It’s one of the biggest weeks of news in a while as WB announced a Smash Brothers clone called Multiversus, Sony had a Star Ocean full of news drop during their State of Play, Among Us is adding new roles in the next content update, and in sadder news, PAX South is coming to an end and apparently Pokimane owns EVO. Oh, you thought I was done? Amazon’s New World is a complete mess, Blizzard officially changed McCree’s name, Blizzcon was cancelled, and Bobby Kotick took a pay cut in a failed attempt at good PR. Far Cry 6 has horrible marketing, Resident Evil had a big week, the Wu-Tang clan are making an RPG and Shoji Meguro is leaving ATLUS to make his own game. Speaking of new games, A Quiet Place is getting a game tie-in from iLLOGIKA, Digimon Survive is now coming in 20222 and ConcernedApe has the Haunted Chocolatier in the works. We’re also getting a new third party DLC character in Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and Melty Blood: Type Lumina‘s DLC Rollout is starting this winter.

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The post VGCC Episode 377: A Scary Amount Of News appeared first on Gamesline.

5. Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp

This game is exactly as simple as it sounds: you’re trying to get a date while you’re at monster summer camp. This competitive multiplayer board game-ish dating sim is a fun, immature, and lighthearted take on what a visual novel could be. The game has a diverse cast of characters largely poking fun at different horror and fantasy tropes, and an extremely cute art style that juxtaposes itself against its constantly off-color humor. Monster Camp isn’t a deep or evocative visual novel in any sense; in fact, most of the game is toilet humor followed by desperately hoping that your monster crush will take a liking to you, only to get rejected in some new embarrassing way. In most cases, it’s the opposite of a game you really want to crack open and discover its inner workings. Sure, there are rules to get the “good endings”, but all it takes is a wrong move or two and you’re back on your ass with the game making fun of you for drinking a glass of bees or something. Since it’s such a unique experience though, with a fun, cute atmosphere and tons of event scenes for both successful and unsuccessful endings, it kept my friends and I coming back whenever we needed a new casual game instead of Jackbox.

4. Yakuza: Like a Dragon

I almost let this game fall through the cracks last year since I had been meaning to work through the rest of the Yakuza series in order before getting to this one, but man, I am glad I didn’t. By now it’s well known that this is a Yakuza game with turn-based, JRPG style combat. You manage your party, improve relationships, choose classes, but the gameplay isn’t the only huge change with Yakuza: Like a Dragon. This new title includes a brand-new protagonist, Ichiban Kasuga, who takes all the built-up dramatic aura and tone from past Yakuza titles and flips it on its head. Ichiban is not Kiryu, he is not cool and suave; he’s goofy, loud, and brash, and he makes it known that he loves his friends. Sure, there are still dramatic moments and big plot points like past games, but I loved how much this game managed to shake up everything I knew about Yakuza. The game also takes place in a totally new area in Yokohama, and while it includes the usual vast selection of minigames and things to do in the city, it’s nice to see something different for a change. The unique combat system works great and combined with everything else, it makes Like a Dragon a great and memorable entry in the Yakuza series.

3. Persona 5 Royal

I wasn’t sure how high I should’ve put Persona 5 Royal on this list since it’s another updated Persona game that we knew was coming out eventually, but it did have enough improvements on the formula that it feels about right to put it at number 3. The new story content added in Persona 5 Royal is…conflicting. It’s got great setup, a bunch of strange actions and motivations in the middle that almost broke my suspension of disbelief, and it boasts one of the strongest, most satisfying ending sequences to a game I’ve ever played. Of course, Persona 5 had a pretty crazy drawn-out end sequence, but after playing through a 150-hour game, Royal really felt like every single hour paid off just for the ending, as it should if you’re going to sink triple-digit hours into a game.

In terms of what has been updated from vanilla, the experience of playing Royal with its new areas and updated gameplay is probably the best representation of a Persona game purely from a gameplay perspective. Tons of quality-of-life changes were made to the combat, and the game has a much clearer path to set you up for its strong endgame with the new Kichijoji area. My favorite part of the updated content is the updated dialogue; it’s small, but lots of dialogue was rewritten and it definitely plays up the relationships between characters a lot more than the sometimes-stiff sounding dialogue of Persona 5. I was skeptical of how meaningful the new content and changes would be to the experience of playing Persona 5, but as I played through the game everything kept adding up to make this a much better feeling experience and definitely worthy of a spot on my list.

