It's been 7 years since i played persona 5
and since then i think i can totally call myself an "smt Fan" instead of just someone with passing interest, ive played about 10 games now at this point and im levelling with you..

I think Persona 4 has the worst gameplay of these 'modern era' type persona games,

No, really!
I think this Process of going through persona 4 dungeons sucks! There's some exceptions here though... the GaMEr dungeon is neat.. the laboratory one.. the two before the endgame one that i wont say the names of..
but in general I think while the aesthetics are a step above persona 3's tartarus blocks... i do wish they took more advantage of sending you back to previous floors or even having mid bosses thatre more interesting, some of them are so utterly stupidly hamfisted in one way or another that just makes them not stand out to me AT ALL compared to persona 3 mid bosses
The closest thing to a smooth dancer or sleepy table moment was the big fuck you jarhead mech asshole that has an ungodly amount of defense
But even in spite of this there's so much variety that goes in with your party and having party members remember shit from doing side activities.. ultimate personas getting a THIRD tier.. its incredible
HAFHAHF INFACT LIKE EVEN THE MOMENTS WHERE A BENCHED PARTY MEMBER CAN JUMP IN AND DO A FUNNY ATTACK ON THE ENEMY WITH THEIR MOTORCYCLES, THE TEAM ATTACKS THAT CAN SOMETIMES JUST H A P P E N, ALL THAT I love that
I love how involved everyone is to the point of even showing up in some random blocks of the dungeons just for idle interactions, persona 3 had some moments like this too! but nowhere Near at this extent even in FES
And thats really why this whole game works for me in general

Yeah you could say the plot technically doesnt kick into gear until the latter quarter of the game, yes there's absolutely disgusting momentary segments of for lack of a better term

'atlus moments' where theres punching down at being queer or even having whole actual just predator/pedo characters in this shit while at the same time having arguably the fruitiest fucking cast in this entire series with yosuke, naoto, kanji and even teddie and the others getting glimmering moments of acceptance and self affirming perspective about them. This is where the game comes into a sort of cognitive dissonance that makes it so conflicting to talk about and I think to wrap my head around in general while playing and even after playing ....
This game WAS written in the 00s after all, and the bulk of the cast that this game centers on.. are kids! freshmen and sophomores just trying to do the right thing out here and it shows. Yosuke MAY be goonerer supreme in some moments of the narrative, and then be one of the most realistic characters in self doubt and isolation and wanting to Be something and have a grip on who he is.. in his social link!.. but bits of that Do trickle into the narrative too.. so you have this guy thats just so gross but it gets brushed off so quick as if the game itself knows its just a stupid silly thing that he had bought girls swimsuits in advance for his friends in a creepy manner...?????????

Yea
This game has some moments like that. and I never like it but I think it speaks volumes on it all when there can be fuckshit in this game and I primarily remember and Felt at the forefront what was going on when it mattered.
Shopping for groceries, getting drivers licenses for the motorcycles, the silly shit at the beach, the camping, the ski trip, going to the movies, yosuke needing help at junes', the fuckup with halloweeennn all of it.. i loved All of that more than the actual boss fights, more than the personas more than any of that more than anything that shit stuck with me

ESPECIALLY when it came down to Nanako and Dojima whichre two of my favorite characters in this franchise now too because in some ways I think it feels like somewhat of a peek into what itd be like if i could be there for a little version of myself going through shit alone with her dad when her mom's passed, what itd be like if there was someone to make things right and close the rift between my dad and i instead of it rolling harder and harder in contempt for one another. This is a lot of projecting im aware, but honestly this is the meat of why this game is even a 4/5 at All because if none of this landed to me, idve probably gave this game a 3/5 at most.
Which still isnt bad, but there's so much here that i think is Objectively hampering whats going on.. but theres so much soul fighting through to the point where itd feel like i was Lying through my teeth telling you this game as a whole sucks
because i loved it so much
I didnt wanna say I did
because everybody and their fuckin mama's goldfish meatsuckle this shit to hell and back
and i think i was afraid of being biased like that too
I even had some contempt for how id been spoiled on this years ago on instagram... but Im so glad i didnt play this as a teenager because it felt like the most brisk wave of nostalgia i didnt think a game i never played could ever give me.. a piece of media ive never experienced evoking so much out of me so different from what made persona 3 so special to me. I grew up in a town where jackshit happened apart from hanging with friends to talk and play games, there wasnt much going on for being one of the most boring towns in the entire state of florida at that too. But it was always PEOPLE that got me through my first time being homeless, it was always people that got me through the passing of loved ones, the decay of my enjoyment of school, first car, venting, movies, all of it bitch
im talking all of it
This made me think about all of that to the point where I think it was around december or january, these stupid asses teddie and yosuke were at the door of your place and i started to cook yosuke for being dumb as all fuck and how karma always shines and repays in full with every stupid ass little thing he says and thinks to do during the game.. but tears kept flowing cause he felt like a friend or atleast someone id know from back in those days and his growth was absolutely felt(until atlus thinks to do stupid shit for a joke)

It's that shit that matters, its that shit that makes the whole journey worth it, its that shit that makes even the several BAD endings that much cooler, its that shit that makes pressing through the social stats feel so much more Earned, its that shit that makes you wanna actually talk to everyone and get to know everyone because the group chemistry is so knit together well. I love S.E.E.S but the Inaba investigation group is so specifically bumbling and sweet and dumb all at the same time that I think they give the vibes of a cast that can literally have conversations about Anything and keep going and going without a writer being pressed for how to handle a situation.
Having been spoiled on shit in this game prior also made following along the killer really interesting too, it even got me keeping an eye open for them at all times and catching onto how their alibis would form and all that
which honestly just made the mystery that much more fun.

So yeah, i only got one more set of Persona(s) to play through
I was gonna make this one the last one and keep my weird play-pattern for this series rolling till my last breath but I really needed something to make me feel Good lately with how heavy life's been. I think this game has and probably still will continue to be there for people like that with how many characters can resonate with you regardless of age and regardless of identity. I think it's beautiful in it's own.. sometimes ugly little way. I cant let some shit slide though so its capped at 4/5 on here because like, THERES TOTALLY SOME THINGS THAT PISS ME OFF

which brings us to this lightning round of things i like and dont like since this is already probably my longest backloggd review

-margaret's social link is a farcry from what elizabeth's was that shit is so depressing and only is nice for some momentary nods about the past i GUESS.

-if you played persona 3 and loved persona 3, and its your favorite one like me, this shit will meatsuckle you like crazy for a little bit and i think thats kindof cool

-shuffle time i THOUGHT was completely fucked up at first, but I think that sweep bonuses and everything pertaining to it are good I just miss the mystery guessing aspect of shit now

-The final boss funnily enough aint even the hardest fuckin fight in this game LMAO

-I think its fucking disgusting that atlus went out of their way to have two bath house scenes that suck ass in this game

-THE PINK ALLIGATOR GOT PUBLISHED!!!!!!!!! AND SLEEPY TABLE HAD A COMEBACK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

-This is now my most played steam game at 230 something hours...

-Marie is rly cool

-Kamui Miracle is the best additional skiill in the whole franchise and we should always make it mandatory to have a way to gamble when you fight in a persona game thank u

so yeah this game sucks and i hate atlus, loved it, bye