Can we also just talk about Persona in general?

It's great that P5 is getting attention again, and I'm not trying to steal its thunder, but this series has become so big recently that I thought it would be fun to just discuss some of our favorite things about the series!

Who's your favorite Velvet Room resident? Do you miss Philemon and Nyarlathotep, or are fine with it just being the Igor show now? Looking forward to Persona Q2? How about those dancing games? What do you miss about the pre-3 games the most? If you jumped into this series with Persona 5, do you see yourself checking out earlier games? Favorite love interest? Ever beat the Snow Queen Quest? Best Joker?

Those are just a few quesions to get the ball rolling - feel free to add more. Let's talk Persona!

Favorite Velvet Room resident has got to be Elizabeth. I don't miss the residents from the earlier games because I never got far enough to really care. Bottomline: the gameplay of P1 and P2 is too much of a chore. The stories themselves interest me but I find it hard to motivate myself to play because I don't like the gameplay too much and particularly dislike grinding negotiations for cards.

Who's your favorite Velvet Room resident? Elizabeth followed by the twins and then Belladonna, Nameless, and the demon painter. The first two for their fun and quirky personalities and the last three because I liked how they made the Velvet Room actually feel other worldly and surreal.

Do you miss Philemon and Nyarlathotep, or are fine with it just being the Igor show now? I don't really mind Philemon being gone because he tends to always play a background role most of the time which Igor fulfills just as well, but I do kind of miss Nyalarthotep. Largely because Persona really doesn't have any great villains after P2 if you ask me. Nyx works as an eldritch horror, P4 has too many antagonists if you ask me, and P5's was pretty nice but also felt like a redo of Nyalarthotep to begin with without the sadism and magnificent bastard qualities. Not to mention that much like P4, the human villain is far more effective and interesting than the eldritch horror helping them out.

Looking forward to Persona Q2? I still need to actually play PQ1.

How about those dancing games? You know, I've actually been kind of avoiding them for some reason. Not really sure why, but they've just never felt like a priority for me despite my love of Persona and Rhythm games.

What do you miss about the pre-3 games the most? Outside of Nyarly, not much actually. P5 basically brought back in some capacity a lot of the elements I liked from the earlier games. Maybe the team demon negotiations because they were super fun and helped the party dynamics. Ooh, I know. I miss the Satomi Tadashi Drugstores and the infectious theme song it had. Great running gag in the first two games.

Favorite love interest? Makoto and Tae from P5. Honestly, P5 has my overall favorite female cast members. Though Elizabeth was my favorite in P3.

Ever beat the Snow Queen Quest? Yes, and it was amusing as hell.

Best Joker?
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I have not played the first two (rather three I guess) Persona games so I can't comment on those.

Elizabeth is my favorite Velvet Room resident. She's curious, cute, and threatening as smurf, and all of her date scenes are wonderful. Margaret and the twins don't have as much to them in comparison. Looking forward to seeing if P5R does something there though.

Not particularly interested in Q2 or the dancing games. I might check them out someday still.

As for favorite love interest... can't really say tbh. Don't remember any romance I was particularly invested in. I'm probably in the minority here but I kinda liked it better when Persona 3 had romance written directly into its social links. In P4 and P5 there's just... so nothing to them I feel.

So touching on some other subjects, I think one of the major reasons why the Persona games work so well is because their core gameplay loop is actually really basically an addiction. Every single reward you get both in combat and in social life feels meaningful and you constantly have the next reward in both of them dangling *just* above your head before you get whisked into the other side. It's a near constant loop of pretty much instant gratification and actually quite insidious maybe, but it works, and the later games only capitalize on it more and more. I don't want to be too hard on the series for this since it doesn't keep them from building bigger narratives and payoffs in the back *anyways*, but during Persona 4 which spun a larger narrative I didn't really enjoy that much I became aware of this element a lot, and it kinda makes it clear to me why Persona 3 is my favorite overall now despite me enjoying the 'sensation' of playing the later games more; the enjoyment I got out of the later games was just more grounded in this addictive element while P3 has more substance that I can enjoy reflecting on in the long term.

