The Persona series has a complex history, beginning in the Playstation era as an off-shoot of the Shin Megami Tensei series that saw a low-key North American release in the console's early days. It later got a Japanese-exclusive sequel in Persona 2: Innocent Sin, which itself got a sequel in Eternal Punishment (which saw a US release right away while its prequel had to wait nearly a decade for one, leaving many North American players confused by its storyline). But the series truly made a splash with Persona 3, a late-era Playstation 2 game that separated itself from its predecessors storyline-wise and completely changed up the format, combining elements of school sims and dungeon crawlers together in a rather clever way - the more the player would advance their relationship with in-game characters, the more powerful they would become for the dungeon-crawling aspect of the game.
Persona 4 continued that idea, polishing up the gameplay while putting much more emphasis on the characters, giving each of them an individual story arc admist the ovearching plot of a murder mystery and exploring a strange alternate world. The player was no longer the only beneficiary of advancing once's social connections - the playable characters along the way would also gain new benefits, such as follow-up attacks, the ability to survive a single fatal hit or, at maximum level, their Personas would transform into a new form, gaining more power and usually losing their elemental weaknesses. A logical step up from 3 in most respects, but a welcome one.
Persona 5 once again continues in Persona 3's vein, largely retaining its style of gameplay while attempting to reintroduce some elements of earlier games in the franchise. Nuclear and Mind spell elements make a return here, as do characters having a secondary gun weapon that can attack multiple enemies in a round. Perhaps most surprising, though, is the fact that it restores some traditional Shin Megami Tensei elements to the mix - demons are no longer simply acquired via cards or fusions, but also via the series' traditional negotiation system - one must bargain with demons by choosing the right options during dialog, and occasionally gift them items or money to convince them to join the player's ranks.
A few new ideas have also crept their way into Persona 5's design. Being a game themed around thievery and heists, the primary dungeons in the game now take the form of "castles", with the player encouraged to utilize stealth to evade traps, find hidden passages, solve puzzles and hide around corners to ambush enemies. Each time they are sighted, an alert level will rise for the dungeon, making enemies more on-guard and aggressive. Routes through them are also considerably more convoluted, generally requiring the player to snake their way through vents, atop walls and ledges and through mazes of laser traps, though this is largely visual pizazz as you're still following a mostly linear path from start to finish. One also cannot return to a given castle once it is completed, though there is a randomly-generated dungeon called "Mementos" that grants opportunity for the player to level up, gain new items and complete sidequests between the main quests. That all sounds interesting, but the gameplay as a whole is hampered by the fact that Persona 5 has the Ocarina of Time problem - the game explains out every single puzzle and gameplay mechanic in great detail, to the point where they feel like they're often included to simply waste time and prolong the experience with empty busywork rather than provide any kind of legitimate, satisfying problem-solving on the player's part.
At first glance, Persona 5 also appears to take a much darker turn with its storytelling. The main character is depicted as a delinquent on probation for a vague past incident, and his first encounters with nearly everyone are markedly unpleasant, with them dismissing him as a criminal and seemingly ready to have him locked up at the first excuse they get. The game even opens in medias res with a scene depicting him being captured by the police, aggressively beaten and then grilled by a prosecutor about vague past actions (which gets called back to many times throughout the experience), hinting at some skeletons in his past that justify the general attitude toward him, or possibly events that have yet to be portrayed in the game's narrative. The villains take a much more sinister twist as well, with themes like sexual abuse, exploitation and, most shockingly, attempted suicide quickly creeping into the story. The only break from this, at least at first, seems to come in the form of the other world the protagonists stumble into, which gives them an escape from their bleak reality into one where they have strange powers and use them in pursuit of revenge against their real-life enemies. This had the potential to set the protagonists up as power-high vigilantes taking revenge against those they perceived to have wronged them, eventually crossing a line and becoming perceived as a threat to society as a whole (hence the framing device with the prosecutor character) - effectively, they could be antiheroes or even outright villains, which would have been a pretty clever twist on the format Persona 3 and 4 established.
However, the writers seems to have quickly gotten cold feet and immediately reversed course; not long after the first chapter's conclusion, they largely backpedal on the idea and draw a much clearer line, with the protagonists becoming the 'lovable misfits' (despite never doing anything lovable), the hero's "dark secret" being that he was slammed with bogus charges for messing with the wrong guy, and every last villain is now a shallow, cartoonish straw man with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. The main characters' big crusade is painted as a purely noble cause, and the game never even thinks to show there might be any any negative consequences for their acts whatsoever - none of the cardboard cutouts they target have family members or dependents or important positions in society or even friends who might suffer from said person presumably going to off themselves right after the heroes are done with them; it's just treated as another total victory for the so-cool, so-righteous Phantom Thieves, now cheer and worship them accordingly. Basically, you're supposed to root for a gang of self-serving sociopaths just because the people they target are irredeemable scum with no humanity whatsoever and they look better by default, and that's just hacky thinking - if it didn't work for a legendary character like Hannibal Lecter, why would it work for these boring schmucks? Hell they even have the gall to have another group of villains be vigilantes following in the Phantom Thieves' footsteps, just with the added touch of thrill-killing people they don't like, and the game denounces their actions but not those of the protagonists; because you can drum up hate, bully people into self-harm and inspire the impressionable into becoming the worst kind of violent criminals, but never pulling the trigger yourself technically means you've got clean hands and a clear conscience, right? I'm sure ol' Chuck Manson would be proud at that line of reasoning.
