Persona 5 – Standard Edition – PlayStation 4 (PS4)

In a twisted sort of way, which is the only way Persona knows, these games are a bizarre 21st entry heir apparent to John Hughes high school hijinks and angst. Persona 5 continues a very unique evolution of the SMT JRPG system which by this point is a genuine formula involving dungeons, Pokemon, high School, social links, group battles and dating. Yeah that’s all Persona. All of it.

After many, many P4g and P4 PS2 play throughs, I can attest that P5 is a well-made follow up to P4. The lineage is clear. The music is great and the story is solid. Atlus did a great job in some areas in particular:

– The Tokyo details. You didn’t have to spend time in Shinjuku to pick up on everything, but if you’ve spent any extended time anywhere in metropolitan Japan – Osaka, Kobe, etc – there is so much here to connect with. From the convenience store layouts to lines of subway ticket machines, the environment designers hit all the right notes. THERE IS EVEN A POLLEN WARNING FOLKS.
– The music. Now arguably P4 had better music, but the soundtrack is still pretty awesome stuff.
– The visual design is as colorful and as lively as walkthrough through Shinjuku or Dōtonbori in Osaka after sunset. Atlus sort of took the Catherine graphics design and went nuts.
– Offering a Japanese audio track for free. Confession: I haven’t actually heard a single word of the English track. I have a Japanese copy I brought back from Osaka and I played through the American release from start to finish with the Japan audio. I know some people have ranted about flaws in the localization, but if that stuff bothers you so much, just get the full Japanese version. If your kanji isn’t really up to snuff like mine, but you can get through the audio, the American release is an easy choice. The Japanese audio track is a free download on the PSN store.
– 100 hours from start to finish. This shouldn’t be a surprise to any Persona vets. The truth is, a lot of this play time is more about watching the story unfold and fulfilling character stat boost tasks than some grueling marathon. It’s like a Netflix season really.

– Though the difficulty spikes are still there, the combat is also still tons of fun, strategic and really satisfying.

Now some complaints. Persona 5 is not perfect. Neither was 4 or 4G. Or 3. Or 3 FES. Or Q.

– Main dungeons are not half random like before, but honestly, they’re still a little bland. Some have some really great bits and the use of color is fantastic on all of them, but you’re still essentially on rails waiting for a button prompt to hit shadows for combat. I actually think Persona Q felt a little better than this even if you were just moving on squares. Traversal in a Persona game has never been a focus of the designers and it’s not really much different here than past titles, but it feels limiting. Mementos – the side mission grind playground – IS made of randomly generated room branches and mostly a good edition since dungeons disappear permanently after you beat them, but it’s sort of small scale simplistic stuff that often feels a little weak in comparison to the rest of the game. However, you finally do get a mystery machine van that we didn’t have in P4.

– 100 hours from start to finish. The downside to this? Well a lot of that time has to do with Morgana telling you what you can’t do on particular days early on (this was something the game used to force on you in P4 but now handled through a screen character). Another chunk of time is the infinite cross fading loading screens between any action that happens in the game.

– Persona 4 was a little slow moving until you hit the 8-10 hour mark. Persona 5 is marginally better, but arguably, the game doesn’t actually begin until when the 3rd dungeon begins which is roughly 18-20 hours in.

– Lastly, and this is 100% subjective, but as good as this game is, it is lacking the immeasurable charm and heart from P4 or P4g. I’m not taking anything away from the full group of characters in P5, but overall, it’s maybe 9/10s of Persona 4. There is a distinct lack of freshness to many of the game’s systems too as some aspects of the game feel lifted from Catherine too. But as I type this, I know there were plenty of people who said similar things about Persona 4 coming off P3. Your mileage may vary.

You can’t go wrong though. Person 5 is in line with the other life dominating Atlus entries to the series and is so dang amazing that my complaints above came after much thought from a player who has braved the Tartarus, Midnight Channel and now the Metaverse. This is a great game and in many ways is the opposite of open world games in good and bad ways that are dominating video game releases these days. By the end, it’s not really about stats or how many cars you have in your GTA garage, it’s about looking back and truly earning the right to say, you went on a real journey and you did it among friends.

But I still miss Yukiko and Rise. And maybe Chie.

Well, to say that this is a good game would be an understatement. It’s very easy to find the highest-selling game and purchase them with a single click, but it’s very difficult to find those games which are worth of every penny that you spend. And this is one of those games – a hidden gem!

Thanks to “Metacritic”, when I found this game among the “Best Games Of All Time”, having the position among games such as God of War, GTA, The Last Of Us, and Red Dead Redemption 2, I was initially skeptical as to whether go for it or not. Since I was never a fan of games which had “Animation” and even JRPG for that matter, I had my inhibitions. But luckily, I made the right decision.