2. Hades

I didn’t expect to love this game as much as I did but here it is close to the top of my list. I’m not necessarily a huge fan of roguelikes, but every time I played Hades I was so interested in every aspect of the game, I couldn’t find myself caring about gameplay aspects I normally don’t like. Everything is just so cool: the music is great, the characters are super interesting both in the underworld and on Mt. Olympus, and the gameplay is way better than I expected. While I was skeptical of how a roguelike could create an interesting story while also having fun gameplay, Hades delivers. The way that the game doesn’t quite give you information in the same order all the time, and how it really does feel like you’re finding out new things at the same time as Zagreus makes a lot of story beats feel much more impactful. It also gives you more motivation to get right back into the game and try to progress. Everything, from the presentation to the gameplay is great in Hades and it oozes style while doing so.

1. Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War

I don’t have a graceful reason for why this game is at the top of my list, but here it is: it has Zombies. That’s all it takes. Don’t get me wrong, I love the campaign of Black Ops Cold War, and the multiplayer is great from what I’ve played, but damn can I sink hundreds of hours into running in circles with a Ray Gun. This was the year I thought my interest in COD would fizzle; I surely thought that Activision wouldn’t let Treyarch make an interesting story, much less spend resources tuning multiple game modes. I was prepared for another Call of Duty title with a battle royale mode I’m not interested in and a milquetoast campaign, but I was surprised.

All things considered, Black Ops Cold War delivered tons more than I expected, and the game was hitting on all fronts; Campaign, Multiplayer, and Zombies. I was floored by the campaign’s story, at least for a Call of Duty title, and ended up loving the combination of classic Black Ops faces and new characters. Once I finished through each ending of the campaign and hopped into Zombies, I found an experience so far beyond my expectations that I was certain I would be playing this game for quite a while. Everything about Zombies was improved and expanded upon, and after the shaky course of Black Ops 4’’s Zombies, it felt like Treyarch once again meaningfully put resources into crafting Zombies. With continued, free support for a game mode I’ve always loved but didn’t always want to spend $90 on, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War has certainly solidified itself as a game I’ll keep coming back to.

The post Tristan’s Top Five Games of the Year appeared first on Gamesline.

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Persona 3 and 5 Dancing (henceforth abbreviated as P3D and P5D) are very much cut from the same cloth of 2015’s Persona 4 rhythm spinoff Dancing All Night. While Dancing All Night had an isolated story mode with its own visual novelesque plot that felt at home with the series, P3D and P5D choose to instead adapt their stories through a series of “social link” style conversations with individual characters. These social links are usually one-on-one, but sometimes other characters will come in for a sort of skit scenario. This framing works very well with the silliness of the game’s story, which features each game’s respective Velvet Room guide challenging each other to a dance off with the player character as their representative.

The games themselves are standard rhythm game fare. Players have six different sections of the screen corresponding to various directional and input buttons, and as notes travel across the screen, players have to hit the corresponding button in time with the music. While the gameplay is largely unchanged from Dancing All Night, with stuff like hold notes and scratches making a comeback, the game has also implemented double-tap notes, which feel like a natural evolution for the songs.

Since there’s no story mode in either of the games, songs are unlocked by clearing them in order through the “Dancing!” menu, similar to the “Free Dance” mode in Dancing All Night. While the hardest difficulty is locked until you complete every song, once you unlock a song you can play it on easy, normal, or hard, so you aren’t forced to slog through a difficulty that might be too simple for you. By getting away from the previous iteration’s story mode, the main draw of playing more and more is wanting to see the social link interactions between Persona’s cast of characters.

