Moderator: JC Denton
by icycalm » 19 Nov 2023 02:01
ATLUS wrote:Join the Phantom Thieves as they lead an uprising of the heart! Assemble an all-star team of heroes in a brand-new story in this thrilling combat adventure set in Persona's iconic universe.
by icycalm » 19 Nov 2023 02:02
NVDragon wrote:TLDR: A bunch of really cool ideas, executed as though the dev team was trying to see how little effort they could get away with while still making bank on Persona 5's brand.
The Good:
- Positional cover-based combat with mechanics that HEAVILY reward smart plays.
- Elemental weaknesses are replaced with interesting status effects, so choosing your party is less about covering bases than planning your strategic approach - shock effects control movement, wind inflicts knockback, etc.
- Characters can move freely within their movement range until they perform an action, giving you plenty of opportunities for planning and experimenting with positioning before you commit.
- Seriously, this could have been really cool if they went harder in the X-COM direction. A team of sneaky underdogs abusing status effects and cover mechanics to bring down numerically superior foes? When it works, it feels fantastic.
The Bad:
- Flanking barely matters. Hitting a unit that's completely out of cover gives the attacker a whole-ass extra turn, which feels awesome, but for some reason leaning gently against a wall protects you against that even if there is physically nothing between you and your opponent.
- The soundtrack sounds like if someone asked an AI to write tech support on-hold music in the style of Persona 5.
- The story is bland, sub-fanfic tier writing.
- The game really, really wants you to pay attention to as much story as possible, to the point where you can only skip cutscenes until the point where you need to make a (wholly pointless) dialog choice.
- Missions are too short to really get invested in. Considering how uninteresting the story is, it's frustrating that at this point I think my gameplay has been about 40% gameplay, 40% cutscene, 10% load times, and 10% menus.
- Personas are boring now. Every character can use an extra one, therefore every character SHOULD use an extra one, therefore you're gonna spend way more time in the Velvet Room, but those sub-personas are significantly less impactful so it's ironically much less beneficial.
- All-Out Attacks feel clunky, they often force you to ruin your positioning just to get slightly better attack coverage, and they don't even have the stylish finisher animations.
- Enemy AI is terrible. Like... when units can freely reposition until they commit, the enemy shouldn't get bottlenecked, ever. Instead it happens like once a mission.
- Seriously, the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ story. Persona 5 was fantastic. Even Strikers was pretty good. This one is about the Phantom Thieves getting isekai'd for some reason, but luckily the Velvet Room got isekai'd too, and also they met a totally unrelated politician who also got isekai'd on a different occasion. The story tries to dangle so many plot hooks in front of you but it doesn't actually follow through on enough to make it feel like anything matters.
- The whole game pauses if you alt-tab. Including loading screens. Just... ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.
The Ugly:
- The art style. It's not just chibi, it's DK Mode.
- Joker's silhouettes in the menus have red faces for some reason.
- There's a character who doesn't have a persona, she instead has "arts," but the default keybind for it is F so her menu helpfully offers the option to use "FArts" every time she's selected.