Topic: Persona 5

@Voltan The first palace is definitely the most unsettling, thematically. If the case is putting you off, don’t worry because it gets better. However it does continue to deal with very adult problems and peoples dark and often abusive tendencies.

As far as the gameplay, the key to combat is taking advantage of enemy weaknesses. If you’re new to the series and struggling to wrap your head around it, you may want to just put the difficulty down to “safe” or “very easy” so that you still enjoy the story and all the social aspects. I’ve played Persona 2-4 and a couple of the SMT games all prior to this and we take for granted that someone understands the core gameplay. For a first time, it’s got to be tough. But if you’ve played a lot of JRPGs you should pick it up pretty quick. The elemental weakness exploitation is a recurring theme in JRPGs, it’s just a matter of learning the Persona names for “wind”, “ice”, “fire” attacks etc. The enemy negotiation is definitely confusing, even for me. It was an old mechanic from the former SMT games that they brought out again and it’s really hard to grasp early on. When you negotiate and try to get a persona to join you the answers you give during the negotiation seem pretty random to me. But later on you develop skills if you rank up certain confidants where negotiation becomes much easier.

The more I think about it with velvet room fusion, leveling up attributes, and all the added side activities, I can see how completely mind blowing the game could be for someone new to the series. 😅

@Ralizah I’m 105 hours in and finishing up the 6th palace, so you’re actually doing a lot better than me, time wise. I’ve spent a decent chunk of time in the Velvet Room for the Strength confidant so that’s part of it. I’m trying to do everything I can on this first run because I’m pretty sure I’m not going to replay this anytime soon. Maybe Royal, but even then, this has been such a marathon.

I agree that the difficulty balance is really varied. Enemy encounters are either really easy or surprisingly difficult. If they get you with a status effect or a weakness early on and start pounding you then it can get ugly really quick. And if they attack you first or you end up surrounded, it shifts the balance drastically. Thankfully I have Futaba leveled up enough that she comes in to turn the tables back sometimes when I’m surrounded and that saved my bacon a couple times yesterday.

As far as the 6th palace, I appreciate the thematic and gameplay changes it brings, but the map is pretty tough to navigate. I spent a lot of time running in circles at the second level trying to figure out what I was supposed to do.

@Th3solution nah, it's not off putting, just much heavier than I expected.
I think I'm doing fine with combat so far, it's an interesting system. My JRPG experience is mostly playing most of the Final Fantasy games and just a few others so I don't know if that counts as a lot but it's certainly not nothing

The confusion comes from things like... when you get a new confidant it tells you that fusing personas of that kind will give you bonuses - but it happens long before the game tells you what fusing is. The time management thing is also something that you don't see in other games. Your friends are all like "are we going in today" all the time but that's pretty clearly not what you're supposed straight away, just like you're not supposed to try to do the whole thing in one run. Hopefully I'm doing it right and will make it to the end of the palace in time. I think I have about a week left.

Anyways, I'm enjoying it so far.

@Voltan Yeah, in-game time management is one of the hard things to master in these games. And you’re correct - I usually end up ignoring all the frantic texts asking me if I’m ready to go to the palace until it gets closer to the deadline. I am usually able to do the palace in two runs, but you can certainly take your time, so long as you make it to the next save room so you don’t lose progress.

With confidants too, you’re going to have them messaging you all the time asking to get together and sometimes you might have 3 or 4 people saying “Want to hang out today?” and so don’t feel obligated to spend time with the ones hounding you if you’d rather do something else. Sometimes I end up turning down several offers and instead I find another confidant on the map who’s also available but didn’t message me.

And yeah, the fusion bonus is just basically that the end product persona will have added XP the higher the confidant’s level is. It is a weird system when I think about it, but honestly it doesn’t make that much of a difference since you’ll eventually have tons of personas to choose from and you’ll cycle through most of them pretty quickly and move on to the next group of higher ranked and stronger personas. So whatever you’re fusing now will probably be worthless anyways after the next palace or so.

One nice thing about the game is how many game saves you have, so be sure to keep a rotation of saves with some older ones too in case you mess up and need to go back a few days.

@Th3solution yeah, I'm not used to keeping multiple save files but it seems like the sensible thing to do here. I'm pretty confident I can do the first palace before the deadline but I'll have to pay more attention to that afterwads.

