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Persona 5 |OT2| Someone must have been helping you go to bed early. Talk!

Just ended up maxing all of my SLinks in early December with like 13 days to spare (and that's after dicking around for the entire first half of the game). Fortune really makes things so much easier.
 

Frimaire

Member
How come 7 months in everybody still acts like I'm a delinquent, despite the fact that I answer every question in class correctly, never break any rules, get the highest marks on tests, and am dating the Student Council President?
Because you're still hanging out Ryuji and that negates all

I'm really not though, I must have over 50 unread texts fro Ryuji on my phone.
 
How come 7 months in everybody still acts like I'm a delinquent, despite the fact that I answer every question in class correctly, never break any rules, get the highest marks on tests, and am dating the Student Council President?

Because you're still hanging out Ryuji and that negates all
 
The problem is that you have almost no incentive whatsoever to do palaces in more than one go, so you do all of your battle time in one massive chunk and then you're left with crazy long times without any actual battling. Then the entire point of the game is for your to choose what's best to do each time, but they fill days up with pointless shit and don't let you do much of anything for huge periods of time sometimes. And then they break patterns without telling you, too.

So in my case I beat a palace the first day, because that's what was best to do and then didn't go into mementos because it would expand after a change of heart. Little did I know that after that change I would be locked out of Mementos for nearly a month meaning I'd be without any real battling for like 9 or 10 hours of time.

They really need to bring back the tired mechanic and then just give players the option of doing other shit during the times they blocked out now. Force people to actually do palaces in a spread out manner, like 3 chunks or so. Mementos, too. Because of the way things are, honestly this is some of the worst pacing I've ever had in a game, and it's really amazing to me it scored as high as it did. Don't get me wrong I probably would still give it a 9, but I don't really expect mainstream reviewers to give this ridiculously much leeway on some glaring problems like this.

Part of it is that the experience is actually a lot better if you're not minmaxing your time. For example, I didn't unlock SP adhesives until the third or fourth palace (I think fourth, honestly), and even then they were hella expensive. So for the first few palaces my strategy was to go into a palace every other day and see how far I could get before I completely ran out of SP without using too many SP items. Once I ran out of gas, I'd bail, then spend a day on friends/stats, then back into a palace. Rinse/repeat until done, though in practice this meant I only went into palaces twice. Game feels a lot better if you do this.

I agree, though, that the game design pushes you away from doing this. It's also not amazing that the best solutions we've been able to come up with so far are to force people out of palaces more often, like they did in the second palace, or to bring back mechanics like fatigue that people didn't really like in Persona 3. In other words, ways of punishing the player for doing something they shouldn't (spending "too long" in dungeons) rather than ways of rewarding the player in different ways for taking their time.

Something that might be neat would be to bring back a feature from Persona 4 Golden, where you'd occasionally run into the fox and one or two of your reserve party members inside a dungeon. When this happened, you'd get points towards their social links. This isn't exactly what I was suggesting above when I said "reward the player for leaving palaces more often," but it would at minimum ease the pressure a bit to save time elsewhere by shotgunning dungeons. Another potential option might be increasing social and stat gain the day after coming out of a dungeon, like a post-fight high. Or maybe everyone goes out to celebrate the night after a visit to a dungeon (like coworkers going for after-work drinks, except not), and you gain social points with all your party members.

It's tough, though. As long as time management is a major component of these games, some people will always feel the need to minmax time, and right now that has an associated cost of trying to sprint through dungeons and wrecking the pace of the game somewhat. A more fundamental rethink of the calendar system might be in order, though I don't think they should get rid of time management altogether.

Is the red light district supposed to be Kabukicho?

Probably, Kabukicho is right next to Shinjuku in the real Tokyo. Also, walking through that area in the game reminds me of Yakuza games, which would also be a nice touch.
 

Toki767

Member
Just in case people are interested...a figure of the MC just went up for pre-order. It's about $100 not including shipping. Comes out in September though.

3K79njc.gif
 

Opa-Pa

Member
Question: 12/19
the game is totally going to rob me of all free time up until the last day, 12/24 arrives, won't it?
 

kenta

Has no PEINS
I'm almost at November and my shelves are still empty... Did I miss something there or is that still to come?
 
I'm almost at November and my shelves are still empty... Did I miss something there or is that still to come?

Did you try examining the shelves? Or are you saying you still don't have anything to put on them despite having the option to?

Pretty sure you should be able to do something with them by now, but you'll need something to put on them first. (very minor mechanics spoiler)
If you invite a confidant to a different location, depending on where you go they may give you a gift--those are the things you put on the shelf. For example, when hanging out with Yusuke, try inviting him to Ueno instead of just hanging out normally. You can only do this when that confidant isn't ready to rank up, though you might be able to do it after you max them out as well?
 

