Topic: PS4 recommendation thread

@colonelkilgore Yeah, I had to just ignore a lot of the supplemental side activities. If I ever go back I’d like to find all the dinosaur bones and some of the other collecting quests which I just had to force myself to ignore so I would make progress. I played to max honor and so I was constantly stopping to help people on the road, save NPCs being robbed, etc and finally had to ignore a lot of that too, because it was just never ending. I don’t think I ever got a legendary animal. In fact I spent very little time hunting, mainly just did it for the practical usage of meat for the camp and furs. I think after they introduced fishing, I never went back to fish again. Fishing mini games are probably one of the most over-used side activities in gaming, in my opinion. Why every game has to have fishing is beyond me. Even NieR Automata 😅! JRPGs like to throw it in there all the time. Anyways, I typically ignore fishing and the hunting was fun but I chose to press the narrative stuff more.
As such, I didn’t get near to even sniffing the platinum anyway, much less all the Red Dead Online trophies. Think I ended up at 30% trophy count to the game, and that’s with spending probably 80+ hours.

There’s a thread somewhere on here of top 5 games and I had a list of my top 5 that I’d want to have if stranded on a deserted island with my PS4 and RDR2 is definitely one of them. You can burn hundreds of hours in that virtual world, and adding on RDO that number could balloon into the thousands.
I can’t remember what the other 4 were — I think Bloodborne was one, due to its endless replayability with different builds, and maybe Yakuza 0 due to its eternal distractions of mini-games that you can just sink hours of time into and never complete. The others were probably Horizon Zero Dawn and Assassins Creed Origins for their huge open worlds.

Edit: Actually no — Witcher 3 and Persona 5 were on the deserted island list. Being stuck with nothing else to do would be what I probably need to get through both of those games.

Between Zero Dawn, RDR2 and the Witcher what you you guys choose first? I'v heard horizon zero forbidden west is coming out in 2021 but who knows when this new year. Far Cry 6 is also coming out that might be good.

@Th3solution

Hmmm, I think I need the world to go into lockdown again if I’m gonna dip my toe back in to RDR2 off of the back of that 😉.

@tangi_atori

I’d personally go with Horizon but that’s just the one I personally enjoyed the most and the only one I actually finished. As in the above discussion I fully intend to return to RDR2 though... and The Witcher 3 for that matter (once the PS5 update is launched}.

@tangi_atori Yeah, of those three, probably HZD is the one to go for first. It’s definitely the shortest, but it’s still a pretty sizable game. It depends if you prefer smooth action combat with lots of strategy and different weapons ranged and melee (HZD), more of a slower paced simulation style open world with tons to do where combat is more restricted to third person shooting (RDR2), or if you prefer a fantasy setting with tons of lore and story driven side questing and larger focus on narrative (W3). With Forbidden West coming out, you’ll want to have HZD completed. And like the colonel says, W3 will get a PS5 upgrade supposedly so maybe wait for that. But far and wide most people consider W3 the greatest game of this generation, but it depends on your preferences.

@tangi_atori

This “With Forbidden West coming out, you’ll want to have HZD completed” mentioned in @Th3solution ‘s post should/could probably be the deciding factor. You have no deadline on the other two, well unless RDR 3 and The Witcher 4 are announced shortly for 2021 (HIGHLY unlikely)... but with Forbidden West around the corner, you don’t want the story of the original spoiled for you during the sequel’s release buzz.

RDR2 and The Witcher 3 are both so darned good that I didn't want to play anything else and was sad when I finished both games. They're head and shoulders above all other open world games imo.

Persona 5 is the nearest competition when it comes to size and quality whilst The Last of Us Part II is the best linear game I have ever played.

Horizon Zero Dawn is a fantastic game in it's own right and the sequel should be amazing as well.

Those are my top 5 games of their generation.

Is there anyone out there who doesn’t like Persona 5?

I frequently see this as in peoples’ lists of best games of the gen but every time I look at it, it looks a bit too JRPG for me. I don’t mind that style at all but when I read about dating, schoolwork etc I end up rolling my eyes.

The Royal edition is on sale (again) so should I just get on and play it?

@Thrillho I don't like persona 5 either because it is a jrpg ! And I hate jrpgs because it's repetitive in the combat and it is turn based !

The best rpgs nowadays are action rpgs like skyrim , the witcher 3 , outward ...etc and hack n slash arpgs like diablo 3 , path of Exile , wolcen ...etc

On the recommend area , I recommend ghost of tsushima and cyberpunk (after the updates and patches) and maybe wait for diablo 4

I can't say anything about anything specific to the Royal version seeing as I haven't played it but I didn't really enjoy my time with the "vanilla" version of Persona 5 all that much @Thrillho despite enjoying the previous 2 entries done in the same sorta style.