@Voltan Yo man I'm super excited to hear which confidants and palaces are your favorite. I just finished up the 5th palace and on my way to the 6th. The 4th palace is by far my absolute favorite. The premise, the setup, the environmental themes, the music is killer, and the confidant associated with that palace is my favorite next to Morgana. Can't wait till we all finish so we can have that end game discussion!

So I completed the 6th palace which turned out to be pretty good since there was a few different activities involved, but oh goodness me, does the game do an enormous exposition dump here! Whoah. It’s like 2 hours of text and cutscenes. Jeepers. I mean, I really like where the story has gone and I have to say I didn’t see it coming (well, except for Akechi was creeping me out and now I see why) but the whole triple sabotage table turner was a great story beat. Granted you can’t think too hard about it or the plot kinda falls apart, despite them trying to make an explanation for every single part of the plan, but there’s a few things I can’t quite ignore — like why the rest of Phantom Thieves team is running around without being exposed by Akechi. Presumably he thinks that killing Joker was all that was needed to accomplish his goal of “catching and defeating the Phantom Thieves” but he’s just going to let the whole team run around his bosses palace? He know who each of them are and could easily tell the guards who to watch for. Anyways, maybe it makes sense later on.

So I have really enjoyed the story so much more now, but I still would criticize it for taking this long to start to manifest. The pace is just too slow through the middle third. Glad it’s now picking up (finally at hour 110 😂)

110 hours?! I was making a joke the other day about how it'd take you 150 or so hours to beat it... But that might actually turn out to be true @Th3solution! You've already took 6 or so more hours just getting to the end of the 6th palace then me to beat it fully

I have to admit I'm a little envious of you sol enjoying your time with the game despite noting some flaws you have with it (Not to mention all the folks who just straight up adore it). If there was one game I absolutely wanted to love it was this and nearly 4 years on from it's release I still can't. I think I should just accept it's a bit of a lost cause now

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Yeah, 😅 I’m surprised at how much longer my playthrough is taking but I have been rather obsessive-compulsive of utilizing all my in-game time. I’ve explored every nook and cranny, spent quite a bit of time on activities like fishing and batting cages (don’t think I’m going to be able to get the stupid home run trophy though. Still working on catching the Guardian), I’ve done every single request at Mementos and spent a lot of time there leveling up (I’m currently at level 77), I never waste a free time moment and I leveled up Kawakami early and so she often gives me extra free time in class for reading or making infiltration tools and I call her to grant extra free time after palace and mementos via a massage, I’ve done a lot of time in the Velvet Room and maxed out the twins, I do a fair amount of shopping between palaces and run around collecting cheap SP replenishing items between palace runs — and other activities which doesn’t advance the time, etc, etc. I mean, gosh, I’ve had all 5 character traits maxed out now for probably at least 20+ hours of game time. I feel like the other Persona games were harder to Max your stats on, so I probably went overboard trying to get that done too aggressively and wasted a lot of time on it.

All that said, some of it likely has to do with the games lack of a true pause feature. If I am going to walk away from the game for a few minutes to answer a call, get a snack, bathroom run or whatever I put the game into the menu as a pause and pretty sure the clock keeps ticking. During that long exposition I just couldn’t sit through it all in one sitting and had to “pause” and get up and get my blood circulating because it was seemingly endless 😅. So I could definitely see how someone could finish the game in 80 hours or so if they just slipped a lot of that extra stuff and advanced the story only. It still makes for a marathon of a game even with trying to speed through it. But yeah, this might be an example of my trying to get a bunch of trophies tainting the game a little for me. I shouldn’t complain about the game dragging since I’ve brought a little of that on myself by doing all the optional grinding and extra side stuff. Still, I think the story advances way too slow at certain times and way too much texting back and forth and repeating the same basic dialog amongst the team to have to read through, as I mentioned before. Unless things change, I’ll probably rank this behind P3 and P4 for that reason alone. I felt they were tighter experiences. Still, as you say, I am enjoying it. It reminds me how I felt while in the final stretch of Red Dead Redemption 2 where I felt the story just kept going and going longer than needed. But I ended up looking back on RDR2 favorably after the whole experience was complete.

And like I had reasoned before I re-opened this game a few weeks ago — I’ve got way too much of an investment to stop now. I’m committed to making it to the end.

