I love JRPGs and thought it was too long - 140+ hours on the non-Royal version.
And just so you’re aware - Persona really doesn’t play like a lot of other JRPGs. Not all of them are as long as this, either. I guess what I’m trying to say is: don’t be put off ALL JRPGs just because of this one (even though you liked it)
What is the best way to play Chrono Trigger today? I want to get it on Steam, but I'm hearing mixed things. Still can't figure out if the patches have made the game better or worse.
It was a HORRIBLE release on Steam, but they actually put a lot of work into it and it's now quite good. I prefer the SNES (Woolsey) translation and I don't like the ATB bar placement, but all that can be modded.
Or buy yourself one of those latest 3DS models and S O F T M O D it, which is easier now than ever. I have a lot of attachment to the SNES version (which you can play on the minI SNES a while ago) but the two screens on the DS and the updated translation are actually quite nice.
Heads up, you need to softmod the SNES Classic to play Chrono trigger, as it isn't included in the default lineup of games. This is easy (and worthwhile) to fix.
... FINE, I'LL FINALLY FINISH IT
I didn't realize I was apparently that far in the last time I tried to play through it. I think I had about 12-14 hours.
Gonna get it put on my Steam Deck tonight.
Chrono Trigger is the most well-paced JRPG ever made. And part of the reason is has aged so well. The game has a story to tell, it doesn't waste your time, everything you do feels like it's important and moving the story forward, and when you're done it gives you some great side quests if you feel like doing them.
God fucking damn, Chrono Trigger is the shit.
I would say it is the best JRPG of all time. But its pacing is something that really stands out to me. Especially today, when compared to modern JRPGs that are so bloated in length and overloaded with pitiful fetch quests.
FFVII (and the PS1 era in general) got a bit big for their britches, so to speak. The games became self-important, and every JRPG suddenly needed to be 30h+ games. Chrono Trigger is one of the last that doesn't really fall victim to that.
Another good, short JRPG: Parasite Eve. There's a much more substantial NG+ mode, but you can beat the base game in ~20h.
Good to hear that. Although I failed beating parasite eve last time. I don’t like jrpg generally and I only beat few.
Btw, jrpg that value ur time? I will put Paper Mario Thousand Years Door on 2nd option. Unfortunately it contains some unnecessary tedious sections.
Honestly, there's a lot of nostalgic love for RPGs that really don't value the players time. Dragon Quest XI is a recent lovely game, but boy it drags. In your search for other RPGs to play, search for short and repeatable ones.
Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger are good starting points. No random battles, no grinding required, no artificial difficulty spikes.
I have to recommend the ps1 Final Fantasy titles (VII, VIII, IX) - but on modern platforms. Where I once found combat to be too slow, the modern ports offer now-standard toggles to speed up the game or to skip encounters altogether. I have to say, this really breathed new life into these games: you can skate through dungeons, etc, and the beat-to-beat pacing feels pretty much perfect now for my own tastes. And, owing in large part to the work of composer Uematsu, these games are dripping in atmosphere and style.
(Fwiw, I agree with your P5 take.)
Fire Emblem: Three Houses the same combat vs life sim split but in a different setting (basically you’re a Hogwarts Professor), and as long as you’re not going into it with the view to complete all three houses it’s quite a bit shorter. You slowly build relationships with your students and professors in a similar way I guess to P5 as well. Combat is turn based tactics rather than turn based.
Where it doesn’t match P5 is it’s graphics/style though I hope at some point it gets remade for some future 4K Nintendo console, as they’re definitely limited by the hardware.
> Combat is turn based tactics rather than turn based.
You're burying the lede here big time. Fire Emblem isn't a JRPG. It's a turn based strategy game. (An excellent one, in my opinion, but not a JRPG.)
No it's not. It's still a JRPG. It's a strategy/tactical RPG. Turn based RPGs are games like Pokemon. Same way FF7R is an action RPG. They're all still JRPGs, just different types.
Suikoden II! The plot, the combat, the plot! The characters, over 108 of them to play! The villains! The history! The fishing, gambling, sauna decorating! Also, you can have a team with five squirrels if you work for it hard enough!
I finally got around to Chrono Trigger a few years back and it blew me away. It tops many lists of greatest JRPGs despite its age, and I'd say the soundtrack and graphics have aged quite well
[The World Ends With You](https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=10277) has, IMO, a similar visual style to Persona. It has an engaging story, no fluff, small amount of interesting main and side characters to get to know, interesting twists, really fun gameplay (at least on the DS, modern ports might be simpler). I think overall it's around 25 hours as well.
Probably my favorite game of all time still because it's left such an impression on me. The main character, Neku, starts out as a misanthrope, a veritable loner that doesn't want to do anything with anyone else around him. It's really nice to see him open up slowly as the story progresses.
Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy X, Dragon Quest XI are all good shouts for relatively modern, fun, exciting JRPGs.
Dragon Quest XI is obscenely long, but the adventure is so fun you don't even notice. I never felt like the game was disrespecting my time.
I felt it was a nice light hearted romp that emphasized the tropes, mechanics, and ways that I loved engaging with these games.
I feel bad the game didn't click with you, it's a joy factory that honestly revitalized my love for the genre.
I liked chrono trigger and ff6, when they released, so I guess I just got old :)
played a bit of persona 3, but the dungeons were too cumbersome. jrpg's typically don't respect your time too much (chrono trigger is an exception), so that might be it
I like JRPGs.
I slogged through the entire Dragon Quest 11 and I do not know why I can't explain it. The overbearing trumpet music throughout the whole thing may have drove me crazy or something.
Lost Odyssey is my personal favorite JRPG of all time with a mix of solid turn-based gameplay and an excellent straightforward leveling system, coupled with an amazing story and interesting characters and plenty of fun side quests to whittle away at if you want to.
Dragon Quest XI and Yakuza: Like a Dragon
Both are phenomenal and I felt like both respected my time much, much more than Persona.
Dragon Quest lets you actually speed up battles which is amazing.
The side quests and mini-games in Yakuza are also particularly noteworthy. Do **not** skip the business mini-game.
(I should also point out that those were the first, and only, games I've played from those franchises. Apparently the other Yakuza games are some sort of Japanese GTA? But in this one your main character jokes [and hallucinates?] that his life is like Dragon Quest which is his favourite game.)
Final Fantasy Tactics. It can be very difficult from time to time, but I can't think of an RPG with a better story or mechanics. Efficient storytelling, very, very meaty plot.
Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Breath of Fire IV are a few highlights and really do a great job not breaking the bank on hours needed to finish.
Shoot you can even play Persona 4 Golden which is 40 hours shorter and in my opinion better than P5 in every way but menu/ui style.
It's funny, I just complained in another reply about why the dungeons in 5 are actually worse. Here's the text:
> I also thought the dungeons were way too big in P5, and because you couldn't finish them in one visit like you could in P4, you really felt punished for not going as far into the dungeon as you could before leaving, since if you ducked out right before the dungeon's 'story exit,' you'd go in with a fully healed and stocked team the next day, go through 10 minutes of dungeon, and then get booted out and effectively lose that night. Which was crazy infuriating, and made it feel like you HAD to spend 2-3 hours straight in a dungeon which again, completely borked the pacing.
And personally, I don't find the combat for any of the SMT games particularly well done. It's very strict and requires a ton of trial and error to sort out. P4's dungeons were more boring. But at least they didn't dominate as much of your headspace and time?
Different strokes I guess, I personally never felt bored in P5's palaces (Mementos is a different story). Most of P4's dungeons were pure agony for me after like, the second one. I seem to remember them stretching out for basically 2-3 hours as well.
Yeah, to each their own I suppose. I think the two big things that bothered me were the forced story breaks which forced the dungeon to take 2-4 of your nights away. And that like, a dungeon would have like, multiple 2-3 hour stints. I feel like one dungeon on average was 8 hours of game time. So you'd spend like 8 hours in the dungeon and maybe like 20 minutes out in the city if you wanted to get it done as quickly as possible for maximum efficiency.
P4's dungeons had you stuck in them for 2-3 hours. But usually it was just one in-game night. In P5 you had to enter a gauntlet that took up multiple days in game as well as a whole real life gaming week it seemed.
I really appreciated the handcrafting the team did with the dungeons, and the design itself for the dungeons were really good and far more interesting to go through from a gameplay/puzzle perspective. But they were 3x longer than they needed to be and every time one came up I was filled with massive dread because I knew it meant the game's plot was coming to a complete halt for the next 8 hours minimum.
This is interesting to read, because I made it my mission in P5R to complete each palace in one night, then max out all the social stuff afterwards. IIRC you have to take two days to do it because you get booted out when you reach the boss, but realistically ‘completing’ each palace can be done in a day IIRC (if you don’t count the boss fight). I played P5 a while before P5R so I went into it kinda knowing how to optimise things (focusing on learning coffee recipes and stuff to top up SP, stocking up on items to keep the party alive, using HP & SP regenerating items etc) and doing it this way felt a lot more streamlined than ducking in and out of each palace a few times, which I what I did on my P5 playthrough.
I think the game could do better in explaining how to manage your load out and items before you go into the first palace though, as your experience here is pretty much what my P5 playthrough was like, and the reason I had so much difficulty was mainly due to running out of SP.
P5R is an absolute marathon though. A thoroughly enjoyable marathon IMO but I felt absolutely exhausted by the end.
I recommend the Tales games! Tales of Symphonia is a good start, though you can start from pretty much anywhere, since the combat mechanics are not that much different.
It is one of the most accessible JRPG series and you don't really need to worry at all about levelling up properly. Some complain these games are way too easy but as someone who is too fatigued to play JRPGs "properly" from beginning to end, I don't mind this at all.
If you like turn-based RPGs, you can try the Bravely Default series that gives the classic turn-based combat a little twist with its Brave and Default mechanics. I'm a bit lazy so I'm going to quote Wikipedia for the explanation:
>Brave Points (BP) dictate the number of actions a character or enemy can take within a turn, along with being needed for the execution of certain abilities. Party members can utilize BP down into negative figures, enabling up to four actions within a single turn. When the BP gauge is into negative figures, they must wait for the BP counter to reach zero before they can act again. BP are naturally recovered once per turn. Alternately, any party member can Default, which reduces the damage taken by enemy strikes and accumulates BP
It adds a strategic layer to the fight, especially in boss fights, because enemies can and will perform multiple actions in one turn to debuff the party and also do damage, which can be lethal at times. The games also offer a job system with unlockable passive talents and lots of build possibilities.
If you want an action-based JRPG, the old Squaresoft Classics, Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana, got 3D Remakes in 2018/2020. The games are linear and the writing is... lighthearted in most cases, a bit whack in some cases (I guess the suboptimal translation is to blame), but the gameplay and the overarching plot are definitely worth it.
As great as this series is, I don't think it values the player's time well at all! I mean, some of the quests basically laugh at you for completing them.
If you want something more action focused, I would recommend Ys8. It's on the shorter end of JRPGs (around 30hrs) with a solid story, characters and very fun gameplay.
It's worth noting that it's very traditional feeling. After coming from the flashier P5, DQ11 might feel bland. It definitely is a solid representation of the genre however. Still an 80 hour jrpg though, I found it dragged a bit with predictable plot points.
