The Café

I could see #1 happening, yeah. Though for me Mementos time is podcast time.

#2 could be solved just by spreading out the nav lines a little more so that other people can chime in for those moments (since Futaba, Morgana, and Makoto all work nav duty at various points and for various purposes, the setup is already there.)

I like #3 the way it is, but a new edition of P5 would almost certainly add new confidants to balance this out.

#4 you should go to sleep.

#5 I'm not 100% sure how that Ryuji ability works, but I'm betting that it only triggers on shadows that are too low level to offer much XP or yen relative to your current level anyway. But it could stand to be tweaked, yeah. Just turning it off when Ryuji's on backup would be fine.

John Layfield wrote:Akechi,

Spoiler :

what a dipshit.

I've read suggestions to make Ryuji's ability it's own button, so you can ambush or insta-kill. That would work best, I think.

Akechi is the king of the dipshits.

As for the best way to improve the game...

MAJOR ENDGAME SPOILERS!!!

If we're going whole-hog, I'd add a P3P-style FeMC route, maybe going so far as to genderswap basically the entire main playable cast. Just for kicks.

Oh man, that's a can of worms. For a while there, I was lurking on the GameFaqs board for P5, and the huge shot storm that arose every time someone suggested a FemJoker. (Never mind we've already had 2 FemMC's in a Persona game...) But yeah, people saying it couldn't work because she couldn't possibly threaten the drunk guy at the beginning, or that the crooked cops beating and drugging her would rape her, or that Kamoshida would rape her, or a young girl dating older guys would be creepy, or just dumb shit like "I'm a guy so I can't play as a girl!" Never mind all these complaints are easily dealt with. Change the scene slightly so the drunk guy slaps the woman and FemJoker gets accused of that, make the interrogating cop a woman, Kamoshida only molested girls on the volleyball team and saw MC as delinquent trash so that wouldn't change at all aside from maybe throwing in some pervy dialogue("I won't have you expelled if you do something for me... You won't? Then screw you!") and just fucking get over it.

Blegh, I've wanted to say that for a while, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna sign up for a GameFaqs account.

I like your endgame idea, Hunter. Also, good points on the genderswap thing. I just avoid Gamefaqs these days... I personally would want the femc to cut a bitch, like, ballsy enough to easily threaten a drunk guy, sort of how Makoto is when she awakens, but then I guess there's the issue of making her too similar to Makoto, but I think that can be worked out.

Bier_Engel wrote:He gets better.

Well I mean, I hated his fake-ass persona (no pun intended) when he was on TV/in front of everyone, but liked him near the end when he showed his true colors. I felt a lot more sympathetic after his back story, at least. And honestly, he was great as a party member. I missed having a second dark/light user in the party aside from having to make my protag have them.

Yeah, he was a useful party member, no doubt about that. Sucks you don't get a suspiciously similar replacement. Thought there'd be a non-zero chance it'd be Sae, actually.

Also his metaverse costume is the most Gundam thing possible and I thought that was kinda funny.

HunterF wrote:Blegh, I've wanted to say that for a while, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna sign up for a GameFaqs account.

I'm amazed that it even still exists.

But yeah, like all Persona leads, there's very little explicitly male about Joker's writing, being a mostly-silent protagonist and all, so making a FemJoker work in the main storyline would just be a matter of a few nips/tucks. Like you said, genderswap the officer in the interrogation room, or just cut the violence. FemJoker could still be just as confrontational as OG Joker with the drunk and Kamoshida or anyone else 'cause Joker's got that delinquent air going on anyway. Maybe high school bad girls don't exist in Japan, I dunno, I've never been a Japanese high school student, but I certainly knew a few over here. And hey, it's fiction, it's allowed to take some liberties.

The actual difficulty in writing a FemJoker would mostly be in the social links and Atlus made that work before just fine. After that, it's just a matter of how much money they want to throw at their animation studio to redo the anime cutscenes. Or they could just render all those in-engine like P3P did, which looked like ass on the PSP, but wouldn't be an issue on the PS3/PS4.

Anyway, Akechi did too much bad shit for me to be moved by "daddy didn't love me".

Fully beat the game today. It's pretty good. Felt a lack of follow-up from the "real string pullers" in Tokyo, the ones involved with the research and all, after Shido drops, which was a very interesting part of that game.