I was pretty hyped for Persona 5 so you could attribute some of my disappointment to overinflated expectations... But even then there's still a bunch of things that just did not work for me.

The first twenty or so hours was great and the first villain, along with the events that transpire, was quite hard hitting and perhaps a bit too real with what goes on. But the villains after that felt more like a mustache twirling Saturday morning kids show villain which just did not work for me at all.

Didn't really gel with the cast a whole bunch either. There were some characters I liked (Mainly secondary/side characters like the doctor, the politician, your homeroom teacher) but... Yeah I didn't like the phantom thieves all that much.

I found them either a bit bland or similar to characters that had already been in the previous two entries. The voice acting is pretty decent at times but... Eh.

I found the script way too repetitive too and the story as a whole just didn't particularly grab me either to be perfectly honest.

One of most subjective points then anything else but the soundtrack didn't do much for me. I'm admittedly not the biggest fan of jazz and unfortunately I'm just not particularly fond of the vocalist featured in the soundtrack. Unsurprisingly the best tracks to me are the instrumental ones.

The turn based combat is pretty nice and enjoyable with the various persona/demons based on mythology and various move sets with you being able to create new persona and alter/fine tune their movesets via fusion. The presentation of the game as a whole is very slick and the anime cutscenes are very nicely done.

But yeah... That's all I got.

If I remember right @kyleforrester87 wasn't a fan of it either? For similar-ish reasons I believe and @Th3solution is/was halfway through a playthrough of it too if I remember right with slightly more positive thoughts?

Of course if you want some opinions from people who did actually enjoy it then I'm sure Ralizah, nessisonett or crimsontadpoles (among many others) can give ya their thoughts too 😄

@Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy Thanks for that. It just felt like this game has been universally loved so I’m still not sure whether I should get over my reservations and give it a go.

Knowing it could well be another 100hr feat also puts me off slightly.

@Thrillho It’s one of those games that people who’ve played earlier games in the series have more reservations about than those who play the game blind. I might prefer Persona 3 or 4 for certain things but 5 is a fantastic game in its own right. Haven’t played Royal yet but I do own it. Just not sure when to set aside 100 hours for a game that I’ve beaten for the most part!

@Thrillho
Like @Foxy-Goddess-Scotchy says, I’m in a weird position as it relates to Persona 5. I don’t dislike the game. In fact, I quite like it... but I can’t seem to get the motivation to finish it. I’ve made it through about a third of the game, I think. I liked Persona 3 and Persona 4 very much. And I even played the rhythm games for both of these, having really enjoyed the characters and music immensely. All that Foxy said about P5 is correct, although I’d say I like the cast probably a little more than she does.

If I try to analyze what my gripes with it are, I think I just don’t like the palaces and combat as much as the dungeons of the former games. The gameplay is similar, but the demon recruitment mechanic is pretty frustrating to deal with. I much preferred the card system in P4. The responses and dialogue choices to try to recruit a demon feel ridiculously random and frustrate me to no end. The palaces themselves are interesting enough stylistically speaking, but they’re overly complex as far as layout, and there’s not enough save rooms for my taste. As a result, the palaces require a large time commitment for each play session, because you could be running around fighting random demons for several hours before you come to a save room. It’s a stark contrast to the other part of the game doing daily life activities which you can save really easily and regularly most days between activities with your confidants.

I suppose it all comes down to the time commitment and also that there doesn’t seem to garner enough curiosity about the storyline to make me come back for more.

I still plan on finishing it, but each time I consider it, another game shines brighter in my field-of-view to dominate my attention. As I look at the next 3-4 games I have planned to play, I just don’t feel like P5 is going to knock any of them off my “on deck” backlog.

I wish I could have played Royal since it sounds like an improvement over the base game, but the thought of starting over does not appeal to me. With dozens of hours already invested, I’m not inclined to go backwards to the beginning again. And perhaps that’s telling.

@Th3solution Thanks. A poor saving feature is a bit of a red flag for me these days as a fair bit of my play time is in the evening before bed so I don’t want the choice between playing for loads longer or losing progress!

Persona 3 is one of my favourite games and Persona 4 is a pretty great time... So it's all the more disappointing to me not liking Persona 5 @Thrillho.

I believe @Ralizah is playing Royal so they might be able to tell you about some of the added stuff in that... Perhaps it has better save features too? They did rework quite a bit of the game to my understanding.

