second worst game i played in my life. it drove me to drink. really bad! ❤️

i find the investigation team to be an incredibly negative group when they're together. they truly bring out the worst in one another. i could write a book on yosuke. i can't even bring myself to dislike him, he's just such a complicated character for reasons that i think were both intentional and unintentional. but he definitely contributes massively to the overall bad vibe. teddie i have much less to say about. he sucks and i want to kill him with hammers. chie and yukiko started off really strong and then faded into the background after their shadows, which was disappointing. kanji was easily the funniest character but everyone was so mean to him. rise... sure was obsessed with the protagonist, i guess. and i don't want to talk about naoto right now it's kind of an uncomfortable topic for me. i also didn't really like the trajectories of many of their social links, with the only real exceptions being kanji and yosuke, but kanji's social link was also kind of boring.

the only thing about this game that i liked was adachi. i thought he was very well written and after this entire game and the way characters (mainly yosuke and teddie) talk, misogyny being treated like a serious problem with serious consequences was incredibly refreshing. there were also a few social links that i really liked (shu and naoki come to mind immediately)

also, the gameplay is boring and tedious. i vastly prefer a huge, segmented dungeon like tartarus and mementos, and the palaces in p5 that you do once and don't return to, to the tv world. appreciate the experiment and it worked out in the end because p5 has the best of both worlds, but grinding for quest items was seriously not fun. and yeah, don't do the quests if you don't enjoy it, but i didn't know if there would be consequences and i didn't want to have to play the game again. i did all the quests in p3p as well and they felt bad but not as bad. p3p also had a lot to love outside of gameplay and this game doesn't for me.

i've been past the point of help since early april. i did not like this game until the third semester, but third semester made me love it and made me play the entire series. akechi is truly one of my favorite characters ever and i think everything that was done with him is on a level of genius that atlus may never achieve again, and this is genuinely outside of me being a fujoshi. maruki is the best palace ruler and is genuinely saying something. and you can kill me for this one but i adore morgana. every other character is either mediocre or fails in some deeply disappointing way, but special shoutout to futaba who had the most interesting introduction and then kind of didn't make a ton of impact after that, makoto who didn't really have a ton of potential and then became a cop, and sumire. i believe the cutscene where kasumi dies is the best cutscene in the entire franchise. but sumire's social link is too interested in her being a love interest that it really sets her back. it seems that sumire decided to stop emulating and obsessing over kasumi in favor of emulating and obsessing over joker instead. SAD!

aside from the third semester, the palaces are boring and don't say a lot. akechi feels very much like a reference to light from death note, but when you think about it, are the phantom thieves, by changing individuals' hearts, also kind of killing people in a way and also being light from death note? whatever. that's why i loved the third semester so much, and why i love the bad ending. it's the only time in the game when the actions of the phantom thieves are reckoned with. i just kind of hate moral righteousness and power fantasies and a side portrayed as good no matter what, (can you tell why i might like akechi so much? sigh) so third semester tackled that in a huge way. should it have been longer? yes indeed, but we can't win em all and what it did in its short time was amazing. but i have to say, my brain was still mostly off until i reached 2/2 for the first time. i liked third semester but i wasn't expecting it to really do a lot, and it played with my expectations in a way that i'm not sure if i'll experience again in a game. taking 100 hours to get there to give me a chance to really stop thinking too hard about anything at all, and it was a shock to my system and that is one of the reasons why this game hasn't left my head. it probably feels like not a huge deal to some people but for me it was everything. like i was in a funk. i was not really enjoying the game. third semester intrigued me and i had fallen deeply for akechi at that point and i had bought into the yaoibait so it was worth it for that but i thought the game had no more tricks up its sleeve. i was complacent. i was off adderall because there was a shortage and every pharmacy in my area had run out. i just wasnt thinking. and you know what i had said just a few days earlier, after he died? march 28, 2023? "resurrect him already. sick of this charade". documented on my blog. lifechanging.

