Novel Mike
Member
Wow, I'm surprised so many were disappointed by P5. It's not flawless for sure, but I loved it and still think it's my favorite in the series.
Pretty much my reaction to this thread as well. It blew me away with how much it met the really high expectations I had for it.
I think I summed up the various problems I and other people had with the game in a previous post so I'm just going to quote that.
Its still extensively overrated to me.
Characters that have no direction or just flat out don't grow post whatever arc they are introduced in (Ann, Haru).
Story elements that just seem completely nonsensical.(Why have the traitor go out like that? Why does Joker have to turn himself in to prove the 7th palace person guilty?)
The cast lacks general group development with several of the special events throughout the year being used for plot points or ruined by certain characters (School Festival is used as a means to move the plot along, the School Trip is ruined by Mishima and Ryuji)
The Fanservice centers around a character that literally goes through an arc about sexual harassment which is just creepy as hell.
Extremely unnecessary additions to combat (why do Nuke and Psi even exist?)
The Cover mechanic makes the game stupidly easy (Advantage on almost every encounter in the game!)
Mementos is garbage (nuff said).
Story elements mirror Persona 4 beat for beat (including during the freaking ending of all things).
An obsession with trying to make each new arc and target more grandiose then the last (No I didn't want the game to suddenly have an end of the world type plot thrown in the last minute without a damn hint of foreshadowing unlike the previous games)
Palaces get worse and worse as you progress through the gameAlso just as a note: I rather they go back to randomly generated dungeons if they are going to do dungeons like palaces again.Palace 7's mice mazes are the worst use of padding in an RPG I've seen in a long fucking time.
Finally, I think I had high expectations for the game but one thing that has really been clear to me after time has passed is just how poorly the story is actually written and hobbled together and how the game really lacks a clear evolution over Persona 4. Persona 4 wasn't a clear evolution over Persona 3 but it came out 2 years after Persona 3 so I can forgive it for not evolving.
But Persona 5 came out 8 years after Persona 4. They had plenty of time to work on the game and it was delayed time and again and for this? I know a lot of people liked the game but its easily the worst of the modern Persona's. Hell one of the most unique things about it is its art and its sense of style... But if you take that away (when 90% of the time you aren't seeing that as Joker wonders around the real world) it looks extremely dated and boring.
Those are the major problems I have with the game but theres a ton of minor ones as well such as the social links (confidants, whatever its the same thing) for NPC's all literally following the same exact format. You meet them>You see a personal problem they have>They get in big trouble>You not no secretly help them>Rank 10It's actually cool the first time you see it but when you see it repeat over and over again the pattern becomes obvious and predictable and it makes the reveal at rank 10 feel extensively played out when literally EVERY character figures it out.they find out your identity.
I'm not trying to hate on Persona 5, its not a BAD game its just not very good either. I think at release it was vastly overrated with people calling it GotY which I just can't agree with in the slightest. I'm hoping as time has gone on and more people have played through the whole thing that it'll be viewed in a more objective light but time will tell. I still see people saying how amazing MGSV was which was released in an unfinished and unsatisfying state and it still got a stupid amount of praise despite being released in the state it was in.
I don't know how anyone can defend characters like Haru who provide next to nothing to the plot or to her own character development or story elements that towards the end don't seem to make a lot of sense. I wanted this game to be better then it was and I think a lot of other people did too and its not wrong to bring up those kinds of criticisms on a game that took THIS long to make and has sold this well. This isn't a niche RPG anymore and it deserves to really be scrutinized with how much time went into it and the product they ended up making because of that.
Persona can be better then this, hell it was better then this.
The game is just honestly underwhelming and has a verity of issues that weren't present in previous games to the extent they are in this game. 6 months in and people have already forgotten about a lot of the game because none of it ever really has any impact. Hell I mentioned before but I had to look up various antagonists names because I couldn't remember their names because they had so little of an impact on me.
Yet I can recall almost every major story and plot point and name of every character of Persona 3 which I haven't played since the PSP version came out. Same for Persona 4, those games just had better characters and stories. I understand why people want to like these characters but I don't think anyone can really argue that they are severely lacking proper characterization and development, with Ann being the worst offender as I mentioned in my previous post in this topic.