Lurker > Anagram

- The Means By Which All Is Revealed
Social Links
Calling Cards
Japan
Elizabeth
Shoji Meguro
Personas (Summons)
Rivers in the Desert
Persona 5

- Mine for the Slammin'!
Benjamin Franklin
P5 the Gacha-Killer
Kamoshida as a Villain
Goro Akechi
Persona 5 Strikers Box Art
Suguru Kamoshida
Tohru Adachi: Possibly the most obvious murderer in any detective story ever. Columbo would have figured this out in about six seconds. The fact that Dojima never once even suspects Adachi is a mild strike against him, but it's fine. I said this when I first played this game, but Adachi is basically 4chan personified. This cynical, useless man who thinks he's better than he is, and is frustrated with not succeeding as much as he wanted to, who is perfectly pleasant in normal life, but secretly seething at everyone, especially attractive young women, behind their backs. I suppose you can argue that his position is somewhat a Frankenstein thing, where it's like, how would Adachi be if he wasn't reassigned to this nothing town and was allowed to keep his more interesting job in the big city and still be trusted, did he become this way because people thought lowly of him, so he responded to that, or was he always going to be a bad guy? Well, I can't say how I would react to suddenly being given amazing magical powers, but I would like to believe I wouldn't turn into a serial killer. But yeah, as I said earlier, another of Adachi's strengths is suddenly turning into a wackjob with silly faces at the end of the game, it's VERY memorable. Also memorable is Dojima's reaction to realizing Adachi is the one behind the murders, he still cares about him and wants him to be safe, and in like a one-second moment of reflection, Adachi doesn't know how to react and turns away in shame. Great understated moment. What I don't like about Adachi is his appearance in P4AU, where he's like almost heroic now? That had to be about his popularity with fans and everyone wanting to see more of him, and the writers not knowing how to integrate him into that, so Adachi is like almost on the heroes' side now? It's very strange to see a serial killer reinterpreted to be sympathetic.
The Subway Slammer
The Journey (P3)
October 4th (P3)
Persona 3
Velvet Room
Hiimdaisy Persona Comic
Junpei x Chidori
Mara
Evokers
Ryotaro Dojima: The OTHER guy who takes care of you once you move into his house at the start of the game. Is he better than Sojiro? Yes. Is he better than Ikutski? Yes. Dojima is sort of the reliable, supportive pillar once you move into Inaba, which is funny to say, because he's also defined by constantly flaking out and missing things with his daughter. But it's the fact that Dojima is always, ALWAYS completely reasonable and sort of in the right even when he rides your ass that makes him compelling. You're supposed to feel bad for Adachi when Dojima constantly chews him out, but here's the thing: even before you learn what Adachi really is, Dojima is just unambiguously correct every single time. Adachi really is a garbage cop, and Dojima really is working with nothing, and all of his criticisms of everyone are 100% in the right. He has the most bog standard reason ever for being a single father and vaguely depressed ("my wife died in a car accident"), but that's fine. I think we needed a Dojima to represent the town and be this likable, intelligent, reliable guy whom we connect with and want to help, in order to keep the audience invested in figuring out the case. Him and poor, innocent Nanako. I think it's a little funny, though, that once Dojima realizes you are in some way connected to the grand mystery going on, he'll still trust you, but he still can't figure out what's going on. I mean, it's not really a strike against him, he had to deal with both Adachi hiding evidence and obstructing things, AND the actual murder method involving an alternate dimension of magic. No, it's that you have the option to just tell Dojima about the TV world, and he of course thinks you're babbling nonsense, but one game later, Sojiro, who is a restaurant owner and not a detective, has a similar scene where he figures out that you're involved in the grand mystery, gets you to tell him what's going on, and he just believes you about the most insane shit in the universe. He is like mildly surprised when you tell him about a meowing cat sounding like normal human language to you, but just accepts everything and starts helping you from then on. More on Dojima is also in the Adachi writeup.
Persona 4
Tarot Cards
Masayoshi Shido (Boss Fight)
Menus
Nyx
The Reaper
Mitsuru Kirijo
Sojiro Sakura
Persona 5 Strikers
Makoto Stalking Joker
P3/4 having dedicated Enemies, P5 having Personas as Enemies

NFUN posted...

yes, they messed up a pronoun in "I am thou, thou art I". which is fine fuck cases all my homies hate German

Eh, it's for dramatic flair, I'm fine with the human subconscious not caring about those kinds of details.

Alright, let's end this topic at 300, so everyone will get 2-3 more nominations before it's over.

- Gasp! The Enemy!
Toaster Aigis
Shadow Okumura (Boss Fight)
Lotus Juice (Rapper)
Urban Fantasy (Genre)
Heartful Cry
Other RPGs Mimicking Persona's Calendar System
Koromaru
BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle
Hiimdaisy Persona 4 Comic Dub
Magic Spell Names
Fictional High Schoolers Dating Adults in Anime
Haru Okumura
Harems Compared to Canon Romances in JRPGs
Renaming S-Links to Confidants
Shitty Adults
Principal Kobayakawa
Playing Coy with the Year P5 is Set
Erebus
Forced Romance (P3)
Thieves' Den
Failure to Make Persona 5 Arena
People Saying Any Jazz Song Sounds Like Persona
Persona Q Weddings
Mr. Edogawa
Afterschool Clubs
Hatsune Miku
Mementos

- All You Do Is Eat Away At My Life
Kyosuke from Danganronpa 3 resembling Yu
Marin Karin
Protagonist Death Game Overs
Ichiko Ohya
Fusion Accidents
Endless Rereleases Changing the Games
Kasumi and Sumire
Yosuke in the Camping Trip
Tartarus
Variable S-Link Point Dialogue Choices
Ken Romance
Nozomi Suemitsu
Remaking Persona 4
Burning Men's Soul
Fishing Minigame
Yosuke Goes Through a Breakup (Video)
Metis

- Please Beat The Shit Out Of Me
Fuuka's Original Voice Actress
P4G's Prolonged Vita Exclusivity: I mean, MGS4 is still PS3 exclusive. Can you believe that? That has to be the highest-profile game that never got ported or rereleased or anything. At least P4G EVENTUALLY got put onto Steam. I wouldn't have played it if I'd known they would one day remake it P5-style, but c'est la vie.
Persona 6 Development Time
Uncontrollable Party Members
Persona 5 Tactica
The Answer (P3)

- Veto
Persona Q: A rare veto! But I've never played any of these games, and it's like I said, if you're not available on Steam or Switch, you're not getting played by me. These look like very simplified JRPGs about dungeon crawling that have nothing to do with normal Persona gameplay? Reminds me of that one shitty Danganronpa spinoff about vacationing during the summer.

- The Means By Which All Is Revealed
Social Links
Calling Cards
Japan
Elizabeth
Shoji Meguro
Personas (Summons)
Rivers in the Desert
Persona 5

- Mine for the Slammin'!
Benjamin Franklin
P5 the Gacha-Killer
Kamoshida as a Villain
Goro Akechi
Persona 5 Strikers Box Art
Suguru Kamoshida
The Subway Slammer
The Journey (P3)
October 4th (P3)
Persona 3
Velvet Room
Hiimdaisy Persona Comic
Junpei x Chidori
Mara
Evokers
Persona 4
Tarot Cards
Masayoshi Shido (Boss Fight)
Menus
Nyx
The Reaper
Mitsuru Kirijo
Sojiro Sakura
Persona 5 Strikers
Makoto Stalking Joker
P3/4 having dedicated Enemies, P5 having Personas as Enemies: I think this was a good decision overall by P5. It sort of limits the total number of enemy types you can encounter, but who cares? It's sort of fun and exciting to see a strong enemy and know that you can get that for yourself, again, Pokemon-style.

- OMG! We Are SO Awesome!
Character Titles (P4AU)
Takuto Maruki
School Concert (P4G)
Shooting Yourself in the Head
Mass Destruction
Dating Every Girl
Thanatos
Zenikichi Awakens His Persona: Well, it finally happened. We had Dog with persona. We had Kid with persona. We had Robot with persona. We had Velvet Room Attendant with persona. We had Shadow with persona. We had Whatever Morgana Is with persona. We had Computer Program with persona. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that all that was left was Plant with persona, Alien with persona, Ghost with persona, Gaijin with persona, and Adult with persona. It took until 2021, but finally, FINALLY, we got Adult with persona. Well, I guess we already had Maruki and the P3 cast in P4AU, but they don't count. It's interesting, too. I get why persona awakening happens to teenagers; it's all about accepting who and what you are and gaining power from that. Obviously, that has a lot of thematic play with kids doing it, since they're in a constant process of growing up and learning what they are, whereas a man in his 40s is supposed to already have accepted all of that. But on the other hand, it was fun for Zenikichi to do it, especially after you see his daughter, who's only a little younger than you, and just LOOKS like she'd be a Persona-user, and then NOPE, it's the grown-ass man, and she's completely useless. Too bad about his costume, though. He's an adult cop, his idea of a rebel should be, like, something completely different from wacky cultural concepts that kids half his age have. But that's fine. I like how Zenikichi's persona basically tells him that he has to stop ignoring injustices, and then Ryuji is surprised. "For real?!" Ryuji, you were the first person here to gain a persona after Morgana and Joker, you have seen this process like six times now, the only unique aspect is that the person getting their persona is an adult. I also appreciate how Zenikichi is actually in his 40s, you compare this to FF7 and FF10, where the old man characters are in their early and mid 30s. Good choice of a persona, too, Jean Valjean makes complete sense for him. Barely counts as a rebel, but I'll allow it.
Akinari Kamiki
P5 Tarot Art
Aria of the Soul
P3 Characters in P4AU
President Tanaka
Negotiation (P5)
Rise Posters (P5)
Hot Spring Scene (P3)
EMMA
Persona Kart (Hypothetical)
Battle for Everyone's Souls
Mementos (Smash): I stopped playing Smash before this stage came out, but it does look good. Captures P5's sleek aesthetic well, looks absolutely nothing like Mementos, but maybe that's for the best. I appreciate that it just straight-up uses a P5 song unaltered. The stage barely has any gimmicks, just a moving train at the bottom of the stage occasionally, which is surely to its benefit. I also like that the other Phantom Thieves sometimes show up in the background and cheer you on. But like, do you prefer guest stages to have a lot of fancy, complicated gimmicks and be interesting, or boring and functional and fair?
Joker (Smash)
King's Game
I am Thou, Thou art I: What a great line. I don't have much else to say about it beyond that, but it is a great line. By the way, I am aware of the irony of putting this above the tier named after it, sue me.
Persona Fusion
Kanji Tatsumi
Never More (Song)
Memories of You
Adolf Hitler (P2)
Lovers Arcana: Let's see, Yukari, Rise, and Ann... Is the only arcana where it's always a party member? Briefly looking it up, Magician is a quasi-case because Junpei has it in P3P, but not any other version. Priestess! Okay, that's also always a party member. And on a super technicality, World/Universe for the protagonists at the ends of their games. Anyway, look. Yukari is fine as this kind of irrational girl, but at least she is involved in the plot in some capacity, even if she'd be cuttable without too much hassle. Rise REALLY pushes herself as the canon girl, but that's okay. Ann is great, but she's nowhere near my P5 waifu. Overall, this is a pretty solid field of waifus. I imagine there will never be a male Lovers, even though the logic of Lovers should be half male, right? It's not like this is Empress or anything.
Magician Arcana
Maya
Akihiko (P4AU)
Optional Romance Choices vs Canon Romance
P3 Persona Awakening Cutscene
Sadayo Kawakami
Yosuke Hanamura
FeMC (P3P)
Funky Student
Cosmic Tower Burger
P4G Bike Ending
Tae Takemi
The Fox (P4)
Shiki-Ouji
P5 Using Igor's New VA as a Plot Point
Akira Konoe

- I Am Thou, Thou Art I...
Mr. Urshimaru
Burn my Dread
Persona (Carl Jung)
Hawaii Scene (P5)
Reach Out to the Truth
Ambushing Enemies with Attacks in the Overworld
Pancakes
Dungeons (P4)
Adachi Cube
Munehisa Iwai
Sae Interrogation Framing Device
Nihil Hand
Dancing Spinoff Games
Futaba Romance
Labrys
Arsene Lupin
Persona Pokerap
Weaponized Golf Clubs
Cheesing the Game with Overpowered Special Personas at Level 1
Morgana
Hifumi Togo
Shadow Labrys
Morgana saying Go to Sleep
Meat Dimension
Loki
Jack Frost
Operation Babe Hunt
Navigators
Ending Fights with All-Out Attacks
Silent Protagonists
I'm gonna renovate your ass!
Green Persona 6
Yu Narukumi
Void Quest
Persona Evolution
Nominative vs Accusative Cases: Is this some kind of subtle jab at "I am thou, you art I?" That's all I can think of. If so, that's a clever bit of japery. But literally no kid likes memorizing this kind of stuff.
Junes Department Store
P4G Shuffle Time
Heritage Palladion Liberator
Nanako Dojima
Gentle Madman
Deleted Yosuke Gay Romance
Cut P5R Harem Ending
Benjamin Franklin (Musician)
Vanilla P3 Protagonist's Ability to Equip All Weapons: I know a ton of people love this about P3, but I didn't really care about it at all. Sure, it means that you have more sources of a specific damage type, but like, who cares? How often does that actually come up? I'm fine with him having a dedicated sword type the way Yu and Joker do.
P5's Translation
The Fog (Song)
Battle for Everyone's Slams
Orbit: You'll Never See It Coming
Tatsumi Port Island

