I said I was done after the ridiculous padding of the calling card mechanic, and I meant it. I trudged through all of Persona 4 and I’m not making that mistake again. I’m told the story does not get better after this, so I don’t think I’m missing much.
I am genuinely astounded this game got published. I have never seen a script so incoherent and confusing since HEARTBEAT, and that was an indie project by fascist nutjobs, not a AAA release from one of the most popular series in modern gaming. There is no consistency to anything and the pacing is nonsensical when it’s not completely backwards.
We’re told we’re on an extremely tight leash and no one will tolerate any screw-ups, but also all the authority figures are slackers who can’t be bothered to discipline us for flagrant rule violations. Everyone’s spreading rumors about us but also the actual police report was leaked so people should know the facts and not rumors. We’re told rumors are a big deal but they never seem to matter; everyone knows about Kamoshida’s abuse except when they don’t, and no one reacts to anything we do (why isn’t everyone talking about the cute kitty cat we’re keeping in our bag?). We need evidence to accuse Kamoshida except everyone already knows so evidence shouldn’t matter except it double doesn’t matter because we just solve it with magic powers. Ryuji was personally abused by Kamoshida but keeps being shocked to discover Kamoshida’s abusive. Ryuji and Ann have known each other for years but also Ryuji treats her like a stranger. Morgana knows everything but also knows nothing. Personas are masks except they’re also your true self. Nothing about the Palaces makes sense (except for the gun mechanic, I’ll admit that’s pretty cool). What are Shadows? What are the safe rooms? Why does the Treasure need to be materialized but nothing else? Everything is true and nothing is true.
Some of this is apparently the fault of the localization, which fan translators have noted is extremely bad. That site tries to be polite, but I will not be: Atlus America owes everyone an apology for their comprehensive failure to deliver the quality they promised, and their localizers bring shame to their profession. The errors described by that website are not innocent, understandable mistakes — they include failures of basic grammar and logic that any professional writer should have noticed. Moreover, AAA studios are supposed to have chains of quality control to make sure these problems are fixed long before a script is finalized, which means every link in that chain was also asleep at the wheel. The translators should be ashamed they turned in such a lazy hackjob, the editors should be ashamed they didn’t catch their mistakes, the voice directors should be ashamed they didn’t either even when hearing the nonsense spoken aloud, and the managers should be ashamed they allowed this catastrophe to happen. This level of sloppiness and mismanagement in a AAA title is unacceptable.
I feel this makes it particularly pointless to keep doing a line-by-line analysis, because I can’t tell what’s the fault of the localizers and what’s the fault of the writers. However, just from the structure of the script it’s clear the original writers aren’t without sin either. The prologue is stupidly and unnecessarily long, the placement of Morgana’s exposition is nonsensical, and the insistence that a single conversation somehow takes a whole afternoon remains as stupid as ever. The porn is also, obviously, the fault of the original artists, as is the decision to put the sexual abuse victim in a stripper catsuit and make her pose like an Escher girl.
But alright, I will at least read the Wikipedia plot summary to see where they were going with —
The Phantom Thieves infiltrate the depths of Mementos, the Palace of everyone’s hearts, to steal the Treasure at its core, believing that changing the general public’s hearts will cause them to realize and accept the truth. Inside, they discover that the public is in chaos and has chosen to give up their autonomy. The Phantom Thieves are ejected from Mementos by the Treasure itself, manifested as the Holy Grail, and vanish after the Metaverse merges with reality. Upon awakening in the Velvet Room, Igor proclaims Joker has failed to prevent the ruin and orders Caroline and Justine to execute him. Thanks to Joker, Caroline and Justine regain their memories and integrate into Lavenza, their proper form. Lavenza reveals that the Igor in the Velvet Room until this point is actually Yaldabaoth, the God of Control, who imprisoned the actual Igor. Yaldabaoth, the Holy Grail made sentient, was created from humanity’s wish to give up control and be free from suffering. Through a wager made with Igor over humanity’s goals, Yaldabaoth had given Joker and Akechi their abilities to see the influence of their actions on society while steering the wager in his favor.
Oh, they were too lazy to come up with a new plot and just rehashed Persona 2‘s. I feel very validated. Freedom vs. security is at least a more relevant question than “If a few people think we should all die, do we deserve to all die?” but it remains as fascistic and oversimplified a question as ever. What do “freedom” and “control” even mean in this context? We see a bunch of people being controlled by powerful abusers, not people voluntarily choosing to be sheep. This is victim-blaming crap, just as it was in P2. (Plus, the whole question is made a farce the actual structure of the game — the designers have clearly sided with control given how aggressively they railroaded everything.)
And what does the Demiurge or the Holy Grail have to do with any of this? As per usual, the writers just took a grab-bag of random mythological figures without any deeper interrogation of their cultural context; nothing but children smashing action figures together.
Once again, I’ll turn to the fans to tell me what the point of this mess was intended to be:
The main theme of Persona 5 revolves around rebellion, freedom, as well as the anger and breaking free from oppression, to corrupted adults from the school, prestige class, gang, corporation, government and politics. Persona 5 discusses the hardships of modern-day 21st century society and features characters that are restrained by the rules and expectations set by said society, especially in Japan where the game is set. This freedom is meant to liberate those who “are bored and discontent with their lives.” Persona 5 was made to be an emotional experience that stirs up its audience and finally lets them go with a strong sense of catharsis.
