Happy Life
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Persona 5 with the addon
Everyone in the world, and especially everyone in this thread, knows that two trails stretch across the floor behind Atlus: a brown one from Katherina and a yellow one from P4G. Fortunately, not even ten years have passed before he finally came to his senses — took a bath and thoroughly washed his pants.
The city locations are not some dead-end street in a random middle-of-nowhere town with a couple of static autistic invalids, barely supported by PS2 hardware and looking more like a purgatory afterlife, but a "full-fledged" Tokyo. Shibuya, Akiba, Kabukicho — these nostalgic places are painfully familiar to us; we've been there on school excursions, sneaked out at night from our parents and got scolded in the morning, jumped over garage roofs, scraped our knees on the asphalt of Public Park №3, and grew up alongside them since the nineties. The streets — detailed as much as the PS3 allows — with signs, storefronts, shops of various shapes, with dozens of bodiless silhouettes of pedestrians endlessly scurrying back and forth, with subway stations, maid cafes, arcades, burger joints, ramen shops, host clubs, and other recognizable spots of our childhood and daily lives, really help you feel a living city and happily immerse yourself in it.
The visual style... Let's just say it's closely tied to the general game style. I had to get used for a very long time to how deliberately gaudy and crude the menus are plastered in every direction, how the fonts are skewed, how the button animations and transitions between elements twitch, and so on — at first glance, it all looks like the work of someone in a very serious stage of mental illness, and is almost unreadable. In short, it took me quite a while to get used to this.
But if you put that aside, overall, the general game style — which didn't attract me much at first (the "we're cool, stylish, bright, brash thief-robbers, screw everyone, no one can catch us" vibe, etc. etc.) — turned out to be maintained from start to finish. Both stylistically and narratively, it is thoroughly developed and ultimately reached that benchmark of engagement where even some cheese moments aren't perceived as excessive or overplayed, but as pleasant and organic.
But none of this would matter if it weren't for the main point — not even ten years have passed before the next-gen PlayStation allowed the devs to create a normal, sane, hand-crafted dungeon instead of the endless procedurally generated crap with a couple of dead ends from the fourth game. It would seem like a simple and obvious thing, completely standard for the RPG genre. What stopped them from doing this earlier? As a result, we have a dedicated dungeon for each stage that adheres to the theme of the chapter from start to finish, fully revealing the backstory of the "target" (basically all dungeons are made with quality, but about half of them seemed genius to me within the context of the game), with detailed full maps, with simple dungeon-styled puzzles, with carefully directed floors, having structure and meaning, and playing into the aforementioned "heist" style.
What's funny is that parallel to the story dungeons, the devs added another, not strictly mandatory "classic" procedurally generated one. And despite a few features that diversify it compared to the procedural dungeon of the previous part and add convenience, it becomes more obvious than ever how stupid and sloppy a format this is. I hope this was a sufficient lesson for Atlus — never again to put procedural garbage in as main content in the future.
With this approach, the combat also stops seeming like a meaningless, unliftable piece of chthonic machinery — the player now has an incentive to play properly and enjoy the dungeon stages instead of skipping procedural floors on Very Easy, which is why the hardcore Persona system isn't as stressful; it stops seeming like complexity for the sake of complexity and is perceived on par with systems in other games. Although, of course, both in combat and in the optional procedural dungeon, you can really feel the echoes of how reluctantly Atlus bends to mentally healthy people, grudgingly bringing their heap of mechanics into a digestible form and slowly moving it away from the "classics."
And besides the mentioned, new features were added to the combat that diversify it, which is absolutely correct.
I don't always give numerical ratings to games that I've enjoyed from start to finish, so let it be 9.5/10, and in some places even 9 — some flaws are still felt in the pacing, gameplay, plus the tediousness of frequent running to the Velvet Room. However, then I remember that this is a game from Atlus that fundamentally corrected the main mistakes for which I trashed the recently ported fourth game — and did so not haphazardly, but quite with quality — and therefore I give it a honest Atlus-style 10/10.
ps: fishing is fine. Grindy and repetitive, rewards are so-so, but the process itself is pleasant, and the coolest fish can make you sweat a bit. As a connoisseur of JRPG fishing, I give it a solid average with potential for growth.
