@ben_h: I did not leave the game idling for any appreciable amount of time, no. I just grind a lot in these games. Typically I would only go to Tartarus once per month (save the last month), and stay there for about four hours each time. And I agree that the top-tier gear really isn't *necessary*, it's just something I was looking to do for completionist purposes, because it's typically a thing I've done.

But aside from thinking that gathering all those mats sounded terrible, the "slog" feeling did not come from the dungeon crawling for me. Again, I feel like it came from the fact that there's almost no story before the last quarter of the game, and so there was nothing driving me forward to see what happened next. The large shadows you killed every month were not interesting characters with personalities like the palaces/TV world, there was no story there. It was sheer routine for the first three-quarters of the game, and it was never clear what you were actually accomplishing. And then of course (spoilers!) it turned out that killing those twelve shadows was actually bringing about the end of the world. So doing it was, in fact, worse than useless, and was really uninteresting to boot. One shadow was the same as the next. No emotional impact and no story moving forward, really.

I agree that Mementos in P5 was really boring, very similar to Tartarus from OG P3, but I didn't particularly mind the catbus solution to it in P5R. It accomplished making it shorter, and I'm not sure what other solution they could have enacted.

@av_gamer:I suppose that does make a certain amount of sense, had never thought about it that way before. Still feels weird how little of a presence the school side is. Like Joker is in college and rarely goes to class.

I'm going to spend the entire year saying "Damn P3 Reload is really good I gotta get back to that" as something else comes out and I play that instead.

No joke, I was worried it was about to happen again to me for P3R. I first got interrupted by Helldivers 2, then Dragon's Dogma 2. Then yesterday the second DLC for Remnant 2 was released. Knowing that was coming, I was hoping I could finish P3R beforehand. Finished just in time...

My beef with that solution was that it kind of sucked all of the challenge out of the last 40ish hours of Persona 5, which made much of that part really boring. You could so easily hit level 99 with everyone and have such ridiculous amounts of money that you could fuse the most broken personas possible. I think the thing that compounded it was that they chucked an entire new section of Mementos at you when it seemed pointless to and just added a few more hours of driving around holding the boost button looking for those flower petals.

Though that gets to my general gripe with both Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Royal in that they give you added content but none of it feels necessary and often it seems awkwardly shoe-horned into an already complete game. The various quality of life things added to both games were great but the extra content just didn't do anything for me. I think that's why I like this version of Persona 3 so much. It's just Persona 3, for better and worse, but with a bunch nice updates to make the game better to play and less repetitive day to day. If you go back to them, you notice immediately that Persona 3 and FES were extremely thin games material wise so it's not surprising to me that some folks also find P3R also kind of slow and thin on content since it is very faithful to the old games. I just happen to enjoy slow burn stories like the one in this game so it works well for me.

@ben_h: The funny thing about P5R, and I know I've said this somewhere on these forums before, is that I don't actually like the extra month added on to the end and the way they retconned the original ending. While that last month is OK when considered in isolation, they didn't need to make a long game even longer, and I thought the new conclusion was less satisfying than the original one. However, they added so much other new stuff into P5R that I still consider it the vastly superior version. The original P5 now feels barren by comparison, just in terms of the stuff you can do within the original calendar and all the new systems.

And as I know I've said in this thread already: I really don't care about the challenge aspect for these games, so the fact that you get really overpowered in the end just doesn't bother me the way it's going to bother other people who are looking for challenge. I want challenge in action games, but usually not in turn-based JRPGs. I'm more in these games to catch 'em all (the personas, that is) and craft all the best gear while experiencing the story and social links/confidants. So I think it's just a difference in what we were each looking to get out of the game.

Oh yeah for sure. I'm in the same boat there. The extra day to day stuff they add in the main portion of the game both P5R and P4G is generally great but then they tack on that extra month and all of the content associated that feels out of place and awkward. Both of those games wrap up neatly but then have to be weirdly unwrapped to allow for the extra month. Though at least for P5R, the new social links actually fit well into the main game. For P4G, Marie doesn't fit in with the rest of the game at all. She's basically the Poochie of that game.