I bought a PS4 just so I could play this and feel it was worth the price of admission.
Persona 5 is a game that achieves a special kind of perfection. It takes the foundations that were laid down in Persona 4 (and Persona Q too) and takes them to a level of perfection beyond what even the most ardent fans were expecting.
Storywise, the game is thematically distinct from Persona 4 in that there is no murder mystery to solve, but rather a larger conspiracy of adults to oppose. P5 is a game whose central theme is outcasts conducting a rebellion against our shitty modern society. The result is our protagonists are much more active this time around, with all of the Phantom Thieves' heists into cognitive dungeons feeling more than just typical RPG romps where you bust down the door and kill everything until the problem is solved. Since you are Phantom Thieves there to steal the hearts of your victims, the game has the 'dungeon' portion consist of sneaking through guards until you've got your entry route, at which point you leave and send a calling card announcing your intention to come for the target. As your guys come together for the final blow, the game gives you all the feeling and satisfaction you might feel when a good plan comes together.
For gameplay, the game has taken all the niggling annoyances of the first game and removed them while enhancing what P4 already did right. Instead of a fairly basic 'see enemy and fight enemy', you've got a (admittedly very simple) stealth system that gives the player an advantage for initiating a battle out of stealth. Instead of the randomly generated dungeons, you've got dungeons that are meticulously designed to give you a perfect feel for what you're doing (with some pretty good puzzles to boot).
Special mention goes out to how they've changed Social Links to make it so that non-combatants give you assorted benefits for maxing them. That gave the acts of getting bonds feel less like pissing away your time between the real stuff and more like being an active revolutionary who is gathering backers and resources for the cause.
Persona 5 oozes style out of every orifice, effortlessly achieving what other RPGs can only wish to have a fraction of. It's worth playing.
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