As with Persona 4: LOL, no. “Rebellion” is not twiddling your thumbs for two weeks and waffling over if you’re just as bad as serial pedophile rapists every time you do anything that remotely challenges the status quo. There is no “catharsis” in repeatedly telling people there is no solution to real-world problems outside of fantasy magic powers. This is Rebellion Chic: employing the aesthetic of “rebellion” over a narrative that is deeply conservative at its core.
The story’s premise was always inherently flawed, really. In the previous games, you were using supernatural powers to fight supernatural threats; the heroes and the villains are operating within the same sphere. You can make that work as a metaphor or allegory for real-world commentary. They didn’t, but you could. But solving mundane problems with supernatural solutions? That’s just shallow escapism. Which isn’t in itself bad, but it’s kind of hard to make any profound statement with it. What is the moral of this story? The heroes repeatedly insist they have no recourse but a supernatural one (even though, as I repeatedly pointed out, mundane solutions absolutely existed), so… what, if you’re in that situation in real life, you just have to roll over and give up, since you don’t have magic powers?
We see this regressive victim-blaming all through the Kamoshida arc. The only way Ann’s femme fatale persona could have worked is if she was actually sleeping with him — using her sexuality to her advantage — but that couldn’t be the case because, I suspect, then the writers wouldn’t consider her sympathetic. The narrative walks this weird tightrope of saying abuse is bad, but also if you are abused you’re scum who deserved it. Ryuji’s “friends” all blame him for snapping under horrific abuse and not the abuser who deliberately provoked him. Mishima is raked over the coals and forced to “atone” because an abuser coerced him into doing something bad. Shiho, the actual rape victim, is unceremoniously removed from the narrative and her family isn’t allowed to press charges even after Kamoshida’s confession, because people would gossip about how she’s now used goods. If you don’t have the willpower to remain a perfect victim the abuse becomes your fault too.
When Farla first watched the protagonist’s backstory with me, she immediately said that it was normalizing abuse rather than criticizing it. The protagonist sees someone getting hurt and steps up to stop it… and his life was ruined. He’s only able to get out of it with magic powers, which his real-world counterparts don’t have. Implication: It’s a good thing to do in the abstract, but if you don’t want to be a martyr you should just shut up and keep your head down. If you see a powerful man harassing a woman, no you didn’t. I thought this was a very uncharitable reading at first, but after seeing how the Kamoshida arc was handled I’m not sure she’s wrong.
I suspect we may have misread the protagonist’s backstory entirely. It was never about acting because he thought something was wrong, it was about doing what was supposedly the right thing that society should reward you for. The police and all the adults were supposed to tell him he was amazing for what he did. The unfairness was that he was punished, not that the woman was being hurt in the first place — she’s an object, she’s irrelevant. This is why, after the Phantom Thieves deal with Kamoshida, the conversation immediately moves to how the other students perceived this and how impressed everyone is with them; it’s why there’s no discussion of getting rid of the actual problem, which is all the other abusive teachers and administrators. Instead it turns to the website approval rating, because that’s what all this is really about. From plot summaries I’m given to understand this is the point and why the Phantom Thieves are supposedly “morally ambiguous”, but that doesn’t change the fact I don’t want to be following a bunch of selfish dickwads who are only in it for the fame, and it only makes the anti-rebellion thing worse: Not only should you not rebel because of the consequences, but you should suspect the motives of anyone who does rebel because maybe they’re only in it for themselves, propaganda that’s been used to discredit leftists since long before video games existed.
But hey, Royal added a sequel arc by a different director that everyone says is much better, how’s that?
In Persona 5 Royal, two new characters interact with the Phantom Thieves: Kasumi Yoshizawa, an accomplished gymnast who transferred to Shujin Academy the same time as Joker, and Takuto Maruki, a counsellor hired by the school after Kamoshida is exposed. Kasumi awakens to her Persona after discovering a new Palace in Odaiba with Joker. Maruki, in turn, talks to each of the Phantom Thieves throughout the main story and learns their deepest wishes and regrets via their counselling sessions with him. After defeating Yaldabaoth, a still-living Akechi [who died in the main story] turns himself over to Sae in Joker’s place. At the beginning of the following year, Joker finds reality distorted; Akechi was released without reason, and each Phantom Thief has had their deepest wish granted, including some deceased people being brought back to life. Joker, Akechi, and Kasumi investigate the Palace in Odaiba and learn that its owner is Maruki, who is revealed to be a Persona-user that can alter reality by forcefully changing people’s cognitions. After Yaldabaoth’s defeat, Maruki took control over Mementos and is determined to create a world where everyone’s dreams become reality. Maruki reveals that “Kasumi” is actually her twin sister Sumire, who had been impersonating her to cope with the former’s death due to the influence of Maruki’s powers. Maruki gives Joker time to choose whether to accept his idealized reality. Joker reminds the Phantom Thieves and Sumire of the strength and growth they gained from their real lives, and they agree to change Maruki’s heart before the altered reality becomes permanent.
