There are things, in our world, that you must like. If you don’t, you are a moron.
I can list some: The Queen, Tarantino’s movies, Guardiola’s Barcelona, pizza, dogs.
Anyone can have an opinion on everything. However, certain things can be addressed by personal taste, and personal taste alone. Some topics have a technical backbone instead, where arguing is allowed if done properly.
Here’s my argument for today: Persona 5 sucks.
Now that I have your attention (and rage, and hate), follow me. Please.
Persona 5 is a game that bored me to the bone and, while I recognize some of its amazing design choices, I truly can’t understand why people went crazy about this game.
Let’s start from the pro’s: incredible art and visual style. Seriously, Persona 5 has…personality. Character. It doesn’t go unnoticed. Sometimes it reminded me of Jet Set Radio, with that incredible attention to detail and boldness. It just appears and sounds great.
Speaking of which, the soundtrack is simply amazing. SFX are also perfect, and while the English dub is a stab to the ears, I found intriguing that the team allowed users to download Japanese original voice over for free.
I also recognize that mechanics and dynamics work as they should – the game is polished, it is complex, deep and interesting to some extent. However, I can’t see any reason why this game should be a positive experience.
no further comment required
Simply put, Persona 5 is a simulation of Japanese adolescent life, mixed with a gatcha-style system that forces the player to collect, breed, and train monsters to fight with. That’s it. Nothing extremely new, nor exciting. In between long and redundant dialogues, there is a lot of grinding (as expected from a JRPG), dating (?), and collecting stuff.
The first dynamic – the Japanese adolescent life simulator – mixes interesting mechanics with long, dead times, and lots of planning. For the equivalent of a whole year (or so) the player is forced to plan every daily activity according to a schedule that is partially forced by the game’s events, resulting in an everlasting work life simulator. Frustrating, to say the least, for those adults that already have to plan their week outside of a digital game. If I turn on my PS4 I would like to engage in a different set of activities than those I face on a daily basis.
Let alone the planning: what about reading redundant dialogues for hours, with characters repeating the very same concepts for three, or four times? I tried to fast-forward some dialogues, timing them. It takes several minutes for the player to even skip parts of uninteresting plot discussion. For a time-consuming JRPG this should not be a surprise, but in Persona 5 it still feels as “too much”. Too much of the player’s time wasted in reading endless lines of text.
Not to mention the repetitive sessions of lectures where the player has to answer a question, and take note of what the teacher says in order to pass some tests afterwards. Sure, you can learn something from this. But be aware not to call Persona 5 a game for learning.
Then we have the pocket-monsters system: I am familiar with Persona’s gameplay, so this was the best aspect I found in the downsides of the game. While the personas are intriguing, and well characterized, the excitement fades after a few minutes of play: as frustration ensues, the player realizes that the very same feeling of growth, and breeding, can be achieved with any gatcha on Apple or Google Store, for example. Which, again, would eliminate the frustration of a GoogleCalendar-meets-dating-sim gameplay.
At some point I wondered: is it me? Am I too much critical with things I don’t like? Perhaps. I searched for negative Persona 5 reviews, and didn’t find one. Metacritic is a praising party. The best I could find is this post on Gamasutra Blogs, but it still doesn’t sound like a genuine critic to this game.
So yes: maybe I am a moron, a contrarian, a grouchy type, the only person in the world who didn’t like Persona 5. Amen to that. I prefer it this way, than praising something just because the rest of the world did.
zero/3 