Danny Stueber, Staff Writer
When Persona 5 was announced back in 2013, I knew it be my top game of the year whenever it came out. Time and time again it was delayed until this past April when it was finally released and what do you know, I was not wrong all those years ago.
Persona 5 is a long-ride filled with great characters, a great story, a plethora of things to do, and even after completing the game after 100 plus hours, I was ready to jump right back in for another play through. Not only is it one of the most stylish games ever made, it’s possibly one of the best RPGs ever made period.
Presentation
When Persona 4 was released back in July of 2008, you played as a kid who moved to a small town with your uncle for a year in and right away you were the most popular student around. Everyone loved you and everywhere you went you felt like no one could be cooler than you.
Persona 5 goes in the complete opposite direction. You are forced to go live in the big city after being expelled from your previous school and receiving a criminal record for a crime you did not commit (you stopped a man from abducting a woman but it turns out that man was a high-ranking government official and was able to have you arrested for attacking him).
You go to live with a guardian while you serve your probation period and everyone stays away from you thinking you’re a hardened criminal that could snap at any moment.
The complete contrast was very refreshing after Persona 4 and being treated differently and not having a power trip was something I have not really experienced in a game before. You feel like garbage because of how everyone treats you even though you did the right thing in saving that woman and you must work your way to being seen as a good kid through the game.
To do this, you hang out with friends, go to your jobs, read books, take exams, and everything else you’d assume a high school student would do. Half of the Persona series is life management and simulators; that might sound boring but it’s the complete opposite when everything you do has flair or helps make your character stronger.
You also only have a year in the city before you are sent back home and you can only really do two activities a day (one after school and one in the evening), so you need to spend your time wisely.
Like I said though, this is only half of the game. The other half is dungeon crawling through the hearts of corrupt adults to make them realize their misgivings. You and your friends are able to go to another world where if you steal the “treasure” of these corrupt adults, you can cause them to have a change of heart and to become better people, even admitting to their crimes.
The game does an amazing job at setting up your opponents and making you want to take them out with some examples being a school coach that physically abuses his athletes, an artist who plagiarizes his students work for his own gain, and a mob boss who uses students as drug mules.
The villains are complete scum and it’s up to you and your friends to take them out while also balancing your real everyday life. This all takes place in what is known as “Palaces” which are all completely different from the previous one before it. They take the physical representation of the adults desires so a school will look like a castle or a city will look like a bank with the citizens as ATMs.
All of this is held together with the most stylish visuals and a perfect soundtrack. Every menu, loading screen, battle animation, purchase option, etc. has extravagant visual design that continuously impressed me. I even felt anger at some points seeing how much polish went into this game’s design compared to other games.
Additionally, the game is filled with an incredible soundtrack, one in which is full of wonderful compositions and vocals that makes Persona 5 one of the most stylish game I have ever seen in my life hands down. If you ever see me walking on campus, there’s no doubt the soundtrack is being played in my head.
Gameplay
In Persona 5, you fight with personas, physical representations of your inner resolve to rebel against evil adults. In this case, each team member’s persona takes on the look of famous thieves- since you are, after all, stealing the corrupted desires in treasure form from your enemies. For example, Captain Kidd, the pirate and Robin hood steal from the rich to give to the poor.
Every teammates persona has strengths and weaknesses like your friend being strong with fire attacks but weak to ice damage. As the main character, you can use multiple personas though that you collect through the Palaces. It has an almost Pokémon style but not nearly as many compared to that series to collect.
Battles in Persona 5 are turn based. What that means if you have never played a turn based game before, your team and the enemy team each have turns to attack until there is a winner. The main goal of each fight is to find the enemies weakness and if you can do that, the enemy is knocked down.
If they are down, you can attack them with every member at once for a lot of damage, or talk to the enemy to try to convince them to join your Persona team, give you money, or give you items. Every motion of attack whether you’re calling on help from your persona, to firing your gun, or to just straight up attacking, has the same amount of visual flair as the rest of the game.
If you just want to rush through fights, you can just press a button and it will play out for you. The game has thought of everything when it comes to accessibility and making sure no matter how you want to play, you can do it. It even has an option where you can make it so that your character never dies and you can just enjoy the nearly perfect story.
I don’t want to go too much into the story but it plays out seeing your character captured at the start because one teammate betrayed you and turned you into the cops. You then speak to a prosecutor and recall the events of the game trying to figure out who the traitor was while also trying to see the bigger picture in the grand scheme of things.
If there was one flaw with the game, it was that near the end I wanted to just get through battles quickly so I could get back to the story with how engrossed I was in it. Also the combat is a blast but I just wanted to see what was coming next!
Conclusion
Persona 5 is amazing and everything I wanted ever since it was announced. It took years to come out but you can see in the polish and overall design that the developers really put all their heart and soul into their product. I would say the story is slightly less intriguing than that of Persona 4 but that’s probably just because I was so attached to those characters for years and this game is brand new.
The only negative I would say about this game is that, there were times when i just wanted to continue to fight battles, but I couldn’t. Other than that, I loved hanging with friends, making relationships, trying to live a normal life while being a thief in another world, the humor of the game, the times it became dark and you felt for the characters, the design and flare are the strongest of any game I have ever played.
I really like this game and it was completely worth the wait. I cannot praise this game enough. If you like JRPGs or RPGs pick up this game. If you are on the fence about it, trust me and pick up the game. It has something for everyone and by time the credits roll it will be an experience that sticks with you for a long time to come. This will be the first game I have ever given a perfect score to.
Persona 5
10/10
Danny Stueber
Edited By: Brea Childs
Wingate Triangle 