Joker later learns from Maruki that Akechi is alive in the altered reality because of Joker’s desire to save him, and that whether Akechi lives depends on Joker accepting Maruki’s world. Akechi convinces Joker to refuse the offer, stating he would rather disappear as himself, than live under Maruki’s control. The Phantom Thieves then defeat Maruki the following day, and reality returns to normal. With Akechi gone, Joker finds himself back in prison as he was meant to be before reality was altered, but as with the original game’s story, he is cleared and released thanks to his friends and allies. At their final meeting, having reflected on their rejection of Maruki’s reality, each member chooses to pursue their own futures, and make their wishes come true under their own power.
What is this Puritan cult-of-suffering BS. It’s wrong to use your abilities to make the world a better place? It’s better for your loved ones to be dead than to “live under someone’s control”? The Vision of Escaflowne did this better a full 24 years earlier.
I was going to say this is hypocritical when the Phantom Thieves are allowed to use their supernatural powers to improve peoples’ lives, but actually that was textually wrong too, wasn’t it, with all the waffling over the “moral ambiguity” of their actions. This really just confirms all my least charitable readings: This story claims to be about “rebellion”, yet condemns and demonizes any attempt by the characters to challenge the status quo. Like every SMT game, it brings up these themes but the conclusion is always the same: Radicalism and nonconformity are bad, the status quo is good.
I brought up Shinzo Abe’s assassination in the readthrough as a joke, but I think it’s genuinely relevant here. That was real rebellion against a force responsible for many of the “real-world problems” discussed in Persona 5, but I’m sure the writers genuinely disagree with it, even though Abe was quite possibly the closest someone could get to a real-life SMT villain. He was the agent of an international cult conspiracy that is literally trying to bring about the Christian apocalypse! If you put him in an SMT game I’d laugh about what an absurd cartoonish villain he was! Yet here, we can only villify someone attempting to become prime minister; I suspect that if he was already in power, the game would conclude it would be wrong to remove him. Certainly that seems to be the case with the school principal (who does eventually get comeuppance, but by the villains to frame the Phantom Thieves, because only villains can be proactive).
So how do we fix this? Gods, I don’t even know. Persona 4 could theoretically work with the same basic structure as long as you changed the initial variables to include characters who didn’t suck. With Persona 5 I can’t think of anything but throwing out the entire plot and starting from scratch. You could build a compelling narrative off of the individual pieces, but those pieces are mutually incompatible; if I went through it chronologically, I’d have to branch off a new concept in parallel every time I hit a new element.
Like, I praised the story giving the protagonist an established backstory this time, but I think this is the one time where an everyman protagonist would have worked better. It muddies the narrative that we’re only stopping Kamoshida because he’s personally victimizing us, but also he’s a bad person who we should want to stop anyway. If we were an ordinary person using our relative privilege to help the delinquents out of pure principle, that would be a more powerful statement of character, and could even justify the waffling if we don’t have to get involved. But then it’d be harder to railroad us, I suppose. At the same time, you could make the established backstory work, but you’d have to go in the opposite direction by giving the protagonist actual characterization and agency in the main plot instead of making him the same gormless loser as always. The in medias res opening is interesting but it doesn’t work with the fact your choices can change the narrative so the outcome isn’t actually inevitable. (Hey, remember how FF7 actually did clever things with this in the Nibelheim flashback? Truly, Final Fantasy walked so Persona could crawl.) And so on.
The premise is, like I said, inherently flawed, but you might be able to make it work if you leaned really hard on allegory and made the supernatural actions direct parallels to methods of real-world resistance in a wink-wink-nudge-nudge kind of way. (The toy guns could be narratively relevant!) It’s kind of hard to make a dungeon crawler out of that, though, since the uncomfortable truth of real-world evil is that it’s diffuse rather than concentrated into a few Big Bads you can knock off. Removing Kamoshida just removes one abuser; it doesn’t remove the network of abusive parents and administrators who enabled him and will enable the next abuser just as hard. That could maybe be the moral, though, and would add more validity to the final boss being humanity’s collective heart. Though I never like that trope — humanity isn’t a hive mind, so it’s absurd to think you can reduce that collective to a single desire. Maybe make it an allegory for forming a broader social movement to change the views of society?
Meanwhile, if the story is supposed to be a meditation on criminal justice and “rehabilitation”, the game needs to let us actually make that choice. I was disappointed but unsurprised that we’re simply railroaded into sparing the villains after all that setup about how we could totally kill them in a really creepy way. Why did you even bother making this narrative interactive, Atlus? You let us choose when it comes to meaningless dialogue options that, at most, lead to an unsatisfying and OOC bad ending, but not to actually shape the narrative? This in a franchise that built itself on the mechanic of player choice and multiple routes? For shame. Of course, to make this work you would also need to give the villains any redeeming qualities whatsoever. You might be able to do something profound by making them explicit foils to the protagonists, perhaps commentary on the hypocrisy of the justice system condemning actions it itself commits… but that doesn’t really work unless the protagonists are part of the establishment, otherwise the allegory breaks down and we return to victim-blaming rebels.
Overall, though, I’m just not terribly motivated to do a rewrite this time. The game is such a mess that I think it’d be more productive to write my own stuff or look at what more socially-conscious artists are putting out. The whole experience has just left me feeling so jaded and burned-out.