Players can progress through social links by doing specific challenges for each character. Haru, for example, required me to get a “Brilliant” rating on a certain number of songs for each chapter of her story, while Ryuji required me to reach a certain total number of combos across all songs. Overall, I actually liked this system a lot more than Dancing All Night’s progression system, since social links are easily the strongest aspect of any Persona game’s storytelling. Getting to spend more time with the cast of Persona 3 and 5 felt like a warm blanket over my soul. It helped remind me exactly what I loved about each of them (except for that bastard Ken). This format also means that the game is able to avoid talking about the usual social commentary that Persona games typically cover, which is much appreciated after Dancing All Night’s criticism of idol culture. A tonal choice that felt extremely dissonant in a quirky dancing game.

Accomplishing most of these challenges is pretty easy, with almost all of them being completable on easy and normal mode if you’re a player just looking for a story. Whenever you finish reading a new social link, you’ll also unlock things like costumes or support powers. Being able to unlock costumes and accessories is a welcome change from Dancing All Night, where players had to earn money from dancing to buy each individual character’s goods. The costumes this time around are also applied to either all of the boys of the cast or all of the girls of the cast as well, meaning you won’t have to grind forever to dress your favorite character up exactly how you want to. One of the weirder things you have to unlock, however, are support modifiers.

Support Modifiers are a translation of Dancing All Night’s item feature. By ticking some boxes before the start of your song, you can enable some helpful accessibility features like making it easier to maintain combos, or being able to hit any button to land notes. Using these features will cost you a bit of your final song score, but in some cases when you’re really struggling it can be useful to turn them on just to finish one of those tougher songs. While it’s good that this feature is much more accessible than it was in the past, you have to unlock most of the support powers by clearing social links, some of which require significant time played. It feels weird that the developers would create such a useful and thoughtful accessibility feature for struggling players, only to require them to potentially play hours before they even get a chance to use them.

On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, there are also challenge modifiers. The challenge modifiers will increase your score at the cost of making the song harder- and pretty significantly at that. Some of these modifiers include making the notes disappear before they reach the hit indicator, or having notes fly in at ever changing and terrifying speeds. While some of these modifiers just seem like stupid masochistic levels of hard, I can definitely see a few of them as being fun for people really invested in rhythm games. A lot of the challenge modifiers are unlocked in the same way as the support ones, which at least makes sense for something that is ostensibly supposed to be an added difficulty.

When all of these systems come together, both new Persona games are incredibly fun to play as well as just look at. The dancing has a ton of silly choreography to it, especially with characters like Akihiko whose moves feel perfectly crafted with their doofiness in mind. Everytime Futaba came into a dance as a dancing partner, I lost my shit over just how ridiculous literally everything she did was. Who lets her do that? Why do they let her do that? It’s just a bad scene.

I spent a lot of time in the game just going through and making the perfect outfit for each individual character that I felt would suit them the best. There’s all sorts of costumes from unique themed sets like Velvet Room-themed garb, to the various outfits that each character wore during their original JRPG debut. With plenty of accessories like glasses and headphones as well, you’re able to make a lot of really sleek, or ridiculous costumes depending on whether you like or loathe a character. While I decked out Makoto to look really cool and intense because I think she’s rad, I put a clown nose and horrible gaudy glasses onto characters like Ken or Junpei because they do not deserve my time, effort, or respect and can frankly go away.

Unfortunately, There are a couple outfits that are just plain awful. In P5D specifically, there’s a pre-choreographed video for the song Last Surprise which features a lot of really tasteless and sexist imagery of the cast’s four women. While I talked about this before when some specifically bad costumes were revealed, I was still unprepared for just how bad and out of place it all ended up being. Seeing characters from a game that was largely about challenging the old and vile ideologies of the condoning and liberal adult populous all of a sudden get dressed up in sexy nazi (?) outfits and start dancing in cages and on poles just feels…really bad. These are characters from a game that looks at the degrading culture around sexism and sexual abuse, and now here they are displayed as fetish objects for a machine they were created to destroy.

There is that strange undercurrent of tonal mishmash throughout both of the game’s social links and presentations as well. Seeing games that were about big and serious social issues all of a sudden get distilled down to funny dancing and non-sequiturs can feel extremely weird at times. With again, reference to the serious opening of its source material, P5D also has the boss theme for the man responsible for a lot of those heinous acts, being danced to by a pumped up Ryuji. It’s not outwardly offensive or anything, and it’s certainly better than Dancing All Night’s tone deaf critique, but there’s just something uncomfortable about it all.

