All We Can Do Is Wait (Persona 5)

[Rudie]

Hey I want to talk about Persona5. It was released about two years ago. I think everyone was really excited for it played it for 15 hours and didn’t return. Much like overdue DVD rentals from the Shibuya Tsutaya.

I just beat the 4th dungeon. I now have gamer hikkumori girl that in the P5D was unbearable and I played that game for a hour before quiting.

The main reason I picked P5 back up is exercise. When I first played through Persona 4 I got in the best shape of my life. I am a lazy jerk. But the exact pacing of Persona 4 meant anytime I S-Linked or Leveled Up I could stop put down the controller and do pushups, sittups, jumping jacks, planks something. Leveling up in real life. It worked! I do not get enough exercise in Tokyo despite all the walking I do here.

So I am playing this game about being a student in Tokyo while being an adult student in Tokyo. I take the same train! I know Sangenjaya enough that I am annoyed by the interpretation of it.

That Members only old movie flyers shop is cool as hell! God Let me pay 10 bucks just to look around in there and die of second hand smoke.

But Boy is the message of the game, the mood of the game, the player agency, and the story all at odds with each other. This high school girl didn’t want to sell her body for her friend’s future gets her magic powers and then is immediately asked to sell her body for her friends only now it is a joke.

Oh both the girls have sweated so much you can kind of see their bra and the boys are horny for it and you the player are also on board and horny with this haha goof. Haha the girls were thought of as sexual objects and hated it haha. Fuck off persona 5.

Everyone knows at this point you start hiring your homeroom teacher as a maid to unlock being able to play the fucking game. Stop having a shit eating cat tell you you can’t do that today. Fuck off cat. Why do i have to sleep with my teacher to unlock this bullshit.

And the cast sucks compared to P4.

Girl 1 mostly doing the same story as Rise
Boy 1 just loves to run but adults are awful
Boy 2 only thinks about everything in art it is hilarious??
Girl 2 is well alright. Class President realizing the system is bullshit but probably going to come around and say no the system is good
Girl 3 exclusively talks in video game terms in P5D but so far seems alright if artificial.

And so far all the side stories are half assed compared to P4 a game I played through twice and I could defend Kanji and Naoto but no one wants that argument least of all me.

And then there is the daily in game conversations of “All we can do is wait”. Like Yeah of course. Want to talk about anything else. No I don’t want to hang out for fun. The hangouts that give me in game boosts are so numerous and I guess I don’t like any of you that much anyways.

Point is I am keeping my MC celibate of protest and lord I wouldn’t even date any of the guy characters.

And the guy that is obviously the bad guy I mean fucking come on I actually like because I hate his guts and everytime he is on screen I audibly go “Fuck This Guy.”

[Rudie]

I guess this game gets an instant tenouttaten because the first thing you do in it is transfer from the Den-en-toshi line to the Ginza at Shibuya something I actually do everyday and is so complicated I help out one tourist a week doing.

And the game just makes you do it and I screamed.

How anyone who doesn’t know how to do it in real life figured it out is a miracle to me.

[boojiboy7]

I stopped playing right when they were going to go to Hawaii. I feel like I should pick it back up again at some point.

It sure is a Persona team game.

I saw somewhere on the internet that Steve Carrell was saying that a reunion season of the Office just wouldn’t work today, and I kinda agree, and wonder if Persona team games are kinda the same thing.

[rasterradio]

Catherine is the best Persona game.

[american2004]

persona is the 40 year-old virgin “describing sex” scene but instead of sex its just regular human behavior. i think theres more steve carrell <-> shin megami tensei connections to make. i feel like “evan almighty” when i play “another bible”

[isfet]

i really liked Persona 5. probably because it’s themes seemed to parallel a lot of what was happening/is still happening in the world, and i liked the characters and the plot. it felt like they were really going in on the psychoanalysis aspects of the game’s origin.

the criticisms are all valid, though!

this is the only Persona game i’ve actually played to completion. i mean i aesthetically love the PS1 games, but they’re really unwieldy. and i lost interest in 3 and 4 early on.

one thing, though:

Everyone knows at this point you start hiring your homeroom teacher as a maid to unlock being able to play the fucking game.

i don’t understand what this means. i mean i know you can hire the homeroom teacher, but i’m not understanding the last part. maybe i missed something?

[Rudie]

If you date the homeroom teacher enough you can do activities after going to the metaverse/palaces.

[isfet]

oh, damn

[winkerwatson]

I agree with pretty much all of rudies posts but I also did complete the game - maybe it was the menus.

The system interaction is further refined from Golden at least.

[tt_zop]

Awkward translation and tropey stuff aside, I was just pleased to see a Japanese game go hard with the anti-authority anti-government angle. I enjoyed my time but these games have really messed up pacing, it’s always kind of exhausting when you knock out a Palace in one day and then have to fill a month of s-linking and goofing off to get to the next story beat.

[anothersphere]

Teach gave me lotsa massages then I I helped relieve her of guilt debt

It’s weird how against the anti-authoritative backdrop, most of the party come off more vanilla. Than the 2 previous popular purseowners.

Left it about 80% complete I guess, last year. Don’t think I can jump back in after 120+ hours in DQXI.