I genuinely feel bad for the fans who insist this is the best game ever. It isn’t. It is garbage, possibly even worse garbage than Persona 4. Please play other games or maybe read a book. I promise there are better stories out there. You want a story about the limitations of solving real-world problems with magic powers? Watch Mob Psycho. You want a game where you play as a wrongfully-convicted hero that actually lets you choose whether to execute your villains? Play Dishonored. You want a story about actual rebellion against institutional corruption? Read Discworld and The Murderbot Diaries. You want a game in this franchise that isn’t crap? Play Devil Survivor. You want a story that has real psychological themes instead of just using it as set dressing? Look at… basically everything we’ve recommended on this blog, that’s kind of our jam. But stop holding up this regressive, misogynistic, homophobic, juvenile, contemptuous trash as the holy grail of this genre. These hacks do not deserve your money, your time, or your attention. Move on.
I agree with the overall sentiment but want to make one point clear: it’s not the fault of the localizers that the result is a rushed shoddy mess. It’s the fault of management. All the evidence we need can be found in the game’s credits (https://www.mobygames.com/game/86408/persona-5/credits/playstation-4/). Atlus hired six translators and EIGHT editors for the localization. For some context, The Word Ends With You only had two editors. Atlus management decided to rush the game’s localization by throwing man power and money at the problem. Even the most talented people will deliver shoddy results if given ridiculous working conditions.
And this was the Persona game that needed a quality localization the most. It’s the most Japanese game of the bunch, and it’s not even close. Like, the majority of the heist targets are people in positions held in extremely high regard in their culture. So, I imagine making the villains Saturday cartoon villains might be necessary for the writers to convince their audience they should be taken down?
Looking at P5’s credits also shows why the story is so incoherent in both plot and confidants: an absurd quantity of staff. Ten scenario planners; seven event planners; and an absurd number of confidant planners—a number suspiciously close to the number of non-automatic confidants.
On a personal anecdote, Ys 8 released in the west shortly after Persona 5. And it was an equally different localization disaster. Just look up “Archeozoic big hole”. And, I’d argue it has the ‘better’ localization. Because, yes it has issues, like a plot scene having Japanese text; really screwing up the terminology; and, standard typos and nonsensical sentences, “I’m Alison. Please just call me Alison.” But, it didn’t fuck up the plot, like in P5; it didn’t destroy the characters, like in P5; and, it had some charms to it. Like one character using “ijit”.
However, unlike Atlus, the localizers, NISA, publicly acknowledged their shortcoming. And announced they would redo the localization from scratch, at no extra charge. They had blog posts showing their progress. They did everything right. And the new localization was fantastic—“Archeozoic Big Hole” is now “Archeozoic Chasm”, haha.
Meanwhile, Atlus had a similar chance to redo the localization with P5R, but didn’t.
Later, NISA revealed more on why Ys 8 launched with that terrible localization. The company was taking more work than they could handle at the time. Ys 8 was localized while the company was working on Danganronpa V3, a huge game that put a ton of pressure on the staff.
Thus ends my tale of Two Localization Shitshows.
Yeah, the site I linked mentions the too-many-cooks problem, but while that can explain the inconsistent writing, I do still blame the editors for failing to catch the more basic errors. No editor should have approved the nonsense dialogue mentioned on that site.
To add onto this – they missed those mistakes TWICE. Cuz the mistakes were still present for vanilla P5 and persisted for P5R.
I’m willing to bet management didn’t allocate enough budget to fix the original localization and just translated the new stuff. This game had a smaller budget so redoing the localization from scratch was never in the cards. Doing a half ass job and only changing some things only highlights how bad the original is and makes players question why some things changed while others didn’t.
“This level of sloppiness and mismanagement in a AAA title is common practice now”
fixed the sentence for you
“the Demiurge or the Holy Grail have to do with any of this?”
Persona ripping off Fate/Stay Night franchise?
No, this is definitely bad even by current AAA standards. Other Japanese -> English translations that came out around the same time are nowhere near this sloppy.
Decided to waste my time reading this “review” (are paragraphs upon paragraphs of pure seethe reviews? Tough to tell when 90% of it consists of describing what happened in-game followed by “FUCK THIS SHITTY DUMBASS STUPID MORONIC GAME BUZZWORD BUZZWORD BUZZWORD”) after skimming through the Persona 4 “review” and I have to say, this would be laughable were I not aware of the fact that some miserable leftist spent dozens of hours of their life extending a very simple argument into multiple whiny, lengthy segments of intellectual/ideological self-fellating. Next time a video game makes you this uncomfortable by not pandering to your totally sane and reasonable sensibilities, just give up halfway through the prologue and write it off as racist/misogynistic/whatever garbage because no mentally stable individual would dedicate so much effort to insulting (which is different from criticizing) even the tiniest, most insignificant aspects of a game.
These posts only reveal how the thought process of “Does this piece of media directly preach every aspect of my ideology? -> No -> Every single thing about this sucks and the developers are awful human beings” is nothing but a sign of dysfunctionality and/or mental illness. That no commenter has ever offered any pushback to these entries shows that this place is just a leftist circlejerk (and a very weird one at that – who the fuck finds any of this funny, let alone insightful?). I considered offering constructive criticism to certain points but you are clearly a deranged milennial (who’s still stuck in high school, hence why the childishly excessive swearing and shitty sarcasm are fucking everywhere) whose prefrontal cortex has already been irreversibly damaged by age and decades of being mad online.