OrionX

Member
lmao Futaba rank 5 -
girl dragged the hell out of Mishima.
Not one lie to be found tho.

I think she's officially my favorite party member, just slightly above Yusuke.
 

Gigaryu

Neo Member
So ive got a question, i failed to get the 1st treasure shadow in the 2nd palace but ive noticed it shows up on the 1st few floors of mementos. Problem is when i hit its weakness it just insta dies now and i dont get the chance to even talk to it. Any solutions or i cant complete the persona library thing now?
 

Opa-Pa

Member
God, it just hit me uncle Beelzebub is probably the ultimate Devil persona and I missed him... Damn you Ohya, why must you suck so bad...
 

SoulUnison

Banned
I started insta-killing enemies when I ambushed them in Mementos yesterday. Any way to avoid that and get the ambush? It doesn't appear to give you any exp or money when that happens.

I was so excited when I saw this ability unlock, but pretty soon afterwards I wished there was some way to toggle it on and off.

[Ryuji Rank 10 Spoilers]
What the hell? From Captain Kidd to this lame Monkey Magic Persona? What a disappointing step down in concept AND design. I'm worried to hit Rank 10 with my other party members, now.
Even Ryuji sounds uncertain about it in battle.
 

duckroll

Member
I don't really understand the design basis for Ohya's Confidant skill set at all. Did they really put that down on paper, look at it, and think "yes, players will find this useful"?
 

Frimaire

Member
So ive got a question, i failed to get the 1st treasure shadow in the 2nd palace but ive noticed it shows up on the 1st few floors of mementos. Problem is when i hit its weakness it just insta dies now and i dont get the chance to even talk to it. Any solutions or i cant complete the persona library thing now?

Just summon a weak persona that can attack it's weakness from the compendium.
 

Guess Who

Banned
I don't really understand the design basis for Ohya's Confidant skill set at all. Did they really put that down on paper, look at it, and think "yes, players will find this useful"?

I have to assume there is some meaningful portion of the P5 player base we don't know about that just really sucks at ambushes.
 

duckroll

Member
I have to assume there is some meaningful portion of the P5 player base we don't know about that just really sucks at ambushes.

Even if they do.... so what? How does this help them? If you keep getting detected and presumably ambushed by enemies, the security is the least of your worries. One surround attack turn could wipe your party. On the other hand there are so many easy ways to lower the security level.
 
I don't really understand the design basis for Ohya's Confidant skill set at all. Did they really put that down on paper, look at it, and think "yes, players will find this useful"?

And the kind of players that would even bother completing Ohya's Confidant are the ones completing Palaces in one day anyway! So it would be stupid even if you didn't have to fucking TRY to raise your Alert Level past 30%.

And you can make an item multiple times in a single time slot (or have Temperance do it for you) that practically erases your Alert Level while still in the effing dungeon.

Alert Levels were a mistake.

They should have had Ohya give bonuses that, like, increase your actual stealth. Letting you jump covers at longer distances, making you lose a tail quicker if you're spotted and choose to run. I mean, fuck it, stealth's already broken anyway with how fucking easy it is. That's the reason the Alert Level system is utterly pointless. Why not go all the way and at least make stealth more fun?
 

Papercuts

fired zero bullets in the orphanage.
Even if they do.... so what? How does this help them? If you keep getting detected and presumably ambushed by enemies, the security is the least of your worries. One surround attack turn could wipe your party. On the other hand there are so many easy ways to lower the security level.

If you get detected you can still punch them and start the fight off on neutral ground, if you get to 100% they force you out of the dungeon. I've actually had some close calls on NG+ sprinting around, lol.

But either way she has unquestionably the worst confidant rewards. I guess they covered basically everything else already though.
 

PK Gaming

Member
The problem is that you have almost no incentive whatsoever to do palaces in more than one go, so you do all of your battle time in one massive chunk and then you're left with crazy long times without any actual battling. Then the entire point of the game is for your to choose what's best to do each time, but they fill days up with pointless shit and don't let you do much of anything for huge periods of time sometimes. And then they break patterns without telling you, too.

So in my case I beat a palace the first day, because that's what was best to do and then didn't go into mementos because it would expand after a change of heart. Little did I know that after that change I would be locked out of Mementos for nearly a month meaning I'd be without any real battling for like 9 or 10 hours of time.

They really need to bring back the tired mechanic and then just give players the option of doing other shit during the times they blocked out now. Force people to actually do palaces in a spread out manner, like 3 chunks or so. Mementos, too. Because of the way things are, honestly this is some of the worst pacing I've ever had in a game, and it's really amazing to me it scored as high as it did. Don't get me wrong I probably would still give it a 9, but I don't really expect mainstream reviewers to give this ridiculously much leeway on some glaring problems like this.

