Just got to the new content in Persona 5 Royal this friday and... god this game is very tiring to play if you've already finished the base game
This is a very long, mostly negative ramble
I don't get how or why people actually do New Game Plus playthroughs of this game without having just downloaded a finished bland¹ save from the internet(this is what I did to this, and what I'm doing for Persona 3 FES), it takes sooo long with so much stuff that I already saw that even new stuff(like the confidants and a few other things) has to deal with my tired brain wanting to skip through it to get to the new section of the game ASAP
Getting to the new section of the game took over a hundred hours, a hundred hours to get to what I started there to do, of course some of it was me just... being a weird grinding person
I also did the Twin Wardens which is the main NG+ content in the game and I was planning on finishing the game this weekend until I realized that I want to do the new superboss battle that's in Royal as well, which uh, considering how reaper fights take me like 20-40 minutes and the twin wardens took me tens of tries to get through one fight in a similarly long amount of time, and the game has had some hang ups so often, I just don't have the energy to try finishing this yet
The hang ups and crashes are somewhat because I'm emulating it, but I bought P4G and had so many annoying problems through that one crashing mid-dungeon I modded the game to let me save mid dungeons and I was super paranoid saving after every single battle I don't want to pay to have that experience again, so emulation it is
For some reason Sega PC ports are just super broken I feel, I had so many weird bugs and behavior going on in Yakuza² as well, for some reason the Yakuza games run better at higher settings, I have no idea how that's possible, I had a consistent trick in Kiwami 2 where I'd just yeet myself into space cuz looking down at Kamurocho from sky high where it wouldn't load very well was very fun, LAD had the characters constantly giving up on doing their moves cuz they got stuck in geometry
Morgana just so consistently annoyed me, I forgot how annoying that cat is, I kinda hate Teddie in a lot of ways, but it's a lot more when he's just consistently there like in a dungeon than just whenever he appears? In most cutscenes I can just ignore that he's there if he's being annoying, but Morgana is the bag cat, the main character just comes with a Morgana attached as part of a two for one deal that makes everything so... bad, going to the shrine sucks because Morgana is there, talking to people always has to come with one or more text boxes saying "hello, I'm Morgana and I have to make it known I'll not be in this cutscene", whenever I try to leave at night when I'm not allowed to it's Morgana that comes telling me "you're tired, you shouldn't do anything" instead of it being the character saying that, it's... one of those weird things where it feels like someone telling you how to feel instead of it being you that feels that thing, but second hand watching that happen? First and a half hand? Sojiro stops telling you that you can't leave fairly early, and when it's Sojiro that tells you you can't leave that feels alright, cuz Sojiro is Dad, Sojiro is a guy who's responsible for you and doesn't want you to get into trouble until he knows you're going to be alright out there at night, Morgana is some guy who shouldn't have any say in my business but is getting in my way anyways
And Ryuji just constantly gets the short end of the stick as the butt of the joke for no real reason, why is he the guy who gets shit on, like Yosuke and Kanji in P4 just get that same treatment where they're always the butt of the joke and it's just so annoying in that, like them, the thing that gets 'im treated like shit is just... something that it shouldn't? Yosuke has things that could get made fun of that wouldn't be bad, Kanji as well, and the way they treat Ryuji is like... mixing them both up and making it worse? There's jokes where the punchline is "that's gay" or just because the cat that sucks for some reason gets treated like he's more important than the bro that's ride or die for us, dude literally just runs through a blowing ship to try to get people a ride to safety and almost dies for it and when it turns out he didn't die instead of people getting happy they get pissed off at him and beat him up, and you have no option of being happy either, "you brought this on yourself" for what? For living after going through an extremely dangerous situation to save you all and getting knocked out? I feel like I would be able to have more complex feelings on him if only every single thought about how he is as a person didn't get overshadowed by how badly the game treats him, I can't have negative feelings for him at any point because so much of the rest of the game is treating him like shit already, sometimes he does do something kinda pissy but almost immediately something worse happens to him
Like, the fact that he's not smart is cool, I like that, he's rough, he's weird, he's for some reason not allowed to say fuck, he's somewhat sweet, but he's not very smart so a lot of things end up going over his head or he mixes up his words, and that's cool, but every time instead of letting me linger on that, have a little chuckle, the characters correct him kinda rudely, in a tone saying "how could you not know this?" just to drive the point home that he's got something wrong
And I think this is one thing that I really dislike in this game in general? That it doesn't let you think for yourself, there are no metaphors in it because whatever looks like one instantly gets a character saying "this is a metaphor for this", even the clearest, most obvious things like "there are a bunch of robots in this factory and when one of them goes down the rest just keeps going as normal and leaves the dead body there" the characters repeat what just happened and say "so this is how he sees his workers, as meaningless robots that only exist to work for him and to be disposed of when they stop being useful", I really wish the game would let it happen at least twice before explaining the thing? Like, I'm fine with you explaining it, some people won't get it, but when you explain it every time it feels like Morgana, again, you're telling me how to think, how to feel
It's one of those things where you can kind of see how the writers aren't really aligned with the theme they're trying to go for? The theme is "rebellion" but the writers aren't rebellious, they're writing the story for the aesthetic of it, because it's cool, the artist doesn't really make any art that's trying to be challenging, his character arc starts with him not thinking that hard about how his master treats art, he gets pulled out of that by the crew and sees how fucked up it is, and ends with him going back to just... not thinking critically about how his master treated him, there are two characters who are just like that, they start sucking up to the villain of that arc and in some of their hangouts you have one or more options that are just "they were a good person deep down", and choosing that option is usually not something you don't want to do, gameplay wise, there aren't better options than that one, just options that, gameplay wise, have the same effect, many times options to the effect of "family is family and you can't leave your family" aren't bad options to say, and it's so... antithetical to the rebellion theme? Like? One of the most common forms of teenage rebellion is straight up just hating your family and wishing you can leave, why is not being allowed to leave, having to forgive everything they do the thing you're running with in here?
There isn't much of a conclusion to this, I just wanted to get those thoughts out of my head while they're still somewhat fresh, I haven't really been logging this one down like other games I play since throughout most of what I've played to this point it's just the same as base Persona 5
I'm strongly considering just not tagging the game name cuz of how negative I am being about things but I tag more because I want to be able to search it back than discoverability or anything like that, so uh, sorry for being negative to any Persona fans that decided to read this far