Persona has come so far from being a JRPG spinoff in so many ways. Not only has the series bred its own spinoffs, it’s also gotten to the point where they even go out of their way to generate as much money as possible, and it creates a strange sensation. It’s simultaneously satisfying to see a series that you really love doing well as it becomes more and more popular, but it’s equally disheartening to see that the games have reached the level where they almost feel on the verge of exploitative. This could have been one big rhythm game crossover between Persona 3 and Persona 5, but instead of a single best of both worlds title, the end result ends up feeling a lot more like two different almost complete ones.

Still though, if you’re a big Persona fan, and especially if you’re a fan of rhythm games, you’ll probably get enough of a kick out of P5D or P3D for them to be worth your time. I’d recommend just picking whichever entry you’re more partial to however. Since both games have the same general progression and features, it can be a bit mind numbing to play through them back to back. The games are also played best on the Vita in my opinion, because the smaller screen makes it easier to keep track of notes coming in on both sides, which can be a little hard to parse at times on a larger television or monitor. While I wish they could’ve just come together in one big unified P5xP3 crossover dancing game, I still had fun seeing all my favorite ageless student buddies goofing around all over again, and sometimes that’s all you need.

The post Persona 3 Dancing in Moonlight + Persona 5 Dancing in Starlight (PS4) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

From Blazblue, there will be Izayoi, Mai Natsume, and Nine the Phantom. From Persona, there’s Akihiko, Labrys, and Mitsuru. Finally, from Under Night, Merkava, Mika, and Yuzuriha will be DLC.

Ehm found these files grouped with other characters. While there aren’t any images of the characters in the files, placeholders are in the files with filenames hinting towards the different characters. By matching the first two letters of the character’s name to their series, it’s quite easy to guess who is who. If you want to know more, and keep up with other neat finds in the files of games, check out Ehm’s Twitter for more.

The post Unannounced Blazblue Cross Tag Battle DLC Characters Datamined appeared first on Gamesline.

So why the fuck are these nightmarish early 2000’s C-tier game outfits being added to its dancing game?

It feels weird, in 2018, to be looking into media I enjoy and falling into a trap of seeing what is not only the most base level blatant horny something could be, but also a cry back to the good ol’ objectifying days of watching bad anime on the internet. Besides that, it feels bizarre to see these characters from a game so specifically about and against that sort of objectification to fall prey to the same classic stereotypes.

The opening chapter of Persona 5 shows a good example of what happens with women through the eyes of so many men. It shows the egotistical Kamoshida, a school teacher who starts hitting up and blackmailing girls in his classes in order to illicit sexual favors. When the player gets to see through Kamoshida’s eyes in his palace, it’s shown how he views women as objects of lust, things to be won and nothing more. He’s also treated and described as a terrible person because of all this.

So now, seeing this exact same viewpoint, this exact same toxic archaic ideology being used as an advertisement for another entry in that game’s lineage, is a little more than frustrating. It’s a common thread amongst Atlus games to lose their message over time, but this feels like a new level of extreme. When Persona 4 Golden came out and changed its ending to feature things like a more feminine Naoto, and a more prim and proper Kanji, it was disappointing for sure, but even then it was the sort of thing you’d expect and just mope about for a bit. With these outfits, I’m just sort of flabbergasted and left wondering “did anyone who made this game play Persona 5?”

Persona 4 Dancing All Night had the same problems with outfits, but even then that was still a game based off of a source material that itself was decently misogynistic and, so it didn’t feel like such a slap in the face. Seeing deeper characters like Ann, whose character arc has a non-insignificant focus on being taken seriously above just her looks distilled down into objective eye-candy, feels a lot worse than seeing the already over the top Rise wearing a sexy Santa outfit.