There's no hard rule that demands clearing a dungeon in one day. The whole point of the daily life / dungeon split is approaching the game at a pace that works for you. I'm personally fond of spreading out Palaces over a couple of days because it keeps the gameplay fresh and it prevents you from feeling burnt out. I don't mind missing out on confidant/stat up opportunities because there's no point in aggressively maxing out everything on your first run. In fact, Persona 5 is incredibly generous when compared to P4/P3. I've maxed out all but 3 social links and all of my stats by playing inefficiently.

I strongly disagree with forcing people into completing the dungeon in chunks because it's completely counterproductive to the conceit of the game (ie: doing things at your own pace). Also the Fatigue system as a poorly executed mechanic in literally every regard. It was a nuisance in the earlygame and irrelevant in the end, and it didn't even stop you from grinding.
 

Jiraiza

Member
11/24:

They sure know how to pull you out of the game when you have the entire cast all grouped up together in front of cops guarding the Diet Building. MC's not even wearing his hood!

Totally not suspicious at all.
 

Genryu

Banned
New Game+ Boss spoilers:
I lost my shit when the Twins did an all out attack on me, splash screen and everything. Amazing.
 

Laughing Banana

Weeping Pickle
I don't really understand the design basis for Ohya's Confidant skill set at all. Did they really put that down on paper, look at it, and think "yes, players will find this useful"?

Even if they do.... so what? How does this help them? If you keep getting detected and presumably ambushed by enemies, the security is the least of your worries. One surround attack turn could wipe your party. On the other hand there are so many easy ways to lower the security level.

It's more like "Ugh, we can't think of anything else in gameplay benefits to link to this Confidant, so like, whatevs."
 

FlynnCL

Unconfirmed Member
I finally finished it. I believe I clocked at around 120 hours! I could've done a lot better during free time sections, but I'm willing to do another play-through one day so it's not a huge deal. It's surprisingly hard trying to max out certain confidants when you realize just how little you want to hang out with them! Though, overall, I had a great time.

I was starting to feel down on the game during
the lead up to Palace 7; I assumed it to be the final dungeon and I had gained a lot of complaints up to that point. However, the turn of events after that addressed a few questions of mine, the game gets some much needed tension and the real final dungeon was a surprise—it reminded me of classic SMT.
 

PK Gaming

Member
Re: Ohya's confidant

The confidant ability is bottom class, but the confidant events are one of the fastest ways of building up Charm (since it increases during all of her ranks). Very useful when paired with Fortune's ability to increase social stats.
 
the alert level system is just badly designed. nobody is ever going to fail at ambushes repeatedly in this game. there are too many ways to cancel this whole system. i think most people ignore it.
 

Vorheez

Member
For the people who are taking over 100 hours to complete the game, what extra stuff are you all doing? I got a friend who is on palace 7 and about to wrap it up after just over 80 hours and I'm curious how he beat y'all by nearly 20 hours?
 

duckroll

Member
The problem I have with Ohya's skill design is that it goes directly against the design philosophy in every single Confidant. Every character gives bonuses which either open up new options you can use (skills, shops, things you can do in your free time, battle options, etc) or passive enhancements to things you might want to do (battle ability, negotiation bonuses, etc). Ohya is the ONLY one whose entire skill set is increments of a mitigation of a fail state. And not even multiple fail states but the same fail state. That makes it literally useless with zero variety in it. It's baffling. Imagine if Togo's entire skill set was increments of "you can run after being ambushed" at 10%, 30%, 60%, 90%, and 100% success rates. Even THEN, it would be more useful than Ohya's skill set.

the alert level system is just badly designed. nobody is ever going to fail at ambushes repeatedly in this game. there are too many ways to cancel this whole system. i think most people ignore it.

To me the alert system is no different from the stealth system in the game. It's badly designed but more a matter of aesthetics than real gameplay. It's a non-issue as long as it's part of the presentation and doesn't call attention to itself. By designing an entire Confidant around giving incremental mitigation to such a useless system though, that draws attention to it being bad.
 

Guess Who

Banned
For the people who are taking over 100 hours to complete the game, what extra stuff are you all doing? I got a friend who is on palace 7 and about to wrap it up after just over 80 hours and I'm curious how he beat y'all by nearly 20 hours?

Palace 7
isn't the end of the game
.
 
For the people who are taking over 100 hours to complete the game, what extra stuff are you all doing? I got a friend who is on palace 7 and about to wrap it up after just over 80 hours and I'm curious how he beat y'all by nearly 20 hours?

