dudacles

@oursin_360: There are no English subtitles, I think. I'll check the next time I boot it up if you want. Anyway, I speak Japanese, so that's how I'm playing it.

And I agree with Metalsnakezero, the game does feel decidedly darker than P4. Of course, when you think about it, Persona 4 was about a killer viciously murdering townspeople and hanging them from television antenna's, which is dark enough when you think about it, but the game always took a rather lighthearted view of these events, and the game had a happy tone in general, I think. P5 tackles some much heftier themes, not least of all the very reason the MC moves to Tokyo, i.e. because he was witness to an attempted kidnapping (and rape) and was subsequently framed for it. Everyone in Tokyo also thinks he's a sex offender, and frequently references this fact.

I've always felt as though the success of Giant Bomb has come, at least partially, from the original Endurance Run, which is still among the very best pieces of content the GB team has ever produced. Here's hoping they'll find it in their hearts to do one for P5 as well! Now, given that this site is filled with P4 fans, I figure there must be at least a couple of people who are playing the fifth one in Japanese, like I am right now. So let's share some early impressions, shall we! I'll start off with some general comments, and then put spoiler tags over stuff that I consider to be spoilers.

So I'm 3,5 hours in at this point, which will probably end up being only a fraction of my total play time. I am absolutely loving it so far. The game has yet to settle into its main gameplay loop though, I figure. I've just had Ryuji gain his persona (the design of which is just great) and it feels as though the game is ready to open up into the dungeon-crawl-and-social-link pattern that we all know at this point. I might be mistaken though: as you can tell by the number of hours I've already put in, this game takes its time setting the table, and it's entirely possible that the introductory sequence will continue when I pick it back up tomorrow. I haven't been bored for a second, however.

The game is just dripping with style, like you wouldn't believe. Every screen is a joy to look at, and the music is just fantastic. I'm glad I got the special edition version that comes with the "greatest hits music of all the Persona games", because the battle music and the post-battle experience screen song are already amongst some of my favourite tracks of the year. Aside from that, Persona has skipped a generation of consoles, which has given them time to actually animate most of the cutscene stuff. In previous games, the artwork and the dialogue was so good that you didn't really feel as though the game was missing a high level of graphic fidelity, but there's no denying that the "action" scenes were always crude.

Persona 5 makes the actiony parts of the store flow much better by having the character models acting them out. That's not to say there aren't some rough edges still, but they mostly come off as cartoony and totally work within the context of the game, I think. The whole game is just a joy to look at, and if you're like me and have spent hundreds of hours in Persona 3 and 4, the changes are very welcome as to make the whole thing feel fresh.

The characters have real potential. The Persona 4 ones are amongst my favourites of all time, and it's too early for me to say whether or not these new character stack up favourably to Ryosuke, Chie, Dojima, Nanako and co, but I could see the new players becoming very dear to me as the story goes on as well. The dialogue is as good as it's ever been, and the cast is nothing if not colourful. I specifically like Sakura Sojiro, the café owner who acts as this game's Dojima by being the one to take you in after a certain event forces you away from your hometown. He's been very grumpy so far, but I expect he'll come around at some point.

The fundamentals of the combat are unchanged, but the whole fighting system feels much snappier now on a control level, and the fights are more cinematic for it. The dungeon crawling itself also feels much more engaging. The dungeons in P3 and P4 never really hooked me. They often had great concepts behind them (e.g. the Bad Bad Bathhouse) but the graphical limitations of the PS2 made them rather bland on the inside to meander through. The new P5 dungeon (I've only been inside one of them, to be fair) oozes personality, and the concept behind it is great. Kamoshida is a great character, and his volleyball club antics being reflected in the castle dungeon was cool to see.

One of the reasons I liked P4 so much, is because it captured the feeling of living in a peaceful rural Japanese town so incredibly well (I've lived in such a place in Japan for a year, and was constantly reminded of Persona 4 while I was there.) P5 takes place in Tokyo, and captures the feeling of the metropolis very well. One of the things that makes Yakuza great is the way those games emulate the feeling of walking through a Japanese street so perfectly. P5 accomplishes this as well. At the start of the game, you're required to navigate a Tokyo train station and get on the Ginza line by navigating with the signs on the walls, and this (small) gameplay sequence captured the feeling of doing this exact thing in real life so well. You can tell these games are made by Japanese people who know how to encapsulate what makes their country tick into a video game world.

So yeah, those are my thoughts so far. For people wondering how this game stacks up to the previous game(s), I can tell you that I think Persona 5 has been an absolute winner so far for me. There's likely to be 50 - 80 hours still to go in which it could easily falter, but I have been loving it thus far. It's hard for me not to view the elements of this game as parallels to Persona 4, though. For instance, the first thing I thought when I saw Ryuji was: "ah, this is a mix between Kanji and Ryosuke, the character that will become my best friend early on." So far, I've been right on that front. Morgana seems like a Teddy stand-in, though clearly she has a better idea of what's going on than the bear ever did. Takamaki struck me as a Rise type of character, what with the whole model thing, but I've yet to have real story moments with her, so we'll see. Either way, it's been great fun so far!

