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'Persona 5' Overview

You'll have a "change of heart" after reading.

By Jared WilliamsPublished 6 years ago 12 min read
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Let’s talk for a second about one my favorite games ever, Persona 5. Let me just start off by saying that just because you haven’t played another Persona game, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy Persona 5, as their stories are individual but share the same gameplay elements. Persona 5 brings new things to the table and perfects old formulas to make an experience gamers will never forget. If you’re like me and are an avid RPG gamer, Persona 5 is a must-have for you. I highly encourage you to pick it up if you haven’t already done so. I’ll keep this as spoiler free as possible.

If all you’re doing is watching videos and looking at screenshots, Persona 5, and all the other Personas for that matter, may look like a regular turn-based RPG, but it’s so much more than that. There’s so much to do in this game that it isn’t all about the battles or even one single aspect, the game gives a nice blend of everything it has to offer, and keeps it balanced. There will be three main sections to this overview: Battling, social aspect, and the story/world.

So let’s get into the social aspect of the game. No, I don’t mean you can play the game online with friends, so you FPS fanboys and fangirls might as well just click off this overview now. Throughout the game, you will meet various people, some who join your party and gain the ability to use personas, but also some who don’t. With these people, you establish what’s known as a “social link.” The more time you spend with your allies and friends (in the game, they’re called “commandants”), the stronger your bond becomes with them, and your social link will increase in rank. Increasing the ranks of your social links has many perks. Each social link is tied to someone related to an ability or perk you have in the game, and when you increase that social link, your perk becomes more useful. For example, one of the characters you’ll have a relationship with is the weapon shop owner, and increasing his rank will expand the customizable options for guns you can use in battle. Most times when hanging out with your commandants, the game will present you with options for what to say, which will determine the speed of which you increase your rank. Each social link will provide enough back or side story to the game, very rarely was I left thinking, “what happened?”

Each commandant is also tied to an arcana, or a tarot card representation. Each arcana represents a struggle each commandant is going through in the game, and your relationship is built on helping them through their struggle. One example of an arcana is the “emperor,” which represents revelation, and that is something one of your party members goes through during the game. Each persona the protagonist can use is also tied to an arcana, and increasing the social link of a commandant of the same arcana as a persona you create (which I’ll explain in a minute) will make that persona stronger. For example, the weapon shop owner is tied to the “hanged man” arcana, so increasing his rank will allow your hanged man personas to become stronger when created.

I mentioned earlier the passage of time. As you play the game, there are three main segments to each day, school (which is comprised of early morning, morning, and afternoon), after school, and evening. I only mention school because a lot of the story happens during the first segment of the day, but you have very little control over what the protagonist does during this time. After school, you’re able to hang out with your commandants and increase the rank of your relationships with them, go to the dungeon, work, or go to different areas to shop or sightsee. Each time you hang out with your commandant or work, time will pass. If it’s after school, you will go into the evening. If it’s evening, you will automatically go to bed and start the next day. If you go to the dungeon (which is only available after school), you will become tired in the evening and will be unable to go out. How you spend your day is completely up to you. Here’s a tip, you can spend as much time in a dungeon as you want, time will not advance until you leave. You can spend seven hours in a dungeon and time will not move on. Going to shops or different areas will not advance time either, so upgrade your equipment and items before spending time with people or going into the dungeon. You can work jobs such as the supermarket or the beef bowl restaurant, which will earn you money and increase your social stats, but will consume time in doing so.

But wait, there’s more: the social stats I just mentioned. Your social status will help you form and strengthen your relationships with your commandants. You have five social stats to increase; Knowledge, Guts, Proficiency, Kindness, and Charm. Each one has different perks and some are keys to unlocking certain social links. They can be leveled up by doing or saying different things, such as reading books to increase your knowledge, or taking a bath to increase your charm. Some things are not unlocked until reaching certain social status milestones, such as forming a relationship with a girl you’re unable to speak to until you have a Kindness level of “Empathetic.” Jobs can also increase your social stats by working a job that is related, like the flower shop, which can increase your kindness.

Well, that raps up my overview of Per...wait. That’s only 1/3rd of the game. That’s right, we still have the story and battles to talk about. The battle system, as I said before, is a turn-based system. Your characters will take turns fighting the enemies, and your enemies will do the same to fight you. You have a choice as to how your party will play; you can set tactics as to how they’ll act during their turns, or you can set them to manual so you can control them in battle yourself. The AI generally is pretty good, but there are a few times when manual will most likely be necessary. I went with manual for every boss fight. Selecting a balanced mode will make your allies heal when their HP gets low, automatically attack an enemy weakness (if it’s known), and otherwise use the strongest attacks possible.

In fact, there were only three things I disliked about the battles; enemy weakness knowledge, the talking, and the protagonist’s death.I persona-lly (see what I did there?) didn’t like always having to experiment to find the enemy weakness , as opposed to having a battle navigator search for weaknesses like in Persona 3 and 4, but I guess it’s a little more realistic. But, once you find the weakness, it will be saved and you can look at it when you battle the same enemy again. Whenever your party member attacks an enemy with the right spell, falls, misses, gets a critical hit, or basically does anything, one particular ally will say something. These can range from encouraging messages like, “Yeah, knock’ em down!” to something derogatory like, “Focus!” You kind of get used to this but if you’ve never played a Persona game, they can get annoying really quickly.

