The Return of Persona
The PlayStation 2 offered many of the RPGs I look back fondly at today. With few offering the vast open worlds or battle systems which are more flashy than complex – these were often rather linear experiences which offered some form of turn-based combat. But in return, it wasn’t uncommon for these games to take 50+ hours to complete from start to finish, and more often favoured lengthy battles which required a lot of strategy.
Released closer to the end of the PS2’s lifecycle, Persona 3 and Persona 4 were dungeon-crawler RPGs I have found myself replaying many times. Merging school-life and RPG combat elements into one experience and pairing them with a demon collecting system which has long been favoured by ATLUS’ wider Megami Tensei series; these were games which offered a strong combination of storytelling, gameplay and always giving the player something to do. While both games were released within two years of one-another, all ATLUS have had to offer since then were enhanced ports and spin-off games of various genres…. until now. More than eight years following the release of Persona 4 and pretty much an entire console generation, ATLUS have released Persona 5 on the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4.
Was this game worth the wait and hype? Keep reading to find out.
Storyline / Character Development
Persona 5 once again puts players in the shoes of a (mostly) silent protagonist which they can name after themselves, someone else, or a figment of their imagination. Through their interactions, players can help shape this protagonist’s personality, although this has very little impact on the story itself. Far from the standard “transfer student”, this protagonist is a juvenile offender, falsely accused of attacking someone who was himself assaulting a woman. Having transferred to Shujin Academy in Tokyo as part of his probationary period, he finds himself living in the attic of a coffee shop, run by an acquaintance of his family. All intentions of getting through his probationary period peacefully are short-lived, as he gains the ability to traverse Palaces – a manifestation of someone’s distorted desires. Gaining the ability to summon Personas – the protagonist and his growing number of friends form the Phantom Thieves of Hearts – their goal being to force corrupt adults into confessing their crimes.
The story itself is darker than its PS2 predecessors. This time you aren’t left to simply face a hidden-side to those who will eventually become your allies, but rather the shadows of corrupt adults who are happy to step over anyone to get what they want – causing issues for the group both inside and outside the palaces. Despite the shadow controlling each palace, most have a particular party member related to them to some degree, tying in well with the phrase used during the announcement of Persona 5: “You are a slave. Want emancipation?”. While most of the palace “arcs” are only first introduced once you finish the one preceding it, they are well conceptualised and tie in well with the overarching storyline – which progressively unravels over the in-game months.
Comparable to S.E.E.S. or the Investigation Team, the Phantom Thieves are a group of youth with different but mostly memorable personalities. While I would say Persona 5 favours certain characters over others in the story – each does have a purpose, and overall made for a group I enjoyed following. That said, the group chemistry isn’t as strong as either of its PlayStation 2 predecessors, meaning there aren’t as many events where the group partakes in activities outside their investigation, and are generally handled better standalone than as a group.
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There is also the school-life aspect of Persona 5, which you can enjoy between palaces. While there are many events you will be forced to go through, you are also able to use the protagonist’s free time to form relationships with many characters through the social link system – now known as the Confidant system. Once again, you can trade in an afternoon or evening to spend time with one of many characters, which leads you through a series of ten events, involving you helping each character overcome a particular issue in their life. These visual-novel like scenarios are enjoyable, and see you follow some interesting characters who have different relations with either the Phantom Thieves or the protagonist.
In my opinion, these were better written events than either Persona 3 or 4. Especially since most of the non-party confidants are not students of Shujin Academy, this left a lot more room to follow stories completely outside of a school environment. You will have the opportunity to learn about the backstories of shop owners, help a young gamer with an over-bearing mother, and aid a former politician with strong ideals get back on the political stage, among others. Non-party confidants have a little more presence in the main story than social links in past games, although with a few exceptions, only if you max their relationship with the protagonist.
One minor qualm someone could have with earlier Persona games in general is that it can take some time to get into the action. You would often spend the first half an hour to an hour going through text boxes until the protagonist reaches a point where he unlocks the ability to use his Persona. This is the same in Persona 5, however, with one change. The game starts off its end during one of the Phantom Thieves later heists, providing players with an almost immediate opportunity to appreciate some of Persona 5‘s more creative visual flair, enjoy an intense portion of the story, and try their hand at the battle system. It was a great idea in my opinion, and I found it gave me a good push towards progressing through the start of the game. It also sets the game from a different perspective, as most of what you play through is the protagonist retelling the events he had already experienced.