Serenity

FF x Magic crossover

- I Am Thou, Thou Art I...
Mr. Urshimaru
Burn my Dread
Persona (Carl Jung)
Hawaii Scene (P5)
Reach Out to the Truth
Ambushing Enemies with Attacks in the Overworld
Pancakes
Dungeons (P4): Again, I've said this before, but P4 is in almost every way the one between P3 and P5. And obviously that is literally true, but it's like... Almost every element is done better than P3, and worse than P5. P4's only actual strengths over the other games are the best cast cohesion and probably the best setting. Maybe it has something else, I don't know, but it would probably be very minor. So, it's no surprise when I say that its dungeons are better than P3's, but worse than P5's. Honestly, they're not even THAT much better than Mementos. What P4 brings to the table is the idea of dungeons personalized to specific characters, which is a huge step forward over P3, and having the shadow of the dungeon owner show up and taunt you/themself, which is a huge step forward over P3. But like... That's it. It's still doing the annoying randomized dungeon setup, it still lacks in puzzles... I would say the only thing P4 has over P5 in this regard is when each shadow shows up for the first time, a TV-style title card appears without any explanation. I fucking LOVE silly shit like that, but it's only really hysterical the first time when it's unexpected. Like, P4 doesn't even 100% stick to the TV theming with its dungeons. Every dungeon should have been themed around some kind of genre of TV show or something, but then there's just a 1980s RPG dungeon laying around.
Adachi Cube
Munehisa Iwai
Sae Interrogation Framing Device
Nihil Hand
Dancing Spinoff Games
Futaba Romance
Labrys
Arsene Lupin
Persona Pokerap
Weaponized Golf Clubs
Cheesing the Game with Overpowered Special Personas at Level 1
Morgana
Hifumi Togo
Shadow Labrys
Morgana saying Go to Sleep
Meat Dimension
Loki
Jack Frost: As far as mascots go, he's fine. I don't really love him, and he has zero presence in the actual games, he's just another random persona out of a thousand random personas. I actually like Black Frost more, he's a little more striking.
Operation Babe Hunt
Navigators
Ending Fights with All-Out Attacks
Silent Protagonists
I'm gonna renovate your ass!
Green Persona 6
Yu Narukumi
Void Quest
Persona Evolution: Conceptually, I'm fine with this. The problem is that there is just zero pattern in what the personas actually evolve into. Why does Cinderella turn into Freya? Because they're both wives? Dunno how to tell you this, Persona, but most women are wives. I guess it's a cool way to show your party members progressing in power, but again, there's never any logic in which personas are stronger than others. Why is Penthesilea, an Amazon queen, weaker than Artemisia, the advisor of Xerxes? I dunno, don't ask.
Junes Department Store
P4G Shuffle Time
Heritage Palladion Liberator
Nanako Dojima
Gentle Madman
Deleted Yosuke Gay Romance
Cut P5R Harem Ending
Benjamin Franklin (Musician)
P5's Translation
The Fog (Song)
Battle for Everyone's Slams
Orbit: You'll Never See It Coming

- Gasp! The Enemy!
Tatsumi Port Island
Toaster Aigis
Shadow Okumura (Boss Fight)
Lotus Juice (Rapper)
Urban Fantasy (Genre)
Heartful Cry
Other RPGs Mimicking Persona's Calendar System
Koromaru
BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle
Hiimdaisy Persona 4 Comic Dub
Magic Spell Names
Fictional High Schoolers Dating Adults in Anime
Haru Okumura
Harems Compared to Canon Romances in JRPGs
Renaming S-Links to Confidants
Shitty Adults
Principal Kobayakawa
Playing Coy with the Year P5 is Set
Erebus
Forced Romance (P3)
Thieves' Den
Failure to Make Persona 5 Arena: Although I'm sure it would have been successful, I can imagine the reason for this is that P5T cost nothing to make, and P5S was basically a new real game. Like, would P5A be sprite-based? In 2020 or so? Unlikely. But if it was, would you just be reusing the sprites for the old characters from 2012? You can't really do that, either, because they're dated to 2012, everyone would be older. And then like, what, are you going to canonize what happened to everyone from P3 when they got into their mid-thirties? Alternatively, if you use time travel to make everyone be high schoolers again, then you still have to remake all of the P3 sprites anyway. How expensive is it to make sprites this complex? Probably pretty. And that's assuming you use sprites! Maybe in the late 2010s, they thought fighting games had to use 3D models, even Street Fighter was doing so by that point. You're talking about a very expensive venture either way that would require dealing with aging implications for the older characters that they surely did not want to deal with. It's no accident that P4AU is the only one that ages up the characters, and even then, only to their early 20s, every other one is just high school again. And for what? Ultimately, for what? Persona has a following, but a fighting game starring its characters is not going to make a splash in the competitive scene the way Street Fighter, Smash, Tekken, or even Soul Calibur and Mortal Kombat would. I can imagine why they thought it was safer to just keep cranking out P5 spinoffs the way they did.
People Saying Any Jazz Song Sounds Like Persona
Persona Q Weddings
Mr. Edogawa
Afterschool Clubs
Hatsune Miku
Mementos

- All You Do Is Eat Away At My Life
Kyosuke from Danganronpa 3 resembling Yu
Marin Karin
Protagonist Death Game Overs
Ichiko Ohya
Fusion Accidents
Endless Rereleases Changing the Games
Kasumi and Sumire
Yosuke in the Camping Trip
Tartarus
Variable S-Link Point Dialogue Choices
Ken Romance
Nozomi Suemitsu
Remaking Persona 4
Burning Men's Soul
Fishing Minigame
Yosuke Goes Through a Breakup (Video)
Metis

- Please Beat The Shit Out Of Me
Fuuka's Original Voice Actress
Persona 6 Development Time
Uncontrollable Party Members
Persona 5 Tactica
The Answer (P3)

- The Means By Which All Is Revealed
Social Links
Japan: Here's every country I've spent a day or more in besides the USA: Canada, Mexico, Panama, Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Israel, Japan. Of them, Japan is the best to visit. Like, it's got its problems (places not accepting credit cards, hard to get around without a translation app, it's hotter than the flames of Hell during summer), but it's super nice, super safe, exotic, cultured, advanced, and has good food. Every so often, I see people say "P6 should be set in the US or something," and it's like, NO. The actual mechanical concept of personas is only half of the appeal of the series. The other half is how overly Japanese everything is. The fact that all of this is filtered through the perspective of Japan is part of the appeal. For reference, a good comparison is Harry Potter. The whole wizard shtick is only half of the appeal, the other half is seeing the world through the perspective of a middle-class British woman who doesn't know anything about anything and doesn't know anywhere except two-thirds of London and one Scottish town, and nothing in the world actually matters except England. So when foreign characters show up and they're all named the most stereotypical thing possible for their ethnicity (Fleur Delacour, Cho Chang, Anthony Goldstein, Seamus Finnegan), it's because the author genuinely doesn't know anything. When a Bulgarian man shows up and Dumbledore introduces him as "our friend from the north" despite Bulgaria being hundreds of miles south of England, it's because the author genuinely doesn't know anything. Persona is the same thing to me. It's okay to have a foreign person show up now and again, maybe even a party member isn't out of the question, but I don't want it to be set anywhere but modern Japan. Absolute farthest out I'm willing to hear is Okinawa. Try anything else, and you'll get the same result as when Rowling tried to expand her worldbuilding by having the plot set in the 1920s where the characters go international, and suddenly the plot involves the Titanic, World War I, the Great Depression, and speakeasies, because that's all she knows about the world outside of her immediate area.Calling Cards
Elizabeth
Shoji Meguro
Personas (Summons): Such a cool idea. It combines mythology and catching Pokmon, what's not to like? The idea that you can call upon these figures of humanity's collective subconscious to use their powers on your behalf makes complete intuitive sense, too.
Rivers in the Desert
Persona 5

- Mine for the Slammin'!
Benjamin Franklin
P5 the Gacha-Killer
Kamoshida as a Villain
Goro Akechi
Persona 5 Strikers Box Art
Suguru Kamoshida
The Subway Slammer
The Journey (P3)
October 4th (P3)
Persona 3
Velvet Room
Hiimdaisy Persona Comic
Junpei x Chidori
Mara
Evokers
Persona 4
Tarot Cards
Masayoshi Shido (Boss Fight)
Menus
Nyx
The Reaper
Mitsuru Kirijo
Sojiro Sakura
Persona 5 Strikers
Makoto Stalking Joker

- OMG! We Are SO Awesome!
Character Titles (P4AU): Some of these are much better than others. "The Sister Complex Kingpin of Steel," dude, Nanko is 5. But these give a lot of personality to the characters and help set the 'not particularly serious' tone that the game goes for. Who's even assigning these titles? Doesn't matter.
Takuto Maruki
School Concert (P4G)
Shooting Yourself in the Head
Mass Destruction: In my view, the first three seconds of this song are the definitive Persona song, moreso than even Rivers in the Desert. BABY BABY BABY. But then the guy starts rapping, and the song goes downhill fast. It gets better at 0:52 when the woman takes over again, but like, who cares, I just spent all of this time with the rapper guy. You compare this to like FF8 normal battle music and it is just night and fucking day.
Dating Every Girl
Thanatos
Akinari Kamiki
P5 Tarot Art
Aria of the Soul
P3 Characters in P4AU
President Tanaka
Negotiation (P5)
Rise Posters (P5)
Hot Spring Scene (P3)
EMMA: The millisecond this thing showed up, I knew it was going to turn into a cell phone god and try to take over the world. There wasn't a doubt in my mind. Even though it's basically the exact same thing as Yaldabaoth, who I make fun of constantly, I like EMMA quite a bit more, both because its final boss design is funnier (I like the image of being a multiarmed Buddha who holds a gigantic cell phone above its head), and because it's something humanity actually created. The other final bosses are either gods or created from humanity's mind or whatever, but EMMA is just a cell phone with an Alexa app that people use too much. It actually plays into Persona's themes better than most Izanami and Yaldabaoth, so it wins some points for that. But like, I wouldn't really say that any of the games have AMAZING final bosses. Real missed opportunity to have her helpfully comment during the final battle as a rival navigator, giving you actually useful tips and advice on how to fight her, frustrating and confusing Futaba.
Persona Kart (Hypothetical)
Battle for Everyone's Souls
Joker (Smash)
King's Game
Persona Fusion: Again, conceptually this is fun, it lets you repurpose old and shitty personas to create something new and useful, and you can spend quite a long time just creating new silly personas out of what you accidentally pick up in a dungeon just for fun. But again, it is just impossible to guess what will fuse into what. Other than a vague guess at their levels, you will never know that Nekomata + Archangel = Eligor, or whatever, because none of it makes any sense. If there is any pattern besides being completely random aside from level, then I have not been able to divine it in all my years of playing Persona. Whenever I need anything specific, I've always just had to look up a fusion calculator online, which aren't even always 100% accurate. So yeah, it's fun, and it's fun to collect all 151 pokemon, this gives Persona that same "collect 'em all" appeal as Pokmon, but I have no concept of what specifically produces what, and I never will.
Kanji Tatsumi
Never More (Song)
Memories of You
Adolf Hitler (P2)
Magician Arcana
Maya
Akihiko (P4AU)
Optional Romance Choices vs Canon Romance: On the one hand, optional romance choices give the player control over what waifu he wants. On the other hand, having a canon choice lets the writer actually flesh things out more. Given that Persona is at least partly a waifu simulator, I can't fault the writers for going for the former. You compare this to Final Fantasy, where 7 and 10 pretend you have a choice, but then it becomes clear that Yuna/Tifa is the real girl. Too bad for Quistis, too, because she is superior to Rinoa in pretty every respect. Obviously, Persona is never going to give up the optional romance choice angle, and that's fine.
P3 Persona Awakening Cutscene
Sadayo Kawakami
Yosuke Hanamura
FeMC (P3P)
Funky Student
Cosmic Tower Burger
P4G Bike Ending
Tae Takemi
The Fox (P4)
Shiki-Ouji
P5 Using Igor's New VA as a Plot Point: This was clever for longtime fans, although people who were brand new to Persona, like myself, could have never put two and two together. I actually like fake!Igor's voice more than the real deal's. Call me insane, but the deep and booming voice just sounds better to me.
Akira Konoe

Thorn posted...

to defend the honor of my beloved xenoblade 3 - while that picture is in xenoblade 3 the characters involved are the xenoblade 2 cast

That just means XB3 canonized it!

Raka_Putra posted...

I mean if the game's devoted to fishing, then fishing's no longer a minigame.

Possibly, but I've never played a fishing game either.

_stingers_ posted...

For the romance I meant like the style of game that lets you date everyone vs having a romance that's canon in the plot

I'll redo this one.

colliding posted...

Navigators are actually one of the keys as to why Persona is popular in the first place. If you imagine battles without them they feel a lot more boring/traditional than they are.

Thinking on it actually makes me think you're right. I'm going to raise its position in the list.

MacArrowny posted...

Did you skip this one?

I did, and will add it next time.

