Persona 5 SteelBook Edition

For the most part, I love this just as much as the previous two Persona games: The cast is still fantastic and made it so that I genuinely missed them at the end of this lengthy journey, Shoji Meguro's music is still pretty wonderful (though unlike 3 and 4's soundtracks I, oddly enough, ended up appreciating it more outside of the game), the game never really feels that tiring despite its length that, on paper, should feel exhausting as hell (for the most part, I'm incredibly skeptical when a game boasts having at least several dozen hours worth of content, because that usually means that only a small-to-decent chunk of it is actually worth it and everything else is filler IMO). And when it comes to things like the battle system, this is easily the best of the three games, especially thanks to the re-introduction of elements from previous SMT games like demons as Shadows (I actually liked the Shadow designs from 3/4, though the re-colors got tiring), negotiations, and alternate weapons in the form of ranged weapons. Not to mention the palaces feeling more like proper levels than anything else making them feel less repetitive than 4's dungeons and especially 3's Tartarus (and though 5 does have Mementos feel more like Tartarus, it also feels less tedious to go through in my opinion).

But... look, there's being plot-focused, and then there's being so plot-focused that you'd do anything to stay focused on it, even at the expense of downtime. Moments like the class trip and school festival in 4 offered some good downtime from the dungeon-crawling and main plot, but while they're here in 5, it feels like Atlus is too scared to let them offer downtime from anything more than the former: For the class trip, after the cast arrives in Hawaii, you get a couple of moments before "oh by the way PHANTOM THIEVES TAKE DOWN OKUMURA" takes over. And in the school festival, you get a measly few lines at a takoyaki stand before Akechi arrives and forces you back into the plot. Granted, you could argue that due to the protagonist's reputation at his school he wouldn't really be able to enjoy those events as much as Yu Narukami would, but at the same time it still feels as if Atlus wanted to just get those events over with because they were a part of previous Persona games and they just feel rushed as a result. I adore this game outside of that, and this is really just me nitpicking more than anything else, but because of this (along with me feeling a bit more distant to the cast than I did 3 and 4's despite me still thinking that they're fantastic) I'm really not sure that I can say that I flat-out adore this as much as I do 3 and 4. Even if I still adore this.