Persona 5 Royal - I spent three months and 130+ hours playing this game so I thought I'd write a review. I really liked the game! That's why I spent so long on it! Where it really and immediately excels is the presentation. The art style, the battle animations, the music, the voice acting...it's all great and cool. It made me really wish I was a Japanese teenager who is friends with other Japanese teenagers and has a cat. The length of the game is, for the most part, a huge positive too. I really got into the routine of the game, using my two units of time a day effectively (well, eventually, MORE ON THIS BELOW), grinding in Mementos, doing the palaces...it actually felt weird when I was finished because I felt like I had something I was supposed to be doing but then I remembered it was over. When a game is this big you get nostalgic for things from the start of the game towards the end. The world-building was great. I was invested.
The downside of the length is there are just some parts that can too long without letting you actually play. Like you'd have a meeting with the team where you'd decide to do something and it would take ages to get through...then the next scene would be a text message conversation where they repeat all the exact same information. The part between Futaba and Okumura's palaces was a bit of a slog (it didn't help that my game crashed here and I had to repeat it all, of course!) The endless fights with angels before the "final" boss went on a bit. CONVERSELY I didn't find that the extra Royal content at the end dragged at all. It felt like having a sequel to the game within the game itself. I kind of wished it had went longer, if anything.
I do wish I'd known how to manage the confidant stuff earlier on. The game tells you to "take your time" but there's a lot of stuff you do which is kind of a waste of time when you should be prioritising confidants. Like probably any time I watched a movie or dvd with my cat (before reading 'Art of Cinema'!) was a waste. But I still enjoyed doing it. I ended up not finishing off all the confidants I wanted and it was a bit frustrating. (I'm not doing new game+ though!)
Also some of the Japanese cultural stuff is a bit icky: it took me a long time to warn to Morgana because of the scene where he's perving at the sex slave version of a teenage girl a rapist created, the two predatory gay men who want to fuck Ryuji, and also kind of the thing where everyone beat up Ryuji all the time when he didn't do anything that bad(?) But you can't have the good quirky Japanese stuff wihtout the weirder stuff slipping through and I did enjoy some of the ridiculous sex stuff just on a silly level (yes, Kawakami, I was a good MASTER.)
Overall it's a great game I enjoyed it!
Haru best girl.
