I was late to the Persona party. My entry point into the series was 2012’s Persona 4 Golden for the PlayStation Vita, an expanded and enhanced port of the original PS2 title. Over my 100-plus hours with the game, I fell hard for the its many charms and soon was obsessed. I went back to play Persona 3, Catherine, and other related titles while I counted down the seconds until the next series entry would arrive.
The loading icon for Persona 5 has a humble suggestion: “Take your time.” The game’s developers clearly only give advice they have tested and approved. After all, this game arrived over eight years after the last proper new Persona title and six after developer P-Studio’s last wholly original game, Catherine.
That development time was not spent in vain, of course. Persona 5 arrived with ambitious and polished aesthetics, storytelling, and gameplay, all of which build satisfyingly upon the well-loved foundations established by its series predecessors.
The game’s achievements in presentation are extraordinary. Even the menu screens burst with creativity, featuring dynamic designs that impart more style than plenty of whole games can muster. In-engine gameplay and cutscenes veer dangerously close to resembling living, breathing anime. The environments and character models are a tremendous boon to the game’s level of immersion and a welcome leap from even Golden’s PS2-era holdover graphics. And of course fans have come to expect great things from series mainstays Shigenori Soejima and Shoji Meguro. The former’s art and character designs impress as ever, and the latter’s acid jazz-tinged soundtrack adds funky verve to moments mundane to epic.
Persona 5’s plot and gameplay unfold deliberately, much to the chagrin of many detractors of the game’s “slow” opening. But I think it tells a compelling story with themes relevant to our times, and it does so with care even as it juggles pieces large and small. The cast and vibe aren’t as happy-go-lucky as Persona 4’s, a fact that was off-putting to me at first. But the Phantom Thieves’ camaraderie feels well-earned and their group dynamics shift favorably as they add more characters. By the end of my 150-plus hour playthrough, I felt a kinship to many of them that rivals my feelings for previous Persona casts, and their mission resonated with me as I lived through the tumult of 2017.
On the gameplay side of things, various tweaks offer welcome improvements to prior games’ weaker points. For instance, handcrafted dungeons replace the uninspired procedurally-generated ones from previous outings, Confidant rank increases now come with frequent perks that add value to game’s focus on friendship-building, and so on.
In the end, though, as with the other Persona titles I’ve played, the game is really about the immersion of living a heightened recreation of high school life, juggling friendships, jobs, hobbies, self-improvement, and more while embarking on an epic quest of self-discovery and, oh yeah, saving the world. And listening to sweet tunes while you do so. It’s like a sort of rose-tinted remembrance of how it feels being young, but amplified beyond all reason. It’s so uniquely rewarding if you can let yourself get lost in it and just… take your time.