I’m hardly one to begrudge sexualization in media, as an avid fan of hornier games like Bayonetta and a lion’s share of terrible anime, but there’s such a lack of tact or idealization in this that just really hammers home the whole problem. None of these outfits play well with the characterizations of the girls, none of these outfits even attempt to mingle with them. Haru gets the closest, but even then her representation of a musketeer gets bastardized into an outfit entirely focused on her legs. Characters like Ann and Futaba aren’t even so lucky either, with both getting some sort of bizarre combat armor that feels WAY too much like the nightmare “Battle Panties” from Persona 3, a game that came out over ten years ago.

It’s possible to create titillating outfits for these characters without objectifying and mischaracterizing them as well, and even Atlus has shown this. If you look at an outfit like Mitsuru’s from Persona 4 Arena, you can see the blend between the elegance and refinement of her character, as well as the intent to show sexuality. Instead of seeing something like Makoto in a leather jacket with a bikini top or something more up her alley, we get her in some sort of weird chainmail jumpsuit. Instead of seeing Anne wearing something that would fit into her lifestyle of modeling, she gets to looks like Slave Leia.

All of this groaning is even ignoring the fact that there will almost assuredly be no equal representation in shitty horniness for the guys. Both male and female characters will undoubtedly get swimsuit outfits, but there will be no corn ball horny outfits for the prior like we get for the girls. There won’t be any hot Ryuji, there won’t be a Joker with his abs out. It would never even occur to the developers who designed these costumes, because they’re still caught on these base level ideas of what “attractive” is, and what “sells,” that feels increasingly out of place.

Persona 5 was trying to be about change, but Persona 5 Dancing Star Night looks like it’s just about bringing things back to the way they always were.

The post Persona 5 Dancing’s Horrible Hypocrisy appeared first on Gamesline.

Check out Ehm’s work at The Cutting Room Floor, follow us on twitter @VGChooChoo, @john_michonski, @sewerpeak, @finaldasa, & @OtherEhm and don’t forget to rate & review the show on iTunes, as well as tell a friend! You can also send questions, comments, and concerns to podcast@videogamechoochoo.com or find us on Tumblr! You can also join our Discord channel at thegamezone.zone!

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The post VGCC Episode 202: Hot on the Hatman appeared first on Gamesline.

The series will be made by A-1 Pictures, who also helped make previous animated Persona projects like the Persona 3 films and, most recently, the Persona 5 prequel OVA. The voice cast for the series will also be carried over from the original Japanese dub of the game, meaning there won’t be any weird jarring moments of “uhhh that’s not my Makoto?”

While the quality of Persona-based anime has always been questionable, some becoming so maligned they were struck from the canon, it’s better in situations like this to just sit back and hope for the best. I mean hey, if it’s bad, at least Persona 5 is still damn good.

The post Atlus Announces Persona 5 Anime Series appeared first on Gamesline.

Joining the Blazblue stars are Yu Narukami from Persona 4, Hyde from Under Night In-Birth, and Ruby Rose from the RWBY  “anime.” This is a really neat way of keeping these franchises around without having to stretch dev teams thin. Arcsys already has folks working on Guilty Gear, Blazblue, and now Dragon Ball FighterZ. I’m sure some consolidation is welcome. Blazblue Cross Tag Battle is coming sometime next year.

The post ArcSys Announces Blazblue, Persona, Under Night, RWBY Crossover Game appeared first on Gamesline.

There’s a lot to like about Persona 5, whether you’re a longtime fan of the series or a total newcomer swept up in the hype surrounding Atlus’ biggest release in years. While the most hardcore of Atlus fans may argue differently, it’s hard to deny that in terms of mainstream appeal, Persona 5 is very much the company’s flagship product – and this is immediately apparent in every facet of the game’s design. From the moment you boot up Persona 5, your senses are immediately and powerfully overwhelmed by its bold visual aesthetic, smooth jazzy soundtrack, and a cast of characters who, with a couple of notable exceptions aside, are among the most human and well-rounded any JRPG has ever produced.

Of course, this is a Persona game we’re talking about here; so those familiar with the series can probably guess the setup. By some convoluted twist of fate, your main character has had to up sticks, move away from his parents, and settle down for a year in a new environment, with little in terms of an actual support network around him. From here, you enroll in school, make friends with local misfits, and somehow find yourself capable of travelling to a strange parallel universe populated by demons which holds all the answers to whatever major event is happening in the world. It’s not a particularly novel set-up for the series’ fifth installment, as you move into the attic of a café owned by a friend of a friend of your parents, but it’s the way that Persona 5 twists the usual formula that makes it endearing.

