Not rating this because I played it for literally 30 minutes and only sampled a bunch of levels without doing much. There was so much data everywhere and yet the gameplay was so sloooooow. I know this is many people's favorite series (perhaps from a a slightly older age of gaming, but still 100% valid), so I'm not going to shit on it without even having beaten the prologue, but there is no way I will ever be able to finish a level in this game, it's so time-consuming to move units around. Shame. I have no idea how anyone manages to be patient enough to complete this game, even if it was someone from 20 years ago. If they had major QOL improvements that'd be awesome

Very cute, very charming. Played like 3 hours? I don't recommend it as a game. I agree with the other reviewers (who rated it highly). Maybe I'm just not in the right mood, but there's 3 aspects to the gameplay:
1) exploring
pretty good, you can walk around a lot. not much to do though. hard to tell which places are worth going.
2) talking
I didn't get to where the "main story" takes off but it wasn't so rewarding thus far. Am I the only one who would take a timeskip dating sim version of this lol?
3) collecting
Boring, really. Click on a bug, collect bug #27/200.

I could see this being a super money-hungry gacha game, it has about that level of gameplay. I mean it's a Spike Chunsoft game so don't get your expectations too high. Idk, I just wasn't rewarded enough. My expectations are stupid high these days though so keep that in mind.

SUMMARY - Worth a shot if it's one of your first few cRPGs. Disappointing writing but many hours of fun battles, though the gameplay isn't perfect.

WRITING - This game's writing puts together unfunny jokes, unlikable quippy characters, a mediocre chuuni JRPG-tier plot, and many shallow storylines together. The writing is a 5/10 at best.

GAMEPLAY - The gameplay is not perfect either. But I can't rate it lower than 4/5 because I was absolutely hooked on this game for 40 hours (to the point of lowering my life standards lol). But it IS the first cRPG I've really played more than an hour of. Anyway, it was fun trying out all of the different spells. Technically speaking it's definitely up there in recent years.

Two of my biggest complaints.

1) Too much shallow content. You just get a few lines per person in these side quests. I don't feel any investment. YOU CAN'T TELL WHICH SIDE QUESTS WILL BE GOOD. Or which people are worth talking to. You can talk to 100 NPCs hoping for something good and you'll get it like 5% of the time. Is it worth investing time in this area? Or this one?

2) Some things weren't obvious enough. An example is when there's some joke or crazy choices you can make - but is the game going to treat it as an innocent joke or will you get screwed over long-term? You have to spam saves.

Now, I'm not a game designer so I don't know how to solve these difficult problems, but they killed the fun like crazy.

There were also lots of small frustrating bugs (probably at least a hundred). At least a few times I had to restart the game or reload from an earlier save (which takes WAY too long) because of these bugs.

Finally I HATE how rigid the system is. It's like those simulators that lack human logic, you know? The things where the game is totally literal whereas an irl DM could feel things out. Anyway one example is perception checks. You don't know how important the perception thing is (sometimes you literally can't proceed without first "perceiving" a button) so you have to go to camp and get some fresh characters to come back and retry the perception. So dumb. Also the whole "guards noticing you doing bad stuff" system kills fun like crazy.

Also being able to speed up combat would be nice.

FINAL THOUGHTS - Honestly a game from the Persona series would be a better investment of my time. The linearity allows the devs to focus better. I don't need a Tech Demo of "freedom", I just want a fun series of experiences. Freedom comes second. And yeah, before you complain that I'm an "anime-biased person", Persona's writing is simply better. They at least spend time on writing the characters. Baldur's Gate 3 suffers so much from "poetry over story" (making things sound all fancy and poetical but it's all nonsensical so it doesn't matter) and characters only have a few lines, it's so boring.

Definitely worth a download!
If you're a fan, it's definitely worth investing at least a few hours!
Otherwise, it's not really gonna make your top 10 games of all times list. But it's really quite decent.

I don't play many gacha but I understand that a lot of them barely have gameplay and suck.

