7 Things Nobody Wants To Admit About Persona 5

4. There's No Real Overarching Drive Or Motive

I can only attest to playing a healthy chunk of Persona 4 as comparison, but at least in that game, you're tasked with foiling a murder mystery plot; the dark reality of slain bodies forever interrupting the carefree nature of 'another day at school'.

Here, P5 seems to be an exploration of vigilantism, of being a superhero in a world devoid of justice; highlighting the various ways 'adults' can abuse and ruin the youth. Lofty goals, but ones that lack any throughline focus. For the aforementioned 30 hours you'll mostly be high-fiving each other over how awesome it feels to 'change someone's heart', juxtaposed against the narrative framework of each mission being told through flashback, as we know from the intro that our main character gets caught eventually.

This presumably is the 'main thread', the "How they gonna get outta this one?!", but the game handles these cuts back to the future in a weirdly sporadic nature, usually after you've recruited somebody in the present. You'll acquire a team member, then get a minute-long scene where interrogator Sae Niijima says something like, "You must have had somebody working in [insert X industry] all this time". Well, yes, we just got them.

Overall it feels like if you made an entire game out of Mass Effect-style loyalty missions (which was the issue with Andromeda). There is a 'main villain' lurking in the background (that our main character seems unable to connect some obvious dots with), but the occasionally tone-deaf script aims for this rebellious "All adults are corrupt, man!" ideology, allowing its characters to aim at everybody and nobody simultaneously.

Ultimately, for these 40 hours at least, it has failed to provide any will to see the game through, other than how much fun it is to play and look at.