It’d be extremely easy for Persona 5 to fall back into the same tropes that both Persona 3 and 4 did – and indeed, early on it looks like this is going to be the case. At first glance the group dynamic seems all too familiar; the delinquent best friend and local “it” girl archetypes being telegraphed as your best friends from miles away, but before long, the game presents these two characters, Ryuji and Ann, completely differently to any of the previous games’ sidekicks. This is especially refreshing in Ryuji’s case – where Yosuke and Junpei were easily the worst characters in previous iterations of the series, Ryuji is immediately likable as your well-meaning but knuckleheaded partner, although he does, at times, venture dangerously close to crossing the line from loveable to Yosuke.

The rest of your crew is suitably diverse and interesting too. There’s painter Yusuke, shut-in Futaba, student body president Makoto and upperclassman Haru, all of whom immediately subvert the roles they seem pre-destined to fulfill, and it’s remarkably refreshing. Even mascot character Morgana breaks free of the trappings that doomed Teddie so pitifully in the previous game. The supporting cast is also largely wonderful – with back-alley doctor Tae Takemi maybe being my single favourite Persona character ever.

It’s not all rosy on the character front, though, with two characters, one a party member (Akechi, the boy wonder detective and complete narc) and the other a supporting cast-member (Mishima, who hangs onto your gang like a lovesick puppy) are so mind-numbingly unlikable that even seeing them on the screen drove me insane. The game also has absolutely horrendous LGBT representation; with two predatory gay characters showing up periodically to essentially force themselves on the main character and Ryuji. It’s profoundly disappointing that Atlus still haven’t learned anything after the bungles previous games in the series, as well as Catherine, have made when dealing with marginalized people, and it’s a major stain on the game’s writing.

On the whole, though, Persona 5 is written extremely well, although the early parts of the game would have you think anything but. It’s strange, given that you’d think such a long game (you’ll clock anywhere from 90-120 hours, depending how much time you devote to dungeon crawling) would wish to put its best foot forward first. The localization in the early parts of the game is absolutely atrocious. Characters seemingly have completely different conversations when talking to one another, with one particularly egregious example seeing a cop inform a prosecutor that a call has come in for her. She then proceeds to take her cellphone from her own pocket and answer the call. It’s completely immersion breaking, and while the awkward, stilted dialogue does pop-up throughout the game in fits and starts, it’s largely unnoticeable after the first ten hours or so.

It’s those first ten hours that’ll likely determine whether Persona 5 is worth investing any further time into for the player, it’s a slow start, with little in the way of player freedom. If you’re like me, you come to Persona not for the dungeon-crawling or the combat, but for the story, character elements, and the freedom to just hang out with characters you like and see what makes ‘em tick. The first dozen hours or so give you very little room to maneuver, and at times, it’s not uncommon to have over a week where you have absolutely no freedom whatsoever to even study at night. While I found this frustrating at first, it’s possible to get up to three week blocks of time to do whatever the heck you like later on in the game, so it balances out somewhat. How you spend your time is important; the game feels like it’s very much designed to be min/maxed, so it’s close to impossible to maximise all your Confidant links in a single playthrough without following a very specific set guide. It’s a shame too, because as I said, the majority of the characters are genuinely really interesting, with even your dirtbag landlord coming to be a charming, human character by the end of proceedings. It’s not fun to have to stress out about the best part of Persona 5, nor having to concentrate on one particular Confidant to unlock the ability to not lose time when you enter dungeons, and it feels like a misstep.

