The main thing you do in Persona 5 is run around Palaces: solve puzzles, look for treasure, hide behind furniture, and of course defeat a cavalcade of monsters based on religion, folklore, literature and apocrypha.
Previous Persona games had procedurally-generated dungeons, while P5's are deliberately laid-out ahead of time. From a visual perspective, these dungeons are imaginative, gorgeous, and packed with detail. From a gameplay perspective, these dungeons are freaking boring.
Well, "boring" isn't the best word. But exploring Palaces is easily the weakest of P5's main systems:
They're too simple. Other than brief detours with a chest or similar, dungeons are almost entirely linear. You'll see 80-90% of any Palace unless you're actively trying to either see everything or get it done as quickly as possible. There was a lot of potential for branching paths, optional areas, alternate routes that prioritize safety versus profit... almost none of this potential is met.
RIVETING PIN ENTERING GAMEPLAY.
The puzzles are banal at best and annoying time-wasters at worst. Virtually every puzzle comes down to "hold R2 to activate your Highlight Interactibles mode, then interact with the highlighted interactible". There are no challenging puzzles, but some of them are tedious which is kind of like a challenge?. For example, one Palace involves translating four-letter words into four-digit codes. You do this by gathering slips of paper with little math formulas on them like "P=1" and "P+S=5", opening your inventory, doing basic algebra, then plugging the code in. It isn't hard, but you can still fail because you can't look at equations and enter the code at the same time.
The stealth mechanics are so thin they're translucent. Here's how it works: if you attack an enemy from behind, then you can take your turn in combat first (if they see you, you alternate, and if they can attack you they get to attack first.) If you're behind cover, then you're guaranteed a successful sneak attack. The entire map is papered with cover. Whether you're 2 or 102 hours in, stealth mechanics never evolve.Â
This issue of "a failure to evolve" mounts as the game goes on. Later Palaces aren't more complex than earlier ones, just longer- and this means little as you'll have far more resources to work with to compensate. I played on Hard Difficulty, the second-highest, and found everything after the third Palace to be triflingly easy save for the very final boss fight.
Say what you want about Kamoshida, but he does appear to be an ass man based off his decorating sensibilities. How bad can he really be?
The Palaces are meant to be constructs of the minds of their rulers, an intriguing idea that is rarely pushed hard enough. Kamoshida's Palace avoids this with great touches like the furniture resembling female bodies to show how Kamoshida views women, but later Palaces like Madarame, Kaneshiro and especially Okumura feel half-hearted in their attempts to characterize their rulers through environmental design.
Part of the issue is Palace length, which is something necessitated by mechanics. It doesn't seem like the game wants you to complete Palaces in a sitting: they take several hours to finish and they're filled with teleportation points back to the entrance. When you leave a Palace you get a "progress log" where the characters will comment on how close you are to the end.
But save for the first Palace on my first playthrough which took two visits, this was never necessary. I finished them in a go. The game's time mechanics heavily incentivize this: days are made up of two blocks (afternoon and night) but going to a Palace effectively takes up both. Time is the most valuable resource of all, so Palaces are long enough to grow tiresome and yet not so long as to force me to make multiple trips.
The two saving graces is that even lesser Palaces are an absolute treat from a visual and aural perspective, and combat works a good deal better than exploration. "Better dungeons" is number one on my Persona 6 wishlist.
Combat
A typical battle. The horses are dizzy because they got hit with their elemental weakness or a critical hit - if Joker can do the same to the Guard Captain then the fight will end instantly with an All Out Attack.
Persona 5 was many people's introduction to SMT, but this is a 30-year-old franchise with something like 50 different entries. That means that Persona 5 reflects game design trends from the 80's, 90's and 2000's- in fact, its combat is extremely similar to that of Persona 3, which came out in 2006.
In short, it's a turn-based RPG. Your characters use attacks, spells and items to defeat enemies. You always control Joker, who can switch between Personas, and up to three party members who have a single Persona apiece.Â
The interesting wrinkle is the approach to random encounters. Like most RPG's, random enemies are easy to dispatch - instead the game centers around dispatching enemies with the smallest possible expenditure of resources.
For example, let's say I encounter an enemy with an Ice weakness. I know that an Ice spell will knock the enemy down, allowing me to perform an "All Out Attack" for massive damage. If Joker has a Persona that knows an Ice spell, I can switch to it- but this expends Joker's precious SP (mana), meaning I'll have less for future battles against simple enemies.Â
I also know that my party member Yusuke has Ice-type attacks, and I can be more liberal with his SP - but say Yusuke isn't in my party at present. I can swap him in, but in that time the enemy might get an attack off. I could use an item that deals Ice damage, but those are finite. And I could simply rush the enemy down with a barrage of melee attacks that expend no resources on their own- but this could let the enemy attack.
Most combats in Persona 5 will go by without the enemy taking a single turn - and to compensate, your party is hugely fragile. Just two good hits from an appropriately-leveled enemy should be enough to take out most party members. This is alleviated by how much health is restored by spells and items- but the former costs SP and the latter are finite.Â
The devs knew that the players would never go to the doctor's office to buy healing items (since they'd have more than enough from exploring), so they put the doctor in the world's shortest miniskirt.
SP-restoring items are rare, and if your party members run out of SP then you'll have little choice but to leave the Palace and come back a different day. These decisions will play out dozens of times over a single dungeon, further wrinkled by more powerful enemies that can't be dispatched so easily (such as mini-bosses).