Never had a problem with saving personally in the original Persona 5 but it is a game you need a good few hours of time for too.

@Thrillho As one solution for P5, someone on here (I think it may have been KratosMD) suggested to me to leverage the PS4’s suspend feature to make effectively make it a “save anywhere” type of situation, since you can pause the game and put the PS4 into rest mode at anytime and come back hours or days later and resume where you left off. I’ve tried that a few times, and it is effective, but if your life is like mine, sometimes you can go a long time between play sessions and so I don’t know how you feel about leaving a game suspended for days on end. For me, it is a great feature for the Vita which I use commonly if I get distracted in the middle of a game session, but for PS4 it makes me a little nervous. I have had a power outage once a few years ago when my PS4 was in rest mode and it corrupted some stuff and required a complete hard reset of my console and I had to wipe my HDD and reload everything. It didn’t happen while I had a game suspended, but apparently it happened when the console was downloading an update file overnight and it just screwed everything up. Thankfully it didn’t brick the console and it’s worked fine since the restore. Anyways, now I only leave my PS4 in rest mode for a couple nights tops, and never during a rainstorm.

Also @Kidfried is playing Persona 5 Royal currently, I believe and might have some insight with fresh eyes on the game.

@Thrillho So, the life sim elements are definitely there, but it's not like it's a dating sim. You don't even have to date, and dating doesn't really change much about the game. Studying is just an activity to raise one of your stats (knowledge). A big part of the game is the way your daily life impacts your dungeon crawling.

Anyway, Persona 5 (and Royal, which is a slightly improved Persona 5) represents, to me, the peak of that particular series. Every previous game I've played had deep, fundamental issues with mechanics and dungeon design. Persona 5 addresses virtually every problem in previous games: negotiations are back and actually fun, unlike in the first two; guns are back; dungeons are actual, specifically designed, and thematically fascinating locations filled with story and setpieces, as opposed to randomly generated chains of hallways; the soundtrack has a lot more range to it; battles are the best they've ever been, even if I think the battle system is still too easy and exploitable (but that's true of the last two Persona games as well, and battles in P1 and P2 just suck); sections of towns and cities you explore and larger and denser than ever before; etc. I love it.

The only real issue I have with it is that the game restricts your freedom at points by not allowing you to engage in side activities for extended periods of time when plot stuff is going on, which can be frustrating. Royal is a little better about giving you more freedom in general, but important story sections still lock you into linear sequences that restrict what you can do.

For the record, I've had no issues with saving. You can save every night before you go to sleep, you're generally allowed to save after big story sections, and safe rooms, where you can save, pop up throughout the dungeons. Of course, there are extended periods of times in dungeons where you won't find new ones, and will have to choose between going back to save or pressing on and risking death. It's a very old-school, PS2 style of game design. With that said, it's still more forgiving than the save point distribution in something like Dark Souls. You also have items that can take you back to the entrance of a dungeon AND you can use safe rooms to fast travel around dungeons. Also, since the game doesn't have random battles, you don't have to worry about getting ambushed and killed before getting back to a safe room. And even if you do get careless and allow an enemy to sneak up on you, the game isn't filled with instant death attacks like some other Atlus games I could mention.

But should you pick up Royal? I mean... you say it looks "a bit too JRPG" for you, which makes me think you're reacting negatively to genre mechanics, the anime stylings, or both, and, in either case, that sounds like you're fundamentally unwilling to open yourself to this type of experience. P5 Royal is an incredible game, but, I mean, you have to have some level of interest in it to begin with. If you're not looking for an unapologetically Japanese JRPG, then you're probably not going to like it.

EDIT: Also, yes, the game is insanely long. The original P5 took me 115 hours to beat, and Royal has an extra school semester, so it's likely even longer. Don't get it if you're not prepared for an epic story and long sections of pure storytelling.

@Kidfried @Ralizah Thanks for the further comments. It sounds like it's going to be another one going into the backlog then!

Ouch

@Thrillho If that sounded judgey, that wasn't the intention.

Anyway, another thing regarding the length, since it sounds like you bought it. While it's an incredibly long game, it's also a very... segmented one. Both in terms of gameplay (going back and forth between story sections, life sim sections, and dungeon sections) and in terms of overall structure. The game isn't chapter based, but it FEELS like it is, so it's probably easy enough to squeeze in some smaller games without feeling like you're interrupting the flow of the plot.

Out of these games which would you recommend?

1) The Witcher
2) Assassins Creed Odyssey
3) Horizon Zero Dawn
4) Skyrim
5) Far Cry