I absolutely fell in love with this game. I'm not a guy who picks up the new games as they come out, but Persona 5 was always on my radar. After finally releasing on PC, I ended up snagging it on a sale and started playing it. I couldn't get enough of it, its up there as one of my favorites. I loved the characters, the story was really well done, and the combat system was really fun to play around with. I absolutely loved the palaces and the puzzles they introduced. They nailed the concept of keeping things fresh, the moment a palace mechanic started to get stale, they change things up. I absolutely loved the game from start to finish, but I did have a few issues that range from mildly annoying to frustrating.

(A bit of a spoiler warning ahead)

While the keyboard controls worked pretty well, they definitely aren't perfect. All the overworld and menus both in and out of combat worked very well, but the sneaking around and ambushing felt really clunky when transitioning to keyboard controls. That was really the only issue, clunk. The game plays fine on keyboard, but needs a bit of tweaking. The only other issue I feel the need to complain about are the few spikes in difficulty. I went in on normal mode, and while the game didn't hold my hand, I was making pretty good progress with the combat. All of that seemed to flip when I got to the Okumara fight. Up to then, I never felt pressured to use a specific strategy to win, I could generally use what I wanted (within reason) and still do fine. Okumara hardlined me onto a single path of making sure every party member had a counter to the weaknesses and exploiting the baton pass. This would be fine, but you're on a timer, and I'm not talking about the general timer. If you messed up one rotation for the boss, the enemies respawn. One miss, one crit on one of my party members, anything could make the fight restart. I ended up having to put Psi attacks on every party member in battle just so I could exploit the baton pass on one of the robots. It's not a fun fight, and I had never felt that powerless on a fight before or after that until the final boss of vanilla, which felt more like a challenge rather than a sequence I had to follow (a heal before fighting Yaldabaoth would have been appreciated though)

Other than that one part of the game, I absolutely loved Persona 5 Royal. I ended up doing the third semester and plan on trying to 100% the game and go through NG+. Would recommend.

Reviewed on Jul 23, 2023


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