Wait, what? is that true? you can miss the new content entirely? that sounds completely insane.
Yes, it’s true. I had read they added a new girl in Royal, so this being my first Persona, I tried to befriend her at every given chance. Turns out the character that gatekeeps the beefiest part of the extra content is another.
In a nutshell:
First 20 hours: interesting story, good combat balance, fantastic.
20 to 60 hours: interesting story, combat gets easy as you learn the ins and outs and get good equipment, but still fantastic.
Last 30 hours: story slows down, combat is just a routine at this point, dungeons get thrown at you again and again and it sucks the life out of the game.
But Persona 5 has a fantastic cast, great music, and great art, charming and memorable. I had big issues with the grind fest at the end, but I love the game and you absolutely should give it a chance.
In my experience, the first 3-5 hours are the worst part of the game. Everyone talks so much, stuff gets repeated over and over and over, there’s a good dozen characters introduced before you even really get control of things, and you make more train rides than battles. The anime/manga storytelling tropes are just fiercely strong in P5. Every single character has to have at least a line in every single conversation, there’s a dialogue and a scene for the most inane stuff imaginable. There’s literally hours of narrative content that could be cut without affecting the overall narration too much. My first impact with the game was just terrible, but it does pick up after you get a full 4-people party.
Sure, the whole thing slows down towards the end, but it’s mostly the gameplay that suffers. I don’t think the gameplay in P5 is that deep or interesting, it’s all about finding and exploiting weaknesses. I always heard about the importance of buffs and debuffs in Megaten games, but I didn’t really see this in P5 except against some red Shadows in some dungeons. Battles against monsters that have no elemental weaknesses are just a chore - you try every element and find no weakness, then you try every status ailment and in more than a few cases you end up just exhausting the enemy’s HP through regular attacks before you’ve found an exploitable weak point. Dungeon exploration is as by-the-numbers as it gets, and in the later dungeons the devs thought it’d be a good idea to make thing even more redundant with braindead puzzles that probably intended to spice things up, but only manage to make everything even more of a chore.
My main beef with P5 is that it’s kinda two games merged into one, and it makes a pretty poor job of getting the life-sim part at the service of the dungeon crawling. The life sim gives you too much freedom, putting you at serious risk of not getting the optimal requirements for the dungeon exploration and combat.
The game is engaging enough, sure. The story is a bit predictable but good. I like the characters. The artstyle is fantastic, as is the OST. If you’re even the slightest bit into Japan and anime, I can see how this can be a dream game. But it’s too long no matter how you slice it, and the combat never gets as deep or as satisfying as it should.
It's true, you habe to max out a social link im order to view the new content. That said, the game also tells you time after time to go talk to that character, and also tells you when you won't be able to, so it's not really that bad unless you aren't paying attention.
And if you manage to miss it you can just stroll through the whole game on NG+ with your OP demons and skipping every cutscene, which takes around 15-20 hours.
The problem is that the key character is completely unappealing, which made me give up on him to prioritize other social links. While the game hints that he’ll become unavailable at a certain point, nothing makes you think that his social link is the key to a whole new school semester. And when the game did reveal the time limit for the character, it was already too late for me to max his link out anyway. Not going back to a 20-hour old save just for that when I’m so close to the end.
