Persona 5 has a time problem. Not the amount of time it takes to complete; I personally enjoy my time spent playing Persona games and have no issue with their incredibly long run times. It's Persona 5's tendency to disallow you to use that time effectively, to manage your life, that is rubbing me the wrong way.
I should back up and explain: Persona 5 is a Japanese Role Playing Game, or JRPG, in the vein of a traditional Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest game. In it, you control a party of teenagers who are all sick and tired of how they're labeled, beat down, and taken advantage of by manipulative and shitty adults in their life. Gaining the ability to summon Personas, magical representations of their own true emotions and personalities, they're able to go through dungeons caused by "distorted desires" and steal those desires. This causes those shitty adults to become good and, since they still did all the shitty stuff, turn themselves into the police.
Persona 5, as Persona 3 and 4 before it, is not just about going through those dungeons and defeating monsters, though. There's also a sort of time-management element to the game. The story of the game takes place over the course of several in-game months, and typically you can choose what to do on any particular day. You can go into dungeons to become more powerful in battle, obviously, but maybe you don't wanna do that today. Maybe you want to hang out with a party member, giving them additional skills and uses in battle as your bonds become stronger. Maybe you wanna take part in a sketchy medical trial to increase your courage. Maybe you wanna study for your exams that are coming up. There's a huge variety of activities to take part in, and friends to hang out with, and learning to use this time effectively is important to getting the most out of the game both narratively and mechanically.
The problem is, Persona 5 wastes a lot of this time, forcing you to go to sleep without performing any actions. If you've seen this complained about elsewhere, that's probably the context: The mascot character of the game, Morgana, tells you that you simply must go to bed, as you've had a busy day today, or you're going to have a busy day tomorrow, or just for no reason whatsoever, just go to bed already. Any time there's a main plot development in a day, the game can be counted on to say your day has been spent and send you off. The amount of days the game effectively passes over with no real explanation besides "because you need sleep" is astounding.
I've also got a bone to pick with how the game progresses time during dungeons, as well. In Persona 4, it was possible to clear an entire dungeon in a single in-game day. It was difficult, especially since it would mean taking on the final boss of the area low on items, health, and magic points, but certainly possible, especially on New Game +, where you play through the game with certain attributes carried over from a previous playthrough. If you could manage, it was the most effective way to play the game in my opinion: You're one-and-done on the dungeon, and you can coast out the rest of the time until the next story beat stress-free. Even in Persona 3, which did not let you face bosses until you hit the final day of that story arc, let you clear out a dungeon and know you were safe to face the final challenge at the end.
In Persona 5, the structure changes: See, the "distorted desires" are inside of "Palaces", mental fortresses where the person's cognition of the real world affects the rules of the land. And since people know you can't "steal" desires in real life, those desires aren't in a form that can be taken when you first encounter them at the end of a Palace. The target needs to perceive their desires as something that can be taken before they're able to be taken. So, the process of clearing a dungeon as quickly as possible goes like this: You spend one day, or as few days as you possibly can, going through the dungeon, fighting enemies to power up and solving puzzles to progress. Eventually, you come across their Desires, which are a vague blob of something-or-other when you first see them. You then end the day, since going into the dungeon uses up all of the time slots for that day. The following day, you decide to send a calling card warning the target that their desires are going to be stolen. This calling card changes their cognition of their desires to something which can be stolen, which in turn makes their desires take the form of something that can be stolen. The day then progresses again, with you unable to perform any other tasks that day, since you "need to rest up for the heist tomorrow!" I should be clear: You do not send out the calling card on the second day. You merely decide you're going to do that the following day, and then end the day without doing anything else. On the third day, you send the calling card out and make the desires take form. You go back into the Palace, where the desire has materialized but obviously this is a JRPG so there is inevitably a boss fight, and once you've beaten the boss, you've cleared the dungeon, congrats. You're still not able to do anything after the dungeon, but typically at this point you're celebrating with your friends so at least it makes sense in this case.
This all means the game actually requires you to take at least 3 days to clear dungeons, assuming you beeline to the end of dungeons like I typically try to do. But even this is misleading: increasingly common is the game's tendency to eat additional days out of your schedule by forcing you out of a dungeon prematurely so you can see some story play out. In the second dungeon, the game halted my progress midway through the dungeon, and forced me to exit so I could advance the plot outside the dungeon. This ended up adding 2 additional days to the process of clearing the dungeon, one for initial dungeoneering and another for plot, a significant dig in to your time in the game.
All of this does not even take into account issues returning from previous Persona games that take up your time. For example, exams will still effectively automatically progress you through an entire week. Any holiday time is also most likely going to go towards advancing the story of the game, over increasing your Kindness by eating meatloaf, or taking to a schoolmate about their insecurities. This stuff never bothered me in older Persona games, but in Persona 5 they just end up becoming the straws that break the camel's back.
This isn't a huge downer on the game that's dragging me down. As I sit here writing this piece, it's 7:36 AM on the day this will be posted. I wrote the entirety of this piece, or at least its first draft, in the last hour after mulling it over for the last week. I meant to start writing it sooner, I really did. But then I'd start playing Persona 5, and then suddenly the sun's coming up and I have to go to bed. The same thing happened today, in fact, except I don't have work tonight so I don't have to go to sleep at a reasonable time. I finally found the time to write this piece; it's a shame that the game makes it so hard to find the time to spend how I want.
No comments:
Post a Comment