Person of Five Thread

haha remember last summer when I spent three entire months trying to crawl my way through all seven thousand hours of Persona 3 while disassociating and then concluded with "you should probably not play Persona 3"

maybe this one will be good

immediately in love with this weird kaleidoscope effect around the edges of the screen

nothing technically complex, just an incredibly clever idea + a lot of extra polish to juice it up

only a couple hours in, but compared to P3 this already doing a MUCH better job at thematically tying the persona/summoning stuff to the actual characters

prob my single biggest complaint with 3 was that the whole "persona is your inner self but it's also a demon and you summon it by symbolically doing suicide" turned out to have NO connection to the actual story or character arcs

in contrast, 5 going "tear the mask off of your heart/face to expose your desire for rebellion" in the context of characters screwed over by authority immediately feels like it Works

oh hey it's the videogame dog

extremely happy with how much this game's plot + dialogue system encourages you to just be an asshole to grownups

NICE
SOD

extremely good character portrait lmao

attending classes with a cat inside my backpack who keeps telling me to do crimes

lol the school having giant scandal over abusing students, and then hiring a counselor to Open Door Policy their way to Mental Wellness is just..... incredibly on point

this game is just deeply, fundamentally cynical towards anyone in a position of structural authority, and it rules

wait hold on there's like.... nontrivial Computer Graphics going on here

I've spent like ten minutes staring at this trying to figure out how the hell they're blending overlapping colors like that and how the hell they're doing alpha sorting when this appears to be all one single textured mesh??

Finally realized: I think it's just additive blending?

I don't the glass panels actually ARE alpha blended, which means they don't need to be sorted. They're on a very dark background, and they're supposed to look like they're glowing anyway since it's... a lamp

they're just additive, so you get all the cool color shifts for free

which would mean it's not actually a complex rendering trick at all; it's just artists being very, very good at using the engine's existing capabilities to make art that looks good

which also rules

I'm not entirely sure how the moulding between the glass panels is done, since that would need to write depth and it LOOKS like it's a texture rather than geometry

there are a bunch of ways an artist could achieve that without having to involve tech/rendering devs though

get that bread

atlus stop adding boys to my party i do not want them

...although I'll admit I actually like Ryuji

same kind of "friendly dumbass" archetype as Junpei from P3, except instead of junpei's "being a fuckin creep to every girl in the game, written as comedy" deal, ryuji's just a genuinely well-meaning dork

BIGBANG BURGER is very good, but Astral Chain still holds the crown for Best Videogame Food Brand with LARGER BURGER

LARGER
BURGER

oh hell yeah

Morgana is supposed to be a boy, except they do the typical "young boy is voiced by adult woman VA" thing, except she also voiced Sothis in Three Houses, so my brain just automatically hears Anime Girl Voice and never really registers the character as A Boy lol

this single line had to have spawned an entire comiket's worth of doujins right

incredible lmao

ah,,, i see you are a man of twitter

the Hegelian dialectic he's referring to is this

Persona 5

for real though it EXTREMELY rules that every time a character joins your party they have to first completely lose their shit and choose to flip off the universe

makoto literally yells I AM DONE BEING NICE lmao

you always know when someone's gonna join the party because they're always people who are, like, hopelessly overburdened by the expectations of self-serving adults

so then you're just like man I cannot wait for them to fuckin SNAP

and then they do and it rules every time lol

This game spent a TON of money on unique one-off cutscene animations and it really feels worth it

so much of the dialogue takes place while characters are just Hanging Out, so having them do stuff like physically hand things to each other and move props around has a huge impact

I'm so used to JRPGs and even bigger games going to great lengths to AVOID showing stuff like a character reaching into a bag on a chair or something

P5 decided it was worth pouring budget into little interactions like that, and the result is a fantastic sense of personality

like I just got a whole scene where two characters are talking while playing pool, and they actually animated the balls bouncing around to land specific shots. Totally unjustifiable for most games, but meaningful

why is light yagami a cop

this is the platonic form of Girl

you may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like

picked the most edgelord answer but I was not expecting to get shut down that hard lmao

so like the opening act of this game with the abusive teacher is INCREDIBLY intense, in a way that I super didn't expect from a JRPG

everything after that has been... considerably sillier

I went in expecting Anime Bullshit and got hit with something much, much heavier

I get that the narrative would need to lighten up a bit after the opening, bc staying at that level for 80 hours would be brutal, but Anime Bullshit is kind of a letdown after such a powerful start

this whole "ancient egyptian tomb but with broken unicode and shift JIS art as hieroglyphics" aesthetic is extremely clever

naming the hacker girl futaba-chan is hilarious bc it's too on the nose to even qualify as a pun. like if your story had a pro gamer and you just named them Twitch T. Vee lmao

i think that futaba and bernadetta should date

oh hey it's the atlus homophobia beach

why is it always the beach though

P3's shitty trans joke was also the beach

she's so short lmao

when u check twitter

lmao, P5 hitting on a very specific form of Teen Angst: stuck being "friends" with people you actually don't like very much, because you're social horizons are enforced by adults and you have no control over who you spend time with

