Persona 5 Review

There aren’t a lot of franchises that can hold people’s attention for nearly ten years without a mainline entry. Sure, you can throw a ton of spin-offs, side projects and re-releases, ala Kingdom Hearts, to keep the concept of the series alive, but there’s usually a sense of dilution. The idea, story, characters, something gets watered down over time.

Somehow, Atlus’s Persona series has managed to pull this off. The last main entry in the Persona series was in 2008, with Persona 4. It was widely lauded as for its story, gameplay, visuals and music. Hell, it shot the series from a cult niche title into one the most popular Japanese role-playing games in the US, helped in no small part to Final Fantasy’s extended absence. However, since its initial release, Atlus has resorted to the aforementioned spinoffs, remakes and re-releases for the Persona series. We got a remake/enhanced release on the Playstation Vita, a pair of fighting games with characters from Persona 3, a side story with Persona 3’s entire cast, and a rhythm game.

This drought has gone on so long that Atlus basically skipped out on an entire console generation. When they announced that they were working on Persona 5 and scant details came out, fans were left without word or indication of progress for months at a time. Of course, with a project that large, inevitable delays hit and Persona 5 became a split console release, coming out on the shiny Playstation 4 as well as the antiquated Playstation 3.

So now, after roughly six years of development and a ton of hype, does Persona 5 live up to its immense expectations?

Set in the undefined year of 20XX, Persona 5 is about a group of teens called the Phantom Thieves who break into the corrupted hearts of adults around them in order to make them confess their crimes and experience a change of heart. Starting with a heist gone wrong in its opening moments, the story is told through flashback, showing how our mostly silent protagonist got into the situation he’s in. Over the course of dozens of hours, you see how our hero gains the trust of his fellow thieves and how he got into his present predicament.

At first glance, this feels very much like your standard JRPG story. A group of kids and their silly mascot character banding together to fight against the jerk-ass adults that make their life miserable. Thing is, Atlus did some really interesting things right from the start. For one, starting things in the middle of the story works very well for establishing how awesome you’re going to be later. You use cover to set up ambushes on monsters as you’re escaping the casino, making the protagonist look like a top-tier thief as he tries to escape. When he’s captured and you’re dragged into interrogation, they don’t hold back on beating the ever-living crap out of him. And then transitioning into the story proper is excellent. As the game progresses and the player makes major discoveries, you’ll jump back into the present discussion to clarify things to the prosecutor you’re talking to. It’s way more sophisticated than anything Atlus has done in a long time and, generally, works very well.

Combat in Persona 5 plays out similarly to Persona 3 & 4. Encounters are turn-based affairs that kick in when either the enemy or player is interacted with on the field. You attack, defend and cast magic back and forth until one side is dead. Or, if you’re particularly slick, you can take advantage of enemy weaknesses and drop them. What’s new here is that you can enter in negotiations with your fallen foes, where you can extort money, items or even get them to join you. Once they’re with you, your main character can summon them in combat and use their abilities to give you an upper hand. Outside of combat, you can fuse them into new, different and stronger Personas, each categorized under one of the arcana from Tarot decks.

Like the previous games, encounters can have your entire party quickly laid out if you aren’t prepared or get caught unaware. What’s worse is that it’s game over if your protagonist drops, even if the rest of

your party is up and ready to fight. You learn to respect even the simplest of encounters throughout the entire game and you rely on being able to learn your enemies’ weakness as soon as possible.

Also new in Persona 5 are defined dungeons, compared to the randomly generated affairs that players had in Persona 3 & 4. It gives each location way more personality to match the person you’re invading and leads to some interesting puzzles later on. In one dungeon, you’ll have certain hallways that transform you and force you to be sneaky in order to solve several puzzles. Another will have you disabling cameras so that you can get through hallways. It does a lot to break up the eventual monotony of grinding through dungeons before you capture the heart of the denizen. That said, there is a dungeon called Mementos that is randomly generated, but that serves as a side location whose import becomes revealed as you go through it.

When you’re not dungeon crawling, you spend your time in a social simulator. As you go to school and participate in extra-curricular activities, you’ll slowly improve your five social stats. These gate your ability to succeed in several in game events, but more importantly they limit your ability to connect with Confidants. These are similar to the Social Links from the previous games and they serve the same purpose. Each Confidant you meet represents a different house of the arcana and, when you improve you relationship with them, you will increase the strength of personas created in the matching house. You’ll also gain tangible benefits, like discounts on healing items, access to weapon upgrades, and helping all your characters level up faster. Your teammates are also available as Confidants, which will improve their performance in combat. You can also romance most of your lady Confidants, which opens up additional story beats on several dates.

Perhaps the most successful element of Persona 5 is its presentation. When you think about “style” in a game, this is what they’re talking about. Everything from the menus, walking around Tokyo, hell, even the loading screens ooze personality. Even though Persona 5 shares the same character artist as Persona 3 & 4, the characters have more life to them. You get more of this when they transform while they’re in the dungeons and fight in battle. It’s wonderful to watch and thanks to the exemplary jazzy soundtrack, it sounds even better.

If there was anything to dislike about Persona 5, it would probably have to be that its core structure is too similar to its predecessors. Yeah, the story does go to different, ballsy places and the way it’s told is unique, but it’s still a story about teens in high school doing teen things day by day. As previously mentioned, the combat doesn’t do very much that’s new and the final area of the game goes for spectacle over a tight ending. Oh, and I hate Ryuji. Fuck that guy. There was also some to do about the English translation not being very good, but there were few instances where characters sounded clunky. The excellent English dub does a good job of making the ridiculous things that come out of these characters mouths sound logical in this world. Sure, you could nitpick, but you could do that in any release.

More importantly, none of these niggling issues takes away from what is a fantastic experience. All the work that Atlus put into Persona 5 payed off in what is likely to be a classic. An original premise with memorable characters in a gorgeous looking and sounding package is more than I could have asked for. If you want a JRPG that will last you a good, long while, Persona 5 is the way to go.

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