Steve when he gets Bucky back: Realistic version

geniunely not trying to put words in ur mouth im geniunely asking: what do you actually like about persona 5? from all ur rants im just wondering why you didnt drop the game bc it seems (again, im not trying to put words in ur mouth) that it simply not for you? i geniunely have not felt any of the issues you bring up outside of the writing ones and i cannot tell if i'm just easily pleased and not good at discerning what a good game is or we simply have dif things we enjoy in a video game. i hate getting tone across text but im asking out of geniune curiosity im not trying to attack your opinion (;-;)

Nah, i dont feel like ur attacking me, and I hope u dont feel the same when u see my complaints! Lmao. In my defense, I am replaying the game for the first time after completing my first file back in 2020, so alot of the faults i kinda shrugged off in my first playthrough are now glaringly in my face now that I no longer have the confusion and interest in learning the main story to keep me occupied. The game is clunky all the way through, and at some times, even frustratingly so.

But despite that, i do like this game. Alot! Its probably one of my top games ever if im being honest!

This ended up way longer than I intended, so im putting it under a readmore to keep the post short on dashboards

If i had to describe what I liked about the game in the simplest way imaginable…I think I would say, I like how the game makes me feel :) I like the music. I like the vibe. I like the immersion from city to city, and I like the premise! I like the characters and I like the connections you make with these characters! As im replaying this game, i am most excited to see Akira and his comments about the world :) i like hearing everyones voices, I like their little interactions in Mementos, and I like seeing them fight!

P5 is the first game I played in the series; its the game that introduced me to SMT in the first place! And it (smt) is a series that my longtime best friend LOVES and never thought hed be able to share with me! It is a game i keep very near to my heart; it has influenced me in ways i did not think would happen in the short couple of years since i first finished it. It genuinely keeps me awake some nights thinking about the world this game has created, and I think that is a testament to the impact its had, be it good or bad.

The joke about wishing theyd make a persona game that was Good is that despite all of its numerous flaws, the games manage to snatch your attention and pull you in anyway. Imagine if they made a game that had all of those things that i mentioned I loved, but done Right and executed Properly?? Where I got to have a story that made sense and didnt need to be spoonfed to me (in like an HOUR of dialogue and scenes; an HOUR!), and characters that talked and bonded beyond the tiny snippets of interaction theyre allowed to have in mementos? Combat that let me use PERSONAS i liked instead of BUILDS that stop me from getting instakilled throughout the entirety of the endgame, and a Persona building mechanic that didnt feel like I was shooting in the dark looking for possible fusions that end up not even being useful in the endgame.

Ive mentioned it before, but I complain so much bc I have seen what a good p5 game looks like, and its Strikers almost to a T. Combat is still your typical warriors-esque style combat, but it is at least different from the turn based strategy of the main game. Characters talk to each other freely, they hang out and comfort each other in a way that feels more connected that the base game. Strikers implements the ability to see ALL possible fusions with ALL registered personas, not just the ones in your Stock, so you can fuse easily without having yo consult a guide. The story feels like it makes SENSE with antagonists that feel morally grey and sympathetic. Genuinely, alot of the complaints for p5 I had were almost immediately rectified in this game.

But please also know that the praises I sing for this game is only bc of the groundwork laid by p5 and the world it created. Thats what I like about this game, that it had such a captivating premise and cast of characters, that a DIFFERENT company was able to hit the ground running with them. P5 had alot happening in that game, but i think what it had most was potential. The effort put into this game is astronomical, and the possible connections you can outright MISS if u arent paying attention was worth the money and time to implement; even if it meant that it could be considered a waste of resources to higher ups.

Books and games and part time jobs???!! Silly little cutscenes that add nothing to the game PLOTwise, but define and flesh out the personality of your protagonist. There was alot of love put into this game, and its evident by the fact that we have NOT seen a new persona game released; they bank on existing titles bc they are unwilling to make a game like this from scratch again. They dont want to ‘waste’ resources on good voice acting and a complex, overarching story; they dont want to waste money on scenes a player may never see, on routes a player may never get to experience. Making a game that gives u even the slightest bit of freedom means more money in programming and detailing that freedom. This has been an issue for a WHILE, and its a miracle that the gaming landscape had space for a colossal title like p5!

I complain bc I want better, and I do not think that is inherently at odds with my love of this game. In b4 im told to get good; ive played on hard and tested out merciless (its NOT fun, im making godbuilds again and its boring 😞). Its not the most accessible turnbased rpg; theres no colorblind modes, and the affinity system is convoluted and overwhelming. Combo moves are hard to keep track of and it can be incredibly frustrating to see your turns being skipped or seeing characters take extreme technical damage without understanding WHY it happened. The fact that they KNEW the game was desperate for qol improvements by the time royal came out, and instead of updating the base game to have those improvements too, they just pushed the royal edition out for people to play instead. It sucks! Customers and fans deserve better than being forced to shell out money for a game they already played !

As the gaming climate gets more and more hostile and unbearable, I think it is good to look at your games critically, and understand why products come out subpar. Persona 5 is a fun game that has a nice cast and an interesting premise, but it is ultimately tied down by its refusal to build on existing building blocks regarding its combat, and it insists on having insulting and downright out of character dialogue and scenes to appease the audience its designed to be targeted to. It is easy to forget sometimes that queer ppl are infact NOT the prime target of these games, its cishet gamer bros from aged 16 to 40 who will laugh at homophobic comments, who drool over a 16 yr old girl with a 16 yr old mindset and a grown womans body, who need to be placated with constant sexual comments to deal with a convoluted story that will inevitably make zero sense until its laid out for you before the literal end of the game.

