the premise and overall story of the game with multiple protagonists pov's that are complimenting and filling up holes of the others was super interesting and got me hooked for a good while and most of the characters were really interesting but in the end game i was getting a bit burned out.

it doesn't really help that i wasn't a fan of the battle system and the way they tried to shoehorn various romance angles (some of which don't make sense and butcher certain characters) but all in all it was a good experience! the story would work so well in a book format. also i wanted the game to give us more of izumi/chihiro because they were the most interesting duo besides takatoshi and okino. oh well !

Sometimes you just have to disappear for a month and play an Extremely long video game. In summary - I loved Persona 5 Royal and its many many flaws

Let's get the worst out of the way - I do think the game undermines a lot of its own messages/themes by being unable to break away from certain tropes or cheap gags. The first Arc of the game deals with a teacher that uses their position of power to sexually harrass students. However, four different romantic options are adults also in a position of power while the character you control is a minor. The adult characters also acknowledge Joker being underage if you romance them, and some basically have a line of dialogue that's like "welp guess I'm a pedophile now!" which was certainly Something. The other thing is, I myself am an adult and the adult characters are actually pretty great but I couldn't help but feel just kinda skeeved by the whole thing - especially when I don't think the game would lose anything by making our protagonists college students or whatever. I also think it's made worse by Persona's romance options being Very hetero centric and listen before you give me shit for saying that, imagine if the writing team had one extremely unhinged fujoshi on it - that shit would go SO fucking hard, like Joker and Akechi's dynamics are already one of the best parts of this game...... basically it's just a bit silly that a minor dating their teacher was an option before dating your male best friend right? Plus Government Mandated Homophobic/Transphobic Persona Scene would be scrapped

But anyway - P5R is a very long game, split up into multiple gameplay sections. You have preset story moments, the dungeons and the life sim aspects. All of it generally flows pretty well, although I wasn't the biggest fan of Mementos which are minor side quests in a randomly generated dungeon. That was definitely pretty dull at points and could've had the number of floors reduced. In regards to the life sim aspects, I never felt like I didn't have anything to do (besides the last week or so of January where I COULD NOT FUCKING FIND LIKE HALF THE CHARACTERS AAA). I really liked the side stories of characters like Iwai, Yoshida and so on. The palaces/dungeons are....fine? Even though I never needed more than one ingame day to get through them, I still thought a few of them felt a bit too long

I do think Persona's combat has more depth to it than other turn based combat games but still never feels super challenging outside of the Okumura boss fight, which is a huge difficult spike that demands a lot more strategy and planning than any other fight that comes before it. I think the game could've preppred you better for this one - maybe make the difficult increase more gradual instead of a sudden hit to the face

In terms of presentation, it's almost flawless. The soundtrack is great and the stylish UI is literally infamous. The voice acting, character potraits and anime cutscenes get no complaints from me either - it all combines together to make a really expressive experience

Also, I will say - I think the Royal content is what really brought everything together for me, and honestly kinda where a lot of aspects peak. The characters and extra development it brings are just SO damn good, after feeling a bit mixed by the base game's final arc

i think everyone has probably verbalised my feelings about this game better than i can, but i'll try and keep it nice and short.

anyways, being a part of this game's world for 3 months or so was definitely such a precious and immersing experience i don't think i felt recently. it's just so beautiful and fun and it's just a game that i find myself thinking about a lot.

arthur's story is something so emotional, something so human, it made me connected to everyone around him and himself of course and made his whole journey so memorable with just simply being human beings who make mistakes and try to connect despite being flawed and coming from various ways one can encounter in life.

roaming around camps, listening to everyone's story, trying to make the best out of life even though you're in deep, that's arthur morgan to me. arthur passing the baton to john and their bond is something so beautiful to me and even though the end of arthur's journey was so sad and tragic, john's epilogue and little family has healed me, truly an amazing way to end the game.

even just riding your horse around the huge map, enjoying the scenery, fishing or just strolling around town is fun and not something tedious and boring.... i love how every character had their relevance and story and how you can in every step find something relevant to them. the characters feel real, their struggles and emotions feel very human and not tropey and even the antagonists are written in a fear inducing way, not because of the violence or gore, in a psychological way mostly.

i'm rambling once again but you just need to experience this game once in your life. such an amazing and emotional narrative that i will always remember. instant 5/5.

like if silent hill and resident evil took estrogen then had nasty sex

in all seriousness. the inspirations are VERY clear. it's like a love letter to the survival horror genre. what i like about signalis in particular is that it nails the "survival" part of "survival horror" pretty well. unless you're playing on easy, you are almost certainly not going to get anywhere just blasting everything in your path. enemies can and will come back. you don't have enough ammo. you never do.

i had a real pant-shitting moment when i got lost in the second area of the game with exactly ZERO ammo for any of my weapons. exploring new rooms was scary without any way to fight back.

also yes. the lesbian robot thing. i am so, so normal about it.

finally finished slow damage! took me a while to get into it esp since i finished lamento recently, but here we are, it's a very good game. continuing on i will write all my thoughts about this game and its routes so whoever wants to discuss more can freely comment their opinion, i would really love that! anyways.

slow damage looks gorgeous! every n+c game has amazing visuals that fit the overall theme of its games and slow damage is surely one of them, the art, atmosphere and soundtrack all compliment the dark and twisted nature of the protagonists mind and it truly is a breath of fresh air having a 'darker' mc unlike the mcs of the previous entries who are either demure or chipper.