also, the gameplay is good, what can i say. i found it tedious at first but then once i started liking the game and then after playing through p3p i truly understood, that it was good. also, mementos is very connected to morgana to me. and i love morgana. the end

copying this from my tumblr blog rant perhaps i will clean it up but this is my thoughts on it for the most part... I really dont understand this website(tumblr)'s thing for dgs like was it a fun game i mean... parts of it but it frankly drags a LOT. I would say there are 3 cases that are worth playing and all of them are in the second game which you CANNOT play without the context of the first. (2-1 (second best tutorial in the series) (i love lesbianism), 2-4, and 2-5; also its worth mentioning that 2-4 and 2-5 are.. the same case) some of the characters (herlock) are (is) interesting and fun but the game feels too stretched thin to give them proper time. like, you do need both susato and iris for the plot, but the way they both fill the assistant role makes both of them feel somewhat lacking because they're just.. not consistently there. and dont get me started on kazuma. probably the most disappointing character in a takumi-led ace attorney. man. like. i cant even articulate my disappointment with him. he kind of just flopped really hard. he literally barely left an impression on me, despite me really liking 2-4&5! i will say that the overarching plot was very good and the intrigue was built well, but like.. if it wasnt there i would not have finished the games, and no other good ace attorney game has really needed that. But I mean, if i hadnt decided to play All the ace attorney games, i wouldnt have finished them. i played dual destinies im not gonna wimp out on a fucking takumi game, but god is it kind of tedious. and, while the homoeroticism was there, it was just a little uninspired and it was made in what. 2017? they couldve made kazuma canonically gay. for some reason that was my takeaway from the homoerotic subtext like this just couldve been text idk
idk i love prosecutors I'll go to places i wouldnt go with a gun defending known controversial prosecutor and possible misogynist diego "godot" armando, im married to miles edgeworth despite him being gay and me being a lesbian, klavier gavin is one of my favorite characters of all time, and what can i even BEGIN to say about franziska, my beautiful perfect angel. and then you have TWO...!! entire prosecutors in a game and i straight up dislike one and feel neutral to negative about the other? how can you even do that? how can it get that bad..

i think femc makes up for everything, honestly. i understand if it's not for you because of it, but i don't really spend much time in the overworld anyway.

tartarus is boring, but it made me appreciate mementos in persona 5 a lot. it also got me to experiment more with status effects and support skills other than debilitate. finally grew up and broke from my immature pokemon damage dealing mindset. like, i played persona 5 and then persona 4 before this. 5 was fun combat but i couldn't appreciate it because i was not sold on the story until the very end of the game, and i didn't know what was being improved. 4 was tedious both gameplay and story wise, and i wanted to end it as soon as possible. p3p was where i could take the time (there was so much of it...) to really try out things and see what worked and what didn't with modern persona combat. and being able to have a girl-only party is awesome, i won't lie...

story wise, i think femc's route is one of the strongest in the series. (note: i watched a fes playthrough before playing femc, but i didn't play it myself. i think femc improved the story in most ways, but i could be biased due to not playing fes myself, etc. i think it really stands on its own, though. i do wish we had the answer if only so that i could play the answer on my switch because grinding is not as bad on switch to me!) the vast majority of social links hit for me, and making aigis a romantic interest no matter what was such a good move, and making her insecurities specific to femc being a girl was awesome. it really worked for me. every added male social link also felt good, especially shinji and ryoji, who became much more emotionally impactful in ways that drove home the purpose of the game. while i think it was a dumb decision not to have male team members as social links originally, i wonder if the quality of their writing in femc's route can be a partial result of having the team able to sit with them more and really know their characters better. the non-romantic female social links are a little more mixed; i really liked mitsuru's and it honestly felt like a better version of naoto's link from persona 4, but i think yukari's character does actually lose something when she's not dating the protagonist, although cutting the answer also cuts a lot of the reason why i love her so much, so it's not entirely this game's fault. sorry if i lose my feminist card for that one, yukari is one of my favorite characters in the entire series and i think her journey of being so desperately connected to the protagonist only for him to die in the arms of another woman, to be filled with grief to the point where she would turn against her team, and then to be saved by the love of her friends, specifically mitsuru who she brought back from the brink of despair earlier, and then to form a deeper connection with aigis as well.... sorry, what was i saying? i love yukari so much. and her character is done a disservice by cutting off a lot of this.

anyways, persona evolution being dictated by the story and not the social links is a much better decision than what the other games did, because every character can grow and their growth can be reflected in the story. and the relationships between characters, specifically yukari & mitsuru and fuuka & natsuki really added a lot. it really feels like the characters are real and exist outside of the player, and the characters are what brings this game to another level despite its severe limitations in format.