What is the best Persona game?

The best Persona game is...

  • Persona 3 (including FES, Portable, and Reload)

  • Persona 4 (including Golden)

  • Persona 5 (including Royal)

Results are only viewable after voting.
L

LakeOf9

Member
Persona-3-Persona-4-Persona-5-Xbox-Game-Pass-V3.jpg


Arguably the best modern JRPG series, Persona has been delivering turn based JRPG bangers consistently for 20 years nows (we won't talk about the pre-P3 era where the series was more experimental and had not yet figured out what it was going to be). In all this time, there have only really been three mainline games, albeit released in multiple flavours, and milked for spinoffs endlessly.

But those three games are so incredible.

Which of those three is the best though?
 
P3 being the first of the "new" style - so it takes a credit.
P4 - personally it has the best story for me.
P5 - Best style and best gameplay mechanics. Varied main palace (but not the Mementos) was definitely an welcome change for me.

All in all, I found P5 Royal being the best of all. I'm a sucker for a good presentation.
 
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5 and it's not really a contest gameplay-wise. The non-procedurally generated dungeons alone make it so much more enjoyable than the others. Even the Memento is still better than what came before.

The party and the humour are better in P4, yeah. But 4 was such a chore to get through. 5 is also stylish as hell.
I really don't see what people see in P3. Tried the remake. 30 hours in, the story was still going nowhere.
 
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Soltype said:
Same for me , easily the best story in the series. Hoping it gets a remake someday, hate how atlus ignores the first 2 games.
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I actually still prefer the story and atmosphere of persona 1, especially now that every game is a friends teaming up to kill god snooze fest but the characters, gameplay, and depth of content in 2 are just impeccable.
 
I still think 4 Golden is the best. Best group of friends and interesting story. Mind you it was the first one I really played. Got a VITA just to play it. So it holds a special place in my heart. 6 is obviously the most advanced of the lot.

4 has a great anime too. Really well done.
 
Persona 2 is so, so good....by far my favourite one....
From that list, I would say PS4 golden after P3, P5 Royal, P4 and P5.

Have the P3 Reload on my shelf but didn't tried yet 🤔😕
 
Looking at the comments I'm very much looking forward to the P4 remake. I've only played P5R last year and had a blast with it. Tremendous gameplay, great soundtrack, and super stylish presentation, but I wasn't really fan of the whole school/teenagers setting. Came across kinda cringe playing it as a thirty-something adult. Is that a recurring theme across Persona or just P5?
 
I only played Persona 5 Royal, finished it a few weeks ago actually, but I'm quite mixed about it.

Art direction is great, gameplay is better than your usual turn based jrpg (but I wish it went even further with more strategy and less repetitive combats), story was okay, but...

I found the pacing absolutely terrible.
It talks SO MUCH, for nothing. It's so long. I'm not against long games, I loved Baldur's Gate 3 and my 220 hours on it, but it took me almost as long to finish Persona 5 royal while it really didn't feel like such a memorable journey. It felt like all this could fit in a much shorter game.

I also had a big problem with the lack of freedom. I'm not sure how to explain it, but even very late in the game, it often still felt like I was in a tutorial somehow. Too much hand holding, quite often you can't do what you want because Morgana decided it wasn't the right day to do that etc, it's a very weird feeling. It's an extremely linear game that tries to make you think it's open.

It's still an overall good game, otherwise I wouldn't have finished it, but I think it does have issues. A better pacing would really help. Oh and, actual "cutscenes", with camera movements etc... like in most other games, instead of just a visual novel style presentation, because this didn't help with the overall rhythm either.

Maybe something that didn't help is also that I played Midnight Suns before Persona, which is actually a much better "Persona" game in my opinion.
All the confidants, perks etc inspired by Persona are actually much better used, with a better freedom feeling and more strategy, in Midnight Suns (which in my opinion is the game with the best turn based combats I ever played).
I know people don't like the social aspect in Midnight Suns, but this is confusing to me because I found Persona 5 extremely worse at that.

I don't think I'll play another Persona if they're all like this, except Strikers which I already own and plan to play, but it's a shorter game.
 
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Larxia said:
I don't think I'll play another Persona if they're all like this, except Strikers which I already own and plan to play, but it's a shorter game.
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They are all like this

I am in the same boat, I gave 4 around 2 hours of playtime on release back in the days and 5 royal around 1 hour play time before I noped out lol
 
GateofD said:
3 - best story
4 - best characters
5 - best gameplay
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Agree completely with this. P3 has a great story but it's really back loaded, and a lot of the social links are weak.

P4 is where they really got off the ground with the formula, but I prefer the tone and group dynamic of P3. Everything that I found annoying with P4 gets amped up in Golden.
 
Persona 4 is the only one I didn't give up playing, so it has to be this one. The added dungeon in Golden was utter shit though. What a waste of time...
 
4 > 3 >> 5

All Persona games have moments of slog but 5 was very excessive and a chore at times.

I also didn't really care much for the characters like I did in 4 and 3.

Forgot to mention too the rural setting in 4 is just more appealing than 3 and especially 5. At least 3 had the gothy thing going for it, whilst Tokyo in 5 just didn't grab me in at all.
 
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Has always been 3 for me, and definitely now with Reload, which brought a lot of the quality of life aspects up to P5 levels
Best characters, best story, coolest emo setting.
 
P4G
P5R
P3R

... in that order

P2 gets an honourable mention because I love the game, great story, introduced many of the core Persona gameplay innovations, character and world art riffs off the best game ever made of all time (Xenogears), & I loved the mechanics of negotiating with Persona's to catch them. It was hilariously fun!
 
Regginator said:
Looking at the comments I'm very much looking forward to the P4 remake. I've only played P5R last year and had a blast with it. Tremendous gameplay, great soundtrack, and super stylish presentation, but I wasn't really fan of the whole school/teenagers setting. Came across kinda cringe playing it as a thirty-something adult. Is that a recurring theme across Persona or just P5?
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Persona 2: Eternal Punishment is the only one that has an adult cast.
 
It's 4. Even though the other games do have some aspects that are done better, 4 is overall the best package and has no glaring weaknesses.

3 is a slog until midway through the game when the story finally kicks in.

5 has glaring pacing issues and the cast is not that interesting.
 
Having just finished 3 reload, it's nowhere near as good as 4 and 5. 5 is the best gameplaywise but overall 4 gets my vote. SMTV is better than all of them though imo.
 
Go_Ly_Dow said:
All Persona games have moments of slog but 5 was very excessive and a chore at times.
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Curious, because 4 has a LOT of completely filler school-life scenes that drag on endlessly, while in P5 the only part I felt that was completely accessory to the overarching plot was the school vacation in Hawaii.
Yeah, all those parts in P4 are fun. But still pretty unnecessary.
 
I like Persona 3 Fes more, but I think that Persona 4 Golden is overall a better game. I finished both twice.


Persona 5 was kinda boring to me, I bought it at launch and I ended up playing 50 hours of it, then I lost interest and never finished it.
 
Seyken said:
It's 4. Even though the other games do have some aspects that are done better, 4 is overall the best package and has no glaring weaknesses.

3 is a slog until midway through the game when the story finally kicks in.

5 has glaring pacing issues and the cast is not that interesting.
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4 has some rancid pacing, especially the beginning and the stuff with the "true mastermind" was lame and felt tacked on. Not as egregious as the ending of 5 but still. It still has the best cast and premise of the new persona games though.
 
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