Not quite to topic but...
I played Persona 5 non-stop, in part because I was addicted to it, in part because I didn't want to look at my life at that moment, with it being all but confirmed that I was not going to be able to go forward along my then-current path. It was just Persona, all day, all night.
I did a little thinking on the game after my first run and then I played it again, with a more critical eye, because I knew my sister had been sucked into the games seeing me play it and that eventually, she'd get there too and I wanted to come to terms with how I felt about it all before I discussed it with her.
I walked away from that second run with a firmer grasp on how I felt and my initial positive reaction reconfirmed. Thinking about it also, however stupid this might sound, helped me turn around some things in my head and decide how to proceed in my life in a situation where I no longer had any positive inclination towards doing anything. I wouldn't say I've made a good decision, but there wasn't a good decision to be made. So the game touched me quite deeply in that way.
At the same time though, this path of discovery involved discussing the game here on GAF and explicating where I felt the game fell short and the sort of limitations the series is working within. And then my sister had quite a toxic reaction to this game in particular, even if she's sort of walked it back over time. And then GAF has also turned more on the game, over time. So...the game got clouded a bit for me in both my own negative impressions and those around me and I started to question my affection for it again, in a more pessimistic light.
But then there was that Kotaku thread and for some reason putting down where I thought it fell short as a game, what I thought its strengths were, and how it compared to P3 and P4 was a cathartic experience. The cloud lifted within me.
IDK why exactly. Part of it is I realized that by my own standards my first post on the pros and cons of Persona 5 in that thread failed as a worthwhile critique. When I got to discussing the story, all I had to say were the problems I had with it, which is simply not a full view of my impressions of it. Part of it is that juxtaposing the story directly against that of Persona 4, which one vein of the thread was trying to hold up as obviously superior, undercut that vein of the thread, putting in full view just how overblown the criticism wrt that has become. I was able to see again that if I was able to like Persona 4 despite its flaws, and if that was being accepted as a fine position, why wasn't it the same with Persona 5? Why was my liking it problematic to me, given the things I could say about it? I was able to put my own and other people's criticisms in better perspective again.
