ペルソナ(Persona) is an RPG game franchise that spun-off from Megami Tensei. Persona is mostly focused on High-School shenanigans mixed with subconscious demon…stuff. Yeah.
The only Persona game I’ve played so far is Persona 5 and I played that purely for Kawakami-sensei.

I had played about 166 hours of Person 5 before I abandoned it. So just keep in mind that I haven’t finished this game.
The reason I started playing it was because, by complete chance, I discovered Kawakami online. Curious, I looked her up and found out she was a romanceable character in Persona 5…so, naturally, I acquired Persona 5 and started playing. Just imagine my disappointment when I learned it wouldn’t be until May 24th in-game that I would get to start her route.
Anyhow, I think the game is good overall…but not actually the best. This is a JRPG, so the game gets repetitive pretty fast. While playing, I found myself never looking forward to entering the palace or Mementos, because fights were often just the same over and over again. This generally applies to a lot of the game…context-sensitive stuff is just everywhere here which messes up the flow of gameplay and makes the game feel more linear. Like, yeah, I get that this is a linear game, but I don’t like being reminded of that 24/7.
Though, I’ll say this, grinding doesn’t seem to be necessary…for most of the game. I could finish the game comfortably by just using my default tactic of never ever running away from a fight. So I could comfortably play through the whole game no problem, even while spending hundreds of thousands of Yen on Kawakami and random events. Even the occasional 4-hour Mementos trip gave me enough cash to get everything I needed without issue.
Persona 5 also breaks immersion in the dumbest of ways that are easily solvable. Let’s give an example: Joker is a criminal on parole. Kawakami is his homeroom teacher. Kawakami’s job is to keep an eye on him so he doesn’t do anything criminal. Joker hires Kawakami as a maid. Joker tasks Kawakami with making lockpicks and…she doesn’t comment on it at all.
I was actually quite excited to ask her to make lockpicks because I was expecting her to comment on that…but then she just doesn’t. Putting aside the fact I had set myself up for failure, it’s still really strange that she doesn’t comment on it at all. I can understand her not commenting on the other things Joker asks her to craft…well, that’s also dubious…but lockpicks are another thing entirely.
Persona 5 is filled with these kinds of non-inclusions and most of the time it’s due to obvious dissonance between the gameplay and story. That’s right! Ludo-Narrative Dissonance! Finally I mentioned that on the wiki.
Just keep in mind that I found my immersion being broken continuously in-game. I’m also sure this is a game problem and not a me problem because, in the lockpick example, the game is obviously ignoring the story for the gameplay.
Going into personal territory: yeah, I enjoyed the slice-of-life bits of Persona 5 way more than the actual game parts of it. Since, y’know, those got boring and repetitive, while the story parts did not. That said, even those slice-of-life bits got a bit repetitive as they eventually just became prep-work for Mementos and the palaces.
Commenting on the story…people say it’s good, but I think it’s about average. The story could be better (the immersion-breaking doesn’t help) but it’s serviceable. Really, I don’t get what the fuss is about. I won’t say much else, because I played it over the course of about a half-year, so the details are fuzzy. Especially since it’s been a while since I quit.
If I could, I would easily make a buuuunch of changes to Persona 5. Mostly small changes to gameplay and story. You can see some of those proposals in Speculah & Analysis.
Now, I mentioned that I abandoned the game and the reason why was because I accidentally hit a bottleneck.^A) It was for the final dungeon/palace in the game after you go to the bottom of Mementos and finish everything prior. It turned out that my party was too weak and there was no way to level them up besides grinding in that final dungeon or just getting lucky. Pissed off…I just quit the game. My main goal was accomplished after all (romancing Kawakami) so why bother with anything else?
Let’s end this with a few minor notes: Persona 5 is very stylish and I’m about 99% sure this is the main reason it’s liked; parts of the game amuse me, like the DVD rental store and the PhanSite obviously being a textboard; the canon pairing is obviously Joker/Makoto.

I looked through the cutting room floor a little and, honestly, I don’t get why they removed some of the mechanics listed there. In particular, the broken confidant, because that just makes sense and, strangely, the game hints at screwing with confidants. Though, to my knowledge, there aren’t actually any negatives to having half-a-dozen girlfriends.
Anyhow, that isn’t what I’m proposing.

Since Girls’ Frontline and the sequel have shown me the beauty of auto-battles: my proposed implementation would be similar. I think there should be two conditions to allowing auto-battling: first, you defeat the enemy prior; second, you are a higher level. This, in theory, maximizes fun, since you’ll mostly be manually fighting unfamiliar enemies while ignoring the ones you’ve already fought.
The current game’s set up means you’re goign to be in a lot of ‘1 click all die’ fights.

Similar to auto-battling, this one is just based on logical reasoning. Every day, you have the option of hanging out with one person, while multiple are available. Ignoring the fact that, in real life, you could just invite all of them to hang out together…this is an obvious waste. Prior to hanging out with someone, you could ask the thieves you won’t be hanging out with to explore Mementos without you. I would include some limitations here…like, they can only explore previously-explored areas and you get less money/XP if you’re not present…but that would still be useful and ‘make sense’. On top of that, most of the other thieves constantly pester you about going to Mementos.

I’m suspecting that not all of the stuff in class is true. The main example I noticed was the ‘dreams in color’ question. The way it’s phrased implies that, prior to the invention of color television, nobody had dreams in color. So, most people throughout history dreamt in black-and-white.
That isn’t the case. Black-and-white dreams were a quirky historical oddity and it mostly lines up with the era in which monochrome TV was dominant. My father, born in the late 60s, admitted he briefly dreamt in black-and-white.
However, this is obviously due to the influence of television, which was monochrome. Prior to the television, dreams were in color.
So far, this is the only class fact I’m certain is wrong. The only other example I remember is Kawakami explaining the etymology of ‘robot’, which is accurate.

• Official Website