jrpg

I had heard a ton of hype ab the new Fire Emblem game so I decided to go back and play the first North American port of the series (which is the 7th game in the series technically I guess? But it was released as just "Fire Emblem"). I like the formula and the classic fantasy style, but the story was bone-dry a lot of the time, and the perma-death combined with this being my first real tactical RPG made this ridiculously tedious at times. If I had to play this without the rewind feature built into the Switch 2 GBA emulator this might have been impossible for me. Still I can't deny when I did have a good strategy going and I was able to recruit some of the more interesting characters in the story and get them rolling I felt like a god. Also I played as Roy's dad. Roy from Smash. Now I officially know about Fire Emblem from Smash.

This game took me like 95ish hours to beat, which is a really long time. Surprisingly it flew by, and I was shocked how much soying I did throughout. The game begins with roughly 10 hours of "tutroial" (with continuous new systems introduced and explained to you through most of the first half of the game) and presents as very handholdy and restrictive, especially compared to Persona 3 Reload (the only other Persona game I've played). In a way this kind of lulled me into thinking it was a baby game. I thought I could do whatever I wanted and coast through all of this game's content. After completing the game and failing to finish several of the social links (including 2 romances >_<) I realize just how cracked you have to play every single day to see everything. Not just that, but the order you build your social connections in informs a massively different experience. If I waited to do Ryuji's social link I probably would have exploded my switch into the wall while grinding through Mementos later in the game. The palace based progression and flashback interrogation with Sae make this game endlessly exciting and fulfilling (like lowk 1000x more narratively compelling than persona 3 reload even though that one has more fire vibes). The UI/UX is probably the most beautiful things to ever be created ever. The fight mechanics are continuously fun and the persona fusion mechanics allows for all kinds of autistic optimization asides. Persona 5 Royal is a massive feat and I played it for 95 hours and only felt like I was being held hostage once or twice. A must for any jrpg fan.