I still haven't voted myself. I have nothing against their Western studios but they just don't really make games that catch my eye, and it just feels like the internal studio is only good for MMOs, which again, is not my type of genre.

I liked FFXV, it was better to me than XIII, but it certainly had it's fair share of problems and really should have been released next year cause a few more years of development would have done it wonders. Yet some recent events have turned the situation into something else for me.

I remember watching a made-for-TV biographical movie about The Monkees (just google them, I don't have time to explain) and the group had this moment in their history where they tried to prove their critics wrong and show the music industry that they were relevant, so they fought to have an album made where they all wrote and performed on it, they hired professionals to help them make the album, and in the end, it was a pretty good album overall and they proved they weren't a one-note commercial boy band. Then the Beatles released the White album a week later and everyone stopped caring because the White album was a magnum opus for the Beatles and The Monkees foray was quickly swept under the rug and they didn't last much longer as a group after that.

To bring this back to relevance, Persona 5 is the White Album. FFXV was a pretty good show for a company that I felt had been struggling since FFXII to remain actually relevant in the world of RPGs. While it wasn't exactly a revolutionary experiences, it at least showed people they could still make a game that is more than cutscenes and half baked combat systems, well maybe more of the first part than the second. Yet Persona 5 is an unapologetic wrecking ball of an RPG that basically shook it's head at SE's years of lame excuses about moving farther away from turn based combat because "kids love the action-shooty stuff now" and Turn Based is antiquated nonsense only old timers have the patience for. Instead Atlus was like, "No SE, you've just spent so long watering down the mechanics that it got stale and boring, you just need to work your ass off and you'll see people will have no problem with the battle system, you just have to make it fun" . After years of SE making excuses about how their plots target young tweens and older fans should just move on, and then proceeding to go out of their way to write boring and predictable plots with no teeth to it, Atlus turns around and gives us a politically charged behemoth of a plot with sex scandals, attempted suicides that actually do something in the plot instead of just being a fake out drama moment, characters being conflicted and debating the very meaning of justice and social reform. XV had a plot, Persona 5 had a message. You can guess which is more memorable.

FFXV, like the Monkees album, is a pretty decent piece of work and really captures the essence of what everyone was doing at the time, but Persona 5 is like the White album and subverting our expectations and what the genre can be; and it's here that I'm left with curious question of how this happened. Once upon a time, it was Square-Enix transcending the genre with Final Fantasy and now here I am watching as Final Fantasy has fallen behind the times and racing it's little heart out to catch up with everyone else, while Persona 5 just dropped the mic and some of us are still trying to pick our jaws off the floor. So I'm conflicted here.