- I Am Thou, Thou Art I...
Mr. Urshimaru
Burn my Dread: When I first heard this song, I thought I must be hearing it wrong. I thought "Burn my dead" was much more logical. Alas! It is certainly "Burn my dread." This song is fine. I don't really like most of the song, but I do like the way the singer yells "Burn my dreadddddddddddddddddddddd." I don't know, what else do you want me to say?
Persona (Carl Jung)
Hawaii Scene (P5)
Reach Out to the Truth
Ambushing Enemies with Attacks in the Overworld
Pancakes
Adachi Cube
Munehisa Iwai
Sae Interrogation Framing Device
Nihil Hand
Dancing Spinoff Games
Futaba Romance
Labrys
Arsene Lupin
Persona Pokerap
Weaponized Golf Clubs: I like it. The logic of Persona isn't that you actually use proper weapons, it's that you use the idea of weapons (which is why your model guns work like real guns in the Metaverse).
Cheesing the Game with Overpowered Special Personas at Level 1
Morgana
Hifumi Togo
Shadow Labrys
Morgana saying Go to Sleep
Meat Dimension
Loki: Perfectly good, unremarkable persona for Akechi to have. Nothing interesting is done with it. At one point, everyone is like "how can Akechi have two personas at once," and then that's just never explained.
Operation Babe Hunt
Ending Fights with All-Out Attacks
Silent Protagonists
I'm gonna renovate your ass!
Green Persona 6
Yu Narukumi
Void Quest: I'm just going to say it... I'm sort of tired of fiction referencing the first/second generation of games, NES and earlier. It was fine when P4 did it in 2008, but whenever someone wants to establish in fiction that something is 'video gamey,' they always go back to Pac-Man aesthetics or whatever. That shit was out of date when I was a kid in the 90s. And I'm tired of references to 80s JRPGs. Dragon Quest sucks, there, I said it.
Junes Department Store
P4G Shuffle Time
Heritage Palladion Liberator
Nanako Dojima
Gentle Madman: I mean... It's fine? This is not one of the more memorable tracks in the series, sorry. Maruki is great and everything, but not because of his music. He's not really bombastic enough for a game like P5? Even when he goes into persona mode, he's just sort of got a nice gold mask over his face.
Deleted Yosuke Gay Romance
Cut P5R Harem Ending
Benjamin Franklin (Musician)
P5's Translation
The Fog (Song)
Battle for Everyone's Slams
Orbit: You'll Never See It Coming
Tatsumi Port Island
Toaster Aigis
Shadow Okumura (Boss Fight)
Lotus Juice (Rapper)

- Gasp! The Enemy!
Urban Fantasy (Genre)
Heartful Cry
Other RPGs Mimicking Persona's Calendar System
Koromaru
BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle
Hiimdaisy Persona 4 Comic Dub
Magic Spell Names
Fictional High Schoolers Dating Adults in Anime
Haru Okumura
Harems Compared to Canon Romances in JRPGs: I mean... Are you asking about having a harem in a fan work or as a joke, or harems that actually occur in the story? Because the only I can think of in a JRPG is the Xenoblade 3 one. That one was hilarious, I can't believe it's actually canon. The way he's there with his three wives, and they're each holding a baby that's the exact same age as the others, it looks like he's some kind of weird cult leader and these are the women he's brainwashed. It's incredible that that's in a Nintendo game.
Renaming S-Links to Confidants
Shitty Adults
Principal Kobayakawa
Playing Coy with the Year P5 is Set
Erebus
Forced Romance (P3): It's just funny, isn't it? Like, the idea that boys and girls can only interact by means of romance. Zero girls in P3 are like "wow dude you're cool," they all inevitably just start saying "wow dude you're sexy." Such an odd decision to not make this optional. P3R fixes it, at least.
Thieves' Den
People Saying Any Jazz Song Sounds Like Persona
Persona Q Weddings
Mr. Edogawa
Afterschool Clubs
Hatsune Miku
Mementos

- All You Do Is Eat Away At My Life
Navigators: I do not know why this role exists. Everyone treats the navigators like they're the key to the entire mission, and it's true that when Fuuka, Rise, and Futaba locate things using their powers, then sure, they're useful... But 98% of the time, they're just commenting on the battle, and it's like, yes, I already know that enemy is weak to fire. I don't need you to tell Ryuji not to miss in the future. I know I can activate an all-out attack. Stop talking so much! I don't know why this role even exists, who thought it was a good idea? I do appreciate in P5S, though, when everyone is captured by Futaba and a powerless Zenikichi, and he's like "why don't you rescue them" and she's like "my persona is the non-fighty kind." If they ever make another fighting game, it's now canon that Rise can fight, I assume Futaba would learn to fight as well because she's popular, and Fuuka... Fuuka can just fuck herself, I guess. Even in that game, Rise is still the commentator even when she's fighting herself. You know what, I'll say it: I hope P6's navigator is a boy. It's always a girl, I want one boy. Was Chidori also a navigator? I THINK she was, but I'm not sure.
Kyosuke from Danganronpa 3 resembling Yu
Marin Karin
Protagonist Death Game Overs
Ichiko Ohya
Fusion Accidents
Endless Rereleases Changing the Games
Kasumi and Sumire
Yosuke in the Camping Trip
Tartarus
Variable S-Link Point Dialogue Choices: I dislike this, because it means I'm always just looking up the correct answers to maximize my points, which eats up a lot of time. Maybe I shouldn't be doing that, but sue me. It also means that some of the funnier options should never be chosen ("Beep boop") because they aren't the most efficient options available.
Ken Romance
Nozomi Suemitsu
Remaking Persona 4
Burning Men's Soul
Fishing Minigame: I'll let you in on a little secret. No video game has ever had a good fishing minigame ever. They suck in all Zelda games, they suck in Persona. Maybe there's a good game devoted to fishing, I don't know. But it's not Persona.
Yosuke Goes Through a Breakup (Video)
Metis

- Please Beat The Shit Out Of Me
Fuuka's Original Voice Actress
Persona 6 Development Time
Uncontrollable Party Members
Persona 5 Tactica
The Answer (P3)

- The Means By Which All Is Revealed
Social Links
Calling Cards
Elizabeth
Shoji Meguro
Rivers in the Desert
Persona 5

- Mine for the Slammin'!
Benjamin Franklin
P5 the Gacha-Killer
Kamoshida as a Villain
Goro Akechi
Persona 5 Strikers Box Art
Suguru Kamoshida
The Subway Slammer
The Journey (P3)
October 4th (P3)
Persona 3
Velvet Room
Hiimdaisy Persona Comic
Junpei x Chidori
Mara
Evokers
Persona 4
Masayoshi Shido (Boss Fight)
Menus
Nyx
The Reaper
Mitsuru Kirijo
Sojiro Sakura
Persona 5 Strikers: A shockingly good game. By far the best spinoff I've played of the series. It feels like an actual sequel and not just a random cheapo spinoff, it's crazy how high the quality is compared to the other spinoffs. Does it have problems? Sure. All of the 'area' spells are useless, because the single target spells are also area in this game. All of the party members except Joker, Morgana, Sophie, and Zenikichi are just along for the ride and do nothing the entire time. The game spends its entire runtime bending over backwards to explain why the rules of the Metaverse allow for these local palaces. But it really does feel like another epic magical adventure in modern Japan with your friends again, with music and high production. The menus alone feel clean and sleek in a way that the other spinoffs didn't bother with, and if you can't tell quality from menu sleekage, how else can you tell it? Best of all, it does not at all overstay its runtime. Sure, it lacks the confidants that give the numbered titles so much of their personality, but it otherwise feels like a real game in the series.
Makoto Stalking Joker: Pretty easily Makoto's cutest moment. She has a lot of moments where she acts scared of the dark or relies on you and then pretends she wasn't, but this is her cutest moment by far.

- OMG! We Are SO Awesome!
Tarot Cards
Takuto Maruki
School Concert (P4G)
Shooting Yourself in the Head
Dating Every Girl
Thanatos: One of the coolest personas in P3. Why does it have a cape made out of Christian knight sarcophagi? Doesn't matter. Imagine if all personas were just the 'normal' versions of things, like 'normal' Thor or the 'normal' Grim Reaper.
Akinari Kamiki
P5 Tarot Art
Aria of the Soul
P3 Characters in P4AU
President Tanaka
Negotiation (P5)
Rise Posters (P5)
Hot Spring Scene (P3)
Persona Kart (Hypothetical)
Battle for Everyone's Souls
Joker (Smash)
King's Game
Kanji Tatsumi
Never More (Song)
Memories of You: Incredibly strong opening notes, perfect work there. I don't even really care what the singer is saying, I'm sure it's about memories or whatever, who cares. It's good at setting the mood... But would I listen to it independent of Persona? Probably not.
Adolf Hitler (P2)
Magician Arcana
Maya
Akihiko (P4AU)
P3 Persona Awakening Cutscene
Sadayo Kawakami
Yosuke Hanamura
FeMC (P3P)
Funky Student
Cosmic Tower Burger
P4G Bike Ending
Tae Takemi
The Fox (P4)
Shiki-Ouji
Akira Konoe

for something completely different

- I Am Thou, Thou Art I...
Mr. Urshimaru
Persona (Carl Jung)
Hawaii Scene (P5): I love how the loading screens have the normal extras dressed in Hawaiian outfits, etc. But very little actually happens in this scene. The game even sort of draws attention to it, with the story being that the school planned things poorly, so the kids are all just left on their own to do whatever. I also like how the characters go out of their way to say "Hawaii is the most Japanese-y place in America, you won't even need to speak in English lol." It's true, I've been to Hawaii, and there were a lot of signs in both English and Japanese. I feel like this was a bit of missed potential, is all.
Reach Out to the Truth
Ambushing Enemies with Attacks in the Overworld
Pancakes
Adachi Cube
Munehisa Iwai
Sae Interrogation Framing Device: Conceptually, this is fun. In practice, this is fun. But holy shit, Sae is the absolute worst lawyer on Earth. She constantly asks questions that you already explained, and her logic for asking who helped you do X is always insane. "You couldn't have tied your shoes on your own, you must have had a professional shoe-tier helping you! Who was it?!" I like how Sae is held up by the game as one of the few adults who are helpful, but in actual practice, Sae does nothing useful the entire game, she just gets her chain yanked by every single villain. The only time Sae does ANYTHING helpful is when she realizes Akechi is lying to her and obeys your request to use her phone. That's it, that's Sae's entire contribution to the heroes: she presses one button on a phone. That's how useful she is, she can press one button, BARELY.
Nihil Hand
Dancing Spinoff Games
Futaba Romance
Labrys
Arsene Lupin
Persona Pokerap
Cheesing the Game with Overpowered Special Personas at Level 1
Morgana
Hifumi Togo: She wasn't a cut party member, everyone always says that, and it's not true. What happened is that the sprite for Hifumi was the original sprite for Makoto, and then for whatever reason, they drew a new Makoto sprite and just reused the old one as a confidant. So yeah, Hifumi does sort of have the vibe of a party member, because she looks like they're supposed to look. Anyway, as a character, whatever. Her personality is "I am obsessed with Chess and am embarrassed by my mom cheating to make me look even better at Chess." But she gives you probably the best confidant ability in the entire game, in-battle party member switching. The only other one with a potential claim to that title is Mishima's "inactive party members still get experience" ability. Could she have been a party member with her current personality? Maybe. But we already have "I am a smart and perceptive girl" in Makoto, and "I am psychotically obsessed with a useless talent that doesn't matter at all" in Yusuke, AND "I am a graceful girl" in Sumire. I don't know what Hifumi could possibly be adding other than slightly having the look of a Yamato Nadeshiko, but we already had Yukiko going 110% all-in for that one, so Hifumi just sort of has nothing to offer as far as being a party member goes. Although, I would approve of having just the Queen chess piece as your persona, that makes more sense than half of actual personas.
Shadow Labrys
Morgana saying Go to Sleep
Meat Dimension
Operation Babe Hunt
Ending Fights with All-Out Attacks
Silent Protagonists
I'm gonna renovate your ass!
Green Persona 6
Yu Narukumi
Junes Department Store
P4G Shuffle Time
Heritage Palladion Liberator
Nanako Dojima
Deleted Yosuke Gay Romance
Cut P5R Harem Ending
Benjamin Franklin (Musician)
P5's Translation
The Fog (Song)
Battle for Everyone's Slams
Orbit: You'll Never See It Coming
Tatsumi Port Island
Toaster Aigis
Shadow Okumura (Boss Fight)
Lotus Juice (Rapper)

- Gasp! The Enemy!
Urban Fantasy (Genre)
Heartful Cry
Other RPGs Mimicking Persona's Calendar System: I mean, whatever. It's an effective system that Persona can't patent or anything. The idea of having a limited number of days in the year to create some kind of urgency is completely reasonable.
Koromaru
BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle
Hiimdaisy Persona 4 Comic Dub
Magic Spell Names
Fictional High Schoolers Dating Adults in Anime
Haru Okumura
Renaming S-Links to Confidants
Shitty Adults
Principal Kobayakawa
Playing Coy with the Year P5 is Set
Erebus
Thieves' Den
People Saying Any Jazz Song Sounds Like Persona
Persona Q Weddings
Mr. Edogawa
Afterschool Clubs
Hatsune Miku
Mementos

- All You Do Is Eat Away At My Life
Kyosuke from Danganronpa 3 resembling Yu: Jesus Christ, D3 is probably the worst TV show I've watched all the way through. If not, it's close, it's incredibly bad. Both of these guys are pretty anime boys with short silver hair and katanas, and that's where their similarities end. I don't know if there's any reference being drawn here, I assume not. I'm marking this low just because of the Danganronpa 3 connection.
Marin Karin
Protagonist Death Game Overs
Ichiko Ohya
Fusion Accidents
Endless Rereleases Changing the Games
Kasumi and Sumire
Yosuke in the Camping Trip
Tartarus
Ken Romance
Nozomi Suemitsu
Remaking Persona 4
Burning Men's Soul
Yosuke Goes Through a Breakup (Video)
Metis

- Please Beat The Shit Out Of Me
Fuuka's Original Voice Actress
Persona 6 Development Time
Uncontrollable Party Members
Persona 5 Tactica
The Answer (P3)

- The Means By Which All Is Revealed
Social Links
Calling Cards
Elizabeth
Shoji Meguro
Rivers in the Desert
Persona 5

- Mine for the Slammin'!
Benjamin Franklin
P5 the Gacha-Killer
Kamoshida as a Villain
Goro Akechi
Persona 5 Strikers Box Art
Suguru Kamoshida
The Subway Slammer
The Journey (P3)
October 4th (P3)
Persona 3
Velvet Room
Hiimdaisy Persona Comic
Junpei x Chidori
Mara
Evokers
Persona 4
Masayoshi Shido (Boss Fight)
Menus
Nyx
The Reaper
Mitsuru Kirijo: Of every single party member in the series, Mitsuru might be the least believable as a high schooler. Zenikichi is about as believable as she is. She looks, sounds, and acts like she's 29. But that aside, she's easily the most important party member in P3 besides yourself. I said this before, but everyone except you, Mitsuru, Aigis, and Yukari is basically irrelevant to the actual story itself. Mitsuru also has by far the best and most compelling design of any character in the game; she's VERY distinctive and you immediately understand exactly who she is and how she operates. You IMMEDIATELY get that she's a reliable, intelligent girl who's the closest person here to knowing how to deal with this crazy situation. You IMMEDIATELY get that she's the smartest and most beautiful girl in the school. You IMMEDIATELY get that of the series' two redheaded girls with rapiers, she completely mogs Sumire. She's got the backstory you need to actually be intimately involved in the story, she's got the tragic father death (it's funny how Haru is also a rich senior girl whose father dies during the game, but it's played completely differently), she's not as annoying as Fuuka when she's the navigator, she's got it all. Surely the best P3 companion. You know, I just realized that she's the only temporary navigator who isn't the game's mascot character; Teddie and Morgana both handle the job until you get someone else. Oh, Fuuka. I refuse to believe you're anyone's favorite P3 waifu.
Sojiro Sakura: Since P3 has Ikutski, Sojiro and Dojima are definitely neck and neck for the title of "best adult who takes care of you after you move into town." I think Sojiro does win, though. Sojiro is smart enough to EVENTUALLY figure out what's going on, and just continues to help you. He also gets arrested on your behalf, and to my understanding, makes a pretty good curry. He also has a bright yellow car for some reason, don't ask me why.