Still no Philemon. They even took his fucking butterfly away and gave it to Another Velvet Room Girl. 0/10

Philemon flapped his wings across the Pacific and is currently messing with teenagers in Arcadia Bay, Oregon instead.

John Layfield wrote:Still no Philemon. They even took his fucking butterfly away and gave it to Another Velvet Room Girl. 0/10

Spoilers, obvs...

I dunno about that. At the end, after Lavenza and Igor leave, you see a golden butterfly go past Joker. Now, we saw Lavenza as a butterfly earlier, but she was a silver butterfly, plus it seems weird she'd do a butterfly by after she literally just said goodbye. I'm thinking there's a good chance that was Philemon. Also, I know we never see Philemon in any of the modern games, but hasn't it been pretty much established that Yu and Minato(and by extension, Aigis) are chosen by Philemon, hence why they have the Wild Card and can enter the Velvet Room?

Also, tee hee!

Philemon often appeared as a golden butterfly in the first two games, too.

I think the implication in the modern games is that he's always nearby as a passive observant (the blue butterfly) but no longer needs to be an active participant, beyond perhaps acting as a catalyst for wild cards. He leaves all the heavy lifting to Igor now. In the old days, his direct intervention was probably only necessary because Nyarlathotep was also active and basically existed as Philemon's equal and opposite.

That said, my memory of Innocent Sin/Eternal Punishment is fairly poor.

Well, he needs to step back in if Igor and Yaldabaoth are trying to play similar games. You know, make sure the kids aren't playing near the knives and what not.

Where's Trish though. Did she finally make enough money to return to fairy land?

I loved the Velvet Room stuff and it's sorta maybe one of my favourite things about P5's storyline. It'd be like if Suikoden ever did anything interesting with Leknaat (lol no)

That's where the true sympathy for Akechi comes in, I think. The daddy issues angle is small fry; being one-half of a game played between metaphysical entities beyond your control, ending up on the wrong side of it, and being totally destroyed because of it, that's the real damage. He got Jowy'd. Almost.

It reminds me of Adachi, who I similarly have no sympathy for. Interesting characters both, but I couldn't get into the cast's "alas, poor villain" routines.

Heard rumours this was Igor's big write out. Dead VA and all that. Philemon for Persona 6, get it trending.

I hooked up with the teacher. Kawakami. Noice.

Kawakami is love. Kawakami is life.

Oh one last thing. I saw so much Mishima hate online before I played that I was convinced he was the "sell out" for most of the game. Poor guy. Related to him a lot more than Akechi, for sure.

HunterF wrote:Kawakami is love. Kawakami is life.

I don't know why but I love that "yup, yup" line she does sometimes at the start of class scenes.

His social link was really good.

Actually: Favorite and least favorite social link, everyone, go!

I didn't get to complete them all in my first run, sadly. I was really liking Haru's but I only got to rank 5 or 6. I'm going to date her this round to make up for that. I think my favorite of the one's I completed so far was Sojiro's. I really like how he's a grumpy curmudgeon at first but he truly cares for the people in his life.

Least favorite is harder to choose because the automatic ones didn't feel like an emotional investment at all, and there were quite a few of those. I guess Igor. *¯\_(ツ)_/¯* They all had good benefits, at least.

I liked Yoshida, Oda and Togo. Didn't really dig Ann or Ohya.

These are the best social links Persona has ever done in terms of mechanical relevance to the core gameplay and narrative relevance to the overall story, plus I like most of the s-link characters themselves more than P3 and P4's groups, so these are tough questions.

I think all the adult confidants are pretty excellent, though I ran out of time to finish Iwai. Kawakami and Tae are fantastic and Bernie Sanders is a good guy. I think Ohya is pretty underrated, I've enjoyed her stuff a lot, plus she's got Lala as a counterbalance which I think was a great dynamic. I wish more s-links had guests like that.

Mishima is a rare example of an intentionally unlikeable character whose plot stuff and s-link both stick the landing. The Mementos bit with him in particular was really great.

If I have a least favourite it's probably just the folks I only got a rank or two into due to time/stat constraints like Shinya and Haru. That'll turn around on my NG+ run.

Kawakami is legit one of the best S-Links. Sojiro is pretty awesome as well. Most were pretty great. Ann and Makoto, sadly, seemed pretty boring, and I didn't care about Shinya at all. Iwai was also kinda boring.

Still, all of the P5 S-Links are leagues above the other games. Fucing Bebe...