Let’s talk for a minute about death (such a happy subject, right?). The last negative thing about battling in this game is when the party leader (the protagonist) dies, it’s game over. This is a Persona staple and will probably not bother long time Persona players, but if you’re new to the series it may bug you a bit until you get used to it. You could justify it for most of the game by saying that most of the story is a retelling of what happened in the past, so it’d make sense the story is over if the protagonist dies, but it’s still annoying. Once you add in the fact that it’s possible for enemies to one-shot you with a death spell, some battles quickly become more about protecting your leader rather than killing the enemy. Luckily, the one-shots don’t happen too often and the enemy’s AI is pretty balanced so you don’t have to be on-edge for every battle.

As with previous Persona games, enemies can be knocked down and taken advantage of by the player. Whenever someone in the party utilizes an enemy weakness or hits critically, the enemy is knocked down, allowing the same character to attack again. When attacked by multiple enemies, you can switch your personas around and make sure to hit all their weaknesses. Once all enemies are knocked down, a “Hold Up!” will happen, where the enemy gets cornered by the party, at which point there are four options. During a hold-up, you can choose to negotiate for the enemy to join you as a persona, get money, get items, or you can perform an All-Out-Attack which is a frenzy of attacks meant to wipe out the opponent. This makes battles flow simply and help move the game along easily; simply sneak up on the enemy to strike first, attack their weaknesses so they’ll be knocked down, then destroy them or negotiate their lives for money or items.

As I mentioned before, there are a couple different ways of obtaining personas. I already discussed getting them through battle, but you can also fuse multiple personas together to create one persona. Some of the personas are only obtainable through this method. Each persona you obtain is recorded in the Persona Compendium and re-obtainable for... a small fee (do I sound like Money Bags from Spyro yet?). If you’re a completionist, you’ll definitely enjoy creating different personas through this method and completing the compendium. The further you strengthen your bond with each commandant, the stronger your personas will become at the time of their creation. This is all well and good, but the strongest personas in the game are only created when you reach a maximum social rank with your commandants, one for each. In order to complete this game, you’ll have to understand basically every aspect of it. You’ll need to use your time wisely, and be careful when deciding who to spend time with.

The world of Persona 5 is strangely immersive. You’re put in the shoes of a teenager who was wrongly convicted of assault on an adult. As a result of your heinous crime, you’re forced to live with a man who owns a small cafe, a place in which you live in the attic. Though you’re on probation, your caretaker eventually lets you run around and have complete freedom, giving you the ability to use your time to its full potential. Being that you get to name your character, and you get to choose how your character reacts to almost everything, feel like you have control over the game. I’ve played through the game twice, once doing everything I personally would do and choose how I would react, and again, this time choosing responses to maximize social ranks as quickly as possible. However, those aren’t the only options, as you can play however you want. When characters expect you to respond to dialogue, there will be options that pop up, and choosing from those options will have different effects on what the other characters do and say, as well as how quickly your relationship with them grows. The game takes place in Shibuya and the outer areas around it, which are unlockable by the storyline, reading magazines, talking to people, etc. The game does a great job by separating the areas but still making them connected to build a world that feels bigger than it actually is.

There are many different ways you can interpret the story, but it blends together quite well. You play as the protagonist, who is quite unpopular in school because of the crime he was accused and convicted of. You meet others that are oppressed from being misunderstood or controlled by an antagonistic adult figure, just as you were. These other children become your allies, and the things you share in common strengthen your friendship and trust with these individuals. You’ll assist your friends and battle against these antagonistic adults in dungeons literally created by their ego. If you’ve played Persona 3 and remember “Tartarus,” or Persona 4’s “Midnight Channel,” the “Metaverse” will be quite a surprise to you. The Metaverse is a cognitive world created by the people of the game. They reflect the real thoughts and feelings of each person. Instead of being randomly generated, these “palaces” (the dungeons) within the Metaverse created by your enemies remain the same no matter when you go. They’re just as big though, if not bigger. Your checkmarks through the palaces are the safe rooms. There are multiple safe rooms within each palace and when you return, you can start from any safe room you’ve been to. These are also places within the palace for you to save or check your progress, or even leave the palace if you’d like. Each palace follows the same principle; navigate your way through, unlock doors, solve puzzles, etc. There may even be times you need to go back to the real world to get through obstacles. When you complete the dungeon and defeat the boss, the enemy’s palace will fall and the antagonist will have a “change of heart.” Changing the antagonists’ hearts is the main objective throughout the story and doing so will allow you to escape whatever trouble you’re in at the time. Once you help all your party members out through their predicaments, they finally help you in getting out of your own. The one negative thing I will say about the story is that it is EXTREMELY long, but Persona games usually are. Depending on how much extra stuff you’re doing (like maxing out all social links, or even social stats), you can expect to spend anywhere between 80-120 hours during your first playthrough. That may seem long, but it’s time well spent.

As I said at the beginning, Persona 5 is one of my favorite games ever. When I played it the first time, I had never actually played any other Persona games, but afterwards, I went and played 3 and 4. Next on my list is to play Personas 1 and 2 (both of them) and eventually play some other Shin Megami Tensei games. I’m not going to give a score or anything, because I think scores make people sound pretentious, but I will say you need to pick this one up if you haven’t done so already. Hell, I’d even go so far as to say if you don’t have a PS3 or PS4 (it’s available for both), it’s worth it to pick one up just for this game.

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About the Creator

Jared Williams

I just enjoy writing my thoughts down. No one knows who may be interested.

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