***
After enjoying my time with Persona 4, I thought the sequel would be right up my alley, and the first 30 hours were something really magical. It starts at the very surface level - opening, UI, music. It's such a fantastic combination of a great color palette, collage style that brings subculture zines to mind, and the soundtrack that combines class (classic big band and lounge jazz) with some youthful attitude (acid and fusion subgenres). Every menu, every loading screen, the interface during battles, exploration and dialogue, the chat app on your phone, it all delivers the tone and feel of the game in the most minutiae of the presentation, combining the function with eye candy. But it continues into the story - as the exchange student Mr Protag befriends a talking cat, the school's troublemaker and its foreign beauty, they form a group of misfits who were spurned by the society and find comfort in each others' company. Oh, and they have magical powers, so they are students by day and injustice fighters by night. This sort of setting between a YA novel and a Power Rangers season is right up my alley and as long as the story was grounded in it, I was enjoying every minute of it. I couldn't be happier than to see a scene where the gang has made some money and they decide to go to a fancy restaurant to celebrate, drawing the ire of other guests, leading to comments about how the place must've lowered its standard as it lets in such rowdy teenagers who order multiple elegant dishes and just stuff their faces with them, outrageously clashing with the high-brow environment.
And the game keeps our interest by changing the group dynamic with new characters. A poor, eccentric, socially inept artist who was exploited by his master. The strict, uptight, student council president who discovers our secret identities through her own investigation (signalled in the game with her hopeless attempts at staying unnoticed by hiding her face in a book while spying on us) whom has a change of heart and realizes the danger of blindly following authority. A pathological shut-in traumatized by corrupt government officials who lied to her at a young age to hide the truth about her mother's death. Each of them shows a different social circumstance that requires one to rebel if they want to break out of their awful situation. And all the side characters share the same story - someone in position of power has used it against them for their own gain, leaving scars they can only heal with outside help, that is to say, player’s. Up until that point, things are pretty interesting. But that doesn't last. This is gonna be a spoiler for those who only played one game from the series and thus don't realize it yet, but there are certain patterns that repeat throughout some of the entries. That your team members follow certain archetypes (an egomaniac mascot, a loudmouth idiot that looks a bit like a hooligan, a detective who's the only remotely intelligent person in the group). That it follows a structure of "a team member gets added and you encounter a new issue that needs solving by set date by going into the other realm" is another. Those parts are fine. But once we get into late game story twists, I gets really disappointing. As I've mentioned, defeating what serves as the story's conclusive final boss doesn't end the game. Instead it turns out that there is a supernatural figure that has been orchestrating from the shadows, bestowing us the powers that allowed us to enter the cognitive world so that they can test us as the paragons of humanity to see whether we're worthy to keep on existing - and then decide we aren't and try to destroy the universe, leaving the classically jrpg-ish god-slaying as the only available solution. By the end of the story, the characters are spouting lines that have little to do with rebelling motif, but would very well fit Persona 4's "reach out to the truth" slogan. This part of the game is so bland, uninteresting and tonally dissonant that I don't think I've seen anyone defend it. As for me, the bitter taste it left in my mouth lasts to this day. *** Oh well, let’s talk about something different - about how stiff and unnatural a lot of the dialogues are. Characters constantly repeat the same information, struggle to grasp even basic concepts and regularly offer the most banal comments. You walk up to the duct, “oh we don’t need to use it right now but let’s remember it”. You walk roughly two steps to nearby doors, find out they’re closed, “damn, we need to find another entrance”. You retrace your two steps, examine the duct, “so we ended up using it in the end”. Tons of lines of dialogue in the game have about as much flair and as much faith in player’s ability to link facts. Moreover, dungeons offer puzzles that may be a little more complicated than that, but they are still incredibly easy and majority of time is spent walking and watching animations, not actually solving them. On another note, the comments you can hear from passers-by on the streets and the internet posts you read on loading screen every morning are numbingly obvious and boring, restlessly drilling how easy it is to manipulate masses into player’s head. And I’m mentioning all this right now because quite frankly I don’t understand what age group the creators are aiming for. Some of the themes are really dark - grooming teenagers, domestic abuse, murdering pets, assaulting old people, sexual harassment, blackmail and extortion. But the way the characters talk and the emotional maturity they express (majority of them either adult or almost of age) make an average shonen manga look like a psychological horror by comparison. In fact the only dialogues that felt remotely natural were the casual conversations characters have in Mementos - and I very rarely got to hear more than one line of those, because the chat gets interrupted not only by fights, but also by opening doors and chests. And while we’re on the topic of talking, let me discuss my problems with social links. Firstly, during the finishing stretch of the game it became apparent to me that I will finish laughably few of them. Admittedly I got the least of them among my friends, so I was demonstrably inefficient, but it really strikes me how compared to Persona 4, suddenly almost all the characters have high social stat checks. So if like my you happen to pursue only those with 4s and 5s (and perhaps those that you only meet late in the game) then you’re screwed. The system just doesn’t seem to be all that well designed - for example, you can form a social link with the shopkeeper that sells you equipment, but it requires you to have 4 out of 5 points in one of the stats. And before you acquire it, every single time you come to this shop will force you to read through around ten lines about how you would approach this vendor if only you were gutsier. In another relationship one level of the social link happens to grow a little kindness in the player - but this very level had the requirement of the maximum kindness before I was even able to proceed. This kind of inelegantly wasteful design felt more and more prevalent as the game went by. *** This is a title that took 175 hours of my life. It made a good first impression and managed to maintain it going into the second act, but towards the end it started to get really tiring and by the end I honestly hated it. Good UI, music and character designs can only take you so far when the writing has no flavor or depth. The shaky thematic consistency, questionable level design, poor difficulty curve and overall execution of social links made me long for Persona 4. Perhaps as time passes I will forget about the inconveniences and remember the feeling of camaraderie it was able to convey for a few chapters. But right now all I see when I close my eyes is the Throbbing King of Desire laughing in my face.