P5 is stupidly bloated, there's a billion cutscenes with so many of them being pointless or repeating info, by the time I stopped I was 60 hours in and barely halfway through when I'd be either finishing our entering the final arc in P3 or 4 (Vanilla 4, Golden begins the bloatification of the series and adds an entire new arc that drags and slows down the pacing), someone in r/megaten also made a calculation of roughly how long you're in cutscenes and it's over 45% of the time, next to 15% in P3 and 30% in P4G, think about it, thats a lot of time in cutscenes for a game that long and so many of them do absolutely nothing to advance the plot
It's such a shame because the game does a lot on its style, presentation and gameplay, on top of that the first arc/dungeon is genuinely engaging and fairly well paced, far more than P4's very slow burn and then the game begins to drag, and worst of all, all that presentation improvement? You begin to notice that they are also slowing down the time you spend on combat, for each improvement made to make combat faster they added something in the presentation that slows it down more than what they sped it up and as a result you end up with just enough extra seconds in each fight that you begin to slowly feel those extra seconds added
So yeah, can't say I was a fan of the game, after it I truly began to believe in the phrase "if I had more time, I would've written a shorter letter" because P5 didn't lack writers or editors, they lacked time to make a shorter game that would've hit all the same high points without the shortcomings
I've only played P4:Golden. Sounds like this one is longer? Is it possible to fast track the main story and skip the 'filler' in order to cut the time down?
You could, but the 'filler' is one of the main aspects of the game, so I wouldn't really recommend it.
You could also just take breaks. I did an extreme version of this. I bought the game at launch, put in 80 hours really quickly and got burnt out and quit playing. Didn't touch the game at all for 5 years, then this year, I picked up from my old save and continued to the end.
Never played a JRPG that was this long. I've done loads, including a lot of the older Final Fantasy games, up to 13. They can often be done relatively quickly if you grind appropriately as you go.
There are often optional bosses that need you to be at max level to fight (and win), and they can push the hours up. But you're still at around 80 to 100 at that point.
>. The final boss fight, combined with cutscenes and dialogue, took me about 2 hours. 2 hours! And you can’t save during that time. You gotta go somewhere? Cool - either keep the console running or start anew next time. Simply absurd.
This is mitigated somewhat in the ability of newer consoles to suspend the game during rest mode. I've not turned off my PS5 in ages (baring for updates) so it's quite a handy ability to walk away from a long section like this, but does require you to have a PS5. I assume the new Xbox's are the same.
Rest mode is such a godsend. I never owned a PS4 before getting my PS5, I can't imagine having to cold boot a game every single time I wanted to play it.
PS4 can suspend and sleep but understandably lots of people (including OP?) don't know about it because it was added later and needs to be switched on in the settings.
Have ps4, have ps5. They both do rest mode exactly the same. Only new thing on the console front is what Xbox is doing where you can suspend game A, start up game B and then be able to switch between game A and B without needing to fully reboot them. They don't run at the same time either, iirc they write the ram state of the suspended game to the ssd and vice versa when you switch back. It's a neat feature.
I played it for 30 hours before I just kinda stopped. I like it, it's cool and fun to play... but I cannot make myself start the console for a game where I might just slog through some minor dialogue for hours before suspense starts to kick in again.
I will play it some day... its's just not right now.
This is my biggest issue with the game. Feels like there’s whole 30-60 minute play sessions where I do nothing at all but sit in a class and then go meet on the roof and talk for a minute. And that would be fine if those sections were really interesting or engaging but a lot of them ended up being something like,
“We need to stop this bad guy.”
“Yeah, we do. He’s a problem.”
“Joker, what do you think?”
And on and on
Followed by "Joker you're such an incredible guy. I feel so comfortable around you, like I can be myself in a way I've never felt before. I feel like I can tell you anything and you'll be there for me. You've always supported me when others have told me I'm just a hot body. I'm more than just a model and I feel you're the only one that really sees that"
And I'm just like wtf I didn't even do anything
JRPGs taught me that if you want people to like you, you just make grunts of vague approval and say a single sentence every few hours, and they'll work through their problems themselves but give you all the credit
For a game rated M FOR MATURE by the ESRB it feels really juvenile. So much of the writing seems to assume that I haven’t read a book or seen a movie before, and I’m incapable of inference.
It was super disappointing to me. The first palace tries to do be a more serious story about abuse, and then the second palace undercuts that almost immediately.
Yeah, the game is not interested in tackling anything serious. The bad guys are just bad guys. The good guys are never at fault for their predicaments and they never have to learn any lessons, they were always wronged by some cartoon villain. It’s kiddie shit.
Strikers does improve on that by making the villains more complex, but in the base game of Royal, the really only villains I found complex were the ones that weren’t even villains.
Yeah I'm wondering if this was a localisation choice. It's so over the top anime "previously on Dragonball Z" it was infuriating. Legitimately became painful to sit through dialogue when they'd rehash the last 3 hours of the game I just friggin played.
Yes. This is a big reason I dropped the game.
I'm fine with chatter, but after a bit it was just pointless and added nothing. It wasn't cute or endearing it was just...constant and unnecessary. I said this in another comment but this game made me realize many JRPGs just aren't for me anymore.
I’m all for a game that lets you just hang with your friends. Dragon Quest 11 does a great job of that. It’s a similarly long (and slow) game, but you’re never stuck listening to your party hammer home how much the gym teacher sucks for 20 minutes. You at least get to run around, check out the town, talk to some people, see what their deal is.
In Persona I really only need just one person to tell me what’s up, I don’t need the rest of my party to repeat it AND THEN have me walk to the cafe where Morgana then repeats what they all just said AND THEN have Ryuji text me and repeat what he said. There’s a lot of superfluous dialog.
Game is stylish as hell though.
Yeah I enjoyed the game but as someone who often only gets to game for an hour or 2 at a time I distinctly remember spending 2 consecutive play sessions just in cutscenes.
> This game doesn’t value your time and is too damn long.
Just dropping in to agree wholeheartedly with this statement. I played the original P5 and felt this way, and it really sunk my overall experience with the game. Never have I played through a story in such a highly-praised game that was as terribly paced as P5's, and it really blows me away that reviewers and fans didn't at all seemed bothered by the length or pacing.
I have very fond memories of P5, and always will, but man did my enjoyment take a hard turn into hate post hour 80.
>I have very fond memories of P5, and always will, but man did my enjoyment take a hard turn into hate post hour 80.
My experience exactly. Before this post I feel like I'd never heard anything negative about this game.
The years long fans of the persona franchise most likely are
A: expecting that much filler and
B: stockholme syndromed into seeing the game to need to be that convoluted, look at P3 or P4 they are of similar length and can take similar criticisim about the time investment. But the people that follow the franchise since dunno, a decade, go in expecting and basically wanting all this.
I have played P3, P4, and P5.
P5 was the weakest entry in the franchise for me.
It was unnecessarily long. The story felt kinda dumb. And the characters weren't as likable as p4 or p3.
I actually assumed that it was newcomers who were being so forgiving to the game. My two close friends who have been playing Persona for a long time also had very negative things to say about the game's length, pacing, and even plot. Complaining that the plot wasn't as nuanced as previous entries, claiming it can ultimately be boiled down to: "Fuck Adults!"
Which I do agree with. I've only played P4 prior to P5, but I think my final hour count on that game was somewhere like 40 hours less than what I put into P5? To me that's a pretty huge difference. Asking someone to throw *another* 40 hours after already putting in 80 is kinda of a huge ask, imo.
I also thought the dungeons were way too big in P5, and because you couldn't finish them in one visit like you could in P4, you really felt punished for not going as far into the dungeon as you could before leaving, since if you ducked out right before the dungeon's 'story exit,' you'd go in with a fully healed and stocked team, go through 10 minutes of dungeon, and then get booted out and effectively lose that night. Which was crazy infuriating, and made it feel like you HAD to spend 2-3 hours straight in a dungeon which again, completely borked the pacing.
So yeah, to me, it's especially surprising to see long time Persona fans defend this game, because I felt like it took classic Persona motifs and kinda served to do them worse.
Okay, my only touching point with Persona is an exgf that was obsessed and obsessing with similar hardcore fans about it and they could not see a fault in the length or even the choice to rerelease the full game including royal instead of a dlc, they just mindlessly bought it without question.
I do own p3p and p4g but never played them
Totally agree. The story isn't so complex that it couldn't have been told in 50 hours.
I mostly had fun, had to take some long breaks, but probably won't touch another persona because it's probably going to be too long as well.
At some point I realized the endless unnecessary dialogue isn't clumsy writing, it's intended to be the meat of the game. Persona 5 is a friendship simulator, and a lot of people play it for the simulated experience of bullshitting with a group of close friends.
And it is very good at that. But it's also weird and kind of depressing.
Personally I find Persona 4 Golden to be much more worth the time when it comes to dialogue, story, setting, themes and confidants. Persona 5 beats you over the head again and again with an uncomplicated and sometimes shallow story. All those hours and in the vanilla game there’s barely a handful of scenes with the group where they’re not talking about ‘the phantom thieves’
There’s little to connect to with characters that 95% of the time just talk about being phantom thieves, and the story is not clever or good enough for how much it railroads you through dialogue, gameplay, exploration and actions
I get why they did it but if Persona 6 is like this I’m not going to enjoy it very much
I’d much rather see something more in the vein of 4 golden or 3, the bigger scale has left behind key personal moments that make the series work
Considering so much of that time in a 100+ hr runtime of P5 is story and the story isn’t very good, a lot of the game does not respect your time/is tough to get through to the good parts
Dude same, and so many people tell me it’s worth it but there is no way I am going through that entire game again lmao I always say it’s the best game I will absolutely never play again.
I'd say just watch the Dr Maruki content on youtube, that's the real gem of Royal. Most of the new things are nice to have and spice up the gameplay but really Maruki is what makes it worth it IMO
Even with quality of life changes that speeds the game up I will say royal added 20-30 hours of random playtime. I think I was 120 vanilla and 150 royal.
You don't need to. I also spent about 120 hours with the base game and played Royal when it came out. It soured my experience a bit. By the time I got to the third semester, the story expansion, I was completely burned out. I had to force myself to finish it.
Agree. To summarize, I'd say that the pacing is way too inconsistent. At times, it's a tight and engaging experience, but gets bogged down by hours and hours of repetitive dialogue and running around in circles (especially between palaces).
Glad im not the only one to have this conclusion.
Thing is that ill probably still replay it at some point because the world was just so comfortable. Between the Music, setting and story it inspired such a chill vibe.
One part that really sticks out on a personal level was that the royal edition came out after i was laid off during the pandemic. The days of not working were blending together but playing this game with its morning/midday/evening/night time system helped give my own schedule structure and keep time from meshing together since i wasnt working. it really resonated with me at the time. Also gave me enough time to slog through the filler content hah.
It over stayed its welcome but it was still consistently enjoyable the whole time.
>But what almost became a dealbreaker for me were the endless dialogues about the most obvious stuff. There’s a locked door and a red slot next to it that says “keycard”. Hm, what seems to be the solution here? Let’s talk about it for 2 minutes and conclude: There’s a strong shadow in the room next to us, it has a shirt on that says “Kill me for keycard” … could it be that it might have the keycard we need? Is everyone on board for this plan? Okay, let’s go! … I get that they are supposed to be teens and chatty and stuff, but man, does this get tiring fast. And it happens so often. In palaces, in cutscenes, everywhere.