- OMG! We Are SO Awesome!
Tarot Cards
Takuto Maruki
School Concert (P4G)
Shooting Yourself in the Head
Dating Every Girl: Hilarious. I like how it's not even an option not to in the original P3, every girl just automatically dates you because it's impossible for boys and girls to be friends. The scene where all of the girls confront Joker at the same time, and then it cuts to black and Sojiro is like "Well I convinced them that this was just a silly misunderstanding," and man, Sojiro, that's ultimate wingman status there. I have no idea how you pulled that off. It's a funny concept, but obviously I understand why more can't really be done with it, it must be a tiny minority of players who date more than one girl at a time.
Akinari Kamiki
P5 Tarot Art
Aria of the Soul
P3 Characters in P4AU
President Tanaka
Negotiation (P5): I'm a little torn. This replaces the shuffle time, and while it's true that it takes much longer on average than shuffles, I basically only ever use this to obtain new personas, and never for any other reason, which means it takes much less time overall. But conceptually, it is cool. The idea of having to empathize and understand what the persona is about and how it thinks in order to obtain it makes complete sense.
Rise Posters (P5)
Hot Spring Scene (P3): One of the more memorable moments in P3, and one of the few "everyone just hanging out being silly, unrelated to the existential threat" moments. Everyone likes Mitsuru's execution of the boys, even if she's being kind of unreasonable in not letting them explain. Honestly, P3's boys are the least perverted of all of the groups, there's no Yusuke blackmailing you into naked modeling or Yosoke being Yosoke. Real talk, I've never been into a hot spring in my life. I have been into the bathhouses in Hungary, though, those are not completely dissimilar.
Persona Kart (Hypothetical)
Battle for Everyone's Souls
Joker (Smash)
King's Game
Kanji Tatsumi
Never More (Song)
Adolf Hitler (P2)
Magician Arcana
Maya
Akihiko (P4AU)
P3 Persona Awakening Cutscene
Sadayo Kawakami
Yosuke Hanamura
FeMC (P3P)
Funky Student
Cosmic Tower Burger
P4G Bike Ending
Tae Takemi
The Fox (P4)
Shiki-Ouji
Akira Konoe

Raka_Putra posted...

As for the Fate gacha it just celebrated its 10th anniversary actually. Then again, it never collaborated with P5 so maybe that's why.

Jesus Christ, I didn't realize gacha games were even a decade old in their current form.

Little Girl (card)

BlueCrystalTear posted...

Did you not do my last nomination? The one with the compendium cheese in P3...

I did that as "Cheesing the Game with Overpowered Special Personas at Level 1."

Hbthebattle posted...

Other RPGs getting calendar systems to mimic Persona

Has this happened? Is there an example of that?

- I Am Thou, Thou Art I...
Mr. Urshimaru
Persona (Carl Jung)
Reach Out to the Truth
Ambushing Enemies with Attacks in the Overworld: I mean, fair. Who invented this? The earliest I can think of it is in Paper Mario. It was actually a little jarring playing Mario RPG after playing Paper Mario, jumping on a goomba, and just having a normal fight.
Pancakes
Adachi Cube
Munehisa Iwai
Nihil Hand: Wow, this is a pretty deep cut, but okay. This is the two-turn charge attack that Shadow Teddie uses while fighting you that you need to defend against. I mean, it's perfectly serviceable. I like the Shadow Teddie fight, it's when he feels the most actually important to the plot? Like Morgana, Teddie mostly just explains what's going on to the characters and the audience, but unlike Morgana, who turns out to have a backstory connected to what's going on in the plot, Teddie just sort of doesn't. He's just a random shadow that became sapient and got wrapped up in all of this silliness, basically. It's like, whoops! Guess I'll spend the last 40% of the game in human form being a perv. So the Shadow Teddie fight ends up sort of being his best moment, and I guess this is a part of that.
Dancing Spinoff Games
Futaba Romance
Labrys
Arsene Lupin: It's like I said, in actual reality, everyone's personas would be Batman or Ariel or something. But since Persona insists on using obscure things, even to the point where when they use Cinderella, they use the French version of her name for no reason, Lupin is fine. I looked him up on Wikipedia to refresh myself on him, and man, I didn't realize he looks like the Penguin, talk about the Batman connections. I don't know, I'm sure he was cutting-edge in 1905, but whatever, I will never read any of his stories.
Persona Pokerap
Cheesing the Game with Overpowered Special Personas at Level 1
Morgana
Shadow Labrys
Morgana saying Go to Sleep
Meat Dimension
Operation Babe Hunt
Ending Fights with All-Out Attacks: Even though I complained about wasting time with tarot shuffles earlier, the reality is that I end fights with all-out attacks almost every single time I have the chance. Virtually always, my tactic is to trigger weaknesses and then just all-out attack. Sometimes, when an enemy has no weaknesses, I just spam Morgana's 'small chance of crit' attack, but that's about the extent of my planning for basic fights.
Silent Protagonists
I'm gonna renovate your ass!
Green Persona 6
Yu Narukumi
Junes Department Store
P4G Shuffle Time
Heritage Palladion Liberator
Nanako Dojima
Deleted Yosuke Gay Romance
Cut P5R Harem Ending
Benjamin Franklin (Musician)
P5's Translation
The Fog (Song)
Battle for Everyone's Slams
Orbit: You'll Never See It Coming
Tatsumi Port Island
Toaster Aigis
Shadow Okumura (Boss Fight)
Lotus Juice (Rapper)

- Gasp! The Enemy!
Urban Fantasy (Genre)
Heartful Cry: I love the first 18 seconds of this song, where it sounds like it will be a very emotional, thoughtful tune... and then it just stops doing that and becomes more action-y. Unfortunate.
Koromaru
BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle
Hiimdaisy Persona 4 Comic Dub
Magic Spell Names
Fictional High Schoolers Dating Adults in Anime
Haru Okumura
Renaming S-Links to Confidants: Completely bizarre decision. Why did they do this? And more importantly, why does the Persona Wiki insist on having an S-Link page that covers all S-links for P3 and P4, but sequesters P5's to another page for Confidants, as if they were any different? The only justification I can think of is that Confidants give you bonus abilities while S-links don't, but like... who cares?
Shitty Adults
Principal Kobayakawa
Playing Coy with the Year P5 is Set
Erebus
Thieves' Den
People Saying Any Jazz Song Sounds Like Persona
Persona Q Weddings
Mr. Edogawa
Afterschool Clubs
Hatsune Miku
Mementos

- All You Do Is Eat Away At My Life
Marin Karin
Protagonist Death Game Overs
Ichiko Ohya
Fusion Accidents
Endless Rereleases Changing the Games
Kasumi and Sumire
Yosuke in the Camping Trip
Tartarus
Ken Romance
Nozomi Suemitsu
Remaking Persona 4
Burning Men's Soul
Yosuke Goes Through a Breakup (Video)
Metis

- Please Beat The Shit Out Of Me
Fuuka's Original Voice Actress
Persona 6 Development Time
Uncontrollable Party Members
Persona 5 Tactica
The Answer (P3)

- The Means By Which All Is Revealed
Social Links
Calling Cards
Elizabeth
Shoji Meguro
Rivers in the Desert
Persona 5

- Mine for the Slammin'!
Benjamin Franklin
P5 the Gacha-Killer: I can think of no goal more noble than destroying gachas. Every crossover with P5 kills the gacha? I am 100% on board with this. I just looked up the gachas that died, I hadn't even heard of any of them. How the hell does Nier have a gacha? Nier is big enough to even support a gacha? I guess not lol. I have no idea what gachas are even popular, I only know about the FATE one, and for all I know, that one is done. When that latest Fire Emblem added gacha mechanics, I was so disappointed. It only makes me like P5 more that it keeps killing gachas.
Kamoshida as a Villain
Goro Akechi
Persona 5 Strikers Box Art
Suguru Kamoshida
The Subway Slammer
The Journey (P3)
October 4th (P3)
Persona 3
Velvet Room
Hiimdaisy Persona Comic
Junpei x Chidori
Mara
Evokers
Persona 4
Masayoshi Shido (Boss Fight)
Menus
Nyx
The Reaper: Great idea to use the Grim Reaper as the bonus boss who chases you out levels you spend too much time on. And Persona always puts its own spin on the monsters you face, so instead of being a skeleton in a black cloak with a scythe, he is, for some reason I cannot discern, a cowboy with ultra long revolvers and a bag on his head. And when he shows up and the screen gets red and your navigator is like "oh nooooo," it does feel dangerous! Overall, a great part of the series, no complaints here, but it's not like the series would feel completely different without his presence or anything. He's not even really the bonus boss in the games, anyway, that's the Velvet Room attendants.

- OMG! We Are SO Awesome!
Tarot Cards
Takuto Maruki
School Concert (P4G)
Shooting Yourself in the Head
Akinari Kamiki
P5 Tarot Art
Aria of the Soul
P3 Characters in P4AU: It's actually kind of shocking to me that P4AU just has the P3 cast show up, not in 'we time traveled from high school so we're still the same age as you guys' form, but just as adults (besides Ken). Like they just show up, and they're adults, and we get to see what became of them. And it's great! It's the only time in the series that you see anyone really progress beyond the end of the game. Like, P5S has Haru and Makoto, and they're like "we are technically in college now, but it will never come up, and we still hang out with you guys," but it's effectively the same as them still being in high school. So, seeing Mitsuru grow up to own her father's company, then fill it with helicopter pilots dressed like French maids (this makes me not at all feel bad for dressing her as a French maid in P3, by the way, in retrospect she must only be pretending to be upset) is great. Seeing Akihiko become just a crazy adventurer running around the world beating up muggers is great. Seeing Junpei grow up to be a huge loser is great, seeing Ken grow up to be the same age as everyone was in P3 is great, seeing Aigis not change even 1% is great. I don't PARTICULARLY like seeing Yukari in her acting costume, because it doesn't really show her in her day-to-day, but it's okay. They're allowed to have one gimmick character like that. I just think it was fun to see the P3 cast again, but grown up, interacting with new Persona-users. I think it was fun to see the P4 cast be like "wtf you can summon your Personas in the real world?!" Too bad that for gameplay purposes, the evokers are gone. I assume for gameplay purposes, maybe not, maybe they just regretting the suicide angle, I don't know. Too bad that I blow chunks at every fighting game except Smash, Tekken, and Soul Calibur, so I basically just cannot play this game at all.
President Tanaka
Rise Posters (P5)
Persona Kart (Hypothetical)
Battle for Everyone's Souls
Joker (Smash)
King's Game
Kanji Tatsumi
Never More (Song): I have literally no idea what this woman is singing, but it sounds upbeat. P4 really does feel like the lowest stakes game (until the extreme end), and songs like these sort of contribute to that. It's unclear what's going on in P3 until you're very far in, but it's obvious that there are giant monsters that threaten the city even at the start. You know pretty much all of the stakes in P5 from the beginning, except that Yaldabaoth increases them at the end. And then P4... it's like, early on, you know there's a serial killer who's killed like two people. So it makes sense that the game can be slower and have songs like this that are less sorrowful than P3's and less action-y than P5's.
Adolf Hitler (P2)
Magician Arcana
Maya
Akihiko (P4AU)
P3 Persona Awakening Cutscene
Sadayo Kawakami
Yosuke Hanamura: Before I go on, please, if you guys ever become writers, don't have totally unrelated characters be named Yosuke and Yusuke. I'm sure in Japanese, those names sound more distinct, I'm sure in Japanese, the characters mostly calling them by their last names, but please, don't do that. Anyway, Yosuke probably wins the dubious "Best Bro" award. He's also the most tragic, because he starts off as mostly useful, but once Naoto shows up, she surgically removes everyone else's intelligence so she can be the detective. And this is the girl who knew a serial killer was coming for her, and made no attempt to set up a camera or tell anyone, so you KNOW she's smart. I'm also told that he's the second best character in P4AU by virtue of being the speedy guy. I mean, I don't know, Yosuke is annoying a lot of the time, but he at least DOES have a personality that gels with and has good interactions with the other people in his party. I'm not sure that all of the Bro characters deserve the girls' universal distaste, it happens in every game. Well, okay, Ryuji probably does.
FeMC (P3P)
Funky Student
Cosmic Tower Burger
P4G Bike Ending: Oh, this, I didn't even realize this was an optional thing, I just got it naturally. I mean... getting to have more interactions and run around the town after finishing the game is nice and everything. I don't know what else you want me to say.
Tae Takemi
The Fox (P4)
Shiki-Ouji
Akira Konoe: See, I already said this about Maruki, but it applies here equally: this guy just directly complains that the heroes think they can change peoples' hearts, but deny the power to anyone else. It's just another "the writers respond to the audience" situation here, except Maruki is actually the guy you're up against, as opposed to Konoe, who is blatantly a fake boss for the real villain: Alexa. The fucking second the cell phone showed up, I knew it was going to turn into a cell phone god and try to take over the world. Konoe isn't bad or anything, but they already did this with Maruki, who has waaaaaaaaay more of a personal connection to the heroes, which makes him much more interesting to go up against.

Pop-tarts

Ohio

Black Lotus

DomaDragoon posted...

Anyway, nominate: Persona 4 Golden bike riding.

I actually do not know what this is? A quick google didn't help me.
DomaDragoon posted...

Honestly, if we can't get playable Sae and Sojiro in this, there's no point in making it in the first place. For tracks, I'd prefer if most of the tracks were based on the playable racers rather than the palaces/dungeons. For example, Ryuji's track would be mostly oval like a real world track and field event, but with a nautical theme including cannons; Haru's would be like the Gardens of Versailles, but as the laps go on the foliage spreads out more and more; etc.

You are never getting a track themed to every character, it would 100% be based on locations from the games. Sae could be a fun option, but I can't imagine Sojiro ever happening.