Everyone in the world, and especially everyone in this thread, knows that two trails stretch across the floor behind Atlus: a brown one from Katherina and a yellow one from P4G. Fortunately, not even ten years have passed before he finally came to his senses — took a bath and thoroughly washed his pants.
The city locations are not some dead-end street in a random middle-of-nowhere town with a couple of static autistic invalids, barely supported by PS2 hardware and looking more like a purgatory afterlife, but a "full-fledged" Tokyo. Shibuya, Akiba, Kabukicho — these nostalgic places are painfully familiar to us; we've been there on school excursions, sneaked out at night from our parents and got scolded in the morning, jumped over garage roofs, scraped our knees on the asphalt of Public Park №3, and grew up alongside them since the nineties. The streets — detailed as much as the PS3 allows — with signs, storefronts, shops of various shapes, with dozens of bodiless silhouettes of pedestrians endlessly scurrying back and forth, with subway stations, maid cafes, arcades, burger joints, ramen shops, host clubs, and other recognizable spots of our childhood and daily lives, really help you feel a living city and happily immerse yourself in it.
The visual style... Let's just say it's closely tied to the general game style. I had to get used for a very long time to how deliberately gaudy and crude the menus are plastered in every direction, how the fonts are skewed, how the button animations and transitions between elements twitch, and so on — at first glance, it all looks like the work of someone in a very serious stage of mental illness, and is almost unreadable. In short, it took me quite a while to get used to this.
But if you put that aside, overall, the general game style — which didn't attract me much at first (the "we're cool, stylish, bright, brash thief-robbers, screw everyone, no one can catch us" vibe, etc. etc.) — turned out to be maintained from start to finish. Both stylistically and narratively, it is thoroughly developed and ultimately reached that benchmark of engagement where even some cheese moments aren't perceived as excessive or overplayed, but as pleasant and organic.
But none of this would matter if it weren't for the main point — not even ten years have passed before the next-gen PlayStation allowed the devs to create a normal, sane, hand-crafted dungeon instead of the endless procedurally generated crap with a couple of dead ends from the fourth game. It would seem like a simple and obvious thing, completely standard for the RPG genre. What stopped them from doing this earlier? As a result, we have a dedicated dungeon for each stage that adheres to the theme of the chapter from start to finish, fully revealing the backstory of the "target" (basically all dungeons are made with quality, but about half of them seemed genius to me within the context of the game), with detailed full maps, with simple dungeon-styled puzzles, with carefully directed floors, having structure and meaning, and playing into the aforementioned "heist" style.
What's funny is that parallel to the story dungeons, the devs added another, not strictly mandatory "classic" procedurally generated one. And despite a few features that diversify it compared to the procedural dungeon of the previous part and add convenience, it becomes more obvious than ever how stupid and sloppy a format this is. I hope this was a sufficient lesson for Atlus — never again to put procedural garbage in as main content in the future.
With this approach, the combat also stops seeming like a meaningless, unliftable piece of chthonic machinery — the player now has an incentive to play properly and enjoy the dungeon stages instead of skipping procedural floors on Very Easy, which is why the hardcore Persona system isn't as stressful; it stops seeming like complexity for the sake of complexity and is perceived on par with systems in other games. Although, of course, both in combat and in the optional procedural dungeon, you can really feel the echoes of how reluctantly Atlus bends to mentally healthy people, grudgingly bringing their heap of mechanics into a digestible form and slowly moving it away from the "classics."
And besides the mentioned, new features were added to the combat that diversify it, which is absolutely correct.
I don't always give numerical ratings to games that I've enjoyed from start to finish, so let it be 9.5/10, and in some places even 9 — some flaws are still felt in the pacing, gameplay, plus the tediousness of frequent running to the Velvet Room. However, then I remember that this is a game from Atlus that fundamentally corrected the main mistakes for which I trashed the recently ported fourth game — and did so not haphazardly, but quite with quality — and therefore I give it a honest Atlus-style 10/10.
ps: fishing is fine. Grindy and repetitive, rewards are so-so, but the process itself is pleasant, and the coolest fish can make you sweat a bit. As a connoisseur of JRPG fishing, I give it a solid average with potential for growth.
My sword, my trusted ally, unphased by my aspect.