in this game we follow towa who lives pretty self-destructively, reveling in his own pain and madness and living from today to tomorrow. with every route we play we get a fragment of his past or a glimpse of his personality outside his masochistic auteur facade.
as for the routes; i will be frank and say that fujieda's route is the absolute peak of this game, the route that made me obsessively sit in front of the computer and click click click until i finally put the pieces together and see them two live their lives unapologetically and happily.
the other route i also enjoyed very much was rei's. rei is such a good and lovable character, i just wanted to hug him and pat him on his head. also i loved his friend group so much, just a really fun route that also deals with his complex issues, don't want to spoil it much but all in all fujieda and rei are definitely the routes i enjoyed the most.

as for madarame and taku. honestly idk which route i enjoyed LESS. maybe madarame's lol. i know we all love and respect toxic yaoi, i do too, but i kinda feel that madarame had only that going on for him. i can see the appeal but honestly the execution could be better. he was too one dimensional for me to like him and tbh after playing rei's route, going for madarame just hurt and left a bad taste in my mouth. something didn't click for me and i say this as someone whose fave in tnc was shiki lol...

taku was just... boring LOL i really love the older man yaoi route but taku was not interesting enough. his bad end was interesting gonna admit but otherwise kinda stale....

yeah those are my thoughts! fujieda ryou lover forever peace x <3

I would bet it all to smoke weed with Fang and Vanille in their dimly-lit bedroom full of empty takeout bags: I have never seen a burnout codependent lesbian couple depicted this plausibly. XIII is probably the first Final Fantasy to make intra-party dynamics a narrative priority, and the most successful in this. Good dub casting supports this, and it's the series title from which I came away most fond of the characters. Pretty much the gold standard of seventh generation console visuals, and the best version of the ATB system.

The year is 2018. I just started playing Persona 3 FES on my Playstation 2 and I like the game. Sure, no direct party control is weird but it's not hard as long as you know how to use the AI command functions. However, fusion mechanics are god awful as I had to sit there for almost 30 minutes, maybe even almost an hour, trying to get the right passives and skills I want on my persona. Regardless, I soldiered on through and enjoyed what it had to offer until past a certain point in Feburary 2019 my PS2 suddenly cannot read the disc! How? I don't know! Probably internal problems or the disc is scratched to all hell, but this made me unmotivated to continue it since it was hours of progress down the drain that was left at in September. For 5 to 6 years I avoided this game with emulation or the official portable port since I heard they even fucked up that port somehow until this year when the remake was announced so it got me pretty excited. This was also the first time I've decided to play a Persona game on the hardest difficulty setting (Merciless) cause I craved a challenge. I was excited because I'm practically getting to experience that classic RPG that was considered the best in its franchise. However, is this game superior or inferior to the others versions? Well...

Persona 3 Reload improves much upon on the original obviously with QoL. The stuff I didn't like about it that I mentioned in FES was replaced such as being able to have manual persona skill selection, more refined controls, and other changes. In addition, there are more game mechanics that are added and/or borrowed like 'Shift' which is just baton pass from Persona 5 but doesn't have the attack and heal boost. Theurgy, characteristics, monad doors, and greedy hands are said added game mechanics that I'm not sure how to feel about. Theurgy is strategic especially in late game, sure, but they just made the game too easy even on the hardest difficulty. A prime example is Fuuka's Theurgy that has a chance to give the party heat riser, charge + focus, or a full heal for both HP and SP. This ruins the dungeon crawling vibe as you don't feel really pressured on using valuable SP recovery items as her theurgy will mostly do the work for you if it activates. Of course even outside of it if you know what you're doing, like with most SMT games, the game is hard at first but becomes easy. I died several times, but that count lowered till late game and I had fun. Monad doors are just defeating a mini boss, getting gems and models, and being rewarded with 2 floors of a fully charted map. Greedy hands are just RNG based, but late game you can spend MP to trivialize this for a ton of rewards. One thing I do appreciate about the remake's features however is the great clock that allows standby or active party members to catch up quickly in levels for that slice of party synchronization that is also included in shuffle time; speaking of, shuffle time got a massive overhaul in the remake I like. Much like Persona Golden, it involves the major arcanas that add passives and persona stat increases that affects future shuffle times, dungeon crawling, xp, etc. to make your dungeon crawling efforts fruitful. The culmination of these mechanics has some good, some questionable, and some not-good at most. Well, at least I'm not going into the fucking velvet room persona skill roulette mines in FES so I'm glad.

The story I have a lot to talk about. Yeah, I'm told it's just the same as the original, but maybe having this remake harbor the original's story is fine because this is actually a (modern) persona game with a good story. The cast is great and I love the theming of [ we're all going to die some day because we're mortal, but that's ok because as long as we enjoy life, experiences, and rely on friends then everything is all right ]. The voice acting on top of socials links and story beats gave those moments the oomphs it deserved and genuinely made me cry for how much game's story is a timeless classic among one of the icons of the Playstation 2 era's game library.

Other gripes I have with the game is the expansion pass that includes FES's The Answer (which I have not experienced through) for $35 totaling this game to a $105 USD cost. Like I said in my Yakuza 8: Infinite Wealth review, if you think that the it should be rated lower because of this then that is 100% fair. I think it is kinda unfair too. At least, I don't want to buy an expansion pass for it.

Now then, should you play the other versions of Persona 3 over this one? Well, it depends. Do you prefer the clunky, old-school style that has AI-controlled party members that grow to add the narrative they trust you more (side note: they get more commands after defeating major bosses)? Then play FES. Portable recommendation feels disingenuous as that game doesn't have as much as a budget than FES that are presenting like it's some visual novel. If you want to play it though then go ahead; it's got a female protagonist option. If you were discouraged by the either FES or Portable, then Reload is just right for you excluding price. Overall, I really enjoyed Reload despite some of the issues mainly for the story that I haven't got to experience with the original.