Aesthetically, Persona 5 oozes style from every pore on its body, and boasts some of the slickest, most beautiful menu and UI design I’ve ever seen. The Persona series has always been well ahead of the curve when it comes to presentation, and this latest game is no exception. It’s an aesthetic that meets somewhere in the middle between Persona 4 and Catherine, it’s got all the life and vibrancy of Charlie Tunoku’s Inaba Adevnture™, with all the stylish, mature and sophisticated pizzaz of Catherine. Vincent Brooks Meets a Succubus™’ influence is apparent everywhere you turn, not just in the visuals, but also in the game’s absolutely phenomenal soundtrack. The sweet ‘n’ smooth jazz tones contrast with more intense, higher-energy sounds at climactic moments, and it all adds beautifully to the ambiance and atmosphere that P5 is slingin’ on the café table like a hot plate o’curry. Listen closely and you might even hear a remixed version of the Junes theme from Persona 4, and if you’re like me, it’ll no doubt leave you smiling, even if it’s not accompanied by Nanako’s singing.

Of course, as stylish as Persona 5 is, it can’t help being hamstrung just a little bit by it’s clear PS3 lineage. As artistically coherent and cool as P5 is, it’s not an amazing looking game from a technical standpoint; there’s tone of less than spectacular textures, and plenty of jagged edges, weirdly flat looking skyboxes and pasted-on doors. It’s still a real pretty game despite all this, in sort of a sum-greater-than-the-parts kinda way, but it’d have been nice to see it get a little bump visually from the PS3, which is what I played the Japanese release on. And hey, it runs at an incredibly smooth frame rate with no screen-tearing or hitching at any point.

Back when I wrote my hands-on impressions of the Japanese release, I mentioned the darker, more mature tone of the game, and while Persona 5 certainly isn’t as upbeat at it’s predecessor, it’s also (thankfully) nowhere as bleak and emo as Persona 3. It’s certainly a much more mature tone being struck here, one very reminiscent of Catherine, but it plays into the visual styling and the individual characters quite well, even if Persona is still about as subtle as a car accident. Atlus have never been particularly good at hiding the underlying themes of their games, and this is certainly the case once again, with the developers clearly having quite a cynical view of Japanese society and the pressure it puts on its people to be subservient and orderly. It’s not necessarily a bad thing that Persona 5 is so upfront about its politics, but it’s strange to see a game that takes such a stand against conformity while championing individuality also take so many shots at the gay and trans communities. It’s a little bit muddled and a little bit sloppy, and it paints a weird contrast to the game’s own views.

Of course, as with all games in the greater SMT family, Persona 5 is full of dungeon-crawling too. You’ll divide your time up between infiltrating “Palaces”, story-based dungeons whose themes correspond to the current target, and Mementos, a huge randomly-generated dungeon in which you’ll do side quests and grind for more experience and personas. Fans of the genre will know what to expect here, fairly run of the mill turn-based battles that won’t set the world ablaze, but are solid enough to keep you entertained. Longtime SMT fans will also be happy to see the return of the negotiation system for acquiring new personas where you basically hit an enemy with it’s weakness and offer to spare its life in exchange for being granted its power. It’s been simplified down a fair bit from the hardcore SMT franchises, but it’s a nice nod to the series’ roots.

The Palaces are where this dungeon-crawling and exploration mostly shines. While Mementos is fairly uninteresting and regularly feels like a chore to investigate (and you will have to if you want to max out a Confidant), the custom-designed Palaces are each suitably grandiose and filled with their share of unique (if simple) puzzles and traps. I found all but one (the fifth, if you’re wondering) to be really well designed and imaginative, even if there were one or two parts that frustrated me along the way. It’s just a shame that it takes so long to get through them, it’ll probably take you two days minimum to reach the end of a dungeon, and then it’ll take another two days to finish it due to the narrative devices the game uses. Whether or not this is a problem for you may depend on what you come to Persona for, but if you’re like me, it may be a small source of irritation.

At it’s best, Persona 5 is absolutely sensational, with a likeable cast, gorgeous soundtrack and wonderful visual design (even if the game’s PS3 roots do shine through at times thanks to some muddy textures) leading the charge toward stealing your heart. While the quality never drops below the high bar Persona 4 set, there are a bunch of small problems, be them with regard to representation, localization or pacing that may turn some people away, and I couldn’t blame anyone for that. When it’s all said and done, though, Persona 5 may not be a real Shin Megoomi Tensay game, but it is the best.

Hit the bricks, Chie. Takemi for life.

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