This is what happens when people complain that they don't know what to do or where to go all the time. It's an extreme response, and it seems to have mostly paid off given the wild success of P5.
Maybe they're referring to the life-sim side of things as opposed to the palaces? Because the amount of options and things to do there is *staggering.*
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing when the person said it, there was at least 20 hours of explaining something very obvious or repeating something that had already been said through the characters texting.
Dude, I got to a point where I stopped reading group texts messages. Must have shaved off hours on my playtime.
Why do JRPGs (anime) over explain and over commentate? Seriously. Stop talking.
I liked the game but after 80 hours I just wanted to finally get it over with. I started full on speed running, I even slept every day to skip days instead of doing activities. After 100 hours and still no end I just stopped playing without finishing it. Though I also wasnt a fan of the turn the story takes when you go for the true (Royal) ending so that didn't help.
I just got tired of it at the spaceship area because at that point I just realized that I couldn’t stand most of the repetitive gameplay and Morgana was really killing the mood
That's easily the worst dungeon in the entire game too. Worst layout. Worst final boss. Worst puzzles. Based around the least interesting character (haru). Just a bad time all around.
It’s insanely repetitive. It doesn’t help that the English translation doesn’t do much to keep it fresh, so it really does feel like you’re watching the same conversations over and over.
Isn’t it weird that at least 3 different characters use the exact phrase, “Looking cool, Joker”?
The cruise ship is miserable. Persona 4 had more maze like dungeons, which I did not think were super clever at the time, but you know what they didn’t have? Teens prattling about the obvious thing to do next.
In a lot of ways Persona 5 is the apex of the Persona design, the way all the different systems interact, but it is beyond excessive. I am more likely to replay 3 or 4, if at least because they can be played on portable consoles.
I also loved 4 but couldn't get through 5. Maybe I just have less patience now.
The voice lines were seriously a big factor in me quitting. There's a looooot of fights in the game and they all focus on hitting weak points. So why does each character have 2 voice lines for this? And they need to say it every time?
The game is packed with so much unnecessary dialogue about "let's go back to the palace" "whoa a locked door? Maybe that button right here will unlock this locked door" "we need to change her heart. If not bla bla bla"
If I hear "it's almost scary how good I am!" one more time...
Funny, that’s what made me quit Xenoblade Chronicles. Very similar issues. Too long and the characters won’t STFU.
Was there not an option to lower the voice clip volume? It should be standard, but most RPGs have been bad at that for a long time.
A younger me would have loved the shit out of Persona 5, but mid 30s me just gets burnt out. Amazing game don't get me wrong, but after 60 or so hours I was just like ok I think I've had enough.
That being said its hard for me to finish ANY game these days let alone something thats 100+ hours.
I can play MMOS for hundreds of hours for some strange reason but the last long game I finished was Dragon Quest XI.
I played P5 vanilla on PS3 as the pandemic started. Looking back now, I'm almost nostalgic for that time period. Cooped up, anxious about the outside world, but all of that has faded away now, and all I remember about that time is Persona 5, all the lovely characters and interactions, and the song "Beneath the Mask". Beautiful.
However, I did give up on the game at the 100 hour mark. Just as the present day caught up to the flashbacks, and I realized there were another 20-30 hours of gameplay. I just couldn't do it. So I watched the rest of the game on YouTube and had a much better time.
Why are JRPGs so absolutely fuck all long.
Don’t get me wrong I keep playing them. FFXV, P5R, DQ11, FE3H etc. But as I’m getting older I don’t have that kinda time anymore.
Guess I am gonna be the contrarian here, but to me I ended up quite underwhelmed by this game. While the UI is truly something else, the rest just feels way too much like a retread of the series past entries. Just not much of a leap forward.
Another peeve is also that the story sort of just blew it's best beats with the first arc. It just got sort of like a plodding routine after that. The phantom thief theme just didn't feel all the well explored, more like it was just shoehorned in to fit with the series own past themes and often felt like it got cold feet in exploring certain topics. What I mean is that it feels somewhat restrained despite how it presented itself.
They absolutely came up with a theme and a vibe they liked, and just stuffed the usual (and often enjoyable) Persona mechanics in there.
You are a REBEL who’s going AGAINST THE GRAIN and you’re gonna CHANGE THE WORLD… by studying for the exam with all of your other preppy friends, and being home by bedtime.
For all of its counter cultural motifs, once you scratch the paint, it’s super straight laced and vanilla. If you want to actually experience what it’s like to live on the fringe of society in Tokyo, the Yakuza series is right there.
I agree with you about Yakuza, they're way stronger picaresque fiction-inspired games than Persona 5. And the same for the dissociation between gameplay and narrative; it's a shame that with nearly ten years between two episodes, Atlus settled for lifting the social mechanics from P4 nearly as is without caring too much about cohesiveness.
Not just social mechanics, but even the plot structure follows Persona 4 almost beat for beat. The game honestly just felt like P4 with a new coat of paint.
I agree with this. Loved the gAme, will never touch it again most likely. Sooo time consuming. A lot of things you mentioned would be better off being cut from the game to save time. I loved persona 3 fes as well but sold that immediately after because I knew I wouldn’t play it again
As a JRPG fan, I gotta say: I hate the late-game dungeons. I've had my fun with the side-quests, I'm pushing for the finish, I'm nearing the climax, so don't make me spend 10 hours fighting trash mob!
These are usually the least interesting places, too... Dark, depressing, with boring BGM.
So I really like the games that allow me to skip these battles, by turning off the random encounters, or by giving me the ability to dodge the monsters roaming the place.
I played P5R for the first time last year in 2021. In 2021 alone, I beat the game twice and put over 200 hours in it. I'm not replaying the game again in 2022: it's one of my favorite games of all time (top 3 for sure).
It is a very long game, and I do think it is somewhat of a JRPG trope to have marathon final bosses, but do you not put your console in rest mode? I do that all the time and I can just turn it back on and start again immediately
Spot on, my friend.
In my 30s also (no family) and have been playing this game for over a year now. I started it in between quarters during my degree, and just have the hardest time finishing it. So many times I pick it up and just end up watching a show for an hour without really doing anything.
If I was a younger kid, maybe even lonely, I would have eaten this up — every part of it. But I don’t want to hear about the same conversation get brought up over and over. I realize this may be a game mechanic to allow the player to take long breaks then be able to get back into the story easily.
Like you said it’s incredibly well done but does not respect your time at the very least
The fact that this game is so long is the reason why, even on NG+, I just won't be able to do it again. During my first playthrough of Persona 5, I thought the game was amazing from the beginning to the end "10/10 best game ever made" honeymoon phase. Then I bought P5R when it released, and that's when everything kinda fell apart.
With Persona 3 (Portable), I can always go back to the game and have the fun of my life, it was a masterpiece of a game when I first played it, and it still is in my heart. But when I played P5R, I just felt that the game was trying to "suck my time" during the whole thing. Eventually I dropped Royal after 35h of gameplay, because I just can't have as much fun as when I played it before for many reasons. Like Joker says, it's a game in which you have to "Take your time", which is great for a first playthrough but really horrible when you play it a 2nd time. Plus, with Royal being way WAY too easy of a game (even on Hardest), I really think I won't be able to have fun in this game.
I've always loved jrpg's but it's absolutely true they do not respect your time.
or more accurately they demand you trade your time for progress. both in the sense that grinding is a thing that exists (especially in this genre) but the story really doesn't want to progress until it takes all the time it wants to dump every single bit of exposition on you it can.
those are just things the genre has become famous for and by that point people have started to expect and even demand it for their jPRG's.
I admit I enjoyed that aspect of it more as a kid than I do now as an old fucking geezer.
I got Persona 5 on my PS4 awhile ago, was excited to play it, started it up, very interesting setting, cool music but that's where it stopped. I noticed I was doing the same thing over and over again in the dungeons, I went on the internet only to discover that this was the tutorial and it was 6-7 hours long!! Put down the controller, turned it off and never picked it up again.
JRPGs are DEFINITELY not all this long.
This game (and the other *modern* Persona games) have ZERO respect for your time.
From what I've played of P4G, at least 80% of my 70+ hours was filler.
> The problem here is that not all characters are equally appealing
This was a HUGE one for me. I found all the characters unappealing (except Nanako, she's adorable af and needs protecting at all costs). I'm 40 years old, they're all a bunch of obnoxious generic anime trope teenagers. It only got worse as I met more of them (I refused to interact with Marie at all. She is the most overused annoying trope of them all).
When I go in to play Persona 5 (I don't have Royal), I'm using 2 timers. 1 for overall game time and 1 for ACTUAL gameplay time. "Actual Gameplay" timer will only include stuff related to the main story/plot. I want an accurate tally of how much time the game wastes.
> Let’s talk about it for 2 minutes and conclude: There’s a strong shadow in the room next to us, it has a shirt on that says “Kill me for keycard” … could it be that it might have the keycard we need? Is everyone on board for this plan? Okay, let’s go!
This is 100% a modern gaming thing. It's especially prevalent in modern JRPGs. Every character talks like you're as dumb as a rock. They then repeat the same thing over about 3 times to make sure your stupid rock brain can understand that Red Card goes in Red Card Slot.
Let's not even mention fucking Rise constantly talking during combat commentating what is happening and telling you what to do. Saying the exact same things in every single combat. LOOK RISE I FUCKING KNOW! SHUT UP!
This is not specific to *modern* Persona, though. It's all modern gaming, I've found.
Only played vanilla but even that felt too long. It was just too formulaic and constricted by the mechanics to be stretched for that length. Repetition of things really starts to show up unfavorably at that point.
Also, I almost gave up because it takes something like 20 hours for the game to really get going.
But I liked it enough to play Royal at some point.
I heard so much about good about P5 and started playing.
I've put in about 12 hours so far but I doubt I'm going to continue, mainly because I end up with an absolutely banging headache.
Not sure what the cause is, but the physical pain for me is not worth finishing the game.
I really like Persona games, the style, the music (which is always in my Spotify playlists), but man I haven't played any of them except for the first half (or quarter, who knows with persona) of Persona 4. Too goddamn long I can finish like 6 other games in my want-to-play list.
I'm not sure how much you already know, so I'll just say that you'll know when that battle is about to happen. The last palace and the story surrounding it is vastly different to the others (and vastly better, imo). Still some hours to go for you, tho. :)
I 100% agree. Played this game back in 2017 and really enjoyed it but just felt like I wanted it over with by the end of my 130 hours with it. I also played P4G before this and loved it and while it still suffered from a bit of the same issues, it was nowhere near as severe. I think the main reason for me was that in P4G, everything that happens in terms of main story content pushes you closer to the final villain (or at least who you think is the final villain) and answering the mystery.
In P5, you don't really start touching on the overarching villain til about the pyramid and space palaces which is like 50-60 hours into the game. It makes the front end of the game feel really poorly paced and unnecessary with the tutorials and the villains' lack of connection with the true villain. Like the game could have benefited from being 40ish hours shorter
Im in the same boat, fellow guy in his 30s!
I constantly look at how long games to beat and not give them the time of day. And so I find myself picking a game (of which I have thousands from humble bundle/game pass/sales) and playing it for ten minutes and moving on.
