Has some great levels that unfold in really cool ways and some excellent individual encounters, but I have to question why the world's most badass super soldier seems to be in no rush to get anywhere- painfully slow movement makes so much of the game far less dynamic than it should be. Also, there's a lot of outright crappy level design, and poor weapon balance combined with only being able to hold 2 weapons means you'll spend much of the game using the same handful of power weapons which aren't particularly interesting to use. The only thing that's actually fundamentally good is the enemy AI, which is smart and aggressive enough on higher difficulties to keep things interesting sometimes (when the level design allows).

Maybe everyone just thinks the first Persona game they play is the best- for me that was Persona 4. I was massively hyped for 5 at its release but was disappointed to find that despite its incredible sense of style and overall fantastic visuals and sound design combined with fun gameplay... it kinda sucks. Entirely because of the story, which makes up a huge chunk of the game. The characters are, by and large, the same goddamn characters from 3 and 4 but with way less depth. Persona 4 used its dungeons to explore the psyches of its main characters, forcing the game to write at least some nuance and depth into all of them (Kanji is a really fantastic standout character). Persona 5 instead uses dungeons to explore the minds of its villains, but it has nothing interesting to say about them. Every villain for most of the game is essentially the same person- just an egomaniac sociopath who does bad things because they have no moral compass and only care about themselves and that's all you really need to know. Shadows, established previously in the series as the worst aspect of oneself that characters are forced to face, are almost always in P5 just the same exact person as their already-villanous owners whose mind-dungeon you're exploring, rendering the whole concept beyond pointless. The result is a story about a bunch of bland characters going on a moral crusade against a bunch of bland villains (then the story suddenly comes to life for one chapter when it switches back to the persona 4 forumla... oh well).

Worse yet, there's absolutely baby-level social commentary (sure, yes, adults screw over young people- but like, why? the game wants to comment on society and Japanese society in particular but it's so broad as to be meaningless). Even worse, the game floats the idea of investigating whether what the main characters are actually doing is moral- after all, if they're stopping evildoers by fundamentally altering their souls such that they repent for their crimes, are the people they are now (after being radically transformed on a base level by magic) even really culpable for the crimes of their past selves? It's a fascinating question that the game poses but seems to basically discard as insignificant. I suppose I could've suspended disbelief if the game were wholly disinterested in the question but it seems self-aware enough to have the characters discuss it but, again, the game has nothing interesting to say. Why does evil exist? Because some people have bad souls which need to be fixed, then also after they're fixed they should be thrown in prison for life as punishment for their formerly inherently bad nature. (If the game were actually brave enough to full-throatedly posit this it might actually be worth investigating but it's really just an unintended consequence of its refusal to explore its own themes).

I'd probably have a much higher opinion of this game without a basis for comparison for how its characters could have been handled, but it does itself no favors by basically borrowing its entire cast for the second time now then doing those same characters worse than ever.