The Persona franchise's singular mixture of an immaculate social-sim/dungeon-crawling gameplay loop and heinously regressive moral messaging continues apace with this absurd 110-hour slab of videogame. At that length, even if only 15% of the game is really truly vile that still adds up to a lot of time spent being miserable.
I'm not even convinced that the gameplay is the best it's been this time around, either - this is by far the most expansive and frictionless iteration on the combat system Atlus has rolled out yet, but I think that might be too much the case. Even on higher difficulties very little about the encounters ever feels surprising or dangerous, and that's disappointing to me. Likewise, the huge cast of characters strikes very few bum notes, but with a couple of exceptions also fails to hit the peaks of previous titles.
That's it in a nutshell: not the best Persona, not the worst; it gets close sometimes and there is so fucking much of it that it unconstestably walks away with the title of Most Persona, if nothing else.
I'm not even convinced that the gameplay is the best it's been this time around, either - this is by far the most expansive and frictionless iteration on the combat system Atlus has rolled out yet, but I think that might be too much the case. Even on higher difficulties very little about the encounters ever feels surprising or dangerous, and that's disappointing to me. Likewise, the huge cast of characters strikes very few bum notes, but with a couple of exceptions also fails to hit the peaks of previous titles.
That's it in a nutshell: not the best Persona, not the worst; it gets close sometimes and there is so fucking much of it that it unconstestably walks away with the title of Most Persona, if nothing else.