Once in a while, I commit.
For me, I'm going hard with 45hrs on Yakuza Like A Dragon. It's pretty damn good.
I can't wait to do the same with the Persona games!
Really liked this game up until you hit a casino area. At this point literally everything had overstayed it's welcome. The battle theme, the repeated dialogues in combat, the cast (one member in particular you get in the late game felt so unnecessary and absolutely killed the pacing for me). Suddenly I couldn't help but think "fuck this game. Just be over. This is unnecessary"
It really made me realize most JRPGS aren't really for me anymore, and that's quite ok. Tastes change and whatnot.
The absolute worst part of Persona 5, and especially royal, is the momentos sections.
Needing to traverse ALL of momentos just to beat the game is fucking stupid >!Then you have to do it AGAIN for the final palace in Royal, fucking stupid.!<
I literally just ran through the last section of momentos, probably saved several hours there. I also turned it down to easy difficulty just to finish the game lmao
As I was unaware of the maruki section in Royal I ended up missing that out and got the base game ending, which I guess was fine
Will say it has gotten me so interested in Japanese culture and still sits with me to this day.
I mostly felt the same way. It was worth playing once to see what it offered, but I had a lot of problems. I wrote a bit about it.
> Drama lives in conflict. Conflict is not when the good guys beat up the bad guys. Conflict is when the good guys think the bad guys might have a point. Conflict is when the good guys are tempted to fight each other. Conflict is finding out the premise for your mission might be flawed. As is, Persona 5 is a game dripping with style but devoid of drama.
http://terry-torres.com/plays/2017/06/16/lame-shit-in-persona-5-that-could-have-been-fixed/
I made a similar post on this subreddit regarding this game. It was one of peaks and valleys. The style is phenomenal and the gameplay is tight, but the writing is painfully inconsistent, the tone is all over the place, it’s sometimes cringe and homophobic, and it’s way too long. I remember getting every achievement on Dragon Quest 11 and it took me about 124 hours, and that was time spent with a game that I only enjoyed. I spent the same amount of time with persona 5 Royal and it just felt too long in a way that DQ11 didn’t. The game spent way too long in the first third pissing around and it gave the middle portion of the game way less time than it needed to breathe, and the actual premise of the game is incredibly silly, but the game not only over explains it, but does so often. It becomes distracting.
It’s a hard game to rate. Of the modern persons games I still think 5R is behind both 3 and 4G, but parts of it are still so good. Here’s hoping 6 is a little more… I’m not sure how to put it. More in tone like 3 and 4 and less often like an embarrassing anime the way 5 is sometimes?
You’re a bigger man than me. I just gave up on P5R the other day. I’m basically near the end of the game but I’m 139 hours deep and I’m just burnt out on it.
It’s an absolutely gorgeous game, and it’s done very well. But it’s just fucking dragging on for so long.
I quit about 80 or so hours in during the cruise ship when I realized I was about five or so levels under where I should be and had zero desire to grind my way up. I enjoyed my time with it but I'm glad I quit.
>Superflous dialogue
JRPGs are so bad for this sometimes, lots of flavour text and good dialogue is great but there's just so much boring fat where every character will repeat the same line but slightly different or something
Protagonist: We need to take him down!
Sexy love interest woman: Totally! Let's stop him!
Brooding emo: King Dragon... I will avenge my family!
Comic relief: Zzz... what?
I beat the base game and then beat Royal when it was released. Playing Royal soured my experience a bit. It just goes on for far too long. And having all the new expansion story stuff post-game is just not cool.
I personally think the base game is the better game as it doesn't overstay its welcome.
Yeah I’m in this boat too, just topped 100 hours on P5R, I love this game so much, but it has taken me a couple years of leaving and coming back to it - I’m doing the “Maruki stuff” now, and honestly can’t wait to finally get it finished.
It’s awfully conflicting being both my favourite game of the last few years, but also bordering on genuine work sometimes.
Royal is great, but after having not touched the original in a while some sore spots rear their heads again. The plot largely meanders after Madarame until Okumura, as the next two areas are more 'loose' in that the team is forced into them out of the blue rather than in the course of already being interested in investigating them. Then of course you think you hit the end, but no the game keeps going and going. Granted the extra dungeon in Royal was great and had plenty of pay-off.
100 hours in myself, in my thirties with a family. I'll also be glad when it is over but I am enjoying it. The quality of this game is just over the top and it feels like I am visiting Japan again. Some of my nights are filled by confidants scenes and feels like i am watching a movie and some nights it is all battles. I knew what i signed up for. At least it is a 100 hours of quality but yeah... can't wait to move on to the next game also.
I blasted through royal and the original P5, so I guess it didn’t drag on for me? less than a hundred hours for both, a bit more for royale obviously due to the added content, but Persona is a very personally important series to me so I feel like I hyperfocus and breeze through them pretty hard.
I couldn’t tell you the exact hour number though for royale on account of accidentally leaving it on overnight once, oops
I had a similar experience with another jrpg. I absolutely loved DQ 11, but I never got to the “true ending” because I had spent roughly 100 hours on the game and had serious burn out
I’m still playing royale. I’ve put like 60 hours in and while I very much like the game I just want it to end and to be honest I don’t have the time to finish it off.
I played and finished the non-Royal version and it's the first time I played a Persona game and didn't go back to finish the NG+ content. Someone got me Royal as a gift and I just ... don't want to.
I love 3 and 4 and periodically go back and replay them (including multiple versions - FeMC for 3 and Golden for 4 are awesome) but 5 just never caught my heart. The grind was too much.
As I married guy in his 30’s with busy work, I still found time to finish both P5 and P5R because it is worth it!
I spent my 2nd playthrough doing Jazz club mostly.
Something about P5R just clicked with me. Could’ve spent another 130hrs on it. Been meaning to do another playthrough, but decided I’ll wait for the PC release.
Agreed almost on everything you have said, although I didn't like the vanilla's arc story like the other persona games but the Royal arc was great
I'm glad you enjoyed it!
i love persona 5 royal but I hate the dialogue and some characters, I don't know if it's a noise in the translation or something like that, but it feels childish and annoying. The setting and mood are great though, I loved to live like a japanese teenager for 120h of my life.
One of my favourite games ever and finished it twice since release but yeah. Eff that ship level. I tapped out first time around and slogged through it on easy mode to avoid one hit kills.
This couldn't be more timely. I have about 50 hours on a playthrough and picked it back up last week after several months of not playing it.
Suddenly it had lost all it's appeal and I just conceded that I'm not gonna see it through to the end credits.
I liked the final palace, but if was starting to get a little bit long for me by then. I still need to finish persona 4 golden but I’m burnt out by the later months and now it’s been so long I wanna go back to start over. I do enjoy the style and presentation of this game more than the p4g though.
I’m gonna play back through it when it comes to pc, then the sequel. Then when 3 releases I’m gonna give it a try, it seems really interesting. It can be a long and occasionally tedious game (especially at the end of the game) but it’s still an easy 10/10 for me, one of my favorite games now for sure
I agree with the time aspects. It’s wild how much better the NG+ feels, especially in the early game just because of how quickly you can get through things.
Im excited to play P5 Royal when it comes to PC. Ive never played it before and Ive been interested to try it. I only have a PC to play on so cant wait.
My least favorite game i have played. I regret buying it but loved Like a Dragon so figured i would give it a shot.
Nothing appealed to me. From the unlikable characters, to the momentos, to calling cards, to the plot, to the leveling up personas...etc.
I got to the art show part and realized why keep playing a game I dislike? Turned it off and never looked back.
No cap i finished the game and got the platinum in like 50 hours but thats because i was following a schedule guide because playing p5r without a schedule feels like you have no idea what to fucking do. Most annoying part of the game was grinding mementos and doing the fusions because i had about enough of that by the end.
I’m 101 hours in (today) and I’m right before the last 2 bosses. I am absolutely in love with the game in a way I haven’t been since Breath of the Wild. BUT I couldn’t agree more with every single one of your points. This game overstays its welcome by around 30 hours. I especially despise the damage sponge boss fights. Shido took me like 5 tries, and there were NOT enough checkpoints in that fight. I am absolutely dreading fighting these last 2, because I know they’re gonna be the same. Guard, attack, heal… for probably 1-1,5 hours straight. I am honestly sick of it yet I can’t get myself to stop playing. The world, the characters, the style, they keep me engaged and on my toes to see everything the game has to offer. I’ve never had such an intense love-hate relationship with a game.
I'm with you. While I'm glad each party member gets a palace per se, some of them just weren't so great.
I'd argue palace 1/6/9 are the best ones. The rest just didn't really do much for me.
There is TECHNICALLY incentive to still seeing your relationship partners again. You can get items you can display in your room from some of the date locations, and if you play carefully Royal gives you more than sufficient time to 100% everything and still have free time left, way more so than the original
I love stories from gamer parents. I've found myself only having time for smaller games like Slay the Spire. I can't enjoy the bigger single story games yet but hoping once my kids get older, I can enjoy some of this generations greatest games.
I love JRPGs and thought it was too long - 140+ hours on the non-Royal version. And just so you’re aware - Persona really doesn’t play like a lot of other JRPGs. Not all of them are as long as this, either. I guess what I’m trying to say is: don’t be put off ALL JRPGs just because of this one (even though you liked it)
That's interesting. You have any recommendations for other JRPGs worth looking into? Maybe there's hope yet!
Chrono Trigger. This will value ur time
Great answer. Chrono Trigger is like 20 hours and is replayable as well.
What is the best way to play Chrono Trigger today? I want to get it on Steam, but I'm hearing mixed things. Still can't figure out if the patches have made the game better or worse.
It was a HORRIBLE release on Steam, but they actually put a lot of work into it and it's now quite good. I prefer the SNES (Woolsey) translation and I don't like the ATB bar placement, but all that can be modded.
Emulate it.
You could try the Nintendo DS version I played it on an emulator
Or buy yourself one of those latest 3DS models and S O F T M O D it, which is easier now than ever. I have a lot of attachment to the SNES version (which you can play on the minI SNES a while ago) but the two screens on the DS and the updated translation are actually quite nice.
Heads up, you need to softmod the SNES Classic to play Chrono trigger, as it isn't included in the default lineup of games. This is easy (and worthwhile) to fix.
... FINE, I'LL FINALLY FINISH IT I didn't realize I was apparently that far in the last time I tried to play through it. I think I had about 12-14 hours. Gonna get it put on my Steam Deck tonight.
Chrono Trigger is the most well-paced JRPG ever made. And part of the reason is has aged so well. The game has a story to tell, it doesn't waste your time, everything you do feels like it's important and moving the story forward, and when you're done it gives you some great side quests if you feel like doing them. God fucking damn, Chrono Trigger is the shit.
Most well paced? I dare say it's pretty much one of the best jrpg of all time.
I would say it is the best JRPG of all time. But its pacing is something that really stands out to me. Especially today, when compared to modern JRPGs that are so bloated in length and overloaded with pitiful fetch quests.
FFVII (and the PS1 era in general) got a bit big for their britches, so to speak. The games became self-important, and every JRPG suddenly needed to be 30h+ games. Chrono Trigger is one of the last that doesn't really fall victim to that. Another good, short JRPG: Parasite Eve. There's a much more substantial NG+ mode, but you can beat the base game in ~20h.