And the game keeps our interest by changing the group dynamic with new characters. A poor, eccentric, socially inept artist who was exploited by his master. The strict, uptight, student council president who discovers our secret identities through her own investigation (signalled in the game with her hopeless attempts at staying unnoticed by hiding her face in a book while spying on us) whom has a change of heart and realizes the danger of blindly following authority. A pathological shut-in traumatized by corrupt government officials who lied to her at a young age to hide the truth about her mother's death. Each of them shows a different social circumstance that requires one to rebel if they want to break out of their awful situation. And all the side characters share the same story - someone in position of power has used it against them for their own gain, leaving scars they can only heal with outside help, that is to say, player’s. Up until that point, things are pretty interesting. But that doesn't last. This is gonna be a spoiler for those who only played one game from the series and thus don't realize it yet, but there are certain patterns that repeat throughout some of the entries. That your team members follow certain archetypes (an egomaniac mascot, a loudmouth idiot that looks a bit like a hooligan, a detective who's the only remotely intelligent person in the group). That it follows a structure of "a team member gets added and you encounter a new issue that needs solving by set date by going into the other realm" is another. Those parts are fine. But once we get into late game story twists, I gets really disappointing. As I've mentioned, defeating what serves as the story's conclusive final boss doesn't end the game. Instead it turns out that there is a supernatural figure that has been orchestrating from the shadows, bestowing us the powers that allowed us to enter the cognitive world so that they can test us as the paragons of humanity to see whether we're worthy to keep on existing - and then decide we aren't and try to destroy the universe, leaving the classically jrpg-ish god-slaying as the only available solution. By the end of the story, the characters are spouting lines that have little to do with rebelling motif, but would very well fit Persona 4's "reach out to the truth" slogan. This part of the game is so bland, uninteresting and tonally dissonant that I don't think I've seen anyone defend it. As for me, the bitter taste it left in my mouth lasts to this day. *** Oh well, let’s talk about something different - about how stiff and unnatural a lot of the dialogues are. Characters constantly repeat the same information, struggle to grasp even basic concepts and regularly offer the most banal comments. You walk up to the duct, “oh we don’t need to use it right now but let’s remember it”. You walk roughly two steps to nearby doors, find out they’re closed, “damn, we need to find another entrance”. You retrace your two steps, examine the duct, “so we ended up using it in the end”. Tons of lines of dialogue in the game have about as much flair and as much faith in player’s ability to link facts. Moreover, dungeons offer puzzles that may be a little more complicated than that, but they are still incredibly easy and majority of time is spent walking and watching animations, not actually solving them. On another note, the comments you can hear from passers-by on the streets and the internet posts you read on loading screen every morning are numbingly obvious and boring, restlessly drilling how easy it is to manipulate masses into player’s head. And I’m mentioning all this right now because quite frankly I don’t understand what age group the creators are aiming for. Some of the themes are really dark - grooming teenagers, domestic abuse, murdering pets, assaulting old people, sexual harassment, blackmail and extortion. But the way the characters talk and the emotional maturity they express (majority of them either adult or almost of age) make an average shonen manga look like a psychological horror by comparison. In fact the only dialogues that felt remotely natural were the casual conversations characters have in Mementos - and I very rarely got to hear more than one line of those, because the chat gets interrupted not only by fights, but also by opening doors and chests. And while we’re on the topic of talking, let me discuss my problems with social links. Firstly, during the finishing stretch of the game it became apparent to me that I will finish laughably few of them. Admittedly I got the least of them among my friends, so I was demonstrably inefficient, but it really strikes me how compared to Persona 4, suddenly almost all the characters have high social stat checks. So if like my you happen to pursue only those with 4s and 5s (and perhaps those that you only meet late in the game) then you’re screwed. The system just doesn’t seem to be all that well designed - for example, you can form a social link with the shopkeeper that sells you equipment, but it requires you to have 4 out of 5 points in one of the stats. And before you acquire it, every single time you come to this shop will force you to read through around ten lines about how you would approach this vendor if only you were gutsier. In another relationship one level of the social link happens to grow a little kindness in the player - but this very level had the requirement of the maximum kindness before I was even able to proceed. This kind of inelegantly wasteful design felt more and more prevalent as the game went by. *** This is a title that took 175 hours of my life. It made a good first impression and managed to maintain it going into the second act, but towards the end it started to get really tiring and by the end I honestly hated it. Good UI, music and character designs can only take you so far when the writing has no flavor or depth. The shaky thematic consistency, questionable level design, poor difficulty curve and overall execution of social links made me long for Persona 4. Perhaps as time passes I will forget about the inconveniences and remember the feeling of camaraderie it was able to convey for a few chapters. But right now all I see when I close my eyes is the Throbbing King of Desire laughing in my face.
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