- Gasp! The Enemy!
Urban Fantasy (Genre)
Koromaru
BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle
Hiimdaisy Persona 4 Comic Dub
Magic Spell Names
Fictional High Schoolers Dating Adults in Anime
Haru Okumura
Shitty Adults: It's strange that P5 plays so heavily into this theme. It's not at all part of P3 and P4, where the adults are perfectly normal, or sometimes useless, but never really evil aside from Ikutski and Adachi. But P5 really drives home how all of society's woes are the fault of bad adults. And it's like, what do you expect me to do with this information, exactly? Like, there's a running theme in that game about Japanese society mistreating single women (Ryuji and Futaba's mothers, Sae), and it's like, okay, maybe that's true, I don't know, and maybe we shouldn't do that? But there's nothing we can really do about adults causing most of the world's problems. Are we going to elect teenagers as our politicians? Teenagers are the stupidest people in the world, have you ever talked to one? That's one thing I enjoy about anime things, where teenagers are all super geniuses, when in reality you go to one and are like "what is 6 times 7" and they'll be frozen for like a minute while they work it out in their heads.
Principal Kobayakawa
Playing Coy with the Year P5 is Set: I don't understand why games bother doing this. I remember first seeing this in Earthbound, which is set in 199X. Do P3 and P4 even bother doing this, or are they just outright set in 2006 and 2008? I'm not even sure. This never causes any kind of problems, and it doesn't really detract from the game, so I can't rank it too poorly, but it's just such a strange decision.
Erebus
Thieves' Den: Yeah, I'm not going to lie to you, I opened this once, realized that it wasn't mandatory, checked to see if any of the Steam achievements needed it, saw that they didn't, and never touched it again. I think twice during my game, I automatically had "do you want to call the Thieves' Den" popups, which I just accepted. I also completely ignored all of the Jose content in that one room. But because it was all optional and ignorable, I can't hate on it too much.
People Saying Any Jazz Song Sounds Like Persona
Persona Q Weddings
Mr. Edogawa
Afterschool Clubs
Hatsune Miku
Mementos: If I was going to pick out the biggest weakness of P5, I think it might be this. It took three games for them to finally figure out the obvious: that handcrafted dungeons are more fun and interesting and memorable than RNG dungeons. But then they just casually insert an RNG dungeon anyway. At least they were wise enough to make the characters randomly chat during it, but their chats get cut off whenever you do anything but move, so if you want to listen to the whole things, you have to constantly slow your progress. And like, I'm obviously aware that the exact composition of Mementos changes with each area, but it always just looks like a messed-up subway. I think the logic of it being the public's shared palace is cool, and the specific palaces branching off of it is cool, and going in to change the hearts of lesser villains is cool, and the twist that it's the final dungeon is cool... but the actual practical reality of Mementos is bad and boring. And then in Royal, they add Jose to give you something else to do by collecting stars for him, but don't put enough stars in each section of the dungeon for you to find, so if you want to actually fill out the star thing, you have to replay sections multiple times to get enough, which is way too much Mementos to handle, they squandered a chance to fix things. Speaking of which, if you just ignore it until 12/24, do you actually have to do the entire thing in one go? Like, to be clear, Mementos is still better than Tartarus and the P4 dungeons, because at least the sections of it are usually short, and the Mementos requests are rarely so difficult that you might lose and get sent back to the beginning (although there are a few), unlike Tartarus, which has actual bosses that WILL kick your ass. It's just boring and there's way too much of it.

- All You Do Is Eat Away At My Life
Marin Karin
Protagonist Death Game Overs
Ichiko Ohya
Fusion Accidents
Endless Rereleases Changing the Games
Kasumi and Sumire
Yosuke in the Camping Trip
Tartarus
Ken Romance
Nozomi Suemitsu
Remaking Persona 4
Burning Men's Soul
Yosuke Goes Through a Breakup (Video)
Metis

- Please Beat The Shit Out Of Me
Fuuka's Original Voice Actress
Persona 6 Development Time
Uncontrollable Party Members
Persona 5 Tactica
The Answer (P3)

- The Means By Which All Is Revealed
Social Links
Calling Cards
Elizabeth
Shoji Meguro
Rivers in the Desert
Persona 5

- Mine for the Slammin'!
Benjamin Franklin
Kamoshida as a Villain
Goro Akechi
Persona 5 Strikers Box Art
Suguru Kamoshida
The Subway Slammer
The Journey (P3)
October 4th (P3)
Persona 3
Velvet Room
Hiimdaisy Persona Comic
Junpei x Chidori
Mara
Evokers
Persona 4
Masayoshi Shido (Boss Fight)
Menus
Nyx

- OMG! We Are SO Awesome!
Tarot Cards
Takuto Maruki: I feel like this guy was written directly as a response to the audience saying "is it really heroic for the heroes to be brainwashing assholes into admitting their crimes?" Like, I feel like he's not actually an organic part of the story, that he was created specifically in response to people talking about the original game. "What if you take that idea to the extreme, where he just brainwashes everyone into being happy forever?" Now, ignoring all of the logistical problems with Maruki's idea ('what if two men are both in love with the same girl'), it is mildly interesting. But the characters don't really have anything interesting to say about it. They just wake up from the dream, then all decide immediately "man fuck this guy let's kick him a lot" and that's that. No one is even particularly tempted by his offer. But I do like the idea of Maruki holding no grudge against you, being completely polite and supportive even as you fight him. I like the idea of Futaba and Haru briefly seeing their dead parents, waking up, and there's just no tearful goodbye or anything, they just realize they're gone and there will never be another chance to see them ever again, that's great. I'm okay with Maruki's Palace, even though they REALLY had to break the rules a lot to justify why he has a palace despite being a Persona-user, and why he doesn't have a shadow despite having a palace. I like the idea that he realizes you're the Phantom Thieves just because he's smart and good at psychology... except that's not why he realizes it, he just sees you teleport out of the Metaverse one time. How lame. I don't know, Maruki is alright. He's a better final boss than Yaldabaoth, at least, and he utilizes Yaldabaoth's own gimmick of giving everyone happiness by removing choice better than he does, because he's not being faux-benevolent, he's actually trying to help.
School Concert (P4G)
Shooting Yourself in the Head
Akinari Kamiki
P5 Tarot Art
Aria of the Soul
President Tanaka
Rise Posters (P5)
Persona Kart (Hypothetical): Ignoring the playable characters, because that's obvious, and the plot, because I'm sure it would just be some OC trapping everyone in the Metaverse until they race their way to victory or something, I have two questions: what are the tracks, and who would the 1-3 "unexpected" characters be? For tracks, I imagine one for each of the high schools, the P3 mall, Tartarus, Inaba, the TV world in general (going between each of the palaces or whatever they're called), multiple palaces in P5, and Mementos. For the unexpected characters, I'm not sure. It'd be the parties, the Velvet Room attendants, Adachi... who else? Maruki? Strega? I'm just assuming you need a persona to play in Persona Kart, so no completely off-the-wall characters. I imagine that Rise, Fuuka, and Rise will be the announcers. Will they even bother including the spinoff characters, like Sophie, Zenikichi, Labrys... Redhead Sword Guy... uh... I know each spinoff has new character that's usually a waifu... Shit! Yes, the Tactica girl, too. Anyway, it's more interesting to me than the dancing games. I might play one, if it's on Steam.
Battle for Everyone's Souls
Joker (Smash)
King's Game: I rewatched all of the options for this. By the way, when I first played this, I saw the "nonalcoholic drinks" joke coming from a mile away. I like how all of the girls have different reactions, but are all still happy to be picked by you. And it's funny, too, because really, Yosuke is no less attractive than Yu. I guess Yosuke just doesn't have that Protagonist Aura, it's the curse of being the Bro. None of them escape with their dignity intact; even Junpei, who seemed to get everything at the end of his game, shows up in a sequel as a Little League coach while all of his friends are billionaires and adventurers and famous actors. Anyway, Rise laying her head on your lap is cute. Am I a child for snickering at Chie screaming out "Ah! Number 2?!" Chie being uncomfortable sitting on your lap is cute. Yukiko just sits on your lap and hugs you instead of just hugging you, wow, I would've expected that from Rise. I'm actually shocked that they bothered to make a piggyback animation for Yosuke. Anyway, this is a fun little hangout moment for the group, this is probably why P4 has the best cast chemistry, because they do the most detailed stupid silly things like this. P5 has probably the MOST moments where they all hang out outside of the plot, but they're usually not super long or complex, and mostly are just all of the girls complaining about Ryuji. P3 has only a few.
Kanji Tatsumi
Adolf Hitler (P2)
Magician Arcana
Maya
Akihiko (P4AU)
P3 Persona Awakening Cutscene
Sadayo Kawakami
FeMC (P3P)
Funky Student
Cosmic Tower Burger
Tae Takemi
The Fox (P4)
Shiki-Ouji

- I Am Thou, Thou Art I...
Mr. Urshimaru
Persona (Carl Jung): The social masks we use to present to the world, in order to deal with social situations? Yeah, sure, I believe that. But despite all of his great research and work, Carl Jung never realized that screaming PERSONAAAAA into the air lets you summon magical powers. How ironic. In all seriousness, I'm sure this was a huge breakthrough for psychology and literature or whatever, but I don't really care about that lol.
Reach Out to the Truth
Pancakes
Adachi Cube
Munehisa Iwai: The ex-yakuza who runs the airsoft shop. When I went to Japan a week ago, I was SHOCKED to actually see an airsoft shop selling realistic-looking guns, I guess that's a real thing over there. I like this guy's design, I like his little storyline where he's trying to stay close to his son and get him out of that life, I like how his contribution after you're arrested is to pull strings to get you a better time in prison (the only one who'd actually be helping you). He's perfectly fine as a confidant. But he loses points for requiring guts 4 to start, and yet being available when you'll only have guts 2 or even guts 1. And then later, he needs guts 5 to continue! Completely absurd.
Dancing Spinoff Games
Futaba Romance
Labrys
Persona Pokerap
Cheesing the Game with Overpowered Special Personas at Level 1
Morgana
Shadow Labrys
Morgana saying Go to Sleep
Meat Dimension
Operation Babe Hunt
Silent Protagonists: There really aren't many series left that do the silent protagonist thing. All that comes to mind is Mario, Pokmon, Legend of Zelda, and Persona. I'm sure I'm forgetting something, but it's definitely become rarer over time. Although, obviously the Persona examples aren't pure examples, since Joker has plenty of personality, screaming out PERSONAAAAAAA and occasionally saying things in his very deep voice.
I'm gonna renovate your ass!: I mean, classic Kanji.
Green Persona 6
Yu Narukumi
Junes Department Store
P4G Shuffle Time
Heritage Palladion Liberator
Nanako Dojima
Deleted Yosuke Gay Romance
Cut P5R Harem Ending
Benjamin Franklin (Musician)
P5's Translation
The Fog (Song): I don't remember this song at all. It's not particularly mysterious or dangerous like I associate the fog with, it's much more... action-y? Very odd choice, but I guess it's for when the fog appears in the real world, so whatever. Honestly, not one of the best Persona's got to offer.
Battle for Everyone's Slams
Orbit: You'll Never See It Coming
Tatsumi Port Island
Toaster Aigis
Shadow Okumura (Boss Fight)
Lotus Juice (Rapper)

- I Am Thou, Thou Art I...
Mr. Urshimaru
Reach Out to the Truth
Pancakes
Adachi Cube: The humor here is derived from Adachi's expressions, and he's great at them. I never really played with these sorts of things as a kid, but I am definitely an appreciator of silly faces. I think part of why Adachi is still loved is just how much he flips out at the end of the game after acting like a normal guy the entire time.
Dancing Spinoff Games: I have played zero of these, although I probably would have if they were on Steam. The only non-PC games I bother playing anymore are Switch, and only because Nintendo never ports things except to other Nintendo consoles. I'm not offended by these dancing games' existence, I guess? I get it. They're just an excuse to use these characters more. People get attached to these fictional characters and want more of the, and these dancing games are cheaper than making full new games, so here we are. But I also have no particular desire to play them. At least they use the actual models of the characters, and aren't just chibifying everything like Tactica.
Futaba Romance
Labrys: Jesus Christ, her accent. I wanted to slam her head into a table. I'm sure in Japanese, she has that Osakan accent or whatever, but her ridiculous Baaaaahstan accent made my ears bleed. Despite this, I don't hate her. She's not great, but the idea of Aigis discovering she has a still-extant younger "sister," and that she's no longer the last of her kind, has some merit. They interact with each other enough to be worth the effort. She has a sufficiently sad backstory with the evil scientists forcing her to kill one of her sisters. I like how she appears as the "human" student council president, when you just know immediately that she's not just because they wouldn't have made a portrait for her if that was all she was. Man, that game's plot made no sense.
Persona Pokerap
Cheesing the Game with Overpowered Special Personas at Level 1
Morgana
Shadow Labrys: Why did she pretend to be evil Teddie again? Oh well. Shadow Labrys is kind of boring? She's just a bad guy. Look, I'm all for a cackling wackjob villain who makes silly faces, but I don't know how far I can take that. Is there supposed to be some super complex meaning behind her being a shadow with her own persona? I won't lie to you, I don't 100% remember all of the persona rules.
Morgana saying Go to Sleep
Meat Dimension
Operation Babe Hunt: To me, the highlight of this is the later scene where Akihiko is frustrated that he failed just as hard as Junpei, and can't believe it. Operation Babe Hunt and his reaction to it are like the one time he cracks as the 'guy who is always completely put together. Oh wait, was this the sequence where Junpei gets hit on by a woman who in the original is trans, and he flips out and runs away, but in the remake was changed to be a wackjob conspiracy theorist? Probably for the best that that was changed. It's fun that this ultimately culminates in meeting Aigis, I guess. In the end, they actually did hunt down a babe.
Green Persona 6
Yu Narukumi
Junes Department Store
P4G Shuffle Time
Heritage Palladion Liberator
Nanako Dojima: Perfectly fine character. This might be the only character in the series whose defining moment happens when she's not present. She spends the entire game greeting you when you get home, and then finally when she's not there and you just enter the house and can immediately control yourself, it's actually a little shocking and sad.
Deleted Yosuke Gay Romance
Cut P5R Harem Ending
Benjamin Franklin (Musician)
P5's Translation
Battle for Everyone's Slams: Oh okay, a Space Jam x Nyx theme mashup, fine. I won't lie to you: this is worse than the regular Space Jam theme, it didn't need the woman singing over it. I guess I see the joke here of Nyx and the Space Jam villains both being space beings coming to Earth to... I literally cannot remember what the bad guys in Space Jam wanted to do.
Orbit: You'll Never See It Coming
Tatsumi Port Island
Toaster Aigis
Shadow Okumura (Boss Fight)
Lotus Juice (Rapper)

