i wanna give it a 5 because the front half was so fucking good, but i also wanna give it a 1 because the back half was so mindbogglingly bad.

i found it very odd that the game's writing dropped off when the main plot started coming to the fore. legitimately, everything up to that point was golden. toe to tip, the writing was way beyond what AAA RPGs have been shitting out for the last eternity. so why, then, did none of it last through the unraveling of its own story?

as soon as the game starts pushing you more heavily into the main plot, all the intricate character writing seems to fly out the window and the whole party devolves from characters into plot devices. if you asked me what was going on in the last 10 hours of that game, or why any of it even happened, i genuinely could not tell you. i wish i could. it was epilepsy-inducing light shows happening back-to-back in a bloated, wet fart of a boss rush for 3-4 hours only to then turn around and smirk at you like, "wasn't that shit awesome?"

i wanted to love this game very much. the open world stuff was common fare but couched in enough nostalgia and clever/funny bits of writing that i had full intentions to complete all the side content. i could not, in good faith, recommend this game to anyone unless they get it for free or at super discount.

2.5/5. i am absolutely fucking begging people to stop letting tetsuya nomura and kazushige nojima write stories.

Katsura Hashino is my mortal enemy and I would put myself in unimaginable debt if it just meant I could get into a cage match with him. Fair warning that I'm not gonna bother getting into the gameplay aspects because that, at least, is something the bulk of players seem to agree on.

P5 espouses a solid overarching message; take control of your life! Stand up to The Man! Foster community with your fellow freaks to find meaning in a world designed to put you down! However, it's written by a middle-aged with ass-backwards views on women, queerness, and society. It's one thing to tout the ideals that P5 is allegedly all about, and a whole other entirely to actually follow through on any of it. But the game has Japanese Bernie Sanders in it, so it's Progressive, or something.

I truly cannot comprehend the layers of cognitive dissonance it takes to tell people to fight The Man, then double-fist perpetuating homophobia AND sexism in the same breath. I think constantly about the creepy power imbalance relationships like letting a teenage boy date his teacher but how that's supposed to be chill, yet the mere idea of anyone being gay is completely unthinkable. I try not to take a hard anti-player stance for specific tastes but I do for this game; if you think Futaba makes sense as a dating option to this day, we are mortal enemies and I will see you in the pit.

None of this is even remotely surprising, but I'm continually stunned by how tone deaf players are about the content. Hashino has been writing hollow lip service to progressive ideals and actively bashing them since day one, so we all know what expect from him. But as a player, going from one Persona game to the next, it boggles my mind that so many people uncritically love this game and seem shocked to hear I very critically hate it.

P5 is the epitome of style over substance and I would invite people to fight me on it, but I don't trust anyone on the internet to know how to talk to another human being anymore.