I really like the idea of this mechanic, but it always fails in execution. SP items are scarce but not so scarce that I can't brute force my way through the first Palaces, and by the third one I've got more SP-restoration items than I could ever need. The game has already taught me that I should grab them whenever I can.
The other major mechanic is "One More". Ice is just one of numerous elemental typings 1 , and if a character gets hit with an element they're weak against, they're knocked down. Furthermore, the attacker can attack again- or if they're a PC, they can "pass the baton" to a party member. If you can baton pass three times on one attack then the final party member gets to attack without expending any mana.
This creates a pleasing combination of rhythm and strategizing, as you plan out your baton pass perfectly. Random battles are quick and energetic even late game, helped along by stellar soundtrack and visuals. I love the breadth of enemy designs, they're so rich with inventiveness and it's always cool to see how Persona interprets recognizable mythological figures like Thor or Anubis.
One the first minibosses is the demon Belphegor. He sits on a toilet. When he casts spells he clenches his fists and closes his eyes. He's like this in every single SMT game. None of this is a joke.
New enemies also serve as new Personas you can get, which then make for new Fusion ingredients to make more new Personas. I actually find the Fusion mechanics more interesting than the battle or exploration mechanics; the best part about navigating Palaces was levelling up, because that meant I could return to the Velvet Room and make new Personas.
Outside of that, combat is the usual turn-based JRPG fare. It has some quirks, like how physical skills cost HP to use, or how by midgame you'll only be using spells to fully heal your team because most attacks will drop a PC below 50% health.Â
You have a big toolset and it always feels good to cast spells... but the gameplay goes through few meaningful evolutions. You'll be using baton passes and All Out Attacks as your bread-and-butter from tutorial to endgame, and there just isn't much depth to that mechanic. This would probably be fine in a 20-hour game, but this is a 120-hour game.
Every Phantom Thief gets a splash screen if they successfully end a battle with an All-Out Attack. Here's Joker's.
Joker
In a 2017 fan poll, fans voted Joker as the most popular character in Persona 5. He got almost twice the votes of second place. That's pretty interesting, because Joker is a mute.
Well, not completely. The game frequently prompts you to choose from one of three (or two) dialogue options, and there's often a "funny one" that reveals Joker's deadpan sense of humor. In combat, Joker has a small number of voice lines (such as yelling his Persona's name when he summons it). But it remains that in a character-focused game with a hundred hours of dialogue, the most popular character is the one that speaks least.
Video games have plenty of beloved mute protagonists, but I can't think of a story and dialogue-forward franchise with such well-liked mute heroes. Yu from Persona 4 got a similar treatment from fans, and his characterization was even thinner than Joker 23.
In general I'd chalk this trend up to the franchise's success at balancing "You identify with the protagonist because he's a realized and likable character" with "You identify with the protagonist because he's you." This is accomplished by making Joker, to put it bluntly, a better version of the player.
I may be able to choose what Joker says, but I can't be as quick-witted as he is in high-pressure situations. I can choose how he treats his friends, but I can't lead my own friends to cathartic revelations that forge life-long bonds of loyalty. I can have Joker stand up to bullies but I can't force the real-life jerks I know to change their ways and publicly recant their misdeeds.
I never got to say things like this in high school. Mostly I just talked about Ender's Game.
Joker doesn't do what the player would do, he does what the player wishes they could do. There's no such thing as "the girl too beautiful to talk to" or "the seemingly-impossible test where no amount of studying would produce a satisfactory grade" in Joker's world. It's always a matter of choosing the right dialogue options or grinding out my Knowledge stat.
This is a "power fantasy", and I'm using that phrase neutrally. I'd go a step farther and say that Persona 5 is one of the most effective power fantasies its genre has ever produced. There are a million RPG's where you play as a magnificent hero who saves the world, and a million social sims where you play as someone with extraordinary confidence and appeal to the appropriate sex. Persona gives us both, and Persona 5 is the best yet at marrying these two aspects together. Joker is both a monomythical hero of destiny and a Chad- and he's also similar enough to the player that it's effortless to see yourself as Joker.
A few smart touches that help realize this illusion:
Joker is repeatedly described as "quiet", which suggests his dialogue options are all that he says...
And yet he's also a charismatic leader who commands the respect and loyalty of his peers. This gives us the sense of someone with a strong magnetic presence.
Joker's movements, especially in gameplay, brim with confidence. He complements almost all of his moves with little flourishes and catlike agility. When we see his face in cutscenes, he's usually wearing a cocky grin.
Or being a tiiiny bit psycho. But that's everyone in this game.
His real world posture is much less flamboyant, and projects an easy sense of self-confidence: shoulders squared and back straight, but head down and hands in his pockets. He's taller than most of the other male characters, too.
His glasses and bangs hide his eyes, so we can project whatever emotion we want onto him. If you have the opportunity to chastise another character, it's up to you whether Joker did it in a breezy, stern, ironic or sharp way.
The game only shows us Joker's internal monologue when it absolutely has to. Most narration duties instead go to Joker's companion Morgana, a talking cat that is almost always with him.
I'm not sure if it's fair to call Joker a great character in the same way that I'd call, say, Arthur Morgan a great character - but he is a great vehicle for experiencing the game.