Thank god no one’s wasting money paying you to write this shit.
By your own proposed standards, this comment of yours accomplished nothing. You complain about them complaining about every single thing not pandering to their tastes, but then you don’t even manage to give any examples; complain about them swearing and being sarcastic (essentially making a tone argument) while also swearing unnecessarily and being sarcastic.
You self-admittedly wasted your time reading these posts, only to then also waste time writing this comment.
You complain about nobody pushing back on these posts in the comments — I disagree with a bunch of things being said in these posts, but I don’t care enough about some JRPG from years ago to argue about it.
I’m curious, how did you get here?
Okay, please, just stop. Just fucking stop. No commenter has offered pushback, because how in the hell do you ignore problems blatantly placed in front of you. Let’s address the elephant in the room – Yaldabaoth. Basically, what does Yaldabaoth mean in P5? It’s not like it’s centered around Gnosticism, and it’s not like they made him act like the Demiurge. Ergo, he’s an OC the writers slapped a mythological name on. This happens a lot in SMT, Yaldabaoth is just one of the more egregious examples. Nevermind they rehashed their idea from P2 with the whole “wager with another deity” thing. The themes of rebellion are largely a set dressing as well, especially with the ending that basically just says “just leave it to the adults”
Now, Irin didn’t mention this, but a common occurrence throughout each Confidant is that you solve the issues with Mementos. In other words, you only are allowed to solve issues with magic. Which in of itself is a contradicted statement, as some Confidants do not have you go through a Mementos miniboss at all.
Lastly…characters. Look, Ann is really bad, and so is everyone except Ryuji, and arguably Futaba (as much as the leetspeak annoys me). Also, Irin seethes much more this time because he already suffered through several SMT titles he ended up hating (see also: P4 liveblog), to the point he really had no hope for this one. I partially am to blame for this review as well, I gave Irin rather false expectations
Nah, don’t blame yourself. The entire fandom gave me false expectations.
Y’know, I kinda feel like I have to devil’s advocate a bit here. Just a bit
See, for all the faults of the translation (and the plot’s inconsistencies), it does at least get somewhat better after Kamoshida, in spite of the flawed formula they use (the calendar system). The Confidants though…massive mixed bag. Some are pretty good (Yoshida, Ryuji, Maruki, Akechi), and others really fall short (Chihaya, Kawakami, Takemi, Hifumi). Morgana being incompetent seems stupid…and then the Okumura arc happens, where Ryuji in particular isn’t really happy with Morgana’s incompetence at that point, something Morgana has an inferiority complex over.
P5R defo suffers from the issue of “The game could have ended after the boss preceding the final boss), as in, it could have ended after Shido and all would be fine, but Atlus thought using a “divine figure” to represent authority in its purest form was too novel an idea to pass up
And that brings me as to what Atlus’ problem is. They want to tackle big ideas, but have no clue how to actually do it. The only one they actually did somewhat well on was P3’s themes, even if they lost the plot near the end.
Speaking of…P3 Reload did try to improve upon some of the flaws of P3, but others remained (the plot is still backloaded, some characters like Chidori are still one note, and Takaya is still pretty incoherent, though it feels more intentional, cuz Takaya just changes motivations at the drop of a hat)
Just remembered another game that released around the same time as P5 that upstages it. Tokyo Mirage Sessions (the SMT X FE game) has gameplay better than P5’s in every way. I’m defining “gameplay” as dungeons, progression, and combat.
First, establish where P5 fails. The dungeons are all style, no substance. All the puzzles have linear solutions that amount to “go to the new area you just unlocked”. No alternate solutions to goodies or dead ends. The rat maze in Shido’s ship comes to mind as a glaring example of this. Next, the party member’s movesets are all bland and unoriginal. With no unique skills to help them stand out.
And combat, ugh. They added two new elements for no reason? They don’t really do anything. And while dungeon crawling, which is all about SP management, it’s frustrating seeing Ryuji’s nearly full SP all the time. Because they refuse to add physical elemental skills. Also the bosses were just so , so bad. Which the developers admitted by completely redoing them in Royal. On a more damning note, the game doesn’t address any of the inherent issues with the persona combat. Unlike Tokyo Mirage Sessions (TMS).
TMS has physical elemental moves!
Why has it taken the series over 20 years to do this? Now the physical starting party member can fully contribute in knock downs without damage penalties. Speaking of knock downs, TMS fixes a huge problem of the SMT/Persona 5 combat, which is having to guess enemy weaknesses. It does so in two ways: it implements the FE weapon triangle, and it’s reworked All-Out Attacks aka Sessions.
Sessions are basically an All-Out Attack except instead of a single, almighty attack, it’s a series of multiple elemental strikes from every party member. Attacking an axe enemy with a sword attack will end up revealing its complete elemental affinities in one go. And if the enemy is a monster without a weapon, the game gives you ways to force a session attack to achieve the same result. It’s awesome.
And there are just so many QoL features built in. Like no instant game over if the MC dies. You can change party members multiple times in a single turn to gauge your options without a penalty. Attacking an enemy in the overworld knocks them down instead of starting a fight so you can avoid combat if you want. You get loot and money for performing long session attacks, removing grinding by rewarding the player for doing stuff you were gonna do anyway.