As a game I'd give it a 3/5 (with a +0.5 included if you're a fan. Otherwise, it might be a 2.5 if you compare it to actual console games). But compared to other gacha it's probably at least a 4/5.

It has fewer shorter fully-animated cutscenes than i thought..... like magna says "let's do the thing where you reflect my fireballs at him but...... then it's not shown and we skip straight to asta sword used on the enemy. The minor bits of character development and bits of foreshadowing are skipped here and there.

After like 8 hours, I can't even appreciate the "villain is coming" tagline at the game startup anymore because they really do feel like villains, vic games. (lol, mostly joking, but still). Everything in the game is designed to get you to return to the gacha and shop screens more and more and remind you using free rewards that you can spend them (which reminds you of paid content again), everything is designed to get you to spend money overall.

there's SO MUCH content, each content type with its own currency basically aka a ton of currencies and they all lead inevitably back to paying with IRL money in most cases. and... the game itself is padded a bit with extra battles. so it has a "lot of content" but not really "content content".

i played for 3 hours just now to 3 AM tho lol. but still. idk how far the story will carry it. will i even daily chore this? not that i'm an experienced gacha player at all. also cutting out foreshadowing and little things makes the story and characters much more shallow feeling to probably both first timers and experienced fans like me, it can dampen their spirits. but... so far not bad. as a game, maybe like 6-7/10 which is decent with the +2 black clover bonus.

👎 DROPPED! Out of lack of interest.
Objectively very polished game though.
Really good combat for a JRPG.
Style is 10/10 and substance matters more than style but goddamn does the style in Persona 5 Royal manage to carry the game hard.
They've thought up a lot of ways to make previous Persona entries more straightforward and continuously interesting on almost every day of the calendar.

I dropped it because after what many consider to be the best arc (first arc) I felt zero emotional involvement, and there was zero catharsis from the arc's finale. The atmosphere is not as unique as P3's (or even P4's), instead they went the Chainsaw Man anime route of trying to make everything so realism-focused that it subtracts the soul.

People also weren't lying about every friend character sucking the main character's pee-pee except for the dedicated haters. Anyway, I'm not attached to the friend characters. I might give the game 1-2 more hours but it's tentatively dropped.

Very high production value, which influenced my rating. Which carries the game somewhat far. Overall, I would not strongly recommend the game unless you know you'll be into it.

Consistent story. As others have said, it combines every single sci-fi trope out there into a consistent narrative.
However, the ethos and emotion of the story are rather limited. It is likely intentional, but everything is so subdued. And there is rarely any narration which means you only get to see the outer surface of the characters at most times.

While the characters are relatively well-defined and have good motivations, the motivations for the actions that characters take that shape the largest aspects of the plot are completely obtuse, it's like getting two sentences of exposition on a character's psychology. I didn't empathize with a lot of what was happening at all, at some point it just became word salad.

Most of the time, it feels like the plot twists are there just for their own sake. You could subtract 20 of the plot twists and the story wouldn't be any worse, just less convoluted.

If the story had 10 sections, I'd say sections 3-7 were the most fun. 1-2 were mediocre SOL and not super-engaging mysteries, 8-10 were frantic wrap-ups and connections of all loose ends, but 3-7 had a lot of cool ideas come to fruition.

The gameplay was very fun, though somewhat short, probably just 5-8 hours long?

Overall I'd say it was just barely not worth playing. I wouldn't recommend it to others unless this is within the first 10 sci-fi/mystery stories they've read. It's still quite great but I could have been doing other stuff instead. I'd give it a 3.5 if the gameplay wasn't so fun and the overall quality wasn't so high.

Dropped after the demo ended, watched some of the further bits of it.
Gameplay is absolutely horrid.
The presentation is phenomenal. The style is great.
The story is decent (I got up to finishing 1/3 of the game). But there's not much depth to it. The writing style is engaging and makes you think, but most people mistake an interesting style with a good story.

The Silver Case is the equivalent of a decent writer mimicking a master poet and writing a story like "Bob stabbed Jane. Jane bled out her butt. Wacky spooky"