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Dec 6th, 2025 at 11:47:01 - Persona 5 Royal (PS5) |
This game was SO friggin long. 135 hours. I have been playing it since February (it is now December). And I didn’t even do the third semester and final palace in the Royal edition, which I read add another 10-20 hours. I don’t have the motivation to do any more. I finished the main game, saw the story build-up for the third semester after New Year’s (which I didn’t know I had fulfilled the conditions to unlock), and called it done. I clocked about 80 hours in Persona 4, so 5 is over 50% longer. I loved the game overall, but it kept going and going and going; there was no need for the extreme length. There are a lot of palaces (main dungeons), a huge dungeon called Mementos (full of side quests and the end of the game; like HUGE, literally at least 55 floors [I remember a character commenting on that number]), tons of confidants (characters with whom you forge social bonds), creating and fusing personas, five social characteristics to level up, tons of dialogue (often through long text chains), and just a really long, involved story with a lot of side activities to do. It’s enormous. It reminds me of the rebooted Assassin’s Creed games that were so much longer beginning with the PS4 games compared to those before. I really liked those first two PS4 Assassin’s Creed games, but I wanted something shorter and more streamlined. If there is a Persona 6, I will be skipping it unless it is significantly shorter and changes up the formula.
There really isn’t too much to say about this that I didn’t say about Persona 3 and 4. I made an entry for Persona 4 over 10 years ago! Re-reading it sounded like I was basically describing Persona 5 back then. You’re a displaced troubled youth. Weird stuff is happening, mysterious deaths and people going insane. You meet people at school, meet a talking cat, and get a mysterious phone app that transports you to strange places. You become the Phantom Thieves, who identify rotten adults and change their hearts by going into their “palaces” (minds), stealing their treasures (desires) and forcing them to confess to their misdeeds. In so doing, the Phantom Thieves become social media famous, until the public turns against them. You survive an interrogation (a cool narrative device that lasts about half the game), meet new people, recruit them to the team, go up against bigger and badder adults as you work your way toward the true culprit behind the mysterious deaths and insanities. (That’s when I thought the game was over, but surprise, there is more plot and a true boss after what you think is the last boss, and that’s like another 10 hours of gameplay!!). Along the way, you help all sorts of people with their problems and potentially date a girl.
Combat operates pretty much the same as I remember. There are all the standard Shin Megami Tensei personas and magics. You play a game of strengths and weaknesses in combat, exploiting enemy vulnerabilities for advantage in battle. When you hit an enemy's weakness (e.g., use a fire spell on an enemy weak to fire), you knock them down and get an extra turn. If you knock all enemies down, you perform a powerful group attack. You can recruit different personas to enhance your own arsenal and can fuse personas to create stronger ones to mix-and-match skills to suit your purposes. For example, for most of the game, I created personas with a high magic stat that could use most elements. Whatever I didn’t have at the ready, I would choose party members who had what I was missing. By the end of the game, I was fusing personas focusing on buffs and debuffs because, as “exploit the weakness” combat systems always go, the toughest enemies have no weaknesses, and so you end up being better off going for pure damage, buffing your party, and debuffing the enemies. All the later bosses basically faced me at an attack power and defense deficit because I constantly debuffed them. Every time a boss raised its attack, I nullified it, and I had a few party members always ready to raise my own attack and defense and remove status ailments. Combat could be challenging at times (some particularly nasty enemies or combinations of enemies, some tough bosses), but usually it was a cakewalk, with me by the end of the game using auto-attack most of the time to win regular battles.
Outside of palaces, you are living the daily life of a teenager in Japan, going to school, playing sports, eating ramen, etc. You choose how to spend your time after school, in the evenings, and on weekends, strategically hanging out with people and engaging in activities to raise stats and strengthen social bonds. Or, you’re just really interested in all these characters’ side stories! I enjoyed all of them. One girl is an expert shogi player, but her mother wants to use her shogi fame to make her an idol. Another girl is trying to help a friend who is dating a bad guy who is attempting to exploit her for sex work. You help your best guy friend mediate conflict between his old track teammates. You meet a fortune teller who is caught up in a grift. There is a gamer kid who you train with and a former yakuza arms dealer who you go to work for. And like 15 more. There is a TON of story in this game. I really, really enjoyed the narratives, dialogue-heavy though the game is.