The dungeons in TMS are really good. They have puzzles that require thought to traverse. The later dungeons can be really tricky to figure out. They also have really good boss fights.
And I love the progression. It’s like characters earn skills basically like SMT magatamas through weapons you can craft. And you can relearn skills to power them up or to change movesets at will. You can also remake the weapons after learning the skills to learn them all again plus a bonus skill. Movesets have been reworked so instead of eight skills total, players have six attack, passives, and session skills.
I can gush on and on. The best thing I can say about TMS’s story is that it’s well-paced and doesn’t get in the way. I really recommend trying it if you want to play a JRPG without caring about the story.
I did in fact play TMS, but didn’t have anything to say about it. The gameplay was fine, but I disagree that it was significantly better than Persona’s — in my experience, combat still came down to spamming elemental weaknesses over and over. If anything, sessions made that worse — I actually prefer baton pass as a twist on that system.
Okay, I have to chime in. See, the lack of Str-based elementals used to be a balancing act for things. It meant that if Physical-oriented characters wanted to score knockdowns, they had to sacrifice damage.
AoA in P5 is prolly the weakest it’s been for a good while, until Reload made them even worse.
Also, tbh, I will a hundred times take P5’s very obvious and easily solved puzzles over another teleporter dungeon like in the old SMT games
I didn’t play any Persona games so I don’t really have an opinion here, but I did start playing the Legend of Heroes games, starting with Trails in the Sky, and I gotta say, the first two games FC and SC (First/Second Chapter) have been quite stunningly good. They have satisfied my JRPG kick for some time to come, but the third one burned me out so I haven’t continued the overall series.
Trails is the Sky 1 is one of those flawed games I have very positive feelings about in retrospect. I maintain that the 11th hour twist was bonkers but it was really a lovely travellogue and the characters were good people.
Yeah I mean Trails in the Sky (and probably the rest of the very long series) is very much out there as far as their plotting and twists go, but when they’re just doing the meat of characterization and storytelling I have to say I find them basically unparalleled.
The first game and its villain and plot end up feeling like, you know, the first 10 chapters of a Fire Emblem game where you’re doing a relatively low-stakes conflict inside one nation. The second game takes it into worldwide conspiracies and ancient civilization stuff like Fire Emblem does in the second half of its games. Still, I am ride or die for its cast every time.
-Yaldabaoth, the Holy Grail made sentient, was created from humanity’s wish to give up control and be free from suffering.
This is just the plot of Fate Stay Night?!
I know, right? This was made so long after FSN there’s no way they didn’t know they were ripping it off.
I mean, God of War: Ragnarok was about a mage and patriarch screwing over his entire family and legacy just for a chance at communing with the root of all knowledge. A few friends of mine who played it said Odin is the closest thing to a Nasuverse mage outside the Nasuverse they’ve ever seen.
I guess I’m saying that folks aren’t necessarily ripping him off so much at this point, 20 years after the VN came out, so much as he’s been so influential that it’s just not weird to see almost whole-plot homages
So, I’ve had time to think about things, and, well, I think I have a good idea of how I wanna talk about the rest of the game. People tend to clamor about how the game gets worse after Kamoshida, but tbh, I never saw it that way. So, let me, uh, try to condense it the best I can
Starting off with our next target, Ichiryusai Madarame. We find out about him from one of his students, Yusuke Kitagawa. He’s a bit of a weirdo, but no, he’s not actually a horndog, don’t worry. So, Yusuke wanted Ann to be the model for his next art piece for the upcoming exhibit. Upon agreement, the PTs discover Madarame not only has a Palace (no thanks to a prior more minor target telling them about him), but that he steals the artwork of his students and passes it off as his own. Yusuke is in denial about this when confronted, so he gets a bit aggressive towards the PTs for trying to press him for that info. He eventually decides to ask Ann for a nude painting of her, because of his lack of trust towards Joker and Ryuji (which is Ryuji’s fault, shocker). Ironically, this gives them an out, as Ann can put on 20 layers of clothing to stall for time while Morgana opens a conspicuous door that reveals how many times Madarame has copied a painting known as “Sayuri”. But Madarame catches them in the act, and aims to pursue legal action once the exhibit ends. So, this is where Ann and Mona frantically enter the Metaverse with Yusuke in tow, and there Yusuke finally slowly accepts the truth, awakening to his Persona, Goemon. Flash forward to solving puzzles involving passwords, discovering Treasure Demons, and playing Spot the Difference. But okay, what’s the deal with Sayuri? It’s actually a self-portrait of Yusuke’s mom, which Madarame edited so the baby (which would be Yusuke) is missing. See, Madarame basically saw Yusuke’s mom have a seizure, and he refused to help and just let her die there, since it meant he could get the painting with no strings attached. After Madarame is defeated, he mentions something about a man in a black mask (more on that later)
Whoo, that was…quick. I really try to respect people’s time in spite of making a very long essay. But okay, Madarame confesses, and the treasure is a copy of the real “Sayuri”. We decide to keep it in LeBlanc. Moving on, apparently some students were doing illicit activities recently, and Makoto has to investigate. No thanks to Ryuji AGAIN, Makoto (the sister of Sae) knows we’re the PTs and wants to tag along with us. You probably saw her stalk you during the segment where you find out who the person behind the situation is. Well, a drunken journalist named Ohya tells us it’s Junya Kaneshiro, a mafia boss. As we look for his Palace, we find out it’s in all of Shibuya, and that it’s in the shape of a bank (since he extorts people). But we can’t get in. So, Makoto, in her infinite wisdom, decides it’s a good idea to let herself get kidnapped, have us follow her, so we meet Kaneshiro in person. Well, he is pissy, and takes a pic of us near drugs and alcohol. And threatens that he’ll leak the pics if we don’t pay him 3 million yen. Well, we ain’t paying here, cuz taxation is theft, so, we go to his Palace. Now that we have a debt to pay to him, we can get into his bank, where Makoto awakens to Johanna. After this, you get the drill, MORE PUZZLES. So, Kaneshiro is a money grubber who used to be dirt poor, and thinks it’s justified for him to exploit others now, classy stuff. After defeating the little goober, he tells us that the man in the black mask goes into Palaces to “do whatever they damn well please”. Okay, more info, but nothing conclusive, yea?
