Story Line

The protagonist finds himself walking home and encounters a drunken man berating a young woman. The protagonist tries to intervene and finds himself getting arrested for assault. He is then placed on probation for an entire year and sent to live under the care of a temporary guardian Sojiro Sakura, while attending a new school Shujin Academy. From here, the hero meets a string of new friends and they find themselves in the mysterious “Metaverse”, where they must defeat strong foes in order to change their evil ways.

Expectations

The Beginning

When you start the game you will be thrown into the storyline very quickly and it serves as a tutorial to let you get a feel for the movement and basic combat mechanics. As you progress through the story you will be introduced to additional mechanics that provide additional depth, variety and strategy for combat. There is an abundance to learn, but it is spread out and not overwhelming.

Mechanics

This game is not mechanically demanding as it is turn based and does not require complex button pushing. This is more of a strategy enabled game.

Time Flow

The concept of time in the game is basically as follows, your character goes to school which you can sometimes perform activities. Some of the activities include answering trivia questions, create infiltration tools or progress the story. After school is when you really have freedom (such is life) and you can choose to improve your combat abilities by fighting monsters. You can improve ally relations for special bonus's and you can do various activities to build social stats (Guts, Charisma, Knowledge, Proficiency and Kindness). This enables you to do particular events that require a certain level of that developed skill. Each event that you do takes up a “block” of time, so if you hangout with a friend After School it will change the time to Evening, which means you can only do two major events a day. Some events can only be done during After School or in the Evening, so managing time is a very important aspect of Persona 5.

Social Stats

Social stats are Guts, Charisma, Knowledge, Proficiency and Kindness. (Déjà vu?) These stats can gate specific actions like progressing a friend's side quest. This is not ideal because you can't grow the relationship further and obtain the new bonus until you meet the social stat checks.

Confidants

These are essentially the relationship status. The list shows each confidants progress and how far along the relationship you are on a scale of 1 star to 10 stars. This section also shows what level you need to be with the confidant to earn their next bonus ability. Each confidant represents a different “Arcana” and as such will give benefits for that type. The benefits increase the higher the confidant level is.

Arcana

This is the bread and butter of the game. Arcana is the type of Persona. For example, the first Persona you get is called “Arsene” and his Arcana is of the Fool type. There are a ton of Persona's who differ in looks, skills, abilities, weaknesses and strengths. Your objective is to gather different types of Persona's, level them up to earn stronger abilities, mix and match abilities to triumph over tough opponents and ultimately have fun. You are even able to fuse 2 to 5 currently owned Persona's to create a better Persona to crush your enemies.

Difficulty

There are 4 difficulties which are in order from easiest to most difficult. • Safety • Easy • Normal • Hard I can only speak for the Hard difficulty, which was rather challenging but certainly not impossible. I have had to reset the week two times, for two major bosses because of unpreparedness. Your pride can take a hit when you have to restart the entire week in order to train and prepare for the upcoming fight. This was a learning experience and will enforce actually learning the boss fights and mechanics. The regular fights are easier but still provide a challenge. I would provide some advice, treat the boss fights as marathon and not a sprint and you will have greater success. Overall, Hard certainly lived to my expectations and I've already had several hours of enjoyment.

Time Requirements

Persona 5 is a game where saving is pushed onto the player. In the real world, the player is able to stop and save whenever they feel the need. You can still save in the Metaverse but only in dedicated Safe Rooms, which are abundant in the dungeons. Since I played on the hardest difficulty, time between Safe Rooms was 30 minutes to 60 minutes or longer. You can always go back to the same Safe Room and save if time is an issue. Some of the story cut scenes and dialogue can last several minutes, so prepare for that.

Achievements

Yep, it sure does!

Hardware Requirements

Since this is a PlayStation exclusive, you only need a PS3 or PS4 to play. Unfortunately, it wasn't published for PC or any additional console systems. No internet required to play.

The Good and Bad

Recommendation

Persona 5 was a game with very high expectations set by my friends. After some game time, it easily surpassed all of those expectations. This game has crazy themed dungeons and creative enemies combined with some interesting fighting mechanics and comedic dialogue. All of those things combined, makes for an overall terrific experience. It was one of the very few games that I immediately considered playing again within the "New Game Plus" mode. This game took over 100 hours to complete and I wasn't even able to collect all the achievements/trophies. To keep it short and sweet, this game is addicting and has a large amount of activities to do.

Where to buy?

Action Shots