I guess in the end, that’s really what I was playing for was to see what would happen with all these characters and in the main story. The dungeons ended up getting pretty grindy and same-y with puzzles that just padded them out. Plus, I was way over-leveled. I got some accessories at the beginning of the game that increased experience gain by 15%. Any item that increases experience gain is an awesome long-term investment. I mean, 15% bonus XP in every battle for 135 hours, what could be more overpowered? I equipped that accessory on every character, ignoring all other accessories, such that by the end of the game, I was in the high 70s, with personas in the low 80s. The internet says you should be tackling the final boss around level 70. I completely dominated the final boss, but see how he could have been trickier if I was 10 levels lower (by the high 70s, all your party members' personas' skills are maxed out and, of course, everyone has higher stats, more HP, and more SP).
It was a fun, long ride, with great characters and interesting themes. I am teaching an Introduction to Psychology course for the first time right now, so it was cool to see how the game plays with concepts like the collective unconscious and, well, personas. Very Jungian. There is excellent story payoff at the end. You finally figure out what’s up with Mona/Morgana. However, if I knew before playing that it would be so long and so similar to previous Persona games, I would not have picked it up. Extremely glad to be done and start the next (also long, but nowhere near this long) Playstation game on my list, Red Dead Redemption 2 (also I believe the final PS4 game in my backlog and wishlist!).
PS, I forgot to mention how stylish the game is. It looks and sounds super slick. And the music is AWESOME!
This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Dec 6th, 2025 at 11:50:31.
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Dec 1st, 2025 at 21:06:47 - Divinity: Original Sin II (PC) |
The “toolbox” feel of Divinity: Original Sin 2 is incredible. I am barely through the second act, haven’t even left Reaper’s Eye, and have clocked nearly 30 hours. I’ve explored every bit of every area I can and have been flummoxed by locked chests, complex puzzles, and difficult encounters. Often, I have been stuck on something only to have an “a-ha!” moment. For example, I remember when I realized the value of the teleport spell. This spell is amazing. Cast it on an object and then select where to move the object. It works on most anything—chests, items, even enemies. Chest stuck behind a locked gate? Teleport it to your side. Enemy too close to you in combat? Drop it off a cliff. One of your characters needs to be on the other side of the battlefield, but is slowed and would take three turns to get there? Boom. Teleport him. There are so many abilities like this that have numerous uses that aren’t obvious at first glance. At some point, I realized that if I kept spare junk weapons in my inventory, I could use them to bust down doors. Since they’re junk, it doesn’t matter if they break. At some point, I realized that I could make great use of my undead character being healed by poison. So, I always keep a poison wand on him, all poison items go to him, etc., and he can always heal himself by attacking himself. At some point, I realized that it might be cool to put one point of Necromancer on each of my mages. Necromancer heals the caster by 10% of damage dealt (20% at level 2, etc.). So now all my mages heal for 10% of damage dealt. I am sure there are dozens more such discoveries to be had.
This makes combat fascinating and extremely dynamic. It is based on elements—fire, electricity, oil, ice, poison, blood, steam, etc.—being manipulated on the battlefield. I mean, you can choose to ignore elements, but that would be stupid. You can use them to your great advantage, and accidentally to your great detriment, and enemies will use them too. For example, have a character hurl an oily rock that coats characters and surfaces in oil, then have another character launch a fireball at the oil. BOOM! Explosion. Have a character cast raining blood, which causes enemies to bleed if they don’t have physical armor. Then have another character use a lightning attack, which electrifies the blood. A character on fire? Cast rain to extinguish all the fire. But watch out for an enemy to blast the water surfaces with lightning and zap your previously immolated character. The number of interlocking effects and systems in this game is nuts.