Well, I gotta continue on, so continue on I shall. Next target? Some anonymous group called “Medjed”. They pose as agents of justice, and say they’ll commit “The Cleanse” soon enough. Well, that sounds bad, but how do we solve that situation? Well, some person named Alibaba contacts us…somehow, and wants us to change the heart of a girl named Futaba Sakura, and she is Sojiro’s adoptive daughter. Surprise surprise, Futaba called the hit on herself for that one, she is actually Alibaba. So, after some questioning, we go into her Palace, which is a pyramid. Even though she wants our help, classically, she also tries to murder us with traps. Well that didn’t work, we got to the end real quick. Reasoning for her Palace is self-hatred due to believing she caused her biological mother’s death. The truth was, she actually was killed via a mental shutdown. Eventually Futaba figures it out while we fight a cognitive version of her mother as a sphinx, and awakens to her Persona, Necronomicon, and becomes our new navigator. One fight later, she uses l33t hax0r skillz to stop Medjed, and then has to learn to socialize. This being Persona, it doesn’t take THAT long, but, whatever, we got more
Oh no! The principal is dead! RIP blobfish. Jokes aside, people think it’s the Phantom Thieves, even though it wasn’t. And now we find a new target – a corpo called Kunikazu Okumura. Morgana kinda wants to refuse, because Ryuji got obsessed with fame, and leaves after being called out on his incompetence too hard. This is where he finds the corpo’s daughter, Haru Okumura, and they try to get through the corpo Palace by themselves. It fails, we chase them around, and Mona reconciles with us. Haru also joins, but apparently her Persona hasn’t fully awakened yet. It only does once we face the cognitive version of Haru’s fiance for arranged marriage. Yea, the corpo planned to marry off his daughter to a rich asshole. So, what was once fame-driven has become a biiiiiiiit personal. Sounds good, right. SOUNDS GOOD, RIGHT? Well, it does. Okay, so, we solve airlock puzzles, deal with annoying timers, you get it. Boss fight time! Corpo actually likes to let his robots do everything. Better learn to Baton Pass, otherwise you will struggle with this fight, it’s actually a genuinely tricky one. But after it’s done, we think we got the treasure and changed corpo’s heart, but surprise surprise, the black mask dude is back, and he kills corpo’s shadow, so he fucking dies on the day of the deadline as he’s confessing.
Well, once again, people think it’s the PTs, and support decreases like mad because now they want us executed. Well, pretty boy Akechi thinks it’s not us, and also saw us go into the Metaverse, and has been there himself. So, he wants to join us to change the heart of Sae Niijima, the woman interrogating us in the present, and, of course, this is so she “sees the real picture”, so to speak. Okay, it takes place in the shape of a casino, and the games are rigged, so we rig em back in our favor. Also hey, Nocturne reference, because Thor is here as a miniboss. Okay, this time we wait until the last day cuz Akechi is a dumb dumb and doesn’t want us to do it early. But once we do and seemingly take the treasure, we are arrested, and finally, back to the present
Now, I didn’t mention it earlier, but let’s talk about Akechi. So, after Madarame’s Palace, Morgana one day talked about pancakes. And Akechi asked if he heard something about pancakes. Now, before joining us, he says he was in the Metaverse and had his Persona, Robin Hood, for 2 months or so. But the comment was before that, ergo, Akechi LIED. He’s been tailing us from the start. Now, something Futaba discovers from wiretapping Akechi’s phone was that he planned to go into the interrogation room, kill the guard, and then kill Joker, and be done with it, boom, he wins. Except not really. We were smarter, and we got him into the cognitive world remotely. so he ended up just killing the cognitive copy of Joker instead, while the real one was just chilling in the room waiting to be picked up. Guard is still alive due to this too, btw.
So, who the hell was behind all this? Well, it was a soon-to-be prime minister, Masayoshi Shido. The guy that got us into the whole mess to start. So of course, he is our next target, and we know Akechi worked for him. So, as we go in, we need to get 5 letters of recommendation from 5 elites – a politician, a noble, a TV station president, an IT company boss, and a “cleaner”, who is actually a yakuza working as a hitman. We beat em up, get the letters, but surprise, Akechi found out we fooled him, so he challenges us, and gets destroyed. At the end, he faces his cognitive clone, the door closes, and gunshots are heard. Is Akechi alive? Dead? Hell if I know, because the game won’t say which it is, cuz fuck you. But okay, we got the letters, let’s make a broadcast revealing ourselves as alive, and challenging Shido. He’s definitely a tough cookie, and thinks he gotta steer the country? HAHHAAHAHAHA, no, we are the Phantom Menace now, bois. So, job done, right? Shido shall face justice, Joker gets his record maybe sorta cleared, all lived happily ever after, yea?
