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So I bought a PS4 just after Christmas because fuck it I was back home for a bit and didn't have much to do. Literally only own Persona 5 for it at the moment but holy shit the game's good. I'm generally pretty fucking bad at playing Singleplayer games. I've been playing on PC most of my life and I always found myself getting bored of almost every single game after launching it once, bur P5 has been a massive exception. I planned to play Persona 3 and 4 before playing 5, and tried emulating 3 but I found I had the same problem, I was always alt-tabbing, checking discord and shit like that and could never really concentrate on the game. Alongside that I found very quickly that my 'RPG Perfectionism' kicked in and I was looking for the best strategies to do everything before I had even really gotten anywhere in the game. Since then I built a new PC and never got round to re-installing the emulator and downloading the ROMs, so the idea of playing the previous games went on the backburner. Like I said, I'm home for Christmas so I finally decided to bite the bullet and pick up a PS4. I'm honestly shocked at how much I've enjoyed P5 so far. I'm putting it down to playing on console as opposed to PC, but it feels like I'm actually able to concentrate on playing the game, and I'm actively avoiding most resources to do with the game (with the exception of the bios of a couple of enemies who can only be damaged by one element and will run away if not killed quick enough, because those are just fucking frustrating). The game presents its story really well, and going through it genuinely feels like you're uncovering a mystery to some degree. The combat is really fun, and uncovering and exploiting weaknesses is really fun, and in my experience with the game I've felt like that majority of things I've encountered have been challenging enough to the point that I can never just auto though combat, but not so hard that I'm having to continuously re-try the second I make any mistake. That being said, there are some parts of combat that are quite frustrating. If the self insert main character dies in combat then you automatically fail, no matter the status of the rest of your party members. This leads to a lot of situations where if you get unlucky the enemy AI can all target your character in their turn, and you can just get killed in one cycle. Seemingly the only protection against this is to just prioritise the MC over anyone else when it comes to healing etc (if the fight is going to go on for more than two or so turns) or to make sure you get an ambush on whatever enemy you're fighting, and then hope that its a group you can kill within all your party members initial turns (which is how 95% of combat goes). Because of those factors, its hard to really know when you go into combat how it will go. This really isn't a problem in boss fights as when you fail you're allowed to immediately start over from the beginning of the fight, however it's frustrating when you're going through the games dungeons as a lot of the time the save points can be fairly spread out or annoyingly placed. Specifically in the third dungeon there is 1 save point a little way into it, the second save point is only accessible after going through a series of relatively hard to navigate traps, quite a lot of fights, and finally a mini-boss. However immediately after you access the second save point, you go down an elevator, and the first thing you are greeted by is the third save point, which you don't have to go through anything else to access. My final gripe with the game is that as each dungeon unlocks, you get given a certain number of in game days to go through it. The faster you finish the dungeon, the more of those days you have left over to do side activities. This leads to a couple of problems. I've inherently found that I feel like I'm rushed to go through each dungeon, as the game allows you to do two 'side activities' each day, unless you engage in any form of combat activity (through the main dungeon or the long side dungeon) in which case that eats both actions for the day. Because of this the game goes through a cycle where you'll spend a few continuous hours doing nothing but combat, puzzles etc which will end in a boss fight, and then the next few hours of game time will be nothing but reading (admittedly very engaging) story developments, where despite the 'Visual Novel' type of approach the game takes, I've ultimately felt like I have no real control of what happens past the simple selection of "engage with character X today". The second major problem with how the game sets dungeons out is that in the second dungeon you get told "Hey here's a place that you cant get past, you have to do something outside the dungeon in order to progress further. You're gonna see this shit happen from now on". This only adds to the feeling of being rushed through dungeons, as when you reach a save point your parties health and SP doesn't get restored. Therefore, I feel as though I need to progress as far as I possibly can because I may just be greeted by one of these gated areas at any moment, and the idea that I could enter a dungeon as my action for that day, and in the first door I go through be told "Yeah alright gotta leave the dungeon in order to get past here get fucked". The most annoying bit is that I have only ever encountered this mechanic once, and that was when it was introduced in the second dungeon (I'm currently about 55 hours into the game and I'm about to enter the fifth dungeon) so in my experience so far its as though they introduced the mechanic and immediately forgot about it. If done right that mechanic could help break up the feeling of being rushed through dungeons, however on the opposite end it could be frustrating if they were regular occurrences, as you could be forced out of progressing further in a dungeon even if your party was in perfect shape. Ultimately I don't think it's a problem that could really be solved, however I wish it could be. Perhaps if I continued playing on Hard it would feel better, however I had to turn the difficulty down as it really was Hard and I don't feel as though I know the Persona games well enough to warrant doing that. So yeah, there's all my problems with the game and despite all that I fucking love it. I'm honestly blown away by it. Aside from the few frustrating bits I just mentioned the game has somehow managed to keep the interest of someone who is really never able to play any singleplayer game. From what I've read there's about 100 hours of content in the game for a first playthrough. I feel as though I've probably progressed faster than that, as where I am in the story seems to be getting pretty damn serious now, however I could be completely wrong and I may have ages to go yet (which would make me VERY fucking happy). If I finished the game, and never touched it or my PS4 again I don't think I could say that I feel as though I wasted my money, that's how much I've enjoyed it (although I do plan to play FFXII and FFXV after finishing P5). It's a good game lads, if you have a PS4 already I'd definitely say to pick it up, and if someone was looking to get a PS4 because of Persona 5 I'd say go for it.

I guess you never saw it coming.

Happy new year all of you No matter what you're doing witb your life, whether you're bettering the world squeezing moisture off leaves to feed starving African children or waking up to play videogames all day, just make sure you're happy to wake up every morning Even if this forum is dead I wish you all the best and I mean it