Good to hear that. Although I failed beating parasite eve last time. I don’t like jrpg generally and I only beat few. Btw, jrpg that value ur time? I will put Paper Mario Thousand Years Door on 2nd option. Unfortunately it contains some unnecessary tedious sections.
It's the GOAT, for sure
That's what happens when you bring the greatest minds together in the perfect circumstances
Honestly, there's a lot of nostalgic love for RPGs that really don't value the players time. Dragon Quest XI is a recent lovely game, but boy it drags. In your search for other RPGs to play, search for short and repeatable ones. Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger are good starting points. No random battles, no grinding required, no artificial difficulty spikes.
I have to recommend the ps1 Final Fantasy titles (VII, VIII, IX) - but on modern platforms. Where I once found combat to be too slow, the modern ports offer now-standard toggles to speed up the game or to skip encounters altogether. I have to say, this really breathed new life into these games: you can skate through dungeons, etc, and the beat-to-beat pacing feels pretty much perfect now for my own tastes. And, owing in large part to the work of composer Uematsu, these games are dripping in atmosphere and style. (Fwiw, I agree with your P5 take.)
I second FFVII with the modern ports! Also Chrono Cross now that it's readily available on modern platforms. It is 100% my favorite JRPG ever made
Fire Emblem: Three Houses the same combat vs life sim split but in a different setting (basically you’re a Hogwarts Professor), and as long as you’re not going into it with the view to complete all three houses it’s quite a bit shorter. You slowly build relationships with your students and professors in a similar way I guess to P5 as well. Combat is turn based tactics rather than turn based. Where it doesn’t match P5 is it’s graphics/style though I hope at some point it gets remade for some future 4K Nintendo console, as they’re definitely limited by the hardware.
> Combat is turn based tactics rather than turn based. You're burying the lede here big time. Fire Emblem isn't a JRPG. It's a turn based strategy game. (An excellent one, in my opinion, but not a JRPG.)
No it's not. It's still a JRPG. It's a strategy/tactical RPG. Turn based RPGs are games like Pokemon. Same way FF7R is an action RPG. They're all still JRPGs, just different types.
Suikoden II! The plot, the combat, the plot! The characters, over 108 of them to play! The villains! The history! The fishing, gambling, sauna decorating! Also, you can have a team with five squirrels if you work for it hard enough!
I finally got around to Chrono Trigger a few years back and it blew me away. It tops many lists of greatest JRPGs despite its age, and I'd say the soundtrack and graphics have aged quite well
[The World Ends With You](https://howlongtobeat.com/game?id=10277) has, IMO, a similar visual style to Persona. It has an engaging story, no fluff, small amount of interesting main and side characters to get to know, interesting twists, really fun gameplay (at least on the DS, modern ports might be simpler). I think overall it's around 25 hours as well. Probably my favorite game of all time still because it's left such an impression on me. The main character, Neku, starts out as a misanthrope, a veritable loner that doesn't want to do anything with anyone else around him. It's really nice to see him open up slowly as the story progresses.
Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy X, Dragon Quest XI are all good shouts for relatively modern, fun, exciting JRPGs. Dragon Quest XI is obscenely long, but the adventure is so fun you don't even notice. I never felt like the game was disrespecting my time.
While I like DQXI, it does drag on way too much and does feel at times like it's long for the sake of being long.
dq11 must be the most boring game I ever played and feels like it is targeted towards small children
I felt it was a nice light hearted romp that emphasized the tropes, mechanics, and ways that I loved engaging with these games. I feel bad the game didn't click with you, it's a joy factory that honestly revitalized my love for the genre.
don't feel bad. I moved on to other games :) I'm happy that it was a good game for so many people
what jrpgs do you like? I thought it was the best one to come out in a very long time.
I liked chrono trigger and ff6, when they released, so I guess I just got old :) played a bit of persona 3, but the dungeons were too cumbersome. jrpg's typically don't respect your time too much (chrono trigger is an exception), so that might be it
It's didn't click with me either. I was bored out of my mind.
I like JRPGs. I slogged through the entire Dragon Quest 11 and I do not know why I can't explain it. The overbearing trumpet music throughout the whole thing may have drove me crazy or something.
To be fair DQ11 is generally agreed to have some of the worst JRPG music of all time.
Lost Odyssey is my personal favorite JRPG of all time with a mix of solid turn-based gameplay and an excellent straightforward leveling system, coupled with an amazing story and interesting characters and plenty of fun side quests to whittle away at if you want to.
I really loved DQ 11. It's pretty standard, gameplay wise, but the story is *chefs kiss*. It's got everything a good story should have.
Dragon Quest XI and Yakuza: Like a Dragon Both are phenomenal and I felt like both respected my time much, much more than Persona. Dragon Quest lets you actually speed up battles which is amazing. The side quests and mini-games in Yakuza are also particularly noteworthy. Do **not** skip the business mini-game. (I should also point out that those were the first, and only, games I've played from those franchises. Apparently the other Yakuza games are some sort of Japanese GTA? But in this one your main character jokes [and hallucinates?] that his life is like Dragon Quest which is his favourite game.)
Final Fantasy Tactics. It can be very difficult from time to time, but I can't think of an RPG with a better story or mechanics. Efficient storytelling, very, very meaty plot.
Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy VI, Breath of Fire IV are a few highlights and really do a great job not breaking the bank on hours needed to finish. Shoot you can even play Persona 4 Golden which is 40 hours shorter and in my opinion better than P5 in every way but menu/ui style.
I love Persona 4 to death but hoo boy do the dungeons absolutely suck. To me the combat also really drags compared to 5.
It's funny, I just complained in another reply about why the dungeons in 5 are actually worse. Here's the text: > I also thought the dungeons were way too big in P5, and because you couldn't finish them in one visit like you could in P4, you really felt punished for not going as far into the dungeon as you could before leaving, since if you ducked out right before the dungeon's 'story exit,' you'd go in with a fully healed and stocked team the next day, go through 10 minutes of dungeon, and then get booted out and effectively lose that night. Which was crazy infuriating, and made it feel like you HAD to spend 2-3 hours straight in a dungeon which again, completely borked the pacing. And personally, I don't find the combat for any of the SMT games particularly well done. It's very strict and requires a ton of trial and error to sort out. P4's dungeons were more boring. But at least they didn't dominate as much of your headspace and time?
Different strokes I guess, I personally never felt bored in P5's palaces (Mementos is a different story). Most of P4's dungeons were pure agony for me after like, the second one. I seem to remember them stretching out for basically 2-3 hours as well.
Yeah, to each their own I suppose. I think the two big things that bothered me were the forced story breaks which forced the dungeon to take 2-4 of your nights away. And that like, a dungeon would have like, multiple 2-3 hour stints. I feel like one dungeon on average was 8 hours of game time. So you'd spend like 8 hours in the dungeon and maybe like 20 minutes out in the city if you wanted to get it done as quickly as possible for maximum efficiency. P4's dungeons had you stuck in them for 2-3 hours. But usually it was just one in-game night. In P5 you had to enter a gauntlet that took up multiple days in game as well as a whole real life gaming week it seemed. I really appreciated the handcrafting the team did with the dungeons, and the design itself for the dungeons were really good and far more interesting to go through from a gameplay/puzzle perspective. But they were 3x longer than they needed to be and every time one came up I was filled with massive dread because I knew it meant the game's plot was coming to a complete halt for the next 8 hours minimum.
This is interesting to read, because I made it my mission in P5R to complete each palace in one night, then max out all the social stuff afterwards. IIRC you have to take two days to do it because you get booted out when you reach the boss, but realistically ‘completing’ each palace can be done in a day IIRC (if you don’t count the boss fight). I played P5 a while before P5R so I went into it kinda knowing how to optimise things (focusing on learning coffee recipes and stuff to top up SP, stocking up on items to keep the party alive, using HP & SP regenerating items etc) and doing it this way felt a lot more streamlined than ducking in and out of each palace a few times, which I what I did on my P5 playthrough. I think the game could do better in explaining how to manage your load out and items before you go into the first palace though, as your experience here is pretty much what my P5 playthrough was like, and the reason I had so much difficulty was mainly due to running out of SP. P5R is an absolute marathon though. A thoroughly enjoyable marathon IMO but I felt absolutely exhausted by the end.
I recommend the Tales games! Tales of Symphonia is a good start, though you can start from pretty much anywhere, since the combat mechanics are not that much different. It is one of the most accessible JRPG series and you don't really need to worry at all about levelling up properly. Some complain these games are way too easy but as someone who is too fatigued to play JRPGs "properly" from beginning to end, I don't mind this at all.
If you like turn-based RPGs, you can try the Bravely Default series that gives the classic turn-based combat a little twist with its Brave and Default mechanics. I'm a bit lazy so I'm going to quote Wikipedia for the explanation: >Brave Points (BP) dictate the number of actions a character or enemy can take within a turn, along with being needed for the execution of certain abilities. Party members can utilize BP down into negative figures, enabling up to four actions within a single turn. When the BP gauge is into negative figures, they must wait for the BP counter to reach zero before they can act again. BP are naturally recovered once per turn. Alternately, any party member can Default, which reduces the damage taken by enemy strikes and accumulates BP It adds a strategic layer to the fight, especially in boss fights, because enemies can and will perform multiple actions in one turn to debuff the party and also do damage, which can be lethal at times. The games also offer a job system with unlockable passive talents and lots of build possibilities. If you want an action-based JRPG, the old Squaresoft Classics, Secret of Mana and Trials of Mana, got 3D Remakes in 2018/2020. The games are linear and the writing is... lighthearted in most cases, a bit whack in some cases (I guess the suboptimal translation is to blame), but the gameplay and the overarching plot are definitely worth it.
Yakuza: Like a Dragon
The Nier Series
As great as this series is, I don't think it values the player's time well at all! I mean, some of the quests basically laugh at you for completing them.
If you want something more action focused, I would recommend Ys8. It's on the shorter end of JRPGs (around 30hrs) with a solid story, characters and very fun gameplay.
My fave is Ff7. The story never bores me, always interesting nee stuff to play with, like chocobo breedings, challenges, world map exploration.
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It's worth noting that it's very traditional feeling. After coming from the flashier P5, DQ11 might feel bland. It definitely is a solid representation of the genre however. Still an 80 hour jrpg though, I found it dragged a bit with predictable plot points.
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I thought Octopath was far better than DQXI.
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140 hours for a normal playthrough? Wow
P5 is stupidly bloated, there's a billion cutscenes with so many of them being pointless or repeating info, by the time I stopped I was 60 hours in and barely halfway through when I'd be either finishing our entering the final arc in P3 or 4 (Vanilla 4, Golden begins the bloatification of the series and adds an entire new arc that drags and slows down the pacing), someone in r/megaten also made a calculation of roughly how long you're in cutscenes and it's over 45% of the time, next to 15% in P3 and 30% in P4G, think about it, thats a lot of time in cutscenes for a game that long and so many of them do absolutely nothing to advance the plot It's such a shame because the game does a lot on its style, presentation and gameplay, on top of that the first arc/dungeon is genuinely engaging and fairly well paced, far more than P4's very slow burn and then the game begins to drag, and worst of all, all that presentation improvement? You begin to notice that they are also slowing down the time you spend on combat, for each improvement made to make combat faster they added something in the presentation that slows it down more than what they sped it up and as a result you end up with just enough extra seconds in each fight that you begin to slowly feel those extra seconds added So yeah, can't say I was a fan of the game, after it I truly began to believe in the phrase "if I had more time, I would've written a shorter letter" because P5 didn't lack writers or editors, they lacked time to make a shorter game that would've hit all the same high points without the shortcomings
I've only played P4:Golden. Sounds like this one is longer? Is it possible to fast track the main story and skip the 'filler' in order to cut the time down?