- Gasp! The Enemy!
Urban Fantasy (Genre)
Koromaru
BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle
Hiimdaisy Persona 4 Comic Dub
Magic Spell Names
Fictional High Schoolers Dating Adults in Anime
Haru Okumura
Principal Kobayakawa
Erebus
People Saying Any Jazz Song Sounds Like Persona
Persona Q Weddings
Mr. Edogawa
Afterschool Clubs
Hatsune Miku

- All You Do Is Eat Away At My Life
Marin Karin
Protagonist Death Game Overs
Ichiko Ohya: Maybe this sounds dismissive, but I think the main purpose of female s-links in these games is to be waifus. I'm here for tropes. Give me a noblewoman who doesn't understand the plebs, give me a tsundere, give me an older woman who can't believe she's in love with you, I'm set. What does Ohya bring to the table? Nothing. She's an alcoholic journalist whose peak in the game is telling you, a 16-year-old, how to find a dangerous yakuza. She's not even pretty compared to the other girls! I just refuse to believe that this is anyone's favorite P5 waifu. Also, her confidant abilities are completely useless.
Fusion Accident
Endless Rereleases Changing the Games
Kasumi and Sumire
Yosuke in the Camping Trip
Tartarus
Ken Romance
Nozomi Suemitsu
Remaking Persona 4
Burning Men's Soul
Yosuke Goes Through a Breakup (Video)
Metis

- Please Beat The Shit Out Of Me
Fuuka's Original Voice Actress
Persona 6 Development Time
Uncontrollable Party Members
Persona 5 Tactica
The Answer (P3): This is probably the worst thing in all of Persona, overall. There are worse and crappier parts of the games, but this is the worst large, extended segment of any game. It's just the same identical dungeon crawl over and over again, without any of the high school life that makes the games what they are, starring a character who doesn't feel emotions properly, while everyone is depressed the entire time, all in the service of explaining why the protagonist died at the end of the real game, instead of just leaving it as it was, which was already perfect. And let's not even go into Yukari learning that saving him will doom the world, and then she just wants to anyway. The entire thing is just miserable. But you know what? You can't accuse P3R of compromising on its vision of just remaking P3 exactly but with prettier graphics. It's just the exact same thing as the original The Answer... I'm told. I didn't bother playing it. 38% positive reviews on Steam, no thank you.

- The Means By Which All Is Revealed
Social Links
Calling Cards
Elizabeth
Shoji Meguro
Rivers in the Desert
Persona 5: The best game in the series, I think. It's got style, atmosphere, wacky characters, and the best gameplay the series has ever seen. Like many people, this was my introduction to the series. Is this the FF7 of the series? It does occupy the same space as the most newbie-friendly entry, but it doesn't quite have the same crazy number of spinoffs.

- Mine for the Slammin'!
Benjamin Franklin
Kamoshida as a Villain
Goro Akechi
Persona 5 Strikers Box Art
Suguru Kamoshida
The Subway Slammer
The Journey (P3): AKA the actual Persona 3, we're not talking about The Answer. It's great! It has its flaws, but it's very good. Like yeah, Tartarus sucks. But it has by far the best atmosphere. You really do get the feeling of being a bunch of kids who have no idea what they're doing up against forces they don't understand. Like, how many scenes are there where they say "what should we do now?" "I dunno, let's just keep doing what we were already doing, I guess." And it's funny, because like I said, they have by far the largest support structure (a giant corporation). Is it my favorite of the parties? Not sure. P4 and P5 feel much more friendly, whereas P3 feels more like "these are the other people with personas, we've got to work together." Like, I can't think of a single Mitsuru/Yukari interaction. I remember one comment by Mitsuru where she's like "I can't wear this, it's too cute, only Yukari could pull it off," and it's like... you should have just written that so they're talking together. And while I remember Yukari's interactions with Junpei, I can't remember a single thing she ever says to Akihiko. This isn't really a problem for P4 and P5, where you have a pretty clear idea of what everyone else thinks of each other. And the city has much less personality than Tokyo and Inaba, of course. But overall? It's still a rock solid game. Maybe it has some flaws that got ironed out in later entries, but what series doesn't?
October 4th (P3)
Persona 3: I'm torn between P4 and P3 for the second best game in the series. I think I have to give it to P3. It's got atmosphere for days, and I think I like the characters more as individuals than P4 and P5. It is the jankiest, has by far the worst dungeon (barely tolerable, to be honest), and I don't particularly like Strega as your rivals, but I do think its good qualities decisively outweigh its bad ones.
Velvet Room
Hiimdaisy Persona Comic
Junpei x Chidori
Mara
Evokers
Persona 4: P4 really does feel like it comes between P3 and P5, in terms of everything. Gameplay, sure, but also just the writing. It's got probably the best interparty banter in the series, it's got the best Bro (despite Yosuke's comments about Kanji), it's sort of got the best overall 'normal people on a wacky adventure' feeling (in that P3's cast feels like teenagers who have no idea what they're doing, and P5's feels like they know exactly what they're doing, while P4's feels somewhere in-between).
Masayoshi Shido (Boss Fight): So, someone nominated "my favorite non-final boss," which I have decided is Shido. Hear me out. First off, there are definitely bosses with better imagery, like I like Shadow Chie sitting on top of other women to support herself or Shadow Kanj--you know what, yes, P4 bosses had better imagery in general. But I am of the opinion that Shido should have just been the final boss of P5 (discounting Maruki, who came later). Yaldabaoth is whatever, he's just a boring evil god. Shido is who you have a connection to, Shido is who you care about. Shido is the man who impacted the lives of Joker, Makoto, Haru, Futaba, and... well, I guess he didn't try to ruin Ryuji, Ann, or Yusuke's lives, but still. He's the guy who's personally been a big asshole to you the entire game, he's the guy who's been built up the entire game, he's the guy. He's the only other human boss in the game who comes even remotely close to matching Kamoshida in terms of how badly you want to kick his ass. And the fight you do have with him is great. He starts off glorious, dressed like some kind of shogun, on his fancy golden chariot thing of people praying to him, then he turns into Senator Armstrong. Yeah, the fight is VERY easy, but that's fine, I don't play Persona to be challenged. He's not exactly the best boss ever or anything, but you at least have some kind of emotional connection built up at this point and want to see him get his ass kicked. Like, there was proper build-up and atmosphere and payoff. Just rewrite the game so the Shido fight is even more audacious, then cut the entire Yaldabaoth/Mementos section, I don't care... but I'll admit, the idea that Shido's allies just try to cover everything up and screw you over anyway IS good, so I'm a little torn. Hm, is it cheating to interpret "my favorite non-final boss fight" as the boss fight that's the most like a final boss fight, that I describe as if it was a final boss fight?
Menus
Nyx: AKA the longest final boss battle in any video game. I'm sure that's not true, but man, when Yukari gets mind controlled into healing her and you lose, that's like 80 minutes of progress lost. Conceptually, the idea of a boss with a form for every Tarot card is cool. In practice, however, it means that she has like 20 forms, and it just takes foreverrrrrrrrrrrrr. Nyx is also the first "I'm a gigantic faux-benevolent super deity that wants to enslave/destroy humanity" in the series. I assume. P1 and P2 don't count. She IS more interesting than Izanami and Yaldabaoth, at least. She does have a lot of style points, the battle with her does FEEL epic and important. Like, Izanami wishes she had this level of style. Yaldabaoth feels epic, but he also never felt like an overwhelming force the same way Nyx does. For all of P3's pacing issues, it does do a good job of building up Nyx. You are made very clear on the fact that you're going to get your ass annihilated if you try to fight her, but you try to fight her anyway because of willpower or whatever, and you still don't even really beat her, you just seal her away at the cost of your own life. I think for the reason of presentation, Nyx gets a lot of bonus points for me. Yaldabaoth doesn't quite feel equal to the heroes' power, and you never really get the impression that he's going to win. Nyx actually does feel like she's stronger than you.

- OMG! We Are SO Awesome!
Tarot Cards
School Concert (P4G)
Shooting Yourself in the Head
Akinari Kamiki
P5 Tarot Art
Aria of the Soul
President Tanaka
Rise Posters (P5)
Battle for Everyone's Souls
Joker (Smash)
Kanji Tatsumi
Adolf Hitler (P2)
Magician Arcana
Maya
Akihiko (P4AU)
P3 Persona Awakening Cutscene
Sadayo Kawakami
FeMC (P3P)
Funky Student
Cosmic Tower Burger
Tae Takemi
The Fox (P4)
Shiki-Ouji: So, these are some kind of invisible demons that Japanese wizards can give form to via paper? I mean, that's a cool concept, I see why it's persisted as a legend. These things do LOOK cool, I'll give them that. I don't even know what they look like, but it's definitely cool, some kind of origami spike man. Dunno why they're immune to physical attacks, but it's fine. I mean, look, did you expect me to have much to say about an obscure Japanese demon that has zero presence outside of Japan?
No-Good Tora: Yoshida is such an odd confidant. I think he was my first max on both playthroughs, just because he's one of the only night-only confidants and always gives you a rank no matter what. He has a mildly compelling storyline, and you can tell he's one of the good adults because he doesn't look comically evil. Having him be there to show the good, uncorrupted side of politics and the world is a good idea. Now just imagine if it was another older woman waifu.

colliding posted...

I like Nozomi Suemitsu. One of the more interesting and funny P3 social links

Boo

MacArrowny posted...

Did you skip my nom?

Wasnt that Maya? I did her.

How dare you break the sacred rules of ranking topics and nominate two things at once.

_stingers_ posted...

you skipped this and I will never forgive you

Why you nominated Shadow Labrys instead of regular Labrys, I can't possibly guess, but I'll compensate by putting both of them on the next list.

Numel

- Gasp! The Enemy!
Urban Fantasy (Genre)
Koromaru
BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle: Oh, I didn't realize this was a crossover thing? Okay, let me check the series... I know Persona, I don't know Under Night In-Birth, I've heard of RWBY but know nothing about it, I played like ten minutes of Senran Kagura, I don't know Akatsuki Blitzkampf. Well, okay then. Tons of Persona content, though. Look, man, BlazBlue is like the ultimate 2010~ era game series to me. I played exactly one game, I don't even remember which one it was, but I remember it had DLC characters and that I didn't understand the plot at all despite there being endless amounts of talking. Looking on Steam, I see I could buy this for 4 dollars, but I already own P4AU, and I suck at fighting games regadless, so I think I will pass, I didn't really like the series and it was too anime trope-y for me in general. Wait... Are these sprites directly reused from Ultimax? As in, just reused assets, and that's why there are no P5 characters in it? Man, whatever.
Hiimdaisy Persona 4 Comic Dub
Magic Spell Names
Fictional High Schoolers Dating Adults in Anime
Haru Okumura: EASILY the most pointless character in P5. No one touches Koromaru, of course, but Haru does her best. She joins 85% of the way through the vanilla game, incredibly late, and then she does nothing for the rest of the game. She never has like a moment where she saves the day using her skills or something. And I've said this before, but Haru should have had some kind of moment where she at least doubts the other Phantom Thieves and is upset that they were playing with forces they didn't understand and her father died because of it. Instead, Haru isn't even particularly upset that her father is dead, she's more like "ugh I have so much work to do now," she's immediately on-board with everything else the party does, and that's just that. See, I'm fine with the idea of a rich girl party member who's alienated from the world she knows and ends up palling around with the working class heroes, that's fine, that's good. But so little is done with this character. Ryuji, Ann, and Yusuke are there through the entire game, so we get plenty of them. Makoto and Futaba do all of the intelligence-based stuff, and Makoto has her storyline with her sister. Morgana is connected to all of the magical aspects of the plot. Even Sumire is at least connected to the final boss. Haru, though? Haru joins so late that she does nothing, and her connection to what is going on is that her dad was whacked by Shido. She isn't even like "Man I am angry at Shido and/or Akechi for my dad being killed, I can't wait to confront them." It is 100% pure business for her when you actually take Shido down, and she's as friendly to Akechi as everyone else. You'd think that throughout Sae's and Maruki's palaces, she'd just be seething with hatred, but I guess she's just too good a person. Hey, you know what good people are, narratively? Boring. ... Solid waifu, though. And it's a shame, because I think that of all the Phantom Thieves, I like her costume the most, and her gimmick of being this demure rich girl who carries a human-sized axe and grenade launcher is great.
Principal Kobayakawa
Erebus: I mean, it looks cool and all, but it has the misfortune of being associated with The Answer, which is an automatic -1000 points. I think I dislike everything about The Answer, it's all of the worst parts of P3 distilled.
People Saying Any Jazz Song Sounds Like Persona
Persona Q Weddings
Mr. Edogawa: I'm going to be 100% real with you, I skipped almost all of this guy's dialogue. After a while, I realized that he never says anything important, and he's just there to tell you about stupid mystical crap that forms some of the game's background, maybe, but that you lose nothing by not knowing. I know I said that I like wacky silly teachers, but there's a limit, and this guy is over it.
Afterschool Clubs
Hatsune Miku

- All You Do Is Eat Away At My Life
Marin Karin: I have never clicked this and never will. But I know why it's here, of course. Mitsuru is just so annoying in P3 because of this stupid useless move that she refuses to stop spamming. Not that Yukari is much better, throwing out 50 HP healing items instead of using her party healing skills, but still. I'm not confident if Mitsuru ever actually brainwashed an enemy for me, but even if she did, I am confident that it wasn't necessary.
Protagonist Death Game Overs
Fusion Accident
Endless Rereleases Changing the Games
Kasumi and Sumire
Yosuke in the Camping Trip
Tartarus
Ken Romance
Nozomi Suemitsu: Does literally anyone like this guy? Not only is he mean-spirited and a coward, but he commits the ultimate sin in anime games: he's ugly. I'm not sure if he's the worst s-link in the series, but he's definitely down there. He's buoyed mainly by the fact that it's very easy to max out his s-link, which isn't true for a lot of characters, but that is indeed very low praise.
Remaking Persona 4
Burning Men's Soul
Yosuke Goes Through a Breakup (Video)
Metis