My party is magic-heavy. I have a summoner (my main character, the Red Prince), a fire/geo mage (Fane, the undead), an aero/water mage (Lohse), and a dual-wielding rogue (the woman who is possessed by a demon). The magic variety is awesome because I often have elemental control of the battlefield. But, if there are a lot of enemies with high magic armor, or a lot of physically strong enemies who can get up close, then I can have some trouble. Usually, my rogue can lock down any mages or archers who are around. The trick there is getting her to them quickly (hello teleport) so she can kill one and move on to the next. And my magic users obliterate melee enemies who tend to have low magic armor. The summoner is especially badass because his familiar acts as an extra character, and a strong one at that. Plus, he can summon totems that take a free shot per round at an enemy. The familiar and the totems also act as damage sponges; sometimes enemies will attack them instead of my main party members. I’ll often just summon the familiar out in front of the party to serve as a tank, then bombard enemies with spells from the mages, while the rogue runs around the edges of the battlefield disposing of mages or archers who might be sniping from above. The setup works pretty well! One drawback is equipment though; I keep getting all these badass two-handed swords, heavy armor, strength equipment, crossbows, etc., with no one to use them, and I only get so much equipment that is great for mages, with three mages to share it.
Story-wise, I am loving the world and the characters in it. It’s dark, funny, deep, creative—extremely well written. It was just revealed to me that each of the main playable characters (there are six or seven playable characters, but you can only have four in your party; no idea what happens to the others right now) is chosen by a different god to become The One. It introduced conflict between me and my party in what was previously a collaborative venture! Now The Red Prince (me) is supposed to distrust everyone else because they’ve all been summoned by different gods, and my god told me outright to kill one of my party members (my aero/water mage, who is the healer!). I don’t want to kill any of my party members! I’m so curious about how these intertwining playable character narratives flow together, because any one of them can be you, the main character. That means that the game is a bit different every time, aside from the race/class/background stuff, because each character essentially has their own hero arc.
I started off playing this co-op with a friend, which had its own cool features, though we only played through the tutorial together before I got busy, put the game down for a long time, and then just continued on alone. It was fun fighting together, as you can play off each other in terms of battlefield elements and coordinate in interesting ways. I would like to play some more co-op; however, given the narrative heavy nature of the game and all the inventory management slowing me down (probably the only downside), I don’t think I would enjoy playing co-op except for the combat.
Anyway, I am almost off of Reaper’s Eye, and then on to the next act! Excited to see where this one goes.
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Nov 16th, 2025 at 11:56:46 - Silent Hill 2 (PS5) |
I am sure I played Silent Hill 2 back in the day, but I only have vague memories of some of the enemies, namely Pyramid Head and the nurses, and of running around the town itself (though that was also in Silent Hill 1 and others I think). I had heard that Bloober Team's remake was excellent, and so it was. This is a game that I didn't want to put down, but occasionally had to put down because my nerves would get too worked up (and I was often playing it at night and would eventually get sleepy or know I should go to bed because I had to get up early in the morning). But my sessions were regularly 3-4 hours.
It's not a short game, took me upwards of 20 hours, and rarely dragged. The only part where I was like "okay, come on..." was the end of the Lakeview Hotel after you have to store all your equipment in a locker to ride an employee elevator. There is this really tense part where you have to navigate an employee area and solve some puzzles without equipment, while one type of really deadly enemy stalks the halls. I really didn't like those enemies! You encounter them before and after while running on grates. They cling to the underside of grates, monkey-bar-ing beneath you and lashing at you with their tongues. You have to walk on the grates, so you have to be wary of those monsters and try and avoid getting tongue-lashed. This particular time, they were walking normally in the hallways. Anyway, I had no health items (you stash those away as well) and was down to a sliver of health. I really didn't want to do the whole area again, so I looked up a puzzle solution so I wouldn't have to wander around anymore and risk dying. Right around that part, I kind of looked up two other puzzle solutions because I wanted to get out of that hotel. Every other puzzle in the game (and there are many), I solved without hints. Puzzles in this game are interesting because they often don't require a lot of thought per se; rather, they require you to collect various items, and then do something with them. The puzzles are definitely clever and mechanically intriguing though, even if solving them was usually just a matter of exploring everywhere.
