Beau Burton

I just finished the game and it’s honestly super good. It builds on established characters really well and makes new characters interesting and easy to sympathize with. The story has an interesting take on super intelligent AI and how it can behave based on how it’s interacted with. As far as gameplay goes, I’ve seen some reviews complain about how the battles are less strategic or whatever, but, it honestly isn’t that differing compared to vanilla Persona 5 or even Persona 5 Royal. Switching from a turn based game to a hack and slash is gonna come at the sacrifice of complex strategy; that’s kind of the whole point of a hack and slash. Even with that sacrifice, the battles are still fun and remind me of how Persona 5 started for myself; after a while, you get so good at taking down the basic dungeon enemies that you can just hit a few key places and immediately go into an All-Out Attack. Eventually, you can basically go into an All-Out Attack immediately out of ambush. The bosses are not nearly that simple and do require you to frequently hit weakness to allow you to get in an All-Out Attacks. Bond skills are a really cool way to up different battle aspects without access to social links and other stuff that the original game had. It’s a good mechanic and very fleshed out if you ask me. Music is AMAZING! Including music from older games and remixing original Persona 5 songs AND coming up with new songs that are absolute bangers?! They really outdid themselves with this one. Obviously, this game is shorter than the original game and certain mechanics that are the bread and butter of Persona games (things like Social Links, romances, arcana boost, etc), and Igor is also unfortunately absent. But, that aside, I still felt like this game had enough going on that leaving those out was probably better for it. In summary, this game is really good. If you’re looking for a complex strategy game, you’re not gonna find that here. Don’t focus on how simple the combat is and just have fun with it; get caught up in the excitement and enjoy the ride. 10/10, will begin NG+ soon and looking forward to whatever Atlus has coming next for the Persona series.