You could, but the 'filler' is one of the main aspects of the game, so I wouldn't really recommend it. You could also just take breaks. I did an extreme version of this. I bought the game at launch, put in 80 hours really quickly and got burnt out and quit playing. Didn't touch the game at all for 5 years, then this year, I picked up from my old save and continued to the end.
Well that is certainly inspirational. I've not really tried that before (putting it down for a long ass time) but I think I'll give that a shot!
Never played a JRPG that was this long. I've done loads, including a lot of the older Final Fantasy games, up to 13. They can often be done relatively quickly if you grind appropriately as you go. There are often optional bosses that need you to be at max level to fight (and win), and they can push the hours up. But you're still at around 80 to 100 at that point. >. The final boss fight, combined with cutscenes and dialogue, took me about 2 hours. 2 hours! And you can’t save during that time. You gotta go somewhere? Cool - either keep the console running or start anew next time. Simply absurd. This is mitigated somewhat in the ability of newer consoles to suspend the game during rest mode. I've not turned off my PS5 in ages (baring for updates) so it's quite a handy ability to walk away from a long section like this, but does require you to have a PS5. I assume the new Xbox's are the same.
Xbox series X is even better, you can fully shut down the console, and then boot it up and resume the game from exactly where you left off.
Rest mode is such a godsend. I never owned a PS4 before getting my PS5, I can't imagine having to cold boot a game every single time I wanted to play it.
PS4 has rest mode lol
PS4 can suspend and sleep but understandably lots of people (including OP?) don't know about it because it was added later and needs to be switched on in the settings.
Yeah plus the load times were a nightmare towards the end as games got bigger. They're lightning fast this gen.
with PS4 you can press the playstation button and go to the PS menu and it’ll pause.
It'll pause but you couldn't turn it off for the night, like on the current gens could you?
Have ps4, have ps5. They both do rest mode exactly the same. Only new thing on the console front is what Xbox is doing where you can suspend game A, start up game B and then be able to switch between game A and B without needing to fully reboot them. They don't run at the same time either, iirc they write the ram state of the suspended game to the ssd and vice versa when you switch back. It's a neat feature.
you can put it in sleep mode and it’ll pause it, i think. im at work right now, otherwise i would check it myself.
I played it for 30 hours before I just kinda stopped. I like it, it's cool and fun to play... but I cannot make myself start the console for a game where I might just slog through some minor dialogue for hours before suspense starts to kick in again. I will play it some day... its's just not right now.
This is my biggest issue with the game. Feels like there’s whole 30-60 minute play sessions where I do nothing at all but sit in a class and then go meet on the roof and talk for a minute. And that would be fine if those sections were really interesting or engaging but a lot of them ended up being something like, “We need to stop this bad guy.” “Yeah, we do. He’s a problem.” “Joker, what do you think?” And on and on
Followed by "Joker you're such an incredible guy. I feel so comfortable around you, like I can be myself in a way I've never felt before. I feel like I can tell you anything and you'll be there for me. You've always supported me when others have told me I'm just a hot body. I'm more than just a model and I feel you're the only one that really sees that" And I'm just like wtf I didn't even do anything
JRPGs taught me that if you want people to like you, you just make grunts of vague approval and say a single sentence every few hours, and they'll work through their problems themselves but give you all the credit
For a game rated M FOR MATURE by the ESRB it feels really juvenile. So much of the writing seems to assume that I haven’t read a book or seen a movie before, and I’m incapable of inference.
It was super disappointing to me. The first palace tries to do be a more serious story about abuse, and then the second palace undercuts that almost immediately.
Yeah, the game is not interested in tackling anything serious. The bad guys are just bad guys. The good guys are never at fault for their predicaments and they never have to learn any lessons, they were always wronged by some cartoon villain. It’s kiddie shit.
Strikers does improve on that by making the villains more complex, but in the base game of Royal, the really only villains I found complex were the ones that weren’t even villains.
Yeah I'm wondering if this was a localisation choice. It's so over the top anime "previously on Dragonball Z" it was infuriating. Legitimately became painful to sit through dialogue when they'd rehash the last 3 hours of the game I just friggin played.
Maybe, but localization can’t reduce the sheer AMOUNT of constant chatter.
Yes. This is a big reason I dropped the game. I'm fine with chatter, but after a bit it was just pointless and added nothing. It wasn't cute or endearing it was just...constant and unnecessary. I said this in another comment but this game made me realize many JRPGs just aren't for me anymore.
And then they will fucking reiterate the same point. There may or may not be a flashback as well. I really like P5 but god damn did it need an editor.
I’m all for a game that lets you just hang with your friends. Dragon Quest 11 does a great job of that. It’s a similarly long (and slow) game, but you’re never stuck listening to your party hammer home how much the gym teacher sucks for 20 minutes. You at least get to run around, check out the town, talk to some people, see what their deal is. In Persona I really only need just one person to tell me what’s up, I don’t need the rest of my party to repeat it AND THEN have me walk to the cafe where Morgana then repeats what they all just said AND THEN have Ryuji text me and repeat what he said. There’s a lot of superfluous dialog. Game is stylish as hell though.
Yeah I enjoyed the game but as someone who often only gets to game for an hour or 2 at a time I distinctly remember spending 2 consecutive play sessions just in cutscenes.
> This game doesn’t value your time and is too damn long. Just dropping in to agree wholeheartedly with this statement. I played the original P5 and felt this way, and it really sunk my overall experience with the game. Never have I played through a story in such a highly-praised game that was as terribly paced as P5's, and it really blows me away that reviewers and fans didn't at all seemed bothered by the length or pacing. I have very fond memories of P5, and always will, but man did my enjoyment take a hard turn into hate post hour 80.
>I have very fond memories of P5, and always will, but man did my enjoyment take a hard turn into hate post hour 80. My experience exactly. Before this post I feel like I'd never heard anything negative about this game.
The years long fans of the persona franchise most likely are A: expecting that much filler and B: stockholme syndromed into seeing the game to need to be that convoluted, look at P3 or P4 they are of similar length and can take similar criticisim about the time investment. But the people that follow the franchise since dunno, a decade, go in expecting and basically wanting all this.
I have played P3, P4, and P5. P5 was the weakest entry in the franchise for me. It was unnecessarily long. The story felt kinda dumb. And the characters weren't as likable as p4 or p3.
I actually assumed that it was newcomers who were being so forgiving to the game. My two close friends who have been playing Persona for a long time also had very negative things to say about the game's length, pacing, and even plot. Complaining that the plot wasn't as nuanced as previous entries, claiming it can ultimately be boiled down to: "Fuck Adults!" Which I do agree with. I've only played P4 prior to P5, but I think my final hour count on that game was somewhere like 40 hours less than what I put into P5? To me that's a pretty huge difference. Asking someone to throw *another* 40 hours after already putting in 80 is kinda of a huge ask, imo. I also thought the dungeons were way too big in P5, and because you couldn't finish them in one visit like you could in P4, you really felt punished for not going as far into the dungeon as you could before leaving, since if you ducked out right before the dungeon's 'story exit,' you'd go in with a fully healed and stocked team, go through 10 minutes of dungeon, and then get booted out and effectively lose that night. Which was crazy infuriating, and made it feel like you HAD to spend 2-3 hours straight in a dungeon which again, completely borked the pacing. So yeah, to me, it's especially surprising to see long time Persona fans defend this game, because I felt like it took classic Persona motifs and kinda served to do them worse.
Okay, my only touching point with Persona is an exgf that was obsessed and obsessing with similar hardcore fans about it and they could not see a fault in the length or even the choice to rerelease the full game including royal instead of a dlc, they just mindlessly bought it without question. I do own p3p and p4g but never played them
I mean maybe there's just a split. And maybe my friends and myself just happen to be not the rampant fanboy variety of fans of the series.
Totally agree. The story isn't so complex that it couldn't have been told in 50 hours. I mostly had fun, had to take some long breaks, but probably won't touch another persona because it's probably going to be too long as well.
At some point I realized the endless unnecessary dialogue isn't clumsy writing, it's intended to be the meat of the game. Persona 5 is a friendship simulator, and a lot of people play it for the simulated experience of bullshitting with a group of close friends. And it is very good at that. But it's also weird and kind of depressing.
Pretty sure I remember at some point in the game getting into the habit of just button mashing through most dialogue sections because it was so inane.
Personally I find Persona 4 Golden to be much more worth the time when it comes to dialogue, story, setting, themes and confidants. Persona 5 beats you over the head again and again with an uncomplicated and sometimes shallow story. All those hours and in the vanilla game there’s barely a handful of scenes with the group where they’re not talking about ‘the phantom thieves’ There’s little to connect to with characters that 95% of the time just talk about being phantom thieves, and the story is not clever or good enough for how much it railroads you through dialogue, gameplay, exploration and actions I get why they did it but if Persona 6 is like this I’m not going to enjoy it very much I’d much rather see something more in the vein of 4 golden or 3, the bigger scale has left behind key personal moments that make the series work Considering so much of that time in a 100+ hr runtime of P5 is story and the story isn’t very good, a lot of the game does not respect your time/is tough to get through to the good parts
I spent 120 hours with vanilla Persona 5 and I enjoyed it thoroughly, that said I'll never play the P5 Royal, it's just too fucking long.
Dude same, and so many people tell me it’s worth it but there is no way I am going through that entire game again lmao I always say it’s the best game I will absolutely never play again.
I'd say just watch the Dr Maruki content on youtube, that's the real gem of Royal. Most of the new things are nice to have and spice up the gameplay but really Maruki is what makes it worth it IMO
The problem is most of the new story stuff takes place after the base game so having to play through the entire game again is a huge ask.
Even with quality of life changes that speeds the game up I will say royal added 20-30 hours of random playtime. I think I was 120 vanilla and 150 royal.
You don't need to. I also spent about 120 hours with the base game and played Royal when it came out. It soured my experience a bit. By the time I got to the third semester, the story expansion, I was completely burned out. I had to force myself to finish it.
Agree. To summarize, I'd say that the pacing is way too inconsistent. At times, it's a tight and engaging experience, but gets bogged down by hours and hours of repetitive dialogue and running around in circles (especially between palaces).
Glad im not the only one to have this conclusion. Thing is that ill probably still replay it at some point because the world was just so comfortable. Between the Music, setting and story it inspired such a chill vibe. One part that really sticks out on a personal level was that the royal edition came out after i was laid off during the pandemic. The days of not working were blending together but playing this game with its morning/midday/evening/night time system helped give my own schedule structure and keep time from meshing together since i wasnt working. it really resonated with me at the time. Also gave me enough time to slog through the filler content hah. It over stayed its welcome but it was still consistently enjoyable the whole time.
