Persona 5. Finally.

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 26, 2022

Apparently, I don’t buy game consoles unless I have written games for ’em. I’m a PC gamer at heart, still. So I never picked up a PS3 or PS4. There was really only one game I wanted for those machines… Persona 5. I had trouble justifying that kind of expense for a single game. Well, the expense, and the shelf space, as Mrs. Rampant Coyote regularly complains about these consoles I rarely play taking up space under the TVs.

When Persona 4 Golden launched on the PC–to surprisingly high sales, with a surprisingly good port–I thought it wouldn’t be long before we’d see a PC port. Maybe, technically, it wasn’t long, but it felt like a very long wait. In the meantime, the PC version of P4G felt superior in almost every way to the PS2 original. I continued to avoid spoilers, and I didn’t even play the PC release Persona 5 Strykers, which I understood to take place after the events of the original game. I bought it, of course. Showing support and all that.

My patience was finally awarded, 6.5 years after its initial release, as Persona 5 Royal came to the PC last week. Now I get to enjoy what is ancient news to everyone else.

Well, whatever. It’s not like retro-gaming (especially with RPGs) is anything new for me. 🙂  So far, the storyline seems a bit more forced than it was with P4, mainly with the contrived time limits. Granted, they are going for variety rather than Persona 4‘s “the next time it rains” forecast. And yeah, the game has hella more variety than the previous games, across the board. As usual, it always seems that there’s too much to do and never enough time to do it in… and when you do find time, the opportunities aren’t always available. A lot like real life, huh?

The Persona series (at least what I have played) has always represented the wild, hairbrained kind of inventiveness and weirdness that I felt was missing from mainstream western RPGs. Thankfully, the indies have brought a lot of that back, but Persona remains a cool, (relatively) big-budget breath of fresh air to the genre. So far, nitpicks aside, it’s exactly what I hoped it would be.

Now I just hope that if there is a Persona 6, it will enjoy a simultaneous release on PC as well as consoles. Good times.

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