How the hell is the dungeon design a stepdown? People need to replay P3 and P4, and see how boring those dungeons are.
I replayed Golden right after I finished Persona 5 because I couldn't figure out why I disliked P5 so much and thought that maybe I just wasn't making fair comparisons and P4 wasn't as good as I remembered it. I was wrong, Persona 5 just isn't very good.
The dungeons in P5 are mostly terrible and the randomized dungeons of P4 are better in every way. Sure they are randomized (for the most part) and not unique or interesting but I'd take them any day over doing the P5 dungeons ever again for one simple reason, the P4 dungeons aren't offensively long and drawn out. Every dungeon has a max of around 10 levels and getting through the whole thing takes maybe an hour or so, compare this to the several hours the P5 dungeons take many of which have god awful mechanics (mice maze) that repeat over and over again.
Sure the dungeons in P5 are more stylish and more fleshed out but the basic problem with the dungeons and the whole game in general is that the game is constantly trying to one up itself in every arc. Every dungeon has to be longer and more grandiose then the last and by dungeon 5 they just become slogs to play through. The first dungeon was quite excellent IMO because it didn't have many mechanics that made the dungeon drag on longer then it needed to, it got a bit old by the end but it still wasn't a bad experience overall. From here it goes downhill with each new dungeon giving you more tedious 'puzzles' that are only made to pad out the length of the dungeon itself.
Then there is the problem of the cover mechanic. It's far to powerful and honestly it breaks the game. Using the cover mechanic makes you invisible to the enemy and even if they are looking right at you they can't see you, this gives you advantage in EVERY single battle if you want it to, making every battle simple and boring. Bosses also generally just seem like HP sponges with maybe one interesting mechanic which is generally used to speed up the pace of the battle.
The battles themselves are mostly fine but I've said this before and I'll say it again, Why do Nuke and Psi exist? Guns matter for the style and the hold up mechanic but they also are not very useful outside of hitting an enemies weakness (and gun skills later on but that literally could have been anything they just slapped guns on it to give a bigger purpose to them) but the problem with Nuke and Psi is that they are just completely unnecessary. Bless and Curse had already been improved to offer more then instant kill spells so why do we need another 2 elements on top of that? It's not as if they did anything interesting with those elements they are just yet another 2 ways to damage enemies the only thing it 'adds' to the gameplay is making it slightly harder to get proper coverage of all elements for your team but its so stupidly easy to get your MC a persona with whatever element you need it seems completely pointless.
These two elements feel like something that was thought up from the very beginning but they never found a really good way to use them and instead of cutting them they just kept them because it would've been more work to remove them then to use them despite them being completely unneeded and unnecessary.
I don't even want to get into my issues with the story and its characters as this post has gone on long enough but yeah, Persona 5 was hyped as hell and was in development for a long ass time that like FFXV and MGSV I'm surprised it's taken as long as it has for people to start really being critical of it.
If you love the game more power to you but Persona 5 was a massive disappointment to me and many others.