The addictive element isn't nearly as prominent in Persona 3 really since Tartarus feels far more like a chore than the much more digestible dungeons of the later games (although Persona 5's could get fairly long). The plot also takes its sweet goddamn time to get moving - really I'd say the buildup only starts paying off with October - but it still gets by as the core combat system and social link building is still pretty fun. This game has a much larger emphasis on links being unavailable for extended periods of time which led me to miss out on a whole bunch of them, but that's okay. While I always felt like I was missing out in the later games, in Persona 3 I'm... oddly at peace with it? I guess it really did convey its message perfectly lol.

Persona 4 had the story I enjoyed by far the least as it felt like its themes were all mostly lip service with little substance behind them. Theme of reaching out to the truth? Really not hitting much when there's no harsh truths to be facing. Hell I don't think any of the character shadows are really all that thought provoking. Not that they're empty either, I guess it just didn't resonate with me. Probably the worst one for me though was Adachi who got kinda really shafted by the plot; in the end the main characters have to face nothing about themselves to overcome him even though he even has the personality to incite that - but nobody cares! The characters don't, the plot doesn't! Meeting Adachi and hearing his worldview essentially just have him dismiss him instead of learning a DAMN thing. Gah it makes me mad, and it likely wouldn't make me *as* mad if the game didn't present itself in large part as being about growth, about facing the truths we'd rather not, while at the same time letting its characters get away with it so much.

Persona 5 then went in a different direction and I overall really liked what they presented; the characters were pretty good, the confidants all pretty much just helped in driving home the central point. This game definitely stands out on the gameplay side a lot as well, getting the difficulty level and pacing pretty much *just* right in a pretty admirable way. Story-wise the thing I kinda loved the most is how it portrayed the public sphere; as being mostly people who do not give a smurf, are total assholes, will eat up any narrative that suits them, and being completely unapologetic about all of it. Perfectly encapsulated in the fact that even after attaining 100% approval and summoning smurfing Satanael, it is still only Joker's closest confidants that fight for his freedom, the general public could not care less. It hurt to watch unfold, but was also heartwarming, and I loved it for it.

My few major gripes about the game turned out a bit rambly and also contain spoilers so I'll put them in this tag for those who are interested at all.

(SPOILER)

- The subplot of Morgana feeling unwelcome in the group felt artificial as smurf. Ryuji isn't normally as dismissive and assholeish as he is to Morgana at all, much less incapable of admitting to himself and others that he's doing wrong, and the fact that Morgana treats Ryuji AT LEAST as bad as he does in return is never really brought to the forefront. The whole thing was pretty dumb.
- I hate that the Phantom Thieves have no thematic counter in the story. The closest it comes is Akechi calling them out for being evil, but first he ends up being a major villain, and the second time he does it (just before you fight him in Shido's palace) he is dismissed with the most bulltrout excuse in the whole game - Akechi asks what is even different about what he did compared to the Phantom Thieves and Ann retorts that they don't kill people. Seriously? That's the angle you're taking? No, that is NOT what separates you from Akechi, the thing that separates you is that you are driven by a sense of injustice and *actual* morality, not self-serving bullcrap justifications. At least for the most part you were, at times it could've been really interesting to delve into this further, have them challenged further. But nope. Goddamnit.

I hope that going forward the series takes a long and hard look at itself. I think I wrote up a concept on what I want to see in Persona 6 in a previous thread, but basically I think a lot of the gameplay elements that have become persona staples could be really well questioned and utilized in ways to create a thought-provoking narrative.

So yeah. Persona. They're good games. Not my favorites. But good games.

I've only really played 2, 3 and 4- and haven't ever gotten round to completing any of them.

Speaking of Elizabeth, I feel like she’s one of the few characters that really benefits from her treatment in Persona Q. In it, she’s such a delightful troll that you really can’t not love her.

Still, when it comes to Velvet Room residents, the Demon Painter will always have a special place in my heart