This is SMT, did you think we’d not have a spooky demon man as the final boss? You fool! Of course we do. People STILL vote for Shido, and act as if we never existed. So, off to Mementos we go, solving stupid puzzles, and the final boss is…a cup! The holy grail! We try to beat it, but damn, cup got hands. And it tries to delete us. But fuck you, we’re the main character baybeeeeeee. So, through…means unclear, we somehow do not die, we fuse Caroline and Justine to create Loli 3rd – Lavenza. So, girl tells us Yaldabaoth (AKA Holy Grail AKA Demiurge) hijacked the Velvet Room, took Igor’s form, separazed Lavenza into two, and started this rigged game, threw a hissy fit when Akechi got the boot, and tried to make it all for naught anyway. Not this time, you’re no Nyarly, Yabbadabbadoo. So, we beat up the angels in an unoriginal SMT 1 reference, we fight Yaldy, and with the power of the M A S S E S, we pull out Jack Satanael, and we shoot Yaldabaoth in the face, killing the little fucker
Okay, SURELY it’s over now. SIKE, time for new content from Royal! So, third semester starts, after Akechi somehow comes back and vouches for us so we don’t get arrested for testifying against Shido while we ourselves committed some crimes. So, everything is oout of wack. Morgana is suddenly a twink, Futaba’s mom is…here, corpo is alive again, Ushimaru is not a boomer, Akechi is here, WHAT IS GOING ON? Well, lemme tell ya, our therapist did that. Somehow, we subconsciously gave Yabbadabbadoo’s power to him, so now he uses it to make a “better world I promise”. Did anyone tell him people’s wishes are mutually incompatible? NO! But okay, so, redhead with stabbable thighs Kasumi is also here, behaves strangely too. Turns out, she is actually Sumire, and the real Kasumi died in a car accident, and Sumire could not cope with it. And when we tried to face Maruki the first time, she went against us, then gave up when the PTs suddenly realized everything was out of wack thanks to us reminding them and then they came to our aid in the nick of time. Okay, we got a month to prepare for the big day where we fight Maruki, so let’s get a-movin. Mementos got a new path as well, so that’s…neat. But aside from that, Sumire re-awakens to her Persona Cendrillon (odd that her outfit did not change, but whatever), and we get to do the other 5 ranks of her confidant, finally. Okay, I think we almost did it. So, we get to the Treasure location, very interesting info, I know, and on the last day, we talk with Maruki, tell him a very polite “no” to his reality cuz we’re masochists, and we hand him our calling card. Turns out, our therapist has a Persona now once we fight him. It’s Azathoth. And Azathoth is a bastard. So we beat him up, but Maruki doubles down, and awakens to his new Persona, Adam Kadmon. And we beat him up too. And then Maruki tries to beat us, and fails. And then he tries again, this time with no Personas in play…and fails. But we save the guy from falling to his death. And everything is back to normal. Akechi is MIA, Wakaba and Corpo are gone, and Joker was arrested as in the original timeline. We eventually get to leave, and as we’re about to go home with Maruki as our taxi driver, we see a reflection of…Akechi? Oh boy, the tension, the intrigue, I wonder where we’re going with this!
So yea, make of it what you will. I glossed over SO much, and maybe said too little, because eh, can’t be fucked, this is the closest you guys get from me. But hey, I’m sure Irin will love to seethe about these someday
IDK if you’re still willing to endure SMT spinoffs, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on RAIDOU Remastered: The Mystery of the Soulless Army.
Does it fix the problems I had with the original?
Based on what I’ve seen, they got rid of random encounters. I’m so curious about how the plot works. But I don’t know anything about SMT and would be curious to hear from someone who knows the EU better.
Okay, so, basically, Raidou 1 has you take up the mantle of Raidou Kuzunoha, a title given to specific summoners, and you are also a detective at the same time, investigating supernatural cases as part of the Narumi Detective Agency. Simple to hnderstand, I mean, it is what it says on the tin. To keep it short, time travel is rather involved here, and it takes place in an alternate Japan that became a democracy by the 1930s.
Remastered completely removes random encounters, now you have field encounrers instead, and only in the Dark areas. Additonally, Raidou can have 4 active skills exclusive to him, bound to 4 keys, and each skill is on a cooldown. You get the skills by forging the weapons that carry them. Demon loyalty can now be gained by demons in the stock, and max loyalty demons in it can cast Dia Aura or buffs. Additionally, Raidou gets a Theurgy-esque big attack that charges up over the course of a long time (a little faster if Raidou hits enemies), and it’s an attack that auto selects attribute and pierces resistances
Also also, if Raidou dodges an attack right before it hits him, he can do Devil’s Bane, which is chip Almighty damage and gives him Magnetite back (Magnetite is used for demon skills, and can be regained by Raidou using light attacks)