As for the story I don’t remember seeing much of the promotional material that involved Akechi or a traitor, but it’s been a while. I definitely got weird vibes from him, but I figured that since he was a playable character with a fleshed out persona and his own elemental strengths and weaknesses that they wouldn’t have developed all that if he didn’t have a legit ongoing role on the team. But otherwise I had my doubts about him

@Th3solution For me, the only parts of the game that dragged at all were the Makoto and Yusuke arcs. The game kind of adopted a "villain-of-the-week" feel during those. From Futaba's dungeon on, the game felt like it was organically building up to stuff and developing the overall plot in the process.

Glad to hear you're enjoying the game. Playing through Royal has reminded me how much I liked OG Persona 5 when it first came out. If the difficulty balancing was better, it'd be a top three Atlus game for me (well, Royal would, since it's just a better version of the base game). Unfortunately, the game is ALWAYS either way too easy or (on occasion) way too hard.

@Ralizah What's the top3 then? I don't think I ever played any others.

@Voltan

1) Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse
2) Etrian Odyssey IV
3) Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne

Honorable mentions: Shin Megami Tensei IV; Devil Survivor: Overclocked; Etrian Odyssey V; and, of course, Persona 5/5 Royal.

The other Persona games all have some sort of truly critical flaw that keeps me from ranking them highly. Ditto with the Digital Devil Saga games.

I still need to play Strange Journey, though, which I hear is excellent.

@Ralizah Etrian Odyssey IV is my favourite of the series too. Brilliant setting and soundtrack and I think they nailed the difficulty there too.

@nessisonett It felt like a proper evolution of the series. Which, unfortunately, is the last time that happened. I also liked the difficulty balancing: it felt challenging, but still approachable. The overworld exploration was just fantastic. And, in terms of narrative, it had the best non-intrusive narrative in the series.

Etrian Odyssey V is probably the best "traditional" Etrian game in the series, but I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed that it didn't push forward with the series' evolution.

@Ralizah Thanks. I don't think I've even heard of Etrian Odyssey - I'll look it up.

@Voltan The games are exclusive to NDS/3DS, and make heavy use of the touchscreens on those systems. The primary 'gimmick' of the series is that the touch screen acts as an interactive canvas on which you construct maps for labyrinths you explore.

Anyway, they're relatively bigger-budget (compared to Vita games in the same genre, anyway) first-person dungeon crawlers with challenging gameplay, incredibly deep combat, and a fun sense of discovery provided by the dungeon mapping system. The legendary composer Yuzo Koshiro has done the soundtracks for almost all of these games. Despite being relatively young for an Atlus series (first game released in 2007), it pretty quickly exploded: there are six main series entries, two remakes, a Mystery Dungeon crossover game and, most notably, two Persona crossover games (they combine the dungeon-crawling/mapping goodness of EO with Persona characters, skills, music, etc.)

@Ralizah right - that explains why I'm not familiar. Last handheld I owned was a GameBoy Pocket

@Voltan The majority of Atlus's output for almost two generations was primarily on handhelds.

As much as I love the 3DS SMT games, though, I'm excited to see what Atlus does with the Switch hardware when they release Shin Megami Tensei V. The transition from 3DS --> Switch is a multi-generational leap.

Hopefully Persona 6 will make full use of the PS4 hardware. P5 is beautiful, but, even in its improved Royal iteration, it's still a PS3 game at its core.

117 hours in and partway through the 7th palace. I actually really like this one. I quite enjoy the puzzle elements of turning into a mouse and having to figure out how to open all the door locks. I like that there is a clearly defined task of getting the 5 letters of recommendation from the NPC/enemies. I have 2/5 now and the first two mini bosses were fun both to find and to fight.

I caught the Guardian, read all the books, and finished all the retro video games. I feel like I’m on track to max out all confidants I think, if everything goes well. I have no idea when the game ends. 😂. There always seems to be one more palace! By the way, I don’t know why I didn’t realize each palace is a representation of one of the seven deadly sins. It took me until the 5th palace I think to make the association. 😂 Even though the trophies are pretty clear about it, I usually don’t pay much attention to trophy titles, and if the game narrative itself ever pointed out the relationship to the cardinal sins, I must have missed it in the mountains of text that I’ve skimmed through 😅. Anyways, if form holds, this should be the last palace...? But it seems like the game is eternal so I don’t know

Very much looking forward to seeing how things end.

@Arugula the first palace is kind of cool but if it’s dragging now it doesn’t get much better IMO. At least from what I played, I think I made it to the 4th.

@Arugula “ The tale of Kamoshida being a slave driver and a perverted deviant was pretty cleverly done throughout, hopefully they're as imaginative moving forward.”

That’s what I thought, unfortunately it was an early highlight I found.