Persona 5 Discussion Thread

Video Games
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Atlus has finally revealed the first Persona 5 gameplay trailer! Persona fans–let’s discuss our impressions and what we’d like to see in the next installment.

For those who missed it, here’s the trailer: ペルソナ５　PV#01

I’m loving that…

- It’s set in Tokyo proper. I appreciate the lengths Atlus has gone through to make Japanese culture palatable to western audiences in Persona 3 and Persona 4, but the fictional settings of both games are not that interesting. Tokyo, on the other hand, is absolutely spilling-over with culture and character. I’m curious to see just how many districts players will be able to explore.

- The characters appear to be delinquents. The developers have hinted that Persona’s 5 story involves fighting against an oppressive society, so it makes sense that your party is comprised of punks. It’s a nice change of pace from the casts of Persona 3 and 4, which for the most part are a bunch of do-gooders that are not the type to shake up the system.

- Your party are students by day, cat-burglars by night. This is an awesome concept! I like that the developers are rethinking dungeon traversal, which to this point has been pretty dry in Persona games. Hopefully the stealth mechanics shown will be well-implemented. Also, I can’t get enough of their costumes! They give me an Arsene Lupin vibe.]

Demons are back! Persona 3 and 4 have great combat systems, but I was kind of bummed how generic the “shadows” felt after some time. Fortunately, it seems that we’ll be fighting the standard SMT demons again, which raises the question of how players will recruit demons. Demon negotiation seems way too outmoded for a new Persona game.

It’s chock-stuffed with styyyyyle. Persona 5’s been cooking for years now and it definitely shows. Every facet of this game looks bright and expressive, down to the menu selection. Even though they showed only seconds of each sequence, there is already more going on per scene than in any previous Persona game.

How’d you all like the trailer? What are you looking forward to in P5?

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I love the Catherine art style they’re using in this game. Like you said, everything down to the menus of what they’ve shown looks fantastic and super polished.

It looks like they’re making the dungeon crawling a little bit more involved than just running around and fighting shadow blobs. There was even some platforming!

I’m slightly worried that we might be seeing just another iteration of 3 and 4. The characters they’ve shown all seem to kind of fit in with the archetypes they’ve had from the previous two games. I haven’t seen enough to really know how I feel obviously, but I just got a vaguely samey feeling.

All things considered, I’m super excited to spend another 80+ hours in a bustling new world that Atlus has created. Despite what I said above, if all they did was fixed the boring dungeon sections from P3 and P4, I’d be more than satisfied. P4 is probably my favorite game of all time, and I can’t wait for them to top it.

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Some new details emerged today: RPGFan News - New Details Emerge on Persona 5's Gameplay and Story

Turns out that the protagonist’s main persona is called Arsene :slight_smile: Also, looks like the dungeons will no longer be procedurally generated. I think that’s a smart change, since now the dungeons can finally have unique architecture/geometry to differentiate themselves, as opposed to past titles where each dungeon is essentially a wallpaper swap.

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I could not be more excited about this game! In fact, I’m actually planning on taking a day off of work to play it when it comes out, which I have never done before.

My only concern so far (and it’s silly because there’s so little information available right now) is that the menu they showed in the trailer didn’t have Social Link anywhere on it. I can’t imagine that they would take them out, though - Social Links are a hallmark of the series at this point - but it was odd that it wasn’t there.

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