My non-spoiler thoughts on Persona 5:
It cannot be overstated that this is a brilliant game. Alongside everything else on the JRPG scene at the moment, I don't know of anything that even comes close to the level of polish and design and art that Persona 5 exudes from its very core. Like Persona 3 and 4, it always feels like every aspect of it matches up with every other. The music and the art tie together in a way that almost never happens.
Gameplay has been mentioned by pretty much everyone, but basically it's brilliant. The dungeons are long and interesting, and usually pleasing to look at. The puzzles they add are almost never frustrating and in their best moments really add some variety to standard dungeon crawling.
As an aside, I didn't know how much I wanted to have demons added in as enemies as opposed to Shadows. It adds variety and makes it slot back into the MegaTen spinoff feel alongside games like DDS. As a long time player it's also great to see demons I remember, and then see them act the same way they did back in Nocturne and DDS. The fear I experienced when I encountered three Thoths was the real deal.
The battle system is largely intact, particularly if you've played P4G. Things like navigator participation and follow up attacks from those not in the party make a welcome appearance, but contextualised in a less obnoxious way than in P4G. No riding in on mopeds here, boys.
Demon negotiation is fine, and functions as a reliable way to obtain the specific demon that you want, which makes a nice change.
The hostage taking, however, which is basically reverse negotiation, is really not good, but it happens so rarely that it's not something to worry about. In my 88 hours of game time, I experienced it maybe four times?
Side-note: You can get MegaTen'd again, which I don't know how people are going to react to. There were a couple of times that I lost progress because a single move didn't go how I planned and then I got insta wiped by a random mob.
S Links function a lot more similarly than I think we were led to believe, but I think that's fine. I have no idea if the stories that they tell are any good, but I have no reason to believe otherwise.
The soundtrack is excellent, though I'm surprised by how limited it is once again. Due to the long length of development and the fact that Meguro hasn't really scored anything since P4G, I had expected like a 6-disc epic, but there's actually no more music than Persona 4. You're hearing the same battle theme all through the game. Under The Mask (the nighttime theme) plays throughout the whole game too, so expect to hear it a lot.
Music is less catchy and more ambient this time around, and tracks are full length, so the feeling of repetition doesn't set in as quickly, but more variety would have still been appreciated.
Dungeon music is exceptional, which is a pleasant surprise. Meguro hasn't composed dungeon themes of this quality in a looong time, and it's a huge step up from P4's largely mediocre performance.
My two criticisms of the OST are that :-
A) The Mementos theme is terrible. Straight up. It's like a 40 second loop that goes on and on and on. It's awful. I'll honestly be surprised if it turns out that Meguro wrote it. I feel like he's better than this.
B) The final boss theme is surprisingly weak. It's not bad, but it pales in comparison to The Battle for Everyone's Souls and fog. It's a pretty straightforward track, and it really lacks power or finality.
The visuals are excellent, despite being technically lacking. The colours really pop, and everything genuinely does look super stylish. Scene composition is lovely, and the amount of character that the simple animations convey is wonderful. This is especially apparent in save rooms and hideouts, where characters are left to do their own thing. Anne sits on a table with her legs crossed in a casual way, whilst Yusuke contemplates in the corner, occasionally framing up the scene. It looks really great, and I so hope that they add a screenshot function at some point.
The game is really long. Like I say, it took me ~88 hours to complete. That's doing all the Mementos floors pretty thoroughly, and not skippng voiced dialogue. Because of the dungeon design things never get boring, and the escalation as the thieves take on higher and higher risk jobs means that the pace moves along much more nicely than the stop-start of previous games. The one exception is towards the end, when the game throws boss after boss after boss at you, which I personally found quite exhausting. Consecutive boss fights show up quite often in this section too, which heightens the stress. On the plus side, it does add some challenge, so at least the game isn't a cakewalk.
The individual dungeon stories are good. The first one, I think, will go down as a classic moment that people will remember, as well as dungeon 5, which is also excellent.
The overarching story is... not great. It's pretty silly, mostly predictable, and sometimes frustrating. The antagonists are incredibly evil, but also rather flat. Attempts to humanise what are definitively evil characters is pretty cringey, and the final boss is really dumb. It's not, like, terrible, but it's worse than Persona 4's, in my opinion.
The cast (from what I could tell) seems great. None of them feel like repeats of previous characters, and I was genuinely surprised how mature they seem relative to the silly nature of the game. I'm not sold on Morgana, in large part due to her constant presence, but that could definitely change when I play the English release.
Overall, it's, well, brilliant. It's what a Persona game should be, and largely it feels like a sequel to Persona 4. It doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it does smoothen it out. I found the final act to be pretty poor from a narrative perspective, but that's more due to my hope that it would rise above previous games, and it really is my only real fault with the game (It's also worht saying that the ending itself is really nice).
It's definitely a new Persona game, and I had forgotten how much I needed to play one again. I'm not convinced that it's a better game than Persona 3 and Persona 4, but it's up there alongside them. Hopefully when I play the English release the characters will hold up just as well.
