Persona 5

Well it took a fucking age and a half but last weekend I finally beat Persona 5 and HOLY SHIT it's actually one of the best RPGs I've ever played.  I'll try to avoid spoilers as much as a can but there's a CHANCE that some may get dropped at some point, I'll mark them appropriately if I get into that but just be on your guard since people seem to be very uppity about spoilers for this game.

So here's a short version of my thoughts for people who are familiar with Persona and Shin Megami Tensei as a whole.  Persona 5 doesn't actually do anything particularly new with the franchise but it has an absolutely INSANE amount of polish on it.  If you like Persona you'll adore this game and if you are a mainline SMT snob then even you will find it hard not to get a kick out of this one.  It's just generally a damn good game.

For those that aren't familiar, Persona 5 is half monster breeding JRPG and half school life simulator. The story begins with our protagonist being set up for a crime he didn't commit and then getting sent to some shit school in Tokyo where everyone hates his guts.  From there he runs into a couple of other outcasts and they discover that they can enter an alternate universe where they dress like gentlemen thieves and can invade the hearts of certain people to change them from shitty people to not shitty people.  When you aren't doing that however, you have to go around making friends various folks around your school and Tokyo which has a knock on effect of making your Persona's stronger when you fuse them together to make new ones.  When you aren't doing THAT you can go around a number of places raising stats like charm, courage and academics in order to make you better at doing stuff/providing chances to deepen your friendships with the people mentioned in the sentence before.

The monster breeding, JRPG side of this game is where it really comes to life though.  When you are wandering around the hearts and minds of your targets you run into demons.  If you beat them up in just the right way and knock them down you can hold them at gunpoint and "negotiate" with them.  If you're negotiation is successful they will give you money, items or best of all join you so that you can use their skills in battle.  Once they've joined you can go inside a prison in order to put them under a guillotine and fuse them together to make new ones that are even better which in turn makes stealing  the minds of your targets much easier.

This is just a basic overview of the main two parts of the game but there's so much going on in P5 it'll make your fucking head spin.  There's no way I can do it justice in a short blog post like this, just go and play it.  The fact that I've not dedicated a paragraph to things I didn't like should say a lot about how I feel.  The only "complaint" I do have is that this game is fucking LOOONG but that wasn't really a negative for me and won't be for a lot of other people.  Just be warned though you will be probably at this one for at least 90 hours just for the main run through.

If you like RPGs, play P5
If you don't like RPGs, play P5 anyway
Just if you like games in general, play P5.  Just play fucking P5, right now