Topic: Persona 5

@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.

@Arugula Yeah, ‘progress’ through the game is rather slow. But sometimes the next target pops up quickly, and sometimes a few weeks of gametime passes with seemingly no movement of the main storyline. But you are making progress, even if you don’t feel it, so long as you spend time with confidants and level up the five attributes. The social sim part is definitely hit-and-miss on the characters (mostly ‘hit’ for me). And the palaces are nice since they are all different, but the first one is probably one of the better ones, I think, but the latter ones have really picked up the quality from the ones in the middle, imo.

I didn't have much time to play it this week but I just beat the first palace now. So far so good

@Kidfried I shamelessly used a fusion guide. One can be found on gamefaqs.com as well as similar info on Samurai-gamers.com, Polygon, and other sites. So long as you have obtained the masks of most of the basic personas then you can fuse all of them, you just have to get the recipe through the guide. There may be a couple times when you need a persona with a certain skill as a basic ingredient, but don’t have it yet in your compendium, so you may have to either grind for it in Mementos or go to another guide that shows all possible ways to get that persona, and usually with a little creativity and effort you can get to it in a few steps with what you already have.

I don’t know how they expected anyone to do it without some help through a guide. There is even one of the harder requests for which you pretty much have to utilize a rare skill card in order to get the appropriate skill onto the persona. And that skill card can only be obtained through completing a specific late game Mementos quest. All of the others can be obtained through choosing the specific skill through inheritance during the fusion process.

In addition to all the time spent researching and then doing each fusion it also involves a huge monetary investment to buy all the personas from the compendium. Depending on how much money you’ve accrued, that might be your limiting factor.

The good thing about this confidant is that although it takes a lot of time, effort, and money, it does not make in-game time advance, and so can technically be accomplished all at once without sacrificing opportunities for other activities.

And as far as having the other personas for the other confidants, I agree that is a pain in the neck too, but sometimes I just go and buy the cheapest persona of that arcana for like 1000¥ or whatever and then know that I will just trash it when I actually need to have useful strong personas for palace combat.

How far along are you in the story?

@Kidfried The compendium is basically a log of all the persona you’ve had access to, either by negotiation/capture or through creating via fusion. And it functions as a way to “call back” a persona into your possession again once it’s gone. However — you have to manually add any persona to the compendium that you’ve captured. And it will “save” that persona into that log/library called the compendium for you to access later if you want (for a fee). So you need to be in a habit of dropping by the Velvet Room to upload all the new persona into the compendium before you start using them for fusion or deleting them because otherwise you’ll have to capture them again if you ever want it or need it for a fusion ingredient. If you’ve captured it and saved it in the compendium, you’ll never have to capture it again, so long as you have the money to buy it back.

Also — when you save (or the game calls it “register”) a persona into the compendium it will register and overwrite a previous version of that same persona if you’ve already registered it before. So in other words, as you level up a certain persona in the palaces or mementos you’ll want to update that stronger more leveled version into the compendium. But the twins will automatically remind you if you select that “Register” icon in the Velvet Room to register all the persona you have in your current possession which haven’t yet been registered.

A word of warning though — sometimes the persona you have in your possession is actually weaker than the one you previously registered. So for example, say you have a Jack Frost that you used a lot and leveled up a ton in the palaces and you register it into the compendium, then use it to fuse another persona, so it’s gone from your immediate possession after that; then if you later capture another Jack Frost while you’re palace/dungeon crawling and if you register that new Jack Frost it will delete your higher level Jack Frost and replace it with the new one, and you could lose all the time and XP you had earned with the first version of it. So sometimes you’ll want to avoid the “Register All” prompt when you come back to update your compendium and have to be sure to look individually at each one to make sure you want to “keep” that version in your compendium library. But as a whole, it’s best to visit and make sure you’ve registered all persona you captured or leveled up after each palace or mementos session.

When you create a new persona via fusion, it’s automatically put into the compendium, I think, and you don’t have to manually add it like you do when it’s a captured one.

I’m sorry if that either doesn’t make sense or is a bunch of stuff you already know. 😅

@Kidfried it’s not like you actually need to do things efficiently to enjoy your life as a high schooler and complete the game. I just did what I found fun rather than trying to see everything the world had to offer.

@Arugula The second and third 'arcs' are the slowest part of the game because the main story just kinda... stops... while you build your team.

The story picks up with the fourth arc and doesn't really stop progressing afterward.

@Ralizah Hey how do I use those spoiler tags? I got some stuff I need to say haha