Genre: RPG
Year: 2017
Developed by: P-Studio
Published by: Atlus
Platforms: PS3, PS4, PS5, Switch, PC, XBOX One, XBOX Series X/S
#28
Feeling Like: Royal Flush
I’m a moron.
In previous posts, I’ve lauded some amazing soundtracks. I’m not even a music guy, but I know that a good set of songs can be both sizzle and steak. Oftentimes, they’re the only way I re-visit a game I’ve played years ago. Mechanics or graphics may age, but a good tune rarely does.
Persona 5 might have the best of them all, and I never mentioned it before now. A massive oversight. It’s right up there with both Chrono games, Xenoblade Chronicles, Final Fantasy 10, Secret of Mana, Chrono Cross and a few elite others. For a campaign that lasts over 100 hours, P-Studio knew that the audio better keep up if players were going to tag along for the entire ride.
Dungeon themes like “Ark” always set the tone.
“Beneath the Mask” plays at a time when the player is relaxed, recouping and recovering from the latest obstacle. It makes me want to sip a tea while looking at the rain. Oh, look at that! There’s a “Rain version” too.
“Rivers in the Desert” gets a lot of attention. It’s nowhere near my favorite song in Persona 5 and it’s still amazing.
“Gentle Madman” wasn’t even in the original Persona 5! This is from the definitive edition Persona 5 Royal.
“The Days When My Mother Was There” sounds like something that would be played at some funky bar that I wasn’t cool enough to get into.
“Layer Cake” is literally just played when you open up a menu at a merchant’s shop. This is just for a menu!
And “Our Beginning” is one of my favorite songs, video game or otherwise. This is the End Boss’ theme, so you only hear it after spending five or six weeks playing. It feels like a reward. The drop at 1:22 cannot be beat. If you want the motivation to shoot a corrupt God in the face, put this on.
Little touches make Persona 5 palatable, even after a gargantuan playtime. I like how numbers stay low – no crazy power creep so you’re not trying to figure out the % difference between attack damage in the millions. Your HP will be around 400 or 500 at the end. I always appreciate that, makes combat an easier riddle to solve.
I was also relieved to see status effects ALWAYS work on bosses (well, almost always). What’s the point of having sleep, poison, etc. if the only enemies worth casting it on are immune? Not so in Persona 5, the trade off being that those particular spells cost a lot of energy to cast. Fair deal, I say!
I prefer giant tasks to be broken up into smaller ones, and Persona 5 nails that. You have a certain number of days in a calendar month to complete a dungeon, but you don’t have to go on any specific days. If you’ve just spent two sessions slogging it through fights and getting to a checkpoint, you can very much take a few days off to boost your stats, deepen your friendship with your comrades or hit some baseballs at the batting cages. The pace of Persona 5 is glacial, but by design. I think it’s fair to let the player set the tone when you’re asking them to take on this colossal journey. Even if I only had fifteen minutes of free time, I could still make a small amount of progress.
This is the pinnacle of JRPG turn based combat, in my eyes. There are so many ways to take down enemies, but every single one makes you feel like some sleek, Japanese badass. Like if Batman and Zorro had demons to help them roam the streets of Tokyo, changing the hearts and minds of antagonists who have lost their way. And you can persuade monsters to join you, then combine them into even stronger monsters. Also, some of the enemies are giant penises riding chariots. Hey, I don’t make the rules, that’s just how Persona games are. They are fully entrenched in the weeb/anime wheelhouse. If you’re not game, don’t enter. You’ve been warned.
It’s a staggering game, one of the greatest RPGs ever made. Then, they improved upon it with Persona 5 Royal a few years later. It could very much stand up to modern scrutiny for a decade due to its snappy combat, amazingly deep systems and focus on Joker’s ragtag bunch of misfits. It’s unsurprising we’ve seen so many spinoffs; this is a tree that will bear fruit for years to come.
It very nearly beat out Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild for my best game of 2017. Here’s what I said.
Persona 5 was my very first Persona, and what a way to start a franchise. This completely exceeded every expectation I had.
The style is overwhelming. It is drenched in pizzazz and swagger from the second the intro movie begins. Every single second you’re playing Persona 5, you can’t mistake it for anything else. Even activating the menus, or starting a dialogue with an NPC will treat you to a pixel perfect barrier that’s fully animated and lined perfectly. People cosplay the menus – they’re that good.
It’s a mammoth. It’s the longest single player experience I’ve ever had, clocking in at 108 hours before I beat the final boss. And I never got tired of it. Since the game is segmented by calendar days, it was easy to pop in and complete a few chores if a longer session wasn’t in the cards.
I’ve never seen a game more confident in its own systems. Many other JRPGs seem pedestrian, and immature by comparison. The depth involved with the Pokémon-style enemy capturing and combining is staggering. The payoff is an impossibly powerful creature, or something that you feel only the Japanese could manifest in a drug-fueled dream. It always made me want to capture more Personas, do more combinations, do more dungeon crawling, do more chores, do more conversations, make more friends and succeed in capturing “hearts”.
I could explain the multitude of systems in Persona 5, but I wouldn’t do it justice. It’s enough to know that I felt an extreme sense of comfort, adventure and satisfaction here not since the likes of Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger. The soundtrack warrants its own write up. The end boss fight is stellar. Sojiro’s coffee shop is a second home. I feel like I’ve learned a new gaming language, and I’m ready to be fluent.
I’ve heard Persona 4 named as the best in the series, but I don’t know if I can go backwards now. I’m sensitive to modern updates and quality of life changes designed to save time. Save time? I took 104 hours to beat Persona 5, I don’t think I can justify trying an older version, despite its apparent greatness. I may just have to wait for Persona 6, which surely has to be coming around the corner. With the success, both commercially and critically, it seems like a no brainer. If it’s anywhere near Persona 5‘s quality, I’ll be first in line.
The 500 