RIP the old shout thread, which was where I posted most of my thoughts on this game.
It’s been 6-7 years but I played P5 up to the space burger restaurant palace and dropped it during the second airlock puzzle.
P5 opens with the main character interrupting a rape and getting slapped with a criminal record because he crossed someone of a higher station. We’re set up for a game that deals with serious Mature themes of like teenage disillusionment in the face of a corrupt society run by selfish adults and I don’t think it does anything meaningful with those themes.
I think it treats its player cast poorly and gives way too much screentime to its most grating characters. I touched on this a little in a post here
It also has that sequence on your first visit to Shinjuku, where Ryuji gets dragged off screaming by gay male predators. This follows in the footsteps of Yosuke’s gay panic at sharing a tent with Kanji in P4 (plus that game’s complete fumbling of Naoto as an X-gender character), and the clocked trans woman in the summer vacation section of P3. For a game dealing with outsiders, this looks bad. It’s hypocritical and oblivious and really tells on the narrow lived experience of Team Persona’s writers.
For an 80+ hour game it is so presumptuous of Atlus to expect me to play through more than once or grind and grind to max the stats I need to see Tae Takemi’s social link through to the end. That should have been completable in one go-around without a guide if I’d just focused on her, which I very much did. There are other characters in this game I really liked—the airsoft guy is another one—and I just won’t explore their stories fully because I’m expected to be totally devoted to sinking days of my life into a repetitive and disappointing main plot.
It does have a pretty good soundtrack and I am one who really likes Atlus’s GUI design. I hope they never stop pushing the envelope graphically. The battles are fast-paced and I’ve always enjoyed them since P3, but I enjoy them more when I’m invested in the stakes.