I've played this game twice, and the more time passes, the more I realize that the story and everything surrounding it is honestly kinda doo doo balls.

Persona 5 is a game that tries to paint itself as being progressive and forward thinking, but ultimately just ends up becoming reactionary in the proccess. Well, I would say try, but it really doesn't. The game kinda namedrops some key words like "rebellion" and "opression", but it never really goes anywhere with it beyond "man it's kinda fucked up how that one evil guy is doing that one evil thing we gotta kick his ass." It's not a sentiment I necessarily disagree with, but I honestly just find it to be really shallow, and not interesting enough to make a 90+ hour long game out of. By the end of vanilla, good old Yaldy is spouting off some buzzwords about the "collective unconscious" or whatever, and my eyes are just rolling into the back of my head because this is the third time in a row Hashino has done this shit. It's probably even worse in Royal's 3rd semester, as the Phantom Thieves finally cement their role as the secret defenders of the status quo. Welp, there goes all of the borderline nonexistent messaging and thematic structure built over the last ~90 hours!

Beyond that, this game undercuts itself in multiple other ways. My favorite example of this first arc of the game. Basically there's a predatory teacher in relationships with his high school students, so you fuck him up and make him suffer for his crimes. This stance and message the game pushes is completely contradicted by the fact that this game lets you date one of the school's OTHER(???) predatory teachers relatively soon afterwards. Not only that, but it then takes Ann (one of the abuse victims) and dresses her up in a dominatrix fit for the rest of the entire game. The worst part is that she doesn't even have agency over wearing it either. I've seen some people pass this off as "reclaiming her sexuality" but just like, no. The game evidently doesn't take her seriously, as it makes an incessant amount of creepy ass jokes about it. I don't care if you throw some 12 hour long YouTube video at me, I'm not buying that shit. All I'm gonna say is that Epstein would've been all over this game.

On the topic of the characters, they suck so much dude. Persona 5 might have one of the most bland casts I've ever seen in a JRPG. As said before, this game is like 100 hours long, and I've played it twice. So, when I tell you that I genuinely can't think of anything remotley compelling about any of these characters, I mean it, all of them. Persona 5 also continues the awful trend of hiding key character moments and development (lol) behind optional social links. The worst part is that because they're optional, they can't be a part of the main story in nearly any capacity. The weird thing about this is that ATLUS nailed this balance extremely well in Persona 3, so seeing them completely unlearn it during Persona 4, and then continue to double down on it in Persona 5 is just absolutely bizzare to me. Witnout fail, the cast is also extremely annoying. Sure, Akechi might secretly be some "uber complex flawed character" or whatever, but that motherfucker sounds like a 15 year old on a message board trying to talk like Sephiroth. Like you cannot be asking me to take his ass seriously.

Okay, so I gave this game a 6/10. What's up with that?

In a cruel twist of fate, just about everything else in this game is pretty much great. From the frenetic fast paced combat, to the music, to the striking art style, it's all there. Admittedly, there's some pretty good reasons people don't shut up about this game, and I get it. I know I talked some mad shit about Yaldy and Maruki earlier, but they do genuinely have some very good fights that I absolutely adore, and Maruki's dungeon is fantastic. An awful story can only really dampen my experience with a game so much if the act of playing it is reminiscent of having heroin getting shot straight into my veins. If you were ever wondering why I played this game twice, this is it.

At the end of the day, Persona 5 strikes me as a game that doesn't really fully believe or commit to anything. It's almost as if ATLUS made a really good JRPG, but forgot that they were also supposed to be writing a story for it. It kinda strikes me as one of those visual novels where some really crazy shit happens, but they do the whole dramatic sing and dance of "oooohh this is what it means to live" so people just kinda get tricked into thinking it's good. Clearly it worked in this game's case, since there's legions of 15 year olds willing to sell their soul to this game. And you know what? That's fine. If I was 15 years old, I'd probably think this game is the shit too.