So, anyone else playing with thoughts to share? I might write a new post once I've gotten further in, and may at some point write a review. Provided I manage to find the time to finish the game, that is. I have a free week right now, but my available time will decrease dramatically starting from next week, so I'm not quite sure yet where I'm going to fit in Persona 5. Ah well, we'll see!

I'm not watching this. I'm not watching this.

Ok, I skimmed through the 18 minutes bit. It looks awesome. Can't wait for it to come out.

I've never even owned an NES, but this is insanely exciting news to me. 60 euros for that system and all those games? Bring it on Nintendo.

This is an excellent write-up, thank you for this! I love the old God of War games (though I've yet to play Ascension) a great deal, and am very pleased that a new one is coming out, with new gameplay mechanics. The old mechanics are great, I think, but with 5 excellent games already there to give them to you, it's time for something else. In the meantime, I should replay 3. 2 and 3 are absolutely fantastic games, I think.

Persona 5, baby. My mouth waters at the thought of getting my hands on that in September.

The GBE team did a video in which Austin played the demo. They seemed to think it had potential, but they didn't go crazy for it right off the bat. Since then, they probably just haven't had any reason to talk about it. They'll cover it when it's out, no doubt.

It definitely has nothing to do with them liking or not liking KOEI.

They should one hundred percent stay, and I hope to god that when the actual referendum takes place, a lot of people who have not yet spoken up come out of the woodwork and vote remain, because the leave side seems like a vocal minority to me.

Leaving the EU would accomplish nothing, aside from leaving the driver's seat the UK finds itself in within the union. If they were to leave, they would still have to make sure that their products are in accordance with EU regulations, and they need the mainland for their economy. There is no reason to assume leaving the EU would put a stop to the "fugitive problem" they have, because fugitives will still keep coming.

As it stands, Britain is part of the union, while still standing apart from it in a couple of significant ways. From within the union, it has the bargaining power to both enjoy some of the union's benefits (including the money that comes from having joint economies), and negotiate for particular regulatory freedoms at the same time. Leaving would only mean giving up this bargaining power, and for what? So they can close the borders?

Maybe the UK will leave the union at some point. I just hope to god, that when they do, they do it for a better reason than "the EU forces us to show solidarity with refugees."

I finished the game before it came out internationally, so there might have been patches that rebalance certain things and make the game harder? I remember hearing something to that effect in the days before April 12th. In any case, I thought the game was challenging, but always fair, so I never truly felt frustrated, aside from the Nameless King. I thought the Dragonslayer's Armour (or whatever his name is in English) was equally hard, in that both hit incredibly hard when you mess up a dodge, but the fact that you have to go through a first phase of the fight that is, quite honestly just badly designed, made it incredibly frustrating. He was the only boss I had to fight more than 5 or 6 times. The first phase is annoying in the same way uselessly long boss runs with lots of practically unskippable enemies are. They make the game frustrating, as opposed to challenging and fun.

I finished Dark Souls III, thought it was one of the best games I'd ever played and decided to dive right into Dark Souls II: SotFS (I hadn't played DSII in any capacity) and man, some of the runs to the bosses in that game are so rough. Rough, as in, unrefined, and often not fun. Dark Souls II... is a fantastic game in its own way, but it pales in comparison to DS and DSIII for me so far. Fucking Smelter Demon that has a million guys in front of him on tight walkways.

My answer to this question was yes, but not necessarily in the way that you meant. My current favourite Souls game is Dark Souls III, which I beat the night before last (I live in Japan) and enjoyed immensely. It was not, however, my first Souls game. I've played Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Bloodborne, in that chronological order, but never got close to completing any single one of them. I got about halfway through Demon's Souls, before realising I hated the Valley of Defilement and the levels after it. I also didn't like the look of the world; Demon's Souls just looks extremely bland to me. In Dark Souls, I ran into the pinwheel-looking things, hated them, and got sidetracked by life and never ended up beating them. I was enjoying Dark Souls quite a bit, but it still felt like an uphill battle at times. As for Bloodborne, I just didn't take the time to learn how to gun-parry properly, kept getting owned by Father Gascoigne and just stopped.

With Dark Souls III, however, things have finally clicked. The game is challenging, like its predecessors, but when I started playing DSIII, I suddenly felt like I had a handle on the mechanics, and it kept me from being truly frustrated. I felt in control, and that made the game really enjoyable all the way through. It also helps that the environments look fantastic, and while the levels are still interconnected, I never felt as though I was lost. I always knew where to go, and that helped make the game more fun for me. I think the fact that there is hardly any information to find on forums, simply because the game isn't out anywhere but Japan, also helps. It somehow freed me to make my own way, rather than always be on the lookout for the stuff that I had heard about on the internet (in that sense, I realise now that the way I was mechanically spoiled on the previous games genuinely does make it less fun, which I hadn't thought possible up until now.) The fact that the mechanics have now clicked has made me go back to Dark Souls I, and now I enjoy that game more than I did back then as well. There's likely an element of hype in there as well though.

So yeah, in summary; I love Dark Souls III above the others, mostly because it's the first game that has given me the feeling that I understand what it wants from me. I answered yes, because DSIII feels like my first Souls game, in the sense that it has finally (fully) clicked with me. Now to go back and complete Dark Souls I, before I grow weary of the formula and need a break.