While the weaker group dynamic may mean the characters aren’t as memorable as those in past games, Persona 5 starts off with a bang and continues to offer arguably the series’ strongest storyline to date.
Design / Music / Voice Acting
One of the biggest improvements between Persona 4 and Persona 5 is its design. While good for its time, Persona 4‘s randomly generated dungeons meant you were left spending hour upon hour roaming around nondescript corridors with little in the way of landmarks. Palaces in Persona 5 have each been handcrafted, offering a lot of flair and creativity in each. In my opinion, they offer some of the nicest dungeon designs of pretty much any RPG of this console generation to date. In contrast, it is underwhelming when you are required to go through the dark, randomly generated halls of Mementos at several points in the game.
Character models and portraits for each named character are well designed, giving each a distinct appearance which makes them stand out from each other. Their animations are of a good quality as well, although unlike other modern RPGs, battles are turn-based and not animation intensive. In terms of Personas, there are around 200 in total, including those held by party members. While many return from older games, they have each been remodelled for Persona 5, and look nice overall. A highlight was that they did attempt to shake the designs of party member Persona’s up a little bit, such as Necronomicon which the possessor sits in, and Johanna which takes the form of a motorcycle.
One highlight of Persona 5 to me was how the design team added some extra flair to the menu and store systems, providing arguably one of the most aesthetically pleasing yet still intuitive menu experiences I have seen from any game to date.
If there is one element which the Persona series has consistently gotten right, it is its music. The soundtrack itself offers a lot of great songs which suits the game and its themes well. However there aren’t many lyrical tracks, and only few of which in my mind will become memorable. Therefore, it offers an assortment of music which suits the game nicely, but may not find itself onto my iPod anytime soon.
ATLUS USA have continually offered a strong English dub for their localised releases of Persona games, and Persona 5 is no exception. Recruiting the likes of Cassandra Morris, Max Mittelman, Erika Harlacher, Matthew Mercer, Cherami Leigh, Erica Lindbeck and Xanthe Huynh for lead character roles – they chose some strong talent for the English dub, all of whom managed to represent their characters well. Interestingly the protagonist was voiced by Xander Mobus, whom unlike Yuri Lowenthal and Johnny Yong Bosch before him, doesn’t seem to voice a secondary character. That said, the protagonist does receive a few more lines than in past games – and his screaming of Persona names is more frequent as well. More of Persona 5 is dubbed than its predecessors. Most main story events are now fully dubbed, while the first and tenth Confidant ranks also receive full voice-overs.
Persona 5 does not come with the Japanese audio out of the box, however is available as separate free downloadable content.
Gameplay
Palace Navigation
Many of the battles you will encounter in Persona 5 take place within Palaces, which as discussed earlier, are hand-crafted labyrinths with puzzles to solve and hordes of enemies to battle. The dungeons themselves each offer their own different mechanics, although outside of the enemies, don’t offer much of a challenge. Unlike Persona 3 and Persona 4 where given the right approach you could practically complete a dungeon within one in-game day, this is no longer possible. Especially as you go through the first few dungeons, the sheer scale of each palace and your limited reserves of SP mean it isn’t very practical to go through it within a single run. However, this does become more and more possible as you progress and unlock certain abilities/equipment. Even if you accomplish this however, due to the “calling card” concept which provides further story opportunities, it still takes at least three days to complete a palace.
The battle system in Persona 5 is once again turn-based, as up to four Phantom Thieves and however many enemies take turns in attacking one another. Furthermore, non-boss battles do tend to come down to exploiting elemental or physical weaknesses of your enemies. But, there are a number of substantial changes to the battle mechanics which make it improved from past games.
In Persona 3 and Persona 4, there were only four main elements you could attach with: Agi (Fire), Bufu (Ice), Garu (Wind) and Zio (Electricity) – in addition to Hama (Light) and Mudo (Dark) which were insta-kill attacks which became more prominent closer to the game’s end. Ignoring the latter two, you could effectively have each member in your party cover a particular elemental weakness. Returning from older Megami Tensei games, Frei (Nuclear) and Psi (Psychokinesis) become available skills, while Hama and Mudo receive non insta-kill spell variants. This means there are many more potential weaknesses that an entire party cannot account for without either some creative Persona fusions or shifting between multiple Persons. And even if you shift between Personas… you have limited SP to worry about. Similarly, each character is also able to equip a ranged weapon in addition to their physical weapon. While it still doesn’t change the major battle system mechanic of “guess the weakness”, it does make it a little more challenging to pick it out.
