Persona 5 Royal
I've had a long and troubled history with the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, stretching back over 20 years to when I imported Persona 2: Eternal Punishment (PS1). I loved the idea of the game, but that one was undone by a clunky interface that made battles about as enjoyable as navigating a mid-90s Microsoft Works database, so I never finished it. A few years later Persona 3 looked like a big step forward, so I imported that, loved it at first, but gave up after 50 hours thanks to a story that refused to get out of second gear and some of the most tedious randomly-generated dungeons I've ever seen.
This series does some things so well though (the settings, characters, atmosphere, social aspects, battle system, and persona fusion system) and I kept hoping they'd fix the pacing and dungeons, so I tried Persona 4 multiple times, but each time I bounced off it after 30-40 hours due to the same flaws as P3. Until this year, the only SMT game I'd ever completed was the first Digital Devil Saga, thanks to its manageable duration. I never finished the second one due to losing patience with a battle system that could see my party wiped out before I could take a turn, combined with save points often an hour apart.
So I approached Persona 5 Royal with some trepidation, but I'm glad I gave it a chance because it's now the first Persona game I've completed. It has all the strengths of the earlier games, but finally fixes most of the flaws. Save points are much more frequent and fast-travelling between them is straightforward. The main dungeons are now bespoke designs with all sorts of area-specific gimmicks to keep things interesting, and there's a rudimentary stealth system that elevates exploration above just running around thwacking amorphous blobs to initiate battle. There are all sorts of nice little refinements that make combat flow faster and smoother. Social activities now include some playable minigames like darts and fishing mixed in with the countless dialogue scenes.
It only has a few lingering problems. Annoyingly, the bespoke dungeons aren't a replacement for the tedious randomly-generated corridors, but in addition to them. Mementos is 81 floors of repetitive tedium that the game would have been much stronger without, and is only borderline tolerable because it's so easy to dodge around enemies to avoid combat. It should have at least been optional, but you have to trudge all the way through it to complete the game. That leads into the other problem: for such a great game, the story still takes too long to get going and the game massively, massively outstays its welcome. I had 142 hours on the clock by the end, and the combat was really getting repetitive by the last 50. Weirdly I spent the final 20 hours both impatiently waiting for it to end and wanting it to keep going because I'd become attached to most of the characters. I say most because the final flaw was Ryuji, an obnoxious blabbermouth who acts as the de facto voice of the party early on (thanks to an almost silent protagonist), and consistently says the worst things in every situation.
Despite those annoyances, it's a game that anyone with an interest in JRPGs should play, as long as they have the time and patience for it. It's made me want to dive back into the SMT franchise, so I'm keeping an eye on the upcoming Soul Hackers 2.
) that wasn't included in the anime adaption.