I had kinda forgotten about this aspect of the Teen Experience but man looking back it was really a whole thing huh

this game is like one of the only "high school anime" settings that feels thematically justified? Like it's specifically about how teens are old enough to realize they're screwed over by authority, but too powerless to oppose it, and all the messy shit that spirals out from that

like instead of being in a high school for generic fantasy reasons, or just for narrative convenience, it's full of super overt metaphors about Prisons and Wardens and like authority figures being both punitive and apathetic, and the school setting is PART of that

I'm not convinced it's gonna stick the landing, but for the most part the game Knows What It's About in a way that's super rare in big-budget games writing

how the fuck did they translate this

i love how if it's a holiday/weekend makoto just spends the day standing stock-still outside the school gate

starting to get to some of the higher-level social links and wow this is really Problematic Ships: The Videogame huh

i mean yeah *I* would ask dr takemi out in a heartbeat but also i am A Grownup and joker is Like Fifteen lol

also wow the maid story is like WILDLY all over the map in terms of tone. like what the hell lmao

Interestingly: P5 has largely fixed this problem, and rather than making any significant design changes the solution is basically just Better Writing

Unlike P3Guy, Joker has a name and an inner monologue and, like, an attitude

he still never speaks outside of the player's control, but the dialogue options have CHARACTER. You steer convos but he'll always be a snarky asshole who cares for his friends

P3 also did all narration in second person (i.e. "you feel tired"). P5 shifts this to have Joker actually talking to himself (or Morgana ordering him around lol), which is subtle but helps a ton

Another writing change with a huge impact: Joker actually acknowledges that many of his relationships ARE mercenary. Simply having him say "I should get to know this person so I can learn Thief Skills from them" makes it part of the story instead of a weird mechanical side-effect

blazing hot Persona 5 take: damn this game is long

[persona 5 spoilers]

lmaoo

[persona 5 spoilers]

nope nope nope nope nope nope nope

incredibly frustrated with that whole social link tbh

the entire game is literally about how schools and cops and corporations and politicians are all one unified front of corruption and the only possible course of action is Rebellion, and then she's like "but ill be a good cop"

like if it were any other videogame I'd be like "yeah, anime writers really love cops, It Can't Be Helped", but it REALLY sucks in this specific case

it's like they just straight up forgot what the plot of the game is, and why she ended up joining the party in the first place??

she literally watched her sister get turned evil BY becoming a cop??? the main plot right now is about how the cops are planning to straight up forge evidence to imprison teens????

it super sucks bc she's one of my favorite characters in the main story, and then her social link, like, retroactively makes her suck

:(

also now i have to load a save from like two hours ago in order to find a new gf

this game did the Heist Movie thing where the heroes seem trapped and then reveal that it's actually all part of a genius master plan that the viewer didn't know about

except that it's Videogame Writing so the explanation is so complex it takes a literal hour of expository text

it's INCREDIBLY funny tbh

the game has never been particularly worried about the exact mechanics of its goofy supernatural world, until the climax of the story *slams* the brakes to do an 80-minute lore-explainer video essay lmao

imagine an ocean's eleven movie where george clooney just turns to the camera and spends the entire last third of the film explaining xehanort's rules of time travel

you ever think about how persona 5 is its own coffee shop au

every time this dude talks his voice sounds super familiar and it *finally* hit me

DO YOU GET TO THE CLOUD DISTRICT VERY OFTEN

persona 5 needs to Stop

it's a good game but holy shit it's at LEAST twice as long as it should be

it would be a much, much better game if it was less that one hundred and ten hours long

there are like....... other videogames that i would like to play man

shinya you should not hang out with the gigantic penis chariot

Okay I finished Persona 5

You could EASILY have removed 50+ hours from the middle of the game

but thankfully the final act picked back up and remembered what the plot was about, and it managed to conclude things in a way that stayed consistent with its own themes

on the whole it is A Very Good Videogame

in retrospect I should absolutely have expected the final turn towards Just Straight Up Gnosticism, but they actually pulled it off in a way that connected to everything else, so it was genuinely cool lol

if society is a prison for Foucalt Reasons then it's very difficult to fix because it's a decentralized self-reinforcing system of conformance and punishment

but if society is a prison because of THE MOTHERFUCKIN DEMIURGE then all you need is some anime teens with a giant gun

MEGA SPOILERS:

the final dungeon's image of everyone willingly choosing imprisonment and putting God at the center of The Literal Panopticon is an EXTREMELY clever piece of design, tying the entire game's themes and aesthetics into a single coherent visual

it's some hilariously unsubtle teen edgelord shit, but to be honest the past several years have shifted me into an extremely Edgelord Teen mindset so I was 100% here for it lmao