I HATE Persona 5 Royal

  • I am tired of hearing “PERSONA” each time I press Y in battle.
  • The music was good for the first 10 hours, but 80 hours in, listening to it feels like I’m being detained at Guantánamo.
  • I don’t get why we need to rehash everything in the story through text messages. They literally add nothing at all to the story; I’m reading the same thing twice.
  • Battles become boring after a while. There are no mechanics except the “Technical” and finding a new enemy’s weakness. I didn’t have to strategize in battles at all, just spammed various types of damage until I found one that works. I just had to merge personas to get stronger ones with better stats to keep up with the enemies and that’s it. At 80 hours it just felt solved: find weakness, knock down, All-Out, repeat.
  • Why do I need to hear about “rehabilitation” so often without it being elaborated on? Igor just says the same line: ‘Your rehabilitation proceeds as planned; we have great hopes for you.’ Your confidant rank advances… that’s it. But the game did have to waste my time with the text and animation. I’m not interested at this point, there’s no mystery to it because this prison doesn’t really affect the plot until MUCH later in the game. I promise, I truly promise, that I will remember the prison plot point when it comes up, just for the love of god stop wasting my time…
  • Every interaction with a confidant is “You are such a good listener, thank you” or “You help me to think differently/expand my horizons”. This happens with Akechi, Kasumi, the councillor, Hifumi
  • I can get no respite from useless notifications from the followers. Before you go to a Palace, you get reminders to go to the Palace. After you go there, you get messages about how everyone’s not sure whether the change in cognition actually worked. By 50 hours into the game they have raided those palaces a shitload of times, and the implication in those messages is that THIS time it’s not going to work out? Why are you anxious? Is this a ploy to keep reminding me that the plot is happening?
  • The Ryuji/Mona conflict is really stupid and I’m frustrated that I couldn’t put an end to it myself. There’s literally no dialogue option for me as a leader to stop the infighting and it would be a much more sensible thing to do as a leader rather than let it all explode so that the useless plot could happen. I would have preferred introducing Haru the same way the game introduced other characters and what’s really funny is that her conflict still gets introduced normally during the confrontation in the palace. There aren’t even any consequences for Mona and Ryuji, we just forget about the conflict. This is plot for the sake of wasting my time instead of telling an interesting story.
  • You go to Hawaii and nothing happens there, but you are forced to spend 5 days there for no reason. If it were a way to advance your confidant/relationships with Makoto or Hifumi, it would be excusable, but even in terms of “life simulator”, this was stupid. EVEN the characters complained that nothing happened: “It’s like we were in Japan”.
  • Confidant relationships seem more like busywork than actually building relationships with the support cast. You see them, they thank you for being a good listener and you part your ways.
  • I understand it’s an anime cliché, but I really dislike Ryuji and Joker being creepy to Ann and it being played off as a joke. Ha ha, those guys are real creeps…?
  • The game seems to want to waste my time more than anything else. All-Out Attacks are not skippable: I’ve seen the animation HUNDREDS OF TIMES at this point. Post-battle screen is not skippable AND IT’S ALSO ENTIRELY USELESS.
  • Negotiations don’t have any logic to them. For Upbeat and Gloomy they make sense sometimes, but the rest is complete garbage. The worst part is that the politician confidant doesn’t give the skill that shows the correct answer.
  • Over-explaining the Master Plan to fool Akechi by letting Joker get captured made it so much worse. It shows a certain insecurity on the authors’ part: “We dedicated an insane amount of time to ensure that there are no plot holes for the fans to find.” Brother we are dealing with literal magic here! You can take liberties with how parallel world stuff works! Just roll with it confidently! Let fans pick it apart because you can just: “You see, it was magic”. FUCK
  • If there’s anything I’m after in games, it’s good story or good gameplay. Maybe there’s a good story in here, but it’s wrapped in so much filler, that it’s not worth it in any capacity. In that amount of time I could have watched ~40 movies. And there’s pretty much no gameplay outside of busywork.

A couple of days after writing this, I found out that everything I said above had already been said by Yahtzee in 2017, only he LIKED THE GAME FOR SOME REASON. WHAT?