[a_new_duck]

I’ve been playing this game off and on since it was released in the US a year and a half ago. It’s been a couple months since I played, but I’m pretty sure

I think nothing has ever convinced me that smartphones have ruined our lives as much as Persona 5 has. Mandatory text message chains once or twice a day feel far more oppressive to me than any “society.”

That’s surely at least partly because I can’t really stand any of the characters and don’t want to hear them repeat their defining characteristic over and over and over. (Yusuke likes art! Hur hur hur.) The characters are the worst. I hate them for all the reasons Rude laid out above. Makoto and hacker girl are the only ones I have the slightest affection for, but I still feel like they’re too gimmicky–especially the latter. (And I really resent being forced to join in on the just-for-funsies predatory behavior of my male companions.)

The game’s systems have been polished, I think, to the detriment of the game’s cohesiveness. The quick navigation that ensures you never have to do the laborious chore of walking to any destination in the game more than once over its 100-hour span makes me feel less like I’m a part of Persona 5’s Tokyo than I ever felt I was a student at Iwatami Port Island or a one-year resident in Inaba. The moment where you have to navigate Shibuya station early on is really cool and then it never happens again. Theoretitcally it’s a cool idea to put the game system’s feedback into the mouth of a kitty cat team member who’s always with you, but in actuality it sucks. It’s the level barrier defined by a knee-height hedge. I might have a phone call tomorrow morning so I can’t watch a movie tonight? Fuck you, cat.

And the dungeon designs are “thematic” and actually boring as shit to navigate with irritating narrative checkpoints that thwart your progress midway.

And the central conceit of this game is duuuuuuuumb. Palaces. Distorted desires that can be fixed by stealing someone’s heart. I can see where it almost works, but it just doesn’t really come together (sideplots in Tartarus-like about abusive husbands only make things icky). This isn’t a mature critique of institutions and suffering and evil and oppression, it’s an overly individualized fairy tale fever dream about why people do bad things.

The game’s sexual politics are super gross and work against whatever the rest of this is trying to build.

And I hate the flashback structure. It adds nothing other than a flashy showcase at the beginning–something that was accomplished better with P4’s dream of Izanami. And then I have to pay for the rest of it with a hacky animation and a prosecutor saying something ridiculous like “To do what you did, you must have had someone who baked bread? WHO THE FUCK BAKED BREAD FOR YOU???”

Which leads me to the awkward modular-episodic structure of the game’s narrative overall. The rhythms of the introduction of the coming month’s threat are painfully drawn out and predictable.

Oh, and the Tartarus-like subway thing is bad. With a little tweaking it could’ve been not bad. But it’s bad.

A common line in the games press when writing this game up last year was how much more mature and sophisticated this game was, especially in terms of its narrative. I call bullshit on this. Persona 5 exudes an explicitly intentional darkness in its themes and stylings in contrast to Persona 4, but darkness is not synonymous with maturity. P3 and P4 had more interesting and varied characters, plots that tackled big themes about identity and mortality and social connection without beating you over the head with them in every fucking line of dialogue and text box on screen. I think the Persona series is actually very well poised to take on a story of the individual versus the system in a mature and interesting way. This game doesn’t.

Anyway, Kaneko demons look fucking rad rendered for the PS4 and I can’t wait to see what SMT V looks like. I’ll keep playing this at some point because I’m a big SMT/Persona fan (Persona 3 and SMT3 are still my favorite RPGs). I want a Persona 6 with this engine (like P4:P3) but with scenario and creative direction by Yamanaka Sayo.

[idiot]

yeah this is the only persona game i’ve finished and i can’t really remember anything about it now besides the menus were really pretty and

@a_new_duck

Kaneko demons look fucking rad rendered for the PS4

which i guess was enough to differentiate it from the previous games which i didn’t particularly like

[Ymer]

One of few things good about the SMT mobile game they released this summer (Dx2 Liberation) is seeing some new demons get 3d models for the first time.

Here’s a lot of the new ones (looking real bad though due to being straight models rips with no lighting and all)

Ehm (248163519) (OtherEhm)

[km]

Wish I could be so blissful

[LWJoestar]

P5 best soundtrack of all Personas

[Tuxedo]

It’s pretty wild how Kaneko did his best work and drew like 300 incredible demon designs for the small spinoff Soul Hackers and now years later these designs are the best part of every new behemoth 100+ hours SMT

[parker]

I still want to play this to find what possible outlaw values material can be gleaned from it, or see how bad it is at handling that, but I keep put off playing any ps3 games like nier because it seems like my computer is just a hair under being capable of running them without consistently stuttering occasionally.

[Felix]

that might’ve just been RPCS3’s shader caching before they made it asynchronous a couple months ago

[Rato]

When it came out I really was excited for P5 and I bounced off of it hardcore. Somehow, it’s got even worse pacing than P3 and P4, both of which have like an hour of exposition before you can do anything at the start. Like, you have a pretty excellent tutorial for a lot of stuff at the Casino bit at the start, then you have a much more slow and plodding tutorial for the same shit in the tutorial section of the Castle. It feels like a videogame that would be dramatically improved by a Abridged Series treatment.