- Please Beat The Shit Out Of Me
Fuuka's Original Voice Actress
Persona 6 Development Time
Uncontrollable Party Members
Persona 5 Tactica

- The Means By Which All Is Revealed
Social Links
Calling Cards
Elizabeth
Shoji Meguro
Rivers in the Desert

- Mine for the Slammin'!
Benjamin Franklin
Kamoshida as a Villain
Goro Akechi
Persona 5 Strikers Box Art
Suguru Kamoshida
The Subway Slammer
October 4th (P3)
Velvet Room
Hiimdaisy Persona Comic
Junpei x Chidori
Mara
Evokers
Menus

- OMG! We Are SO Awesome!
Tarot Cards
School Concert (P4G)
Shooting Yourself in the Head
Akinari Kamiki
P5 Tarot Art: It's like I said, Tarot cards are cool. They are cool! That is why they're enduring. And it's extremely easy to make Tarot cards look cool. P5 does a good job of it. I like how they keep the red theme, I like the pure black faces, I like how you can't even really tell what each is without reading the text or being very knowledgeable about Tarot, I like the goofy smile on XVII as she drinks wine, the only thing I don't like are the cards they added. "Faith" sort of fits the theme, but "Consultant" for Maruki? God, at least make it "Vizier" or something. I do like how its image is that of a false benevolent god that everyone worships, though.
Aria of the Soul
President Tanaka: I like him. He's a cruel, greedy piece of shit, and yet he's not a complete monster. I like his ridiculous threats when he tells you not to share what he says, I like how you can buy shady garbage from him online in P5. He's just a generally fun character who fills out the world a little more.
Rise Posters (P5)
Battle for Everyone's Souls
Joker (Smash)
Kanji Tatsumi: I was SHOCKED to see how popular Kanji is in that B8 ranking topic. I had absolutely no idea that he was that beloved. Maybe you've seen this meme post online, but it's sort of true: the thing about P4 is that all of the characters individually say "I wonder if what society expects of me is what I actually want..." and then they each say "Actually yes it is." It happens to Yukiko and Naoto, obviously, but it also happens to Kanji. "Oh no I wonder if I'm gay? Oh I'm not, I just like sewing." Kanji actually realizing he is gay would have been more interesting! I guess that's too much to ask from a game from 2008, though. Also, I'll let you in on a secret: discounting Shinjiro and Akechi for being temporary party members, each game only has two male human members, the Dumb Bro and the Guy Who Joins Later (Junpei/Akihiko, Yosuke/Kanji, Ryuji/Yusuke), and after that it's pure waifus. And I will admit that Kanji is the best of them by far, because he still does have an arc. And yes I'm ignoring Ken because he is a child whatever. Are Kanji and Yukiko also the only characters in the series to not use a real weapon? ... Anyway, as far as delinquent thug anime characters go, he's fine. He's FINE, but I'm not in love with him.
Adolf Hitler (P2)
Magician Arcana
Maya: Wow, remember MMOs? I feel like this dates P3 more than anything else besides the flip phones. I don't even know who still plays WoW, MMOs were popular because of the novelty of seeing that many people online in 2005. Anyway, the idea of this is fun, and making your teacher realize that you were the one playing with her at the last second is funny. Wonder how she reacted to learning you died like ten minutes later.
Akihiko (P4AU)
P3 Persona Awakening Cutscene
Sadayo Kawakami
FeMC (P3P)
Funky Student
Cosmic Tower Burger
Tae Takemi
The Fox (P4)

- I Am Thou, Thou Art I...
Mr. Urshimaru: I used to be a teacher, and maybe I'll go back to teaching eventually, and this is the man I aspire to be: throwing chalk at children's heads. Joker got what he deserved. Although the fact that he requires Proficiency 5 to dodge in early semester 2 is insane, this man's skill is out of this world. I like how this random teacher gets targeted by Maruki for a nice guy brainwashing, too.
Reach Out to the Truth
Pancakes: Oh, I forgot to rank this earlier, my bad. Pancakes are okay. I think waffles have pretty definitively won the pancake vs waffle debate, right? Pancakes require syrup, they're heavier, they need plates and silverware despite being breakfast food you want to eat quickly... Sorry people, I'm a Waffle Boy. Oh, and Akechi is an idiot.
Futaba Romance
Persona Pokerap
Cheesing the Game with Overpowered Special Personas at Level 1: I mean, I respect it. I'm fine with it, it's not like I consider the gameplay of Persona to be sacrosanct. Sometimes you just want to blast through a game with zero effort.
Morgana
Morgana saying Go to Sleep
Meat Dimension: I had to look this up, and I was surprised I sort of remembered this. I mean, it's a fine random comment.
Green Persona 6
Yu Narukumi
Junes Department Store
P4G Shuffle Time: Man, I'm just going to say it: I'm glad P5 cut this. It's not that the idea is bad, it's that after almost every battle, it's eating up just slightly more time. I've got a million shadows to kill on my way to finishing this dungeon, I don't have time for this.
Heritage Palladion Liberator
Deleted Yosuke Gay Romance
Cut P5R Harem Ending: The fact that this was only discovered via hacking the Chinese version of the game is pretty funny. Tragic that Sae still isn't part of the harem, though. I mean, this is a funny concept, Maruki basically bribing Joker into accepting his bullshit world with a harem of pretty girls, that is a pretty good way to get him to agree. "Look here, open your mouth!" Ann, please, not in front of everyone. I like how this also requires brainwashing the party member girls, I guess they just don't have Joker's willpower to resist Maruki, that's fine. "He did all this for us..." Makoto, he turned off the lights to make an entrance for himself. No, but seriously, the girls are kind of out-of-character here? Like, I'm fine with the idea of Maruki brainwashing all of the girls into being in a harem with Joker, but they don't really retain their personalities at all in their dialogue.
Benjamin Franklin (Musician)
P5's Translation
Orbit: You'll Never See It Coming
Tatsumi Port Island
Toaster Aigis
Shadow Okumura (Boss Fight)
Lotus Juice (Rapper)

colliding posted...

I think the wild thing about Akechi is that he's so popular with the fandom. Even the party itself is kind of rooting for him to redeem himself by the end and no one even cares that he killed Haru's dad. Not even Haru herself really.

trdl23 posted...

In fairness, Haru witnessed firsthand that her dad would have no problem killing her off to sate his ambition.

I reject this explanation for Haru not caring because her ideal world created by Maruki is just the normal world, but her dad is still alive.

trdl23 posted...

Nominate Sumire

I already did her! Nominate someone else.

Washington

But I initially was going to put "State of matter"

Johnbobb posted...

so I know by all means Futaba is a lot closer to the protagonist's age than like Takemi and Kawakami but the Futaba romance felt so gross to me; like hey, wanna date your emotionally stunted little adoptive sister? Like her entire social link was basically Joker being an older brother to her, making her a romance option felt super uncomfortable

I didn't think of it that way, that is valid, but it's all so anime tropey that that sort of thing doesn't matter to me unless it's very absurd.

- I Am Thou, Thou Art I...
Reach Out to the Truth
Futaba Romance: ... Why was this even nominated? I mean, it's fine. I think we all want a tiny gamer girl waifu, that's the entire NO I said I'd stop with the Danganronpa references. Anyway, I think we all remember Sojiro telling you not to date Futaba, then being like "Well it wouldn't be that big a deal I guses."
Persona Pokerap
Morgana
Morgana saying Go to Sleep
Green Persona 6: I mean, the theory that its color scheme will be green makes sense to me. I have no problem with it, except that we won't find out until 2034, when they run out of remakes and P5 spinoffs.
Yu Narukumi
Junes Department Store
Heritage Palladion Liberator
Deleted Yosuke Gay Romance
Benjamin Franklin (Musician)
P5's Translation
Orbit: You'll Never See It Coming
Tatsumi Port Island: I'm very neutral about this city, to be honest. P4's small, slightly-dying town works perfectly for "everyone knows everyone" feeling, the fact that Dojima is in charge of such an important case, and the scale of the fog. It has so much personality. Tokyo works perfectly for being this giant slick metropolis that you could never see all of in a million years. Tatsumi Port Island is just a place. It's just a nice modern city. If I was going to pick out one thing about P3 I think doesn't work as well as the rest of it does, it might be the setting, it doesn't really add anything to the game's themes, I think. I don't know what would be better than just "a secondary city in Japan," but it does not ooze personality like P4's and P5's settings do.
Toaster Aigis
Shadow Okumura (Boss Fight)
Lotus Juice (Rapper)

- Gasp! The Enemy!
Urban Fantasy (Genre)
Koromaru
Hiimdaisy Persona 4 Comic Dub
Magic Spell Names: I'm not going to lie to you, I sort of hate these. I can never remember which one is the +attack or +defense or +evasion boosts, and I have to check every single time. I can remember the names for each of the attack spells, at least. This is one area where I think "generic JRPGs" have an edge over Persona. Yeah, having these weird foreign names is cool and lends some verisimilitude... but also, I would like it when if a persona tries to learn Auto-Marakuja, I just know what actually means.
Fictional High Schoolers Dating Adults in Anime
Principal Kobayakawa
People Saying Any Jazz Song Sounds Like Persona
Persona Q Weddings: I had to look this up, I didn't know this existed, I briefly thought this was a mistype for P5T's wedding dream sequence. I watched several of them on youtube, and I won't lie to you, I was surprised to see Yu x Ken was an option. "Do I look like a girl to you?" "Yes." "No I don't, I have pants and short hair!" Dude, you clearly are wearing shorts. This must be some insane person's fetish, this isn't even the first time Ken has gotten into one of these relationships in a Persona game. Koromaru, too, huh? I like how unhappy everyone looks in these, that's the same expression I would have. I don't know, conceptually this could be funny, but the repetitiveness and low-effort chibi art harms the actual practice.
Afterschool Clubs

- All You Do Is Eat Away At My Life
Hatsune Miku
Protagonist Death Game Overs
Fusion Accident
Endless Rereleases Changing the Games
Kasumi and Sumire
Yosuke in the Camping Trip: What an absolute asshole. Again, the context would be completely different if they kept in the gay lover storyline, but since they cut it, he's just a jerk to Kanji for basically no reason.
Tartarus
Ken Romance
Remaking Persona 4: Everyone joked that Atlus would remake the old games before making a new game, and then it just stopped being a joke. It's like... P3 and P4 were perfectly fine as they were, especially P4. They were not flawed masterpieces that could benefit from advancements in technology, like Resident Evil 1 to the REmake. And the fact that they have this super nice and shiny HD look to them now, when they're still set in 2006 and 2008? Like, it was perfectly fine for them to look like old shitty PS2 games because that was appropriate for when they were made. Oh well, at least we can look forward to them all being remade AGAIN after Persona 6 comes out. What game has been remade the most times? I don't even know. I think I'll probably skip this one, P3R had nothing new to offer except remixes of songs and snazzy All-Out Attack images, which you can just see on youtube now, and P4G was way too long anyway. By the third semester, I just wanted the game to end, I was happy that P5R's third semester is only a month long. Do you realize that if the Persona 4 characters were real, they'd all be in their thirties by now? Not even early thirties.
Burning Men's Soul
Yosuke Goes Through a Breakup (Video)
Metis

- Please Beat The Shit Out Of Me
Fuuka's Original Voice Actress
Persona 6 Development Time: Two years from P3 to P4, eight years from P4 to P5, and nine years so far since P5. Remember the golden age of Final Fantasy, when they were pumping out a game every year or two? It's kind of incredible how popular this series is relative to how slowly it produces games. And I know it has a quintillion spinoffs, but still.
Uncontrollable Party Members
Persona 5 Tactica: Persona 5 Strikers feels almost like a real game. It has the look, it has the style, it has complexity, it has a storyline to justify what's going on. It has its flaws, but it feels like a genuine attempt was made to be a real sequel, even if it just completely ignores Royal's additions. Tactica, on the other hand, feels like a low-effort cash grab. Like, when I think of spinoffs, I think of a spectrum, right? On the right, you have spinoffs that are basically as good as the real games, like FFT. On the left, you have zero effort spinoffs that are just there to make a quick buck, like Resident Evil Gaiden or Soul Calibur Legends. And there are games in the middle where they had effort and ambition, but lacked skill or time, like Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls (I'm trying to stop with the Danganronpa references, but I just can'tttttt). Tactica is definitely on the left end of the spectrum. I can kind of appreciate the idea of taking the established characters and putting them into this totally new setting with a completely different tone, but it's just so badly done. None of the characters matter except the new girl, the entire cognitive world is now just one guy's insecurities about his family (a random new middle-aged man we don't care about), and like, you're supposed to get invested in the efforts of these rebels against their evil overlords, but all of them are just abstract people wearing silly hats who are just cognitions and will disappear as soon as you defeat the bad guys because they aren't real, so none of them matter. So it's like, yeah, it's just a shitty spinoff, but at the same time, Strikers came out not that long before this, and felt like a real game, so this is just completely embarrassing by comparison. I wouldn't rank it THAT poorly if it wasn't sold for a full 60 dollars, but it was, so fuck this game.