The development team have also gotten rid of the “Shuffle Time” system, returning a system from early games where the protagonist has to interact with enemies once they have all been knocked down. Depending on your choices and the opponents personality, the enemy may become a recruitable Persona, provide you with Yen / Items, flee or choose to attack you again. This was an okay system and it provided more to the game than what was used before. However, more complexity to the system would have been nice.
The battles themselves are enjoyable, even more so the boss battle awaiting you at the end of each palace which usually have their own share of curve balls as you whittle down their health. The challenge on normal difficulty is moderate, although I didn’t find myself particularly challenged during any of the boss battles. If you wish to enjoy the story, there is a Safety difficulty which provides EXP and Yen boosts – but be warned that it is a lot more challenging to actually recruit Persona’s as you become too overpowered to knock them down without defeating them.
Each palace is destroyed when you complete it, meaning you are unable to replay it without a second playthrough. In its place is the labyrinth known as Mementos, which is essentially a collective palace of everyone who does not have a palace of their own. While it is surprising how dull the randomly generated halls of this dungeon are in comparison to the palaces, this does serve as the place where many of the decent in-game quests come to their conclusion.
School Life and Confidants
As mentioned before, the protagonist is able to form a relationship with his fellow Phantom Thieves and other acquaintances through the Confidant System. Similar to the social link system, you will be able to trade in an afternoon or evening to become closer to an individual, either going somewhere with them (which can result in obtaining a decorative item for your bedroom) or increasing your bond with them.
Where Confidants differ from social links is that there is actually a benefit to increasing your relationship with each character. Almost all confidants have services they can offer or special skills they can teach the protagonist. Getting to know your carer Sojiro Sakura will allow you to create coffee items which can restore party SP, while getting to know the doctor Tae Takemi will allow you to access cheaper and more effective medicines. Party members also have skills they can offer you, in addition to the standard battle skills which are unlocked. While some confidants are a more useful than others, you won’t miss out on too much if you choose to go with the characters that interest you the most.
Completing or even talking to some of these confidants rely on the protagonist having a certain level in one of five social stats: charm, guts, knowledge, kindness and proficiency. This is one component of Persona 5 which makes it feel like a game where time management is very important. Should you wish to complete as much as possible in a single playthrough, you need to effectively juggle your building of these five stats (through the many in-game activities which build these stats), while ensuring you don’t spend too much time on one palace yet have high enough levels to progress and have a stable cash flow to ensure you can upgrade your equipment. If you are someone who just wants to go with the flow however, there are plenty of nooks to enjoy – from cinemas with parody movies (Eg. Mes Miserable, a parody of Les Miserables) to a home run baseball game.
There are a few other things which complete the “school life” experience, such as the ability to form a romantic relationship with one (or technically, all) of the female confidants, take part in part-time jobs which you can apply for and have shifts several months apart, and take part in school pop-quizzes and exams.
Persona Summoning and Network Support
As with past games, you will regularly find yourself meeting with Igor and his two new assistants Caroline and Justine in the Velvet Room. Going with the medieval prison theme, it is here where you can subject the Personas you have on-hand to a number of tortures, allowing you to fuse, convert or enhance them. In addition to fusing Personas in order to create more powerful ones with a custom skill set, you can also convert them into items/equipment, sacrifice one to boost another, hand over a Persona into the care of the Velvet Room to unlock skills related to an elemental weakness or perform a network fusion which randomly matches one Persona with another. While there are new features you may or may not use, it is more or less the Velvet Room from earlier games.
On the note of network mechanics, each time you load up the game, you are asked whether you would like to connect to the “Thieves Guild”. This is an online system where players can provide you with support – providing you with stats on what players did each day, the aforementioned network fusion and the ability to rescue a party member on the rare occasion they are taken hostage by enemies. The network feature is nice to have, but fortunately not something you would miss out too much on if you had no network connectivity.
Final Words on Persona 5
2016 and 2017 have been years where many long-awaited video games have finally been released on PlayStation consoles. Out of all these games, Persona 5 has to me been the one most worth the years and years of waiting for. Offering a well-written storyline and extensive gameplay which worked in tandem to extend my play session by hours, I found myself hooked in for the 70+ hour journey.. Complemented by fantastic visuals and well-suited English and Japanese voice casts – this game is one of the RPG highlights of this console generation in my opinion.
Here’s hoping we don’t have to wait another eight years for Persona 6!