I never would have thought that a game such as this would be able to blow my mind, unlike any other game which I have ever played before. It is pure classic!

Minor Spoilers: You are introduced to the “MC”(Main Character) as a thief who is evading from the police. After getting caught, he is interrogated upon which we get to know about his story through “flashbacks”.

I would just say that this game delivers everything beautifully!! From the story, to the characters, to the combats, and to the techniques, almost everything is well-etched! Although it’s an open-world game, but you get to unlock every location as you progress along the game.

Speaking of the “Difficulty Modes”, you get Safe, Easy, Normal and Hard. But to be honest, if you’re a casual gamer, it’s better to play the game in Safe Mode at first, since you would find most of the missions extremely challenging that you won’t be able to complete them in first playthrough. You can change the difficulty later on, after you’re through the game.

You’ll get a variety of choices how to play and complete this game, but however you would play it, I assure you that you would not be disappointed.

Kudos to the developers behind this game, it is nothing less than a “Treasure Hunt”!! One of the finest games of this generation!!

And just to make it clear, if you’re worried about if this game is connected to its previous parts, it’s not. You can play this game with ease.

And for the hardcore gamers and for the nerds out there, you can find tons of guides for this game at “Gamefaqs”. First, you can play it however you would want to. And for the second time, which I’m sure that you would be compelled to play, you can check out the guides as you would explore various little things and events which would make you appreciate this game even more!!

Waiting for Persona 6, if it would ever come!

INTRODUCTION
Amazing, breathtaking, wrapped society, emotional and personal. These are just some of the words one could possibly use to describe Persona 5. Persona 5 is a game developed by Atlus exclusively for Sony’s PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 systems. Persona is a sub-series of Atlus’ Shin Megami Tensei Series of video games. Persona 5 is the 13th game in the persona universe, even though the game is titled as the 5th in the installment. This is mainly because previous titles were re-released in portable form or as special editions with a couple of titles even receiving spin-offs.

STORY 10/10
The game puts you in the role of a Japanese high school teenager who gets transferred to Tokyo on probation after he was falsely accused and sued for assault and expelled from his school. Once in Tokyo, you uncover that a whole other world exists known as “The Metaverse”, which was formed through the distorted desires of man and while in the Metaverse you could cause a person to have a “change of heart” if you managed to steal their “treasure” which is the object which caused them to have the distorted desires. The main theme of the story centers around the idea of “Freedom”. Throughout the entire experience, there wasn’t a single moment where we felt tired of playing the game and our first playthrough managed to clock in around 103 hours. The story managed to remain engaging to the very end with a more than satisfactory ending. Among all the persona games, this has to be the best one in terms of story.

GAMEPLAY 10/10
This part of the game is the most difficult to explain, since the game does not just stick to a single genre. It plays almost exactly like the Shin Megami Tensei Series except for the social simulation aspect. your daily life acts as a social simulator where you do what your average high school students do, attend school, make friends, study, take on part time jobs, watch movies, play videos games etc. It also plays a bit like a visual novel. But once you transcend into the “Metaverse”, the game plays like a dungeon crawler, turn based game with certain elements similar to the Pokemon series.

Combat is present while in the Metaverse and it is turn based. You can not only use physical attacks, but also elemental attacks by summoning “Personas” A persona is the physical manifestation of your inner most desires, hence the name “Persona”. To put it simply, your inner personality molds the form which your persona takes. All personas are based off religious, mythical or fictional characters. So say, you are a person who loves to help the poor and believes in justice, one possibility is that your persona could end up being “Robbit Hood”.

Each individual can only have a single persona, but the protagonist has the ability to wield multiple personas. Meaning you can have more than one. This is where the game plays like Pokemon. Each persona has a different set of attributes, skills, strengths and weaknesses. The enemies you meet are called “Shadows”, they appear in the form of Lost Personas, you can battle them in a turn based manner and kill them or try to recruit them. Then you can combine different personas you’ve recruited to a create even stronger persona through the process called “Fusion”. You can even inherit skills from the personas used to fuse the new one.

There are a lot of Personas in the game… a lot and collecting them is an option as the game gives you an item called “The Compendium” this is a log book which keeps track of all the personas you’ve unlocked. It also acts as a device where you can back buy a persona you lost to a fusion.

Every persona is categorized into groups collectively called “Arcana”. Groups include “Justice”,”Fool”,”Lovers”,”Devil” etc. These Arcanas represents “Confidents” which are the bonds you create with people while living your daily life in-game. Each Confident is a AI in-game character who you can spend time with. The more time you spend with your Confidents the higher the level of the Confidents gets, which in-turn helps you fuse even stronger personas.

