Persona 5 Royal

Well. I gave it a shot. While I love the style of Persona 5, the game feels like a miserable slog to me. Just under ten hours in, I defeated the first major boss and closed the first small story arc.

I like the characters and the story is interesting. Despite that, I found myself blasting through dialogue out of sheer impatience. I know time is a theme of the game and mundane daily routines between action is another sort-of theme, but it made me care less about the good things in the game when I was spending 3-5 minutes clicking through dialogue that adds nothing to the story and just boils down to “Who do you want to get a +1 relationship point with?” or “Which stat do you want to go up by 0.1?”

Nearly everything I’ve done so far has had one path to follow. If I even try to explore the world outside of that path a little bit, I get stopped by invisible walls and some dumb dialogue from my character like “I shouldn’t go there yet” though my character usually has no reason to know they shouldn’t go there. He’s new in town and somehow already knows where everything important and unimportant is?

Yet I still need to listen to 20 minutes of exposition, explanations, and tutorials between every [non-]decision point. Speaking of which, every decision point I’ve seen so far is a choice between:

• Hell yes!
• Well… OK
• Yes, but say something dickish for no reason

There’s just so much fluff.

Nothing I do feels like it matters. I don’t discover anything on my own. I’m dragged to every solution for every problem. The entire game feels like it’s on a rail. Maybe later on I can lean in one direction or another and it might matter, but I have no reason to believe that based on my first 10 hours.

I value my time too much to keep dumping it into this.

I’d rather just watch an anime. It’ll take much less time to get to the point and probably tell a more interesting story. So that’s what I’m doing now. Watching other people play the rest of the game on YouTube.