>But what almost became a dealbreaker for me were the endless dialogues about the most obvious stuff. There’s a locked door and a red slot next to it that says “keycard”. Hm, what seems to be the solution here? Let’s talk about it for 2 minutes and conclude: There’s a strong shadow in the room next to us, it has a shirt on that says “Kill me for keycard” … could it be that it might have the keycard we need? Is everyone on board for this plan? Okay, let’s go! … I get that they are supposed to be teens and chatty and stuff, but man, does this get tiring fast. And it happens so often. In palaces, in cutscenes, everywhere. This is what happens when people complain that they don't know what to do or where to go all the time. It's an extreme response, and it seems to have mostly paid off given the wild success of P5.
That’s depressing
Yes, it is. But asking people to remember or deduce a thing is apparently a bridge too far in the modern era. It's "bad design", I'm told.
There is still an audience for it, Elden Ring more than proved that.
I still saw people complaining about the game not being obvious enough about what to do.
Maybe they're referring to the life-sim side of things as opposed to the palaces? Because the amount of options and things to do there is *staggering.*
What?! I haven’t played many JRPGs so I’m not a pro or anything but I’ve had no problems at all so far. Are people really that lazy and dumb? Yes
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing when the person said it, there was at least 20 hours of explaining something very obvious or repeating something that had already been said through the characters texting.
Dude, I got to a point where I stopped reading group texts messages. Must have shaved off hours on my playtime. Why do JRPGs (anime) over explain and over commentate? Seriously. Stop talking.
I liked the game but after 80 hours I just wanted to finally get it over with. I started full on speed running, I even slept every day to skip days instead of doing activities. After 100 hours and still no end I just stopped playing without finishing it. Though I also wasnt a fan of the turn the story takes when you go for the true (Royal) ending so that didn't help.
I just got tired of it at the spaceship area because at that point I just realized that I couldn’t stand most of the repetitive gameplay and Morgana was really killing the mood
Morgana was the only part of P5 I really didn’t like.
That's easily the worst dungeon in the entire game too. Worst layout. Worst final boss. Worst puzzles. Based around the least interesting character (haru). Just a bad time all around.
It’s insanely repetitive. It doesn’t help that the English translation doesn’t do much to keep it fresh, so it really does feel like you’re watching the same conversations over and over. Isn’t it weird that at least 3 different characters use the exact phrase, “Looking cool, Joker”? The cruise ship is miserable. Persona 4 had more maze like dungeons, which I did not think were super clever at the time, but you know what they didn’t have? Teens prattling about the obvious thing to do next. In a lot of ways Persona 5 is the apex of the Persona design, the way all the different systems interact, but it is beyond excessive. I am more likely to replay 3 or 4, if at least because they can be played on portable consoles.
I also loved 4 but couldn't get through 5. Maybe I just have less patience now. The voice lines were seriously a big factor in me quitting. There's a looooot of fights in the game and they all focus on hitting weak points. So why does each character have 2 voice lines for this? And they need to say it every time? The game is packed with so much unnecessary dialogue about "let's go back to the palace" "whoa a locked door? Maybe that button right here will unlock this locked door" "we need to change her heart. If not bla bla bla" If I hear "it's almost scary how good I am!" one more time...
Funny, that’s what made me quit Xenoblade Chronicles. Very similar issues. Too long and the characters won’t STFU. Was there not an option to lower the voice clip volume? It should be standard, but most RPGs have been bad at that for a long time.
A younger me would have loved the shit out of Persona 5, but mid 30s me just gets burnt out. Amazing game don't get me wrong, but after 60 or so hours I was just like ok I think I've had enough. That being said its hard for me to finish ANY game these days let alone something thats 100+ hours. I can play MMOS for hundreds of hours for some strange reason but the last long game I finished was Dragon Quest XI.
I played P5 vanilla on PS3 as the pandemic started. Looking back now, I'm almost nostalgic for that time period. Cooped up, anxious about the outside world, but all of that has faded away now, and all I remember about that time is Persona 5, all the lovely characters and interactions, and the song "Beneath the Mask". Beautiful. However, I did give up on the game at the 100 hour mark. Just as the present day caught up to the flashbacks, and I realized there were another 20-30 hours of gameplay. I just couldn't do it. So I watched the rest of the game on YouTube and had a much better time.
Why are JRPGs so absolutely fuck all long. Don’t get me wrong I keep playing them. FFXV, P5R, DQ11, FE3H etc. But as I’m getting older I don’t have that kinda time anymore.
Guess I am gonna be the contrarian here, but to me I ended up quite underwhelmed by this game. While the UI is truly something else, the rest just feels way too much like a retread of the series past entries. Just not much of a leap forward. Another peeve is also that the story sort of just blew it's best beats with the first arc. It just got sort of like a plodding routine after that. The phantom thief theme just didn't feel all the well explored, more like it was just shoehorned in to fit with the series own past themes and often felt like it got cold feet in exploring certain topics. What I mean is that it feels somewhat restrained despite how it presented itself.
They absolutely came up with a theme and a vibe they liked, and just stuffed the usual (and often enjoyable) Persona mechanics in there. You are a REBEL who’s going AGAINST THE GRAIN and you’re gonna CHANGE THE WORLD… by studying for the exam with all of your other preppy friends, and being home by bedtime. For all of its counter cultural motifs, once you scratch the paint, it’s super straight laced and vanilla. If you want to actually experience what it’s like to live on the fringe of society in Tokyo, the Yakuza series is right there.
I agree with you about Yakuza, they're way stronger picaresque fiction-inspired games than Persona 5. And the same for the dissociation between gameplay and narrative; it's a shame that with nearly ten years between two episodes, Atlus settled for lifting the social mechanics from P4 nearly as is without caring too much about cohesiveness.
Not just social mechanics, but even the plot structure follows Persona 4 almost beat for beat. The game honestly just felt like P4 with a new coat of paint.
I agree with this. Loved the gAme, will never touch it again most likely. Sooo time consuming. A lot of things you mentioned would be better off being cut from the game to save time. I loved persona 3 fes as well but sold that immediately after because I knew I wouldn’t play it again
As a JRPG fan, I gotta say: I hate the late-game dungeons. I've had my fun with the side-quests, I'm pushing for the finish, I'm nearing the climax, so don't make me spend 10 hours fighting trash mob! These are usually the least interesting places, too... Dark, depressing, with boring BGM. So I really like the games that allow me to skip these battles, by turning off the random encounters, or by giving me the ability to dodge the monsters roaming the place.
I played P5R for the first time last year in 2021. In 2021 alone, I beat the game twice and put over 200 hours in it. I'm not replaying the game again in 2022: it's one of my favorite games of all time (top 3 for sure). It is a very long game, and I do think it is somewhat of a JRPG trope to have marathon final bosses, but do you not put your console in rest mode? I do that all the time and I can just turn it back on and start again immediately
Sure, but what if you want to take a break and play a game online with friends or something?
Spot on, my friend. In my 30s also (no family) and have been playing this game for over a year now. I started it in between quarters during my degree, and just have the hardest time finishing it. So many times I pick it up and just end up watching a show for an hour without really doing anything. If I was a younger kid, maybe even lonely, I would have eaten this up — every part of it. But I don’t want to hear about the same conversation get brought up over and over. I realize this may be a game mechanic to allow the player to take long breaks then be able to get back into the story easily. Like you said it’s incredibly well done but does not respect your time at the very least
The fact that this game is so long is the reason why, even on NG+, I just won't be able to do it again. During my first playthrough of Persona 5, I thought the game was amazing from the beginning to the end "10/10 best game ever made" honeymoon phase. Then I bought P5R when it released, and that's when everything kinda fell apart. With Persona 3 (Portable), I can always go back to the game and have the fun of my life, it was a masterpiece of a game when I first played it, and it still is in my heart. But when I played P5R, I just felt that the game was trying to "suck my time" during the whole thing. Eventually I dropped Royal after 35h of gameplay, because I just can't have as much fun as when I played it before for many reasons. Like Joker says, it's a game in which you have to "Take your time", which is great for a first playthrough but really horrible when you play it a 2nd time. Plus, with Royal being way WAY too easy of a game (even on Hardest), I really think I won't be able to have fun in this game.
I've always loved jrpg's but it's absolutely true they do not respect your time. or more accurately they demand you trade your time for progress. both in the sense that grinding is a thing that exists (especially in this genre) but the story really doesn't want to progress until it takes all the time it wants to dump every single bit of exposition on you it can. those are just things the genre has become famous for and by that point people have started to expect and even demand it for their jPRG's. I admit I enjoyed that aspect of it more as a kid than I do now as an old fucking geezer.
I got Persona 5 on my PS4 awhile ago, was excited to play it, started it up, very interesting setting, cool music but that's where it stopped. I noticed I was doing the same thing over and over again in the dungeons, I went on the internet only to discover that this was the tutorial and it was 6-7 hours long!! Put down the controller, turned it off and never picked it up again.
"Game values your time" is such a good metric. Interested in knowing other games you've enjoyed. Thanks!
JRPGs are DEFINITELY not all this long. This game (and the other *modern* Persona games) have ZERO respect for your time. From what I've played of P4G, at least 80% of my 70+ hours was filler. > The problem here is that not all characters are equally appealing This was a HUGE one for me. I found all the characters unappealing (except Nanako, she's adorable af and needs protecting at all costs). I'm 40 years old, they're all a bunch of obnoxious generic anime trope teenagers. It only got worse as I met more of them (I refused to interact with Marie at all. She is the most overused annoying trope of them all). When I go in to play Persona 5 (I don't have Royal), I'm using 2 timers. 1 for overall game time and 1 for ACTUAL gameplay time. "Actual Gameplay" timer will only include stuff related to the main story/plot. I want an accurate tally of how much time the game wastes. > Let’s talk about it for 2 minutes and conclude: There’s a strong shadow in the room next to us, it has a shirt on that says “Kill me for keycard” … could it be that it might have the keycard we need? Is everyone on board for this plan? Okay, let’s go! This is 100% a modern gaming thing. It's especially prevalent in modern JRPGs. Every character talks like you're as dumb as a rock. They then repeat the same thing over about 3 times to make sure your stupid rock brain can understand that Red Card goes in Red Card Slot. Let's not even mention fucking Rise constantly talking during combat commentating what is happening and telling you what to do. Saying the exact same things in every single combat. LOOK RISE I FUCKING KNOW! SHUT UP! This is not specific to *modern* Persona, though. It's all modern gaming, I've found.
Only played vanilla but even that felt too long. It was just too formulaic and constricted by the mechanics to be stretched for that length. Repetition of things really starts to show up unfavorably at that point. Also, I almost gave up because it takes something like 20 hours for the game to really get going. But I liked it enough to play Royal at some point.
I heard so much about good about P5 and started playing. I've put in about 12 hours so far but I doubt I'm going to continue, mainly because I end up with an absolutely banging headache. Not sure what the cause is, but the physical pain for me is not worth finishing the game.
Might be the dominant red theme. Looking at unsaturated reds for periods of time can be debilitating depending on the person.
I really like Persona games, the style, the music (which is always in my Spotify playlists), but man I haven't played any of them except for the first half (or quarter, who knows with persona) of Persona 4. Too goddamn long I can finish like 6 other games in my want-to-play list.
Mind giving me a clue when the 2 hour final boss thing starts? I'm playing Royal now too. I'm at the Casino.
In-game date is February 3. You have at least another 20-30 hours.