If you max a confident (Max is level 10) you will unlock the ability to fuse the strongest persona of that Arcana.

You even have “Social Stats” which are “Charm”,”Guts”, ”Knowledge”, “Proficiency” and “Kindness”. You can level-up or increase your social states by reading books, studying, watching DVD movies, going to the movies, answering questions in class etc. Increasing your stats is mandatory to Max out your Confidents. You also need to max it out to do certain actions such as stand up to someone or be in a relationship with someone.

The games takes place within a year so you are limited in time. Efficiently using your time is important.

Reading all this might make the game seem cluttered but trust us when we say that isn’t the case. The gameplay is well balanced and paced. But we will admit that completing everything in the first playthrough is impossible. Luckily the game provides new game plus.

VISUALS 9.5/10
The game was originally intended to be a PS3 exclusive. It was a year after PS4’s release that the game was announced for release on that platform as well. So almost all of the development was done with the PS3 in mind and later ported over to the PS4. This in-turn limited the graphical quality it could have had if it was developed on the PS4. But considering the art style which the team was going for, it looks pretty good. The game was always intended to look like a Japanese anime in a shell-shaded format and never was intended to compete directly with games like Horizon Zero Dawn or Uncharted 4. But the game still does suffer from poor textures on certain objects, lack of detail on non-central characters and NPC pop-ins. That aside when it comes to style, the game is simply oozing in it, graffiti designs with some vibrant colors really make the game pop. Even the title screen to the menu options are stylish beyond comprehension.

Now, let’s talk about the technical aspects of the game. The game runs at 1080p@30fps on PS4 and 720p@30fps on PS3. The game is visually identical in all other aspects if compared. Where there is a difference is when it comes to frame-rates. PS4 manages to keep the game locked at 30fps while on the PS3, it’s not as stable. It keeps moving from 30 to 25fps and back up again. It’s nothing you would notice but is still worth mentioning. Another aspect we should take into consideration is that on the PS3, there are screen tears occurring while rotating the camera around. This issue is not present on the PS4 version of the game. There are no PS4 Pro benefits.

AUDIO 10/10
The game boasts superb audio work. Voice acting is masterfully done to the point where it could manage to put some triple-A titles to shame in that regard. Even the music is something to behold. The Persona series always managed to provide an exceptional OST (Original SoundTrack) and Persona 5 is no exception. The game manages to blend in j-pop mixed in with jazz into the gameplay in a way that both synchronize superfluously. Sure the music won’t be for everybody, but for this game, it works really well.

OVERALL SCORE
STORY 10/10
GAMEPLAY 10/10
VISUALS 9.5/10
AUDIO 10/10

TOTAL SCORE 39.5/40

98.75% approval rating

CONCLUSION
Atlus has always managed to make each new iteration of the Persona series better than the latter and there hasn’t been a Persona title that ended up being inferior when compared to it’s past entries. With 1.2 million worldwide sales in the first month of Persona 5’s release, Atlus might finally receive the international recognition they deserved since the first Shin Megami Tensei game back in the 90’s.

(We would like to point again that our initial playthrough took 103 hours to beat. To put it into retrospect, we managed to 100% complete Final Fantasy 15 in 98 hours, that includes beating Adamantoise, who takes an average of 2 hours of to beat. So this game demands time. But it will be a experience you will not easily forget. It might be possible to complete the game sooner on lower difficulties. So don’t let the length of the game intimidate you, it really is a great game and our Game of the Year for 2017 so far.

The review was conducted on a standard PS4 with PS3 performance collected through secondary data. As of writing this review the game does not have any sort of update or day one patch)

To begin with let me tell you something first, I HAVE NEVER EVER PLAYED A TURN BASED STRATEGY GAME EVER IN MY 18 YEARS OF GAMING. I never thought turned based strategy games were up to my taste cause I felt they were too slow and boring which is why I always steered away from them.

That being said Persona 5 is my very first turn based strategy game and to put it simply I AM IN LOVE.
This game manages to put a smile on my face everytime i start it. The gameplay, the artwork, the setting and the amazing soundtracks all of them just come together so well to get you hooked on to your PS4. I have put in 108hrs already in the game (which i still have to finish) and this is just my first playthrough. I have forgotten about every other game that i have and i simply cannot get enough of this game. I have also been a life long fan of Japanese culture, games and of course anime so i felt really connected to the game.

If this game can make a fan out of an ignorant being like me, then i am pretty sure any gamer out there would want this in their collection of the best games they have ever played in their lives (it certainly is in mine now).

Please do your self a favour and get this game.

Justo el juego que esperas.