Just finished P5. It was really good, as I’m sure you’re all aware. Not quite as good as P4, in my opinion, mostly due to the slightly clunkier localization, but that’s a pretty huge bar to clear. Roll on Persona 5 Racing!
I’m also pretty psyched that Project Re:Fantasy is coming out on PS4. By the way, you should watch Yoko Taro’s predictably hilarious reaction video to the news of it being announced.
Yoko Taro is a gift
On a similar subject, I love how the name of the social links in this actually comes into play. They really are your confidants–they keep your secret and keep helping you. It’s pretty great how they all figure it out (not that Joker’s being particularly subtle with them).
Gonna be honest here:
It’s kinda weird to build a custom site just to say you don’t like the localization and “How Atlus fails fans of Persona 5” is super damn entitled sounding.
I suppose that’s fair to say, but at the same time, I didn’t see anything substantively wrong with the case it makes. There were plenty of moments where I would think, “No one talks like this,” but obviously, they didn’t deter me from playing.
Yeah, a lot of people seem to have somehow parlayed their “this localisation is not as good as it could have been” stance into some huge grandstanding contrarianism.
Well, I guess when you can’t complain about censorship, you have to grasp at something else. There are obvious problems, yes, but most of the grammatical issues seemed pretty easy to overlook when reading through. At least, I didn’t really think to much about many of them, including the opening.
There are some real problems that probably should be discussed, but some weirdness in the localization doesn’t really stand up to those other problems. For example, what happens in the middle of exploring the second palace stands out as a pretty big problem to me (though I haven’t gotten much further than that in the game yet).
There is value in calling for a better localization job, but claiming it’s bad when it’s far from it sounds pretty obnoxious.
I’m a speed-reader so I never really noticed some of the off-sounding lines. Even if I have, it never really bothered me. While the localization may be the worst part of the game, it’s nowhere near the worst thing ever.
I can see the intent behind this as well-meaning, but it makes it sound like there’s only an absolute way to localize something from Japanese. The site could probably take a page from its own advice and word itself better.
The site could also just be a forum post.
Also
If this bothers you even slightly, I encourage you to tweet at Atlus as well as discuss the problem with people you know. Fans deserve better, but publishers like Atlus will continue to produce sub-par localizations if nobody speaks up.
If this only slightly bothers you don’t go complaining to Atlus.
I would just like to share that I have achieved the Platinum for this game my first ever.
“How Atlus fails fans of Persona 5” is really getting at the issue from the wrong angle imo. nine times out of ten shoddy translation work is because of working conditions, and given how poor working conditions are in the video game industry across the board I can’t imagine this is something different. I’m sure Atlus USA would have preferred to have more time/staff/resources on the project, but couldn’t.
Also I just finished the game two days ago and I’m a bit disappointed tbh. [spoiler] The story was pretty simplistic and moralistic for something banging on about how ~mature~ it all is. It comes roaring out the gate with a sexual violence scenario in a high school setting, yet after the dungeon is cleared the perpetrator is just dumped out of the story and one of the main characters victimized is similarly removed, relegated to only ever being spoken of when Ann needs a reason to be sad/determined. I had hoped that if they were going to try for more serious story-lines that they would also carry them longer; following the victim through her recovery and the arduous struggle to get something like this through the justice system, for example. But no, it’s all cleared away nice and neatly by beating a boss fight. (A strange chaser for this sexual violence scenario is also the comedy scene where Ann is coerced into a potentially dangerous, sexual situation with only a talking cat as back-up. because the only power dynamic the game seems to recognize is adults having power over teens, I guess. It’s not as bad as P4 in this respect though, since that game had several male characters who specifically got off on boundary violation, but this seems a low bar to clear)
I feel like a lot of the stories have this very episode-of-the-week feel to them, and it really would have been better to tie it all up in a big mess of tangled stories. P4 really benefitted from the cohesion of the overarching story of the ‘murder mystery’. here it feels like they were going for a more crime drama structure, but the whole reason why those tv shows/books are structured like that is because they want people to be able to sit down and watch an episode without having to catch every single one. There is literally no way to replicate this consumer experience with P5 since you have to play the whole game start-to-finish, you end up sacrificing potential story depth for a non-existent benefit.
In P4 the theme of “be true to yourself” was kinda undercut at various points by the characters deciding that being true to themselves meant living up to the expectations imposed upon them (yukiko doesn’t want to take over the family business character development happens yukiko wants to take over the family business; kanji is gay, wait a minute, no he isn’t; Naoto struggles with body dysmorphia, she’s gets over it), but for P5 to have this theme of rebellion and then portray everything in terms of a very straight-laced morality system seems self-defeating in a much more fundamental way. Teen delinquent stories usually focus on kids who have no support system in society having to make their own and the camaraderie that grows from that – and the vulnerability in their search for that camaraderie (“mixed up with the wrong crowd” etc). I only found one story thread that tried to do anything like that (a s. link scenario) and in the end that very quickly was dealt with by simply telling the person in question sternly to quit being a bitch and suck it up. Obviously this was never going to be Alleycat Rock: The Game, but it’s still very disappointing.[/spoiler]
All the dungeon/fusing stuff is vastly better though, so I suppose I still enjoyed 100+ hours I spent with the game, but there isn’t really anything I think I’m going to remember fondly, beyond, like, cool character designs.
I’ve been playing Persona 4 Dancing All Night, and I really enjoy the conceit of “You saved the world, but can you dance?”
Playing SMT 4 Apocalypse; that first snake boss fight sure is something different, huh?
Yep! It’s also one of two fights in the game that have a 3D enemy rather than art, iirc.
SMT4 Apocalypse is real good so far! (I’m pretty sure I’m at the final dungeon, so I feel safe saying it.) I don’t mind it being more optimistic than the other entries at all, especially since it’s breaking free of the mute protag/chaos hero/law hero triad all numbered SMTs except Nocturne had. It feels like the neutral ending I couldn’t be assed to replay the game to get in SMT4. The quality of life improvements over SMT4 are also great, including but not limited to a working map.
Apocalypse felt a lot like Devil Survivor 2 to me: the characters were more interesting and the mechanics were mostly improved, but I preferred the overall plot of the first game than the plots of the sequels.
I admit, though, I will never quite get over the fact that you kill literal God as the final boss of Apocalypse
Wow, these gods are pulling out all stops to make everyone’s life miserable
Magical EMP that blocks demon summoning? Sure, it’s not like Tokio wasn’t already a hellhole already! But at least I can still use it, thanks Dag-goddammit, now i’m forced to thank someone who’s just as awful as the gods i’m trying to stop! Also thanks for throwing me another impossible boss fight, game, appreciated 
I’ve beaten Apocalypse! It was pretty good overall, and a lot in it felt like a love letter to the rest of the series. Including the final teleport maze dungeon, though it was nowhere as rude as the Strange Journey endgame. Even up to the endgame everything seemed rebalanced, with a bunch of differently-working Severe-tier skills instead of spamming Concentrated Megidola that got me through the entirety of SMT4’s main plot.
Good news for us europeans in the latest Atlus news! We might get Strange Journey Redux, which is great because we were snubbed for a good decade and missed on a lot of DS titles like Etrian Odyssey 2 & 3 and Devil Survivor too, which thankfully is now downloadable on the eShop 
There is no “we might” there
Deep Silver taking over as the Euro provider has been so good.