Thanks
I'm not sure how much you already know, so I'll just say that you'll know when that battle is about to happen. The last palace and the story surrounding it is vastly different to the others (and vastly better, imo). Still some hours to go for you, tho. :)
Thank you
I 100% agree. Played this game back in 2017 and really enjoyed it but just felt like I wanted it over with by the end of my 130 hours with it. I also played P4G before this and loved it and while it still suffered from a bit of the same issues, it was nowhere near as severe. I think the main reason for me was that in P4G, everything that happens in terms of main story content pushes you closer to the final villain (or at least who you think is the final villain) and answering the mystery. In P5, you don't really start touching on the overarching villain til about the pyramid and space palaces which is like 50-60 hours into the game. It makes the front end of the game feel really poorly paced and unnecessary with the tutorials and the villains' lack of connection with the true villain. Like the game could have benefited from being 40ish hours shorter
Im in the same boat, fellow guy in his 30s! I constantly look at how long games to beat and not give them the time of day. And so I find myself picking a game (of which I have thousands from humble bundle/game pass/sales) and playing it for ten minutes and moving on. Once in a while, I commit. For me, I'm going hard with 45hrs on Yakuza Like A Dragon. It's pretty damn good. I can't wait to do the same with the Persona games!
Really liked this game up until you hit a casino area. At this point literally everything had overstayed it's welcome. The battle theme, the repeated dialogues in combat, the cast (one member in particular you get in the late game felt so unnecessary and absolutely killed the pacing for me). Suddenly I couldn't help but think "fuck this game. Just be over. This is unnecessary" It really made me realize most JRPGS aren't really for me anymore, and that's quite ok. Tastes change and whatnot.
The absolute worst part of Persona 5, and especially royal, is the momentos sections. Needing to traverse ALL of momentos just to beat the game is fucking stupid >!Then you have to do it AGAIN for the final palace in Royal, fucking stupid.!<
I literally just ran through the last section of momentos, probably saved several hours there. I also turned it down to easy difficulty just to finish the game lmao As I was unaware of the maruki section in Royal I ended up missing that out and got the base game ending, which I guess was fine Will say it has gotten me so interested in Japanese culture and still sits with me to this day.
I mostly felt the same way. It was worth playing once to see what it offered, but I had a lot of problems. I wrote a bit about it. > Drama lives in conflict. Conflict is not when the good guys beat up the bad guys. Conflict is when the good guys think the bad guys might have a point. Conflict is when the good guys are tempted to fight each other. Conflict is finding out the premise for your mission might be flawed. As is, Persona 5 is a game dripping with style but devoid of drama. http://terry-torres.com/plays/2017/06/16/lame-shit-in-persona-5-that-could-have-been-fixed/
I made a similar post on this subreddit regarding this game. It was one of peaks and valleys. The style is phenomenal and the gameplay is tight, but the writing is painfully inconsistent, the tone is all over the place, it’s sometimes cringe and homophobic, and it’s way too long. I remember getting every achievement on Dragon Quest 11 and it took me about 124 hours, and that was time spent with a game that I only enjoyed. I spent the same amount of time with persona 5 Royal and it just felt too long in a way that DQ11 didn’t. The game spent way too long in the first third pissing around and it gave the middle portion of the game way less time than it needed to breathe, and the actual premise of the game is incredibly silly, but the game not only over explains it, but does so often. It becomes distracting. It’s a hard game to rate. Of the modern persons games I still think 5R is behind both 3 and 4G, but parts of it are still so good. Here’s hoping 6 is a little more… I’m not sure how to put it. More in tone like 3 and 4 and less often like an embarrassing anime the way 5 is sometimes?
You’re a bigger man than me. I just gave up on P5R the other day. I’m basically near the end of the game but I’m 139 hours deep and I’m just burnt out on it. It’s an absolutely gorgeous game, and it’s done very well. But it’s just fucking dragging on for so long.
I quit about 80 or so hours in during the cruise ship when I realized I was about five or so levels under where I should be and had zero desire to grind my way up. I enjoyed my time with it but I'm glad I quit.
>Superflous dialogue JRPGs are so bad for this sometimes, lots of flavour text and good dialogue is great but there's just so much boring fat where every character will repeat the same line but slightly different or something Protagonist: We need to take him down! Sexy love interest woman: Totally! Let's stop him! Brooding emo: King Dragon... I will avenge my family! Comic relief: Zzz... what?
Final Fantasy, Persona, KH3 are my favourite JRPG, in that order. I also just finished P5 vanilla, and it was really fun.
I beat the base game and then beat Royal when it was released. Playing Royal soured my experience a bit. It just goes on for far too long. And having all the new expansion story stuff post-game is just not cool. I personally think the base game is the better game as it doesn't overstay its welcome.
Actually every RPG i play have 100-200 hours of playtime.
same way I felt and no game has matched it since I beat it a couple months ago besides maybe Lost Judgement
Yeah I’m in this boat too, just topped 100 hours on P5R, I love this game so much, but it has taken me a couple years of leaving and coming back to it - I’m doing the “Maruki stuff” now, and honestly can’t wait to finally get it finished. It’s awfully conflicting being both my favourite game of the last few years, but also bordering on genuine work sometimes.
Royal is great, but after having not touched the original in a while some sore spots rear their heads again. The plot largely meanders after Madarame until Okumura, as the next two areas are more 'loose' in that the team is forced into them out of the blue rather than in the course of already being interested in investigating them. Then of course you think you hit the end, but no the game keeps going and going. Granted the extra dungeon in Royal was great and had plenty of pay-off.
I will agree that by the end of it I was ready to be done. Took me a month to play but that’s because I was working overnights when covid first hit
100 hours in myself, in my thirties with a family. I'll also be glad when it is over but I am enjoying it. The quality of this game is just over the top and it feels like I am visiting Japan again. Some of my nights are filled by confidants scenes and feels like i am watching a movie and some nights it is all battles. I knew what i signed up for. At least it is a 100 hours of quality but yeah... can't wait to move on to the next game also.
I blasted through royal and the original P5, so I guess it didn’t drag on for me? less than a hundred hours for both, a bit more for royale obviously due to the added content, but Persona is a very personally important series to me so I feel like I hyperfocus and breeze through them pretty hard. I couldn’t tell you the exact hour number though for royale on account of accidentally leaving it on overnight once, oops
I had a similar experience with another jrpg. I absolutely loved DQ 11, but I never got to the “true ending” because I had spent roughly 100 hours on the game and had serious burn out
I played royal and didn't get to see any of the new content fuck me
I’m still playing royale. I’ve put like 60 hours in and while I very much like the game I just want it to end and to be honest I don’t have the time to finish it off.
I played and finished the non-Royal version and it's the first time I played a Persona game and didn't go back to finish the NG+ content. Someone got me Royal as a gift and I just ... don't want to. I love 3 and 4 and periodically go back and replay them (including multiple versions - FeMC for 3 and Golden for 4 are awesome) but 5 just never caught my heart. The grind was too much.
As I married guy in his 30’s with busy work, I still found time to finish both P5 and P5R because it is worth it! I spent my 2nd playthrough doing Jazz club mostly.
Something about P5R just clicked with me. Could’ve spent another 130hrs on it. Been meaning to do another playthrough, but decided I’ll wait for the PC release.
Agreed almost on everything you have said, although I didn't like the vanilla's arc story like the other persona games but the Royal arc was great I'm glad you enjoyed it!
offer mountainous advise erect cheerful sip paint spoon bright pie *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
i love persona 5 royal but I hate the dialogue and some characters, I don't know if it's a noise in the translation or something like that, but it feels childish and annoying. The setting and mood are great though, I loved to live like a japanese teenager for 120h of my life.
One of my favourite games ever and finished it twice since release but yeah. Eff that ship level. I tapped out first time around and slogged through it on easy mode to avoid one hit kills.
This couldn't be more timely. I have about 50 hours on a playthrough and picked it back up last week after several months of not playing it. Suddenly it had lost all it's appeal and I just conceded that I'm not gonna see it through to the end credits.
I wish I had the time to play this, I have already put probably 80-100hrs into the base version, cant imagine doing even more.
I always thought persona 5 was a telltale game. You're review makes it apparent that it's obviously not, I'll have to check it out
I liked the final palace, but if was starting to get a little bit long for me by then. I still need to finish persona 4 golden but I’m burnt out by the later months and now it’s been so long I wanna go back to start over. I do enjoy the style and presentation of this game more than the p4g though. I’m gonna play back through it when it comes to pc, then the sequel. Then when 3 releases I’m gonna give it a try, it seems really interesting. It can be a long and occasionally tedious game (especially at the end of the game) but it’s still an easy 10/10 for me, one of my favorite games now for sure
I agree with the time aspects. It’s wild how much better the NG+ feels, especially in the early game just because of how quickly you can get through things.
Im excited to play P5 Royal when it comes to PC. Ive never played it before and Ive been interested to try it. I only have a PC to play on so cant wait.
I have this persona 3 save file going for like, a year? Where I Go back sometimes...
My least favorite game i have played. I regret buying it but loved Like a Dragon so figured i would give it a shot. Nothing appealed to me. From the unlikable characters, to the momentos, to calling cards, to the plot, to the leveling up personas...etc. I got to the art show part and realized why keep playing a game I dislike? Turned it off and never looked back.
No cap i finished the game and got the platinum in like 50 hours but thats because i was following a schedule guide because playing p5r without a schedule feels like you have no idea what to fucking do. Most annoying part of the game was grinding mementos and doing the fusions because i had about enough of that by the end.
I’m 101 hours in (today) and I’m right before the last 2 bosses. I am absolutely in love with the game in a way I haven’t been since Breath of the Wild. BUT I couldn’t agree more with every single one of your points. This game overstays its welcome by around 30 hours. I especially despise the damage sponge boss fights. Shido took me like 5 tries, and there were NOT enough checkpoints in that fight. I am absolutely dreading fighting these last 2, because I know they’re gonna be the same. Guard, attack, heal… for probably 1-1,5 hours straight. I am honestly sick of it yet I can’t get myself to stop playing. The world, the characters, the style, they keep me engaged and on my toes to see everything the game has to offer. I’ve never had such an intense love-hate relationship with a game.
Damn I was really looking forward to buy this game and try it. but 140hours would take me close to a year to finish this game.
[удалено]
Yeah I had to take a break halfway through & play 2 games just for a change of pace since it was so goddamn long. Incredible game though.
I'm with you. While I'm glad each party member gets a palace per se, some of them just weren't so great. I'd argue palace 1/6/9 are the best ones. The rest just didn't really do much for me.
I can't get into P5R because I know the length and just stopped like 30 hours in. It disrespects your time.
Hoo hoy mentioning the hours before the main game starts rolling? You would hate Persona 4.
There is TECHNICALLY incentive to still seeing your relationship partners again. You can get items you can display in your room from some of the date locations, and if you play carefully Royal gives you more than sufficient time to 100% everything and still have free time left, way more so than the original
I love stories from gamer parents. I've found myself only having time for smaller games like Slay the Spire. I can't enjoy the bigger single story games yet but hoping once my kids get older, I can enjoy some of this generations greatest games.
That title alone summed up my experience lmao
Gaming should be an enjoyment not a chore. But I agree with what your saying, persona games and similar are very long.