- The Means By Which All Is Revealed
Social Links
Calling Cards
Elizabeth
Shoji Meguro
Rivers in the Desert
Benjamin Franklin
Kamoshida as a Villain

- Mine for the Slammin'!
Goro Akechi: Akechi plays the pivotal role of "evil Persona-user" to show how the heroes could misuse their powers or whatever, just like Strega and Adachi before him. Where he differs, however, is that he's much more outwardly silly. Adachi pretends to be a normal person until the last 5% of the game, whereupon he starts making wacky faces, and Revolver Jesus, Chidori, and Guy Whose Name I Don't Remember are pretty lowkey the entire game. Akechi, though, barely acts normally for the first half of the game, then starts acting like a wackjob for the rest of it, which I appreciate. It makes him much more entertaining, even if the motive for all of his actions is ultimately just "I have a lot of daddy issues." Like, there's a reason why everyone talks about Akechi: he's running around doing evil things, screaming about how he hates the power of friendship, making silly faces, screaming about how he wants to hurt enemies when he's the navigator, and being vaguely homoerotic toward Joker. In a game where every all of the villains between Kamoshida and Shido are either boring assholes (Kaneshiro, Okumura), not villains (Futaba, Sae), or don't interact with the heroes at all (SIU Director), Akechi is a shot of energy in the arm. He's got a great death scene where he sort of redeems himself, even if it's less emotionally resonant than Adachi being ashamed after realizing Dojima still sort of cares about him, he's got a good arc in the final semester where he's like "fuck it, I don't care if beating Maruki means I die again, I'll do it anyway," like, by the late game, all of the characters besides Joker (and I guess Sumire, but let's not talk about her) have already finished their arcs and are just basically satisfied with what they're doing, and then Akechi walks in and acts like a maniac and provides all of the energy for Sae's, Shido's, and Maruki's palaces. I do wish there was a scene where Haru or Futaba could be like "man I don't like Akechi because he killed my parent," but so be it, I understand that Futaba is a plot device to be the computer person and provide cognitive pscience information, and Haru is just there to be... I don't even know why Haru's in the game, to be honest, she's completely pointless as a character. Imagine the game without Akechi, it would be so much more boring for the last third.
Persona 5 Strikers Box Art
Suguru Kamoshida
The Subway Slammer
October 4th (P3)
Velvet Room
Hiimdaisy Persona Comic
Junpei x Chidori
Mara
Evokers
Menus: First, let me say that I like the color scheming for all of them. But more importantly, I think everyone can agree that P5 raised the bar for menus in video games. I think sort of Assassin's Creed 1 ruined video game menus. This is weird, but hear me out: AC1 has these very slick, minimalist menus that look like futuristic computer things because in the context of the game, you aren't Altair, you're his descendant reliving his memories via technology. It makes sense in that context, but then all subsequent games used it, and other games that were not set in futuristic contexts also used it (look at the menus in the modern God of War games, where they just look like glowing minimalistic computers). The fact that Persona goes out of its way to have moody, clean menus, where you see the characters woosh around and look cool, is greatly to its benefit. Like, just the menu for Tae's store, where you see her silhouette against a white background moving around, putting her legs up on a table, looking at a clipboard, etc, brilliant. Absolutely perfect, 10/10. P4 is the weakest here, but I'm sure its remake will alter it to be more like P5's anyway. These have so much more personality than like Final Fantasy menus. You know what, that's a lie, I haven't played a FF since FF13, for all I know, they have incredible menus as well. I won't look it up, and I know I'm wrong about this, but technically I could be right.

- OMG! We Are SO Awesome!
Tarot Cards: I think the entire reason that tarot cards have survived into the modern day when tea leaf reading and chicken bone throwing haven't is purely that they're cool. That's it, that's the entire reason, they're just cool. And they are cool! It's a really cool, compelling idea, which is also why I think it jumped from Europe to Asia as well. Persona is far from the only Japanese thing I've seen using Tarot cards as a motif. And the cards are integrated into the games pretty well, too! Like, sorry, P3, but no one cares about the Lesser Arcana, we're all here purely for the cool Major Arcana.
School Concert (P4G)
Shooting Yourself in the Head
Akinari Kamiki: Good, this was who I thought it was, I googled his name just to be safe. That's something about Japanese names, like, obviously they need to be kept the same, but I won't pretend that I never get confused. Anyway, this is one of the more memorable s-links in the series. It wouldn't work at all in the more upbeat P4 and especially P5, but in the more sullen P3? He fits perfectly. This man who's only a little older than you and who knows his time is almost at an end and has more-or-less accepted it fits perfectly into a game about the bulk of humanity no longer caring and Nyx coming to cleanse them because of it.
Aria of the Soul
Rise Posters (P5)
Battle for Everyone's Souls: Very solid final boss song, I like how it integrates the Velvet Room singing, too. Reminds me of when I first played P3, and Yukari got mind-controlled into healing Nyx to full on one of her last phases, and everyone told me "oh dude no, you have to give everyone the anti-brainwashing accessories," and it's like, how the hell are you supposed to know that in advance?
Joker (Smash)
Adolf Hitler (P2)
Magician Arcana: Let's see, who are the Magicians... Kenji (lmao), Junpei (never played P3P), Yosuke (not too bad), and Morgana... You know what, this is a pretty solid lineup, I'm not going to lie. Like, none of them are among my FAVORITES, but none of them are terrible, either. God, Kenji, lol, how do you live that down?
Akihiko (P4AU)
P3 Persona Awakening Cutscene
Sadayo Kawakami
FeMC (P3P)
Funky Student
Cosmic Tower Burger
Tae Takemi
The Fox (P4): I've played P4 twice, and I don't think I used the Fox's services a single time. He's just crazy expensive, to the point where even if you're fighting like every enemy you come across, it's still a serious expense. But the idea of a mysterious animal companion that isn't quite sapient, but does seem to understand what's going on, is pretty good. I like it, at least. I'm pro-Fox.

I've never played this game. Within the logic of the world, are horse girls and horses separate things, or are there just no horses at all? And are there zebra girls, camel girls, etc?

OrangeCrush980 posted...

I think the official explanation is that it's much easier to summon personas in the TV world and the metaverse because they're alternate planes of reality. Whereas the Dark Hour and Tartarus don't have that property.

That actually makes some sense.

- I Am Thou, Thou Art I...
Reach Out to the Truth: Again, it's pretty chill for a battle theme. It's good and everything, but it's no Rivers in the Desert or BABY BABY BABY.
Persona Pokerap
Morgana
Morgana saying Go to Sleep
Yu Narukumi: I have not seen the anime, so I'll just rank the game version. He's not really a character in P4, but come P4AU, he talks and has a personality, and he's... just a guy. He's just a generic heroic protagonist. Like, sorry, but I don't play Persona to see its incredible protagonists in action. He's also the protagonist who's probably the least interestingly designed? P3 guy is this dour, moody-looking guy who fits perfectly into a dour, moody game. Joker is this stylish asshole styling on all of his enemies for fun. Yu is just a guy.
Junes Department Store
Heritage Palladion Liberator
Deleted Yosuke Gay Romance
Benjamin Franklin (Musician): Is this guy's actual name Benjamin Franklin, or is that some kind of stage name? Anyway, I don't really care about the lyrics in Persona music. It's all about feeling and atmosphere and style, the actual content of what's being said is basically irrelevant.
P5's Translation
Orbit: You'll Never See It Coming
Toaster Aigis: I mean, fair enough little meme. I don't dislike it.
Shadow Okumura (Boss Fight): I won't lie to you, I just played P5R, and I don't remember his fight in P5 at all, I only remember the retooled version. And you know what? This was the only boss fight in the entire game that forced me to reset, because I didn't have the right personas to kill all of his final guys with the same attack and ran out of time. Conceptually, the idea of a completely useless, weak boss who fights via minions is fine, but we already got that with Madarame. The fact that he keeps summoning minions is a good idea, but the actual practice gets annoying fast, and if you don't have the correct personas ready, the fight can be sort of unwinnable? I'm sure someone is going to tell me that you can use just Makoto to handle the nuclear-weak guys if you're good enough, but whatever, I'm not good enough. I do like how he ends the fight by telling Haru to explode at you, and it's completely useless, and he feels zero remorse because she's just a tool to him, that's great. But this is not one of the more memorable or fun boss fights in the game.
Lotus Juice (Rapper): Call me uncultured or whatever, but I've never liked rap. A musician who devotes themselves to rap, whatever, go ahead, but I'm not on board.

- Gasp! The Enemy!
Urban Fantasy (Genre)
Koromaru
Hiimdaisy Persona 4 Comic Dub
Fictional High Schoolers Dating Adults in Anime: I've made my peace with this. I just accept that anime characters are all the same age, even if it's explicitly not the case, so you're allowed to have a 15-year-old anime waifu, it's fine. It's only super egregious cases, like Nowi or the P5 twins, that I care about.
Principal Kobayakawa: I'm a little confused about this guy's motives. He accepts Joker into his fancy school because his superiors want to keep a close eye on him. I'm willing to accept that he's just stupid and can't figure out that Joker is a Phantom Thief, but why did his superiors care about Joker pre-Phantom Thiefing, and even post-Phantom Thiefing, the cutaway scenes make it clear that they don't know who Joker is. Like, why is this guy in on the Shido conspiracy in the first place? Everyone else is either a powerful politician or a scientist or has access to a lot of money Shido needs, but this guy is just the principal of a nice high school that has no connection to what's going on until Kamoshida's heart is changed. I don't understand why this nothing man of no importance is involved in the conspiracy at all, much less is trusted with sufficient information about it that he later needs to be whacked. Anyway, he's clearly the least interesting member of the bad guys. Even the SIU Director, who doesn't even have a name, is more interesting than him, because at least he has a scene where he dies realizing he's been betrayed for basically no reason except safety.
People Saying Any Jazz Song Sounds Like Persona
Afterschool Clubs

- All You Do Is Eat Away At My Life
Hatsune Miku
Protagonist Death Game Overs: I don't really know why this is a thing. It's not common in most RPGs, Persona is the only JRPG I can think of with this mechanic. It's not necessary for any diagetic reason, so I don't really get it? Although I'll admit, it's basically the only danger you're in most of the time, is a random enemy using brainwash or a OHKO move on the main character, so it at least provides some value in terms of creating stakes.
Fusion Accident
Endless Rereleases Changing the Games
Kasumi and Sumire
Tartarus
Ken Romance
Burning Men's Soul
Yosuke Goes Through a Breakup (Video): I watched two minutes of this and turned it off. It wasn't funny at all. I also don't even know what a Jimmy Dean pork sausage is, which have left me without the context I needed to fully appreciate it.
Metis

- Please Beat The Shit Out Of Me
Fuuka's Original Voice Actress: Listen, listen. If you're going to make a video game with voice acting, make sure that the character with the most spoken dialogue has the best VA. I don't know what was going on with this VA. She's not the worst I've ever heard in a major game, she's better than, like, Ada Wong's VA in the RE4 remake, but she's VERY bad.
Uncontrollable Party Members

- The Means By Which All Is Revealed
Social Links
Calling Cards
Elizabeth
Shoji Meguro
Rivers in the Desert
Suguru Kamoshida
Benjamin Franklin
Kamoshida as a Villain

- Mine for the Slammin'!
Persona 5 Strikers Box Art
The Subway Slammer
October 4th (Persona 3)
Velvet Room
Hiimdaisy Persona Comic
Junpei x Chidori
Mara
Evokers: I already kind of covered this in my suicide to summon writeup. I do like the idea of needing a tool to activate your powers, but only by comparison to the other games. It lends SEES a 'not totally in control' feeling, whereas the Phantom Thieves feel fully in control and fully understanding of everything from the word go (though that's partly because Morgana is there to explain how everything works immediately, whereas Teddie shows up partway through). It makes SEES feel a little more ad hoc, which is ironic because they're the only ones who have the backing of a giant corporation that can even make these simulated suicide guns. It makes it feel like SEES is a bunch of normal people trying to enter the world of absolutely insane magic stuff where they don't actually belong, which is a cool concept, compared to the Phantom Thieves feeling completely inside their own element. I wonder if P4 characters not needing this was initially supposed to be the result of them getting their powers from Izanami instead of needing to awaken on their own? And it's sort of interesting that the evokers themselves are never relevant in the story; there's no sequence where a cop is like "why do you have a gun" or someone loses their evoker or whatever. These are here purely for flavor.

- OMG! We Are SO Awesome!
School Concert (P4G)
Shooting Yourself in the Head
Aria of the Soul: This song feels mysterious and moody, but also like it's waiting for something. I like the woman who starts singing at 0:30. A very solid song to listen to while you slowly look up how to fuse something online.
Rise Posters (P5)
Joker (Smash)
Adolf Hitler (Persona 2)
Akihiko (P4AU)
P3 Persona Awakening Cutscene: Very good cutscene, very solid introduction to the concept. It's funny that the main character is the only person who gets a persona awakening shown on-screen until The Answer just starts barreling through everyone's pasts to show them. Everyone else just shows up already knowing how to summon their persona, which is a weird direction for the game to take. And don't tell me they were all already persona-users before they met you, Ken and Koromaru just kind of show up.
Your Affection: I like this song. It's very... chill? Despite being energetic. P4 is definitely the chillest of the games, despite involving multiple deities trying to... I don't even remember what they were trying to do. Was Izanami supposed to be the ACTUAL deity, or just a shadow? Because Nyx was some kind of actual deity thing, whereas Yaldaboath was just an overgrown shadow. Anyway, very solid 'general doing things' song.
Sadayo Kawakami
FeMC (P3P): There's something people should understand about this character. She exists purely because P3P was a complete downgrade from P3:FES, and they needed there to be SOMETHING to incentivize people who already played the main game to purchase this one. So, FeMC and her slightly different route was born. And it's not a bad thing, but there's an obvious reason why the other games never had a female playable character: because the amount of work required to add one, while small, was still insufficient to justify the cost. It's a question of "who is incentivized to buy the game who otherwise would not," and for P4 and P5, the number of people who'd buy a game with a female protagonist but not a male one had to be so small that Atlus wouldn't even bother. Especially P5, where you'd have to rewrite everything involving Shido claiming Joker beat him up and the entire Kamoshida sequence. And it's so odd. You could have effortlessly made a female version of the P3 protagonist, this moody, blue-haired girl. No! They instead make her perky, excitable, and nothing like the boy, and all of the menus change to be pink, which doesn't fit the game's vibe at all. Very strange choices. But just for the novelty of it, I think she has to go in the tier just above average, even if she doesn't quite deserve it. I also enjoy how one of the dancing games reluctantly allowed her to be canon by saying "okay, she's from an alternate dimension that never interacts with the real games except in dancing spinoffs where everyone's memories get wiped afterward."
Funky Student
Cosmic Tower Burger
Tae Takemi: Imagine being a 26-year-old super doctor and falling in love with a 16-year-old boy. Man, 'goth doctor lady' is just too good for me, very solid waifu design choices made here. But I rank her below Kawakami because the teacher-student relationship is just more interesting, and her storyline of trying to cure the dying little girl is more interesting than Kawakami being blackmailed by assholes.

BlueCrystalTear posted...

"Per-so-na... "

What is this a preference to, when the characters call it out in battle?

MacArrowny posted...

Your Affection

have you watched any of the animes?

Nope!

What does "your affection" mean?

Defense