Hahahahaha, I'm about to enter the 7th Palace and I'm 120.

Still got another 20 to go I reckon.

Before you freak out, I have TONS of idle time. It's idling right now while I compose this post. I'm constantly checking GAF as I play and referencing Confidant guides and what not. That has inflated my time by at least a solid 20-30 I bet.
 
Alright so I'm playing without looking at any guides, have just finished the first dungeon so am now managing time.

Am I pretty much always best off spending time with a confidant? Then only if none are available do something to improve a social stat? Speaking of, which places are the best use of time for those stats this time around?

Anything else I want to get done early on?
 

Papercuts

fired zero bullets in the orphanage.
For the people who are taking over 100 hours to complete the game, what extra stuff are you all doing? I got a friend who is on palace 7 and about to wrap it up after just over 80 hours and I'm curious how he beat y'all by nearly 20 hours?

It took me 130 hours to beat it but I did every Mementos request and maxed every confidant on the last day possible, but either way I don't think that would make that much of a time descrepency since no matter what you do in Persona you're filling time with the same amount of events and always moving forward.

I let voice lines always play out, talked to NPCs a lot and rarely quick traveled until later but I still don't think that accounts for thaaaaaaat much time so I dunno. Your friend still has a bit to go though.
 

Jiraiza

Member
For the people who are taking over 100 hours to complete the game, what extra stuff are you all doing? I got a friend who is on palace 7 and about to wrap it up after just over 80 hours and I'm curious how he beat y'all by nearly 20 hours?

127 hours and I just got to the 7th Palace. I'm sure AFKing and Persona fusing took most of my time.
 
To me the alert system is no different from the stealth system in the game. It's badly designed but more a matter of aesthetics than real gameplay. It's a non-issue as long as it's part of the presentation and doesn't call attention to itself. By designing an entire Confidant around giving incremental mitigation to such a useless system though, that draws attention to it being bad.

yup, they probably didn't know what to do with her. some of these bonuses are just op. i guess there are only so many ways to offer perks for established mechanics. at least she's useful in other ways.
 

duckroll

Member
Alright so I'm playing without looking at any guides, have just finished the first dungeon so am now managing time.

Am I pretty much always best off spending time with a confidant? Then only if none are available do something to improve a social stat? Speaking of, which places are the best use of time for those stats this time around?

Not always. It depends on what you have on you too. I would say if there's a Confidant you find useful and it's available to rank up, it's always worth doing one of those first over other things. But if it's not going to rank up, you might want to see if you have a matching Persona in your stock that will increase the points you get from hanging out, and also whether you have a gift they might like. Also worth considering what hang out spots you have available. Rushing stuff early on when you have more limited bonus giving options might not be worth it because if you end up having to hang out multiple times to move up a rank, that's just extra wasted time which you could have saved by doing other things first until you have more options later.

That's just my general mindset when deciding what I want to do with free time. Not a guide to min/max.
 

PK Gaming

Member
The problem I have with Ohya's skill design is that it goes directly against the design philosophy in every single Confidant. Every character gives bonuses which either open up new options you can use (skills, shops, things you can do in your free time, battle options, etc) or passive enhancements to things you might want to do (battle ability, negotiation bonuses, etc). Ohya is the ONLY one whose entire skill set is increments of a mitigation of a fail state. And not even multiple fail states but the same fail state. That makes it literally useless with zero variety in it. It's baffling. Imagine if Togo's entire skill set was increments of "you can run after being ambushed" at 10%, 30%, 60%, 90%, and 100% success rates. Even THEN, it would be more useful than Ohya's skill set.

Yeah, it really sticks out in how under-cooked it is compared to the rest of the confidants. I'd even argue that her final rank ability is outright detrimental since Treasure Demon rates are directly tied to your security level.
 

raveking

Banned
I don't get the people that are saying they can't stand the game after the
7th palace
granted I'm not there yet as I'm about to do the
5th palace with Okumura
but this game is to addicting it's basically consumed my life now that school and exams are over for me. I'm just taking my time and enjoying the experience. Kinda sucks with the
Hawaii trip though, I could only spend time with one person and had to see how the other interactions played out on Youtube
 

duckroll

Member
Yeah, it really sticks out in how under-cooked it is compared to the rest of the confidants. I'd even argue that her final rank ability is outright detrimental since Treasure Demon rates are directly tied to your security level.

Since her Confidant story is about making people more aware of the Phantom Thieves, I don't understand why they didn't make it a boost on treasures in dungeons. Make it so your popularity is linked to the rarity of treasures looted in palaces and Mementos, and increasing the odds of locked chests spawning in Mementos. That would be a good passive ability.
 
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