I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with antiheroes; hell there's some really great ones. Max Payne, Jin Sakai, Cloud Strife, Lelouche Lamperouge and Guts (just to name a few off the top of my head) are all complex characters with relatable motives and often do morally dubious things in pursuit of their goals. Hell, even Tony Montana had his nobler traits; one of them even famously leads to his downfall. But for an antihero to work, they have to be interesting and you have to be able to empathize with them on some level. Persona 5 doesn't give me any reason to care about its protagonists - they're almost entirely deficient of the charm and strong personalities present in Persona 3 and 4's cast, instead just neatly fitting into broad-brushed character archetypes - the pretentious artist, the athletic character, the quirky and introverted computer whiz, the shallow fashionista, and so on, milking their one trait each to the point of inanity and having zero depth beyond it. They're never given any opportunity to become anything bigger than a hollow archetype, which in large part comes down to the game's general premise - by immediately labeling the main characters as misfits, they closed off any opportunity they had to interact with other, more "normal" characters within the game's world on any interesting level. However, that could have easily lent itself to some interesting drama by exposing the player to the difficulties the characters would have balancing their mundane daily lives with their nightlife as masked vigilantes. Key words here being "could have", because there is virtually nothing along those lines in the game aside from barely being acknowledged in a throwaway joke or two. In fact, the social links mostly just read like a shitty Tumblr comment section, with characters heaping on the enablement and cheering on their 'friend's' weird isolating behavior, so they never really feel like they grow at all. It's a very sad, stark contrast to Persona 4's brilliant character building and especially to its villains, who are a perfect showcase of what happens when you give immoral misfits a measure of power and set them loose to terrorize an unsuspecting populace; yet Persona 5 isn't smart enough to see the irony. Morgana is perhaps the worst element of this whole experience, though, quickly going from "mildly charming" to "making the player want to strangle him every time he opens his mouth" as he offers insipid commentary for every single action you take throughout the game and constantly stops you from pursuing social links and minigames in favor of... passing time to the next day and doing nothing. Boy, what an efficient and not-at-all frustrating way to blaze through large swaths of limited game time AND bar you from enjoying its most interesting elements!
With all that said, it really is a shame that all the high-quality art design in the game goes to waste on such a godawful concept. Persona 5 sports very impressive production values, with much flair and polish even in its mundane elements - the game's menus sport bright, vivid colors, flashy fonts and chaotic art design, character portraits and cut-ins during dialog are all animated, and finishing battles with an all-out attack results in a eye-catching pinup shot with a visual style heavily reminiscent of a Gainax anime. The narrative is also punctuated with fully-3D cutscenes for key moments, and nearly every story-relevant scene is fully voiced by big-name actors. Battles themselves immerse themselves in the game's high production values as well - every demon the player encounters has their own complement of voiced lines and full combat animations, and winning fights results in a stylish animation of the protagonists gathering and running/driving off to their next goal. One can easily tell that this was the Atlus art team's most ambitious project to date, and the sheer amount of effort present shows off how Japanese RPGs can truly stand out and be distinct in the HD era. However, it can become distracting at times, particularly when a character is trying to navigate around a town or dungeon and are constantly beset by NPC word bubbles in a half-dozen fonts covering the screen, or all-too-often repeated bits of inane dialog from the main cast during the dungeons and combat.
Of course, the soundtrack is another of Persona 5's major highlights. Series veteran Shoji Meguro returns once more to give the game a distinct and non-traditional soundtrack, this time incorporating elements of acid jazz and hard rock with some surprisingly spot-on English pronunciation in their lyrics despite being performed by Japanese singers. These lend to the overall off-beat atmosphere; I just wish the suave soundtrack hyping up the protagonists as romanticized outlaws wasn't wasted on such an unlikable lot...
Overall, Persona 5 can best be described as a step forward for the series in some respects and a huge step back in other, more important ones. While it makes a strong first impression with its heavily-stylized presentation and darker bent, the fact that they seemed to be afraid to commit to a darker turn for the Persona series and quickly turned it into a trite good-versus-evil (or rather evil-versus-cartoonish-evil) story hangs a cloud of disappointment over the rest of the game. This only gets further compounded by the fact that its writing quality has taken several steps backward from earlier titles, its premise is derivative and hackneyed (just a hack spin on Psychonauts with none of the clever humor or empathy) and its overall design and themes feel generally "kiddified" and dumbed-down to reach a wider audience, especially thematically. There's nothing wrong with revisiting a format that works, but without building on what came before, pushing new boundaries or having a single likable person to cheer for, the franchise quickly stagnates, becoming boring and unspeakably depressing once you realize that the more impressionable people who play it will soon adopt it as their new guide to life and we'll have a whole new generation of internet vigilante 8channers and Kiwi Farmers on our hands, meting out some disgusting form of 'justice' to anyone they find who doesn't meet their impossible standards. Persona's 5 feels like the first step down a very dark road, and I'm sad to say that, judging from the general quality trend of most Atlus IPs since the Sega buyout, I doubt it'll be the last.
Developer: Atlus
Publisher: Atlus
Platform: Playstation 3, Playstation 4
Released: 2017
Recommended version: Both versions are largely identical, though the Playstation 4 version runs in a higher resolution and framerate compared to the Playstation 3 (1080p60 vs 720p30) and the Playstation 3 has substantially longer load times. Both also have slightly different (cosmetic) DLC available for download.