Such an unbelievable improvement over its predecessor that it beggars belief, especially taking into account its lukewarm reception. Everything the first game did well is replicated here, and better - the sense of unfathomable scale is alive and well, married to environments that are far more visually interesting and diverse and, crucially, far more enjoyable spaces to play in.

As for what the first game did poorly (i.e. literally everything else), the improvement is out of sight. The combat is far more interesting and its embrace of MMO-style combat roles actually, like, works now; the blank cyphers of the first game have been replaced with colourful characters who you'll love or hate, but at least you'll feel something about them; the story has actual stakes and momentum now; the side activities are considerably more thoughtful in their execution.

Yes, the game is horny in a way that absolutely sucks. It's purely a taste thing, but I would personally still prefer objectified women with personalities and agency to the lifeless woman-shaped mannequins of the first game. It's really more of a lateral trade than I think a lot of people want to admit.

All in all, I'm a little sad I took as long as I did to get to this one. For all its distracting aesthetic misjudgements, this is one of the most wholly satisfying JRPGs I've played in a hot minute, and enough to make me a Xenoblade convert after the first game comprehensively failed to impress me.

The mid-game twist plays fair, and the way the choices presented throughout map onto the game's seven endings is thoughtful and fairly elegant. Conceptually, this is all pretty sound and a little intriguing.

In practice, this was the longest four-and-a-bit hours of my life, wallowing in the conflict between a group of the most unlikeable shitheads you've ever met and a gang of racist caricatures. When this eventually runs out of steam after far too long, the game falls back on recycling the same two rooms and one jump scare in the back half as it crawls to a close.

But I've heard it's the best one in this series, so that's exciting!

I really don't know that the Crossbell duology has lived up to the hype it has accrued over its 12 years without an official localisation. The likeability hit-rate of the main cast is the weakest in the series, and the pacing and plotting that are usually Falcom's biggest strength are way the hell off.

Case in point: it takes 50-60 hours for this game to reach the point it should have started from. It's clear in retrospect that Trails from Zero didn't do nearly as much work as it should have in lining all the necessary pieces up on the board, and the sequel similarly takes its sweet time in establishing the stakes that it should have come out of the gates swinging with.

The corollary to this is that the game's final chapter is awfully strong; all forward momentum and harrowing personal stakes. Like most people in the West, I played the first two Trails of Cold Steel games before this pair, which take place concurrently. I think it's extraordinarily telling that basically every single event consequential enough to show up in the Cold Steel games is found in this game's final third.

The corollary to that corollary is that this game's final boss fucking sucks and seems expressly designed to prevent any fun or interesting strategy in the name of shooting for the crown of The Worst Final Boss I Have Maybe Ever Encountered in a JRPG. So half a star off for that.

Ungainly and heavy-handed in both its emotional appeals and its narrative construction. Basically impossible to assess or summarise in its soaring highs and disastrous lows. I will say that it's never, ever as good or elegant as Shadowbringers, but then I have to concede that in its floundering it still makes Shadowbringers easier to love in retrospect. But hey, I like a hubristic big swing.

The thing the game is now remains something I like a whole lot less than the thing the game used to be, and I don't think I'll ever completely be able to let go of the sorrow I feel about that having been devoured by the caprices of live-service game development. But at least as a work of game design this is significantly more confidently-expressed and refined than their first stab at simplifying the systems in the last expansion.

Fuck every single thing to do with Zenos though.

More uneven than I expect from this series, which is usually nothing if not consistent. The plotting feels less tight than the other games I've played and the central characters aren't as immediately likeable, give or take Tio. That said, the game-over-game improvements to the combat system continue apace, and the parts of the story that directly follow up on Sky 3 are some of the most affecting in the series. I feel like I might have had an easier time appreciating some of it if Trails of Cold Steel hadn't made it over here far earlier.

The Persona franchise's singular mixture of an immaculate social-sim/dungeon-crawling gameplay loop and heinously regressive moral messaging continues apace with this absurd 110-hour slab of videogame. At that length, even if only 15% of the game is really truly vile that still adds up to a lot of time spent being miserable.

I'm not even convinced that the gameplay is the best it's been this time around, either - this is by far the most expansive and frictionless iteration on the combat system Atlus has rolled out yet, but I think that might be too much the case. Even on higher difficulties very little about the encounters ever feels surprising or dangerous, and that's disappointing to me. Likewise, the huge cast of characters strikes very few bum notes, but with a couple of exceptions also fails to hit the peaks of previous titles.

That's it in a nutshell: not the best Persona, not the worst; it gets close sometimes and there is so fucking much of it that it unconstestably walks away with the title of Most Persona, if nothing else.