There is another part later in the game, when you are in the bowels of Silent Hill, where there is this (for lack of a better term) "dimensional cube" that rotates. You can rotate it every which way, and you have to figure out how to set it so that you can pass through it into the next area. You do this like three or four times and have to get through three or four areas through the cube, which are all dark, drab, terrifying places in the Otherworld. I was ready for that part to be over because I couldn't tell how far I was progressing and it was just like one brutal area after another. So, "tense" is definitely a good word to describe the experience of playing.
Gameplay-wise, it's really standard survival horror, even stripped down to basics. There are no frills. You have a melee weapon, and you get in order a pistol, a hand shotgun, and a rifle. Two different items restore health, one a little bit and one to full. You also have a flashlight. That's it. No other weapons, no special moves, no inventory. Coming off of the irritating inventory management and frustrating combat of Alan Wake 2, I loved having few items to deal with and no inventory to manage. I regularly had over 100 pistol bullets, and by the end of the game (or at least before the last bosses), I was rocking nearly 50 health items. Yeah, I was basically invincible. /flex. It's just you and your few items and the hell that is Silent Hill. Oh, and a few other poor souls you meet along the way who also are there.
There aren't many enemy types, though each type gets an additional subtype as you progress. The vomiting things later can explode upon death. The "legs" later can climb walls and ceilings (terrifying). The nurses develop a faster, more aggressive variety. Despite some lack of variety, they never cease to be dangerous and scary, especially those freakin' legs! So, the legs, imagine a pair of legs that walk with another pair of legs sewn on top of them at the hip, which can attack you like arms. These legs like to act as mannequins. They hide and jump out at you. I don't know how many times I was walking through an area and either would be totally surprised by legs jumping out at me or would spot legs poised in a corner or behind a piece of furniture or wherever, often noticing them just in time for them to jump out at me. Or, I would notice them, think I was really clever, creep up to them to shoot them, never knowing when they were going to leap for me. I think the legs were the scariest enemies in the game, followed by the monkey-bar grate creatures.
The story is presented in a rather obscure way that made it feel good when you made sense of something. Everything seems to be a representation of something in James' subconscious, so if you can think about what the enemies might mean, you can make more sense of James' emotions and the story itself. I definitely had to look up "what really happened" after I beat it though because I still wasn't quite sure. All in all, this was a great survival horror mystery to play through. Definitely a highlight of the PlayStation Plus month and a strong recommendation for survival horror fans.
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Nov 6th, 2025 at 16:25:06 - Sword of the Sea (PS5) |
Easily beatable in 2-3 hours, Sword of the Sea is by the same folks who did Abzu. It shows. This is another movement-focused journey (also akin to Journey) where you bring the ocean back to a desert (hello Journey), befriend a dolphin and a shark (hello Abzu), and fight an evil fire serpent (hello God of W...wait, no). Where the swimming in Abzu could be frustrating, the "snowboarding" in Sword of the Sea feels excellent. The level design is also much improved, especially readability in terms of where you need to be going. I was NEVER lost, which is saying something! I remember swimming around rather aimlessly sometimes in Abzu, though there were always beautiful schools of fish and whales and things to watch and interact with. Those fish are actually here in Sword of the Sea too, plus the rideable whales, turtles, and so on. There are flags, paths, beams of light, collectibles, good camera work in cut scenes, etc. that direct your attention to the right place.
The game is beautiful to look at, with stunning landscapes that dwarf your tiny figure. I don't know what else to say about it really. If you like the Journey/Abzu brand of chill, exploration-heavy, environmental indie games, this is a no-brainer. It just guided me along for its runtime, and it's like I was unaware of time passing, totally absorbed in it. Great experience!
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