Its bad. Its good. Its so shallow and its unbelievable that they thought having the plot twist make ZERO sense until they showed CUTSCENES of YOUR character discussing Goro and his connections to the metaverse for endgame SHOCK VALUE was more important than just having your team be smart and piece it together over time. Its shit. Its literally amazing. It let you FUCK your teacher ??????????????what the FUCK. They also let me shoot a god in the face w the best looking ult persona in the world so i can ignore that shit. And ultimately that is how i got through the game. Lol.

What doesn’t make sense to me is how actors can casually spoil that their characters end up together and no one bats an eye?

I know this interview was quite a while ago—long enough ago that the show’s ending could have changed. But it makes me laugh because no way you would ever see this kind of a situation in Western media 😂

loving the vibe of people who havent watched riverdale and havent watched the finale posting to complain about how they had a very normative ending because it reinforced the idea that characters have to be in relationships to be interesting. like my man fuck 86 year old single mother by choice and feminist magazine editor with no regrets about never getting married whose dying wish was to see all her old friends again betty's entire life just because she was in a quad for a year 67 years ago i guess. it's not enough that narrator jughead erased her whole shit now people on the internet who dont even care about betty my friend betty are doing it too. and the core four arent even in set relationships in the big pop's in the sky because they're juniors again. but you dont get the big pop's in the sky you don't care about the big pop's in the sky. i do

they really committed to making every Vax and Gilmore interaction Like That and it's really sweet

Curious. Since you and I both like tododeku — do you think that we're delusional for falling for this ship? Is it true that there is absolutely no possibility that they could ever be a thing in canon? Horikoshi, in my opinion, is playing games with the fandom. I personally think that he doesnt even know what he wants when it comes to Ochako because hes seemed to have given up on that. Do you think that theres any slight chance that Hori might surprise us, or do we find ourselves in a delusional hole of hope?

Anon I mean this in the nicest way possible but WHAT are you talking about lmao. I ship a lot of things that I know for certain won’t ever be canon. That doesn’t make me “delusional”, that’s just me having fun and curating my own fandom experience. I don’t have to look at canon ships and agree with them. That’s part of why shipping is so fun—I get to decide how these characters interact. Who cares what Hori’s doing. I don’t. I make the rules in this house

Essentially

Just have fun with it bro

I’m so sorry guys I’m not sorry

was going through the forums last night bc i like to see what's up when update drops and there was a surprising amount of complaining. someone asked why the forums always seem so mad and someone replied "because happy people aren't on the forums" and suddenly everything made sense

steve & bucky started off so top tier to me like really cooking, but with how shitty canon keeps handling them and how awful fanworks completely ignore their characters and story arcs and their actual dynamic, it feels like there's just no spark left anymore, which sucks cuz it felt/feels like their story was never resolved anywhere and just kinda shoved into a shoebox to dig up and dangle in front of fans every so often like jingling car keys in front of a baby

steve&bucky are one of those ships where the overarching story is beautiful and the character dynamics are great but they get done dirty by the canon narrative and their own stans, mostly because neither side wants to coexist 😭 recent canon wants to act like they were never important to each other/they just “grew apart” after civil war because they’re “too different now” and a majority of the stans are so dead set on ignoring all aspects of canon that they erase what actually makes the ship GOOD.

the amount of ppl that are getting temporally blocked by me when ep 12 of only friends comes out

sorry for being toxic (<- enjoys the fucked up canon relationship peter and tony have in the mcu)

I refuse to move on

ive been a child of divorce 2 times in under a month how do i move on from this

Ok where did this idea that marvel movies suck now originate? Or that there was a halcyon day where they were good, unlike now?

Like Endgame made some Choices™ but out of phase four the only one that I'd say was actually bad was Love and Thunder, and that was half good. Granted I haven't seen Wakanda Forever yet but the rest were pretty damn solid, and the TV shows, too.

Like.... Are all y'all just nostalgic for 2012 era MCU when it was all shiny and new?

despite all the graphics issues, pokemon scarlet is one of my favorite pokemon experiences ive had in years

(granted, i also did not really have major glitches so it really didn't hinder my experience that much)

I have officially beaten FE Engage! Overall it’s a great game. I really enjoyed the gameplay this time, though a few chapters and paralogues were pretty frustrating. This was definitely the hardest FE game I’ve played (although ironically I found the final battle to be fairly easy), and mostly that’s a good thing. The extra challenge made it more satisfying when I came up with winning strategies. The story and characters were pretty good too! I definitely think this game has gotten unwarranted hate. Anyway, since I previously made a tier list showing my perception of the characters as units, here are some actual stats from the ending showing how right (or wrong) I was:

There was a 3-way tie for who made MVP the most between Alear, Yunaka, and somewhat to my surprise, Alcryst. They each were MVP 4 times. Clanne, Celine, and Alfred were right behind them, each being MVP 3 times.

Alear was unsurprisingly the fighter with the most battles (199) and wins (123). The benefits of being locked into EVERY story & paralogue chapter, I suppose. Her most used Emblem was Sigurd.

I talked at length about how good my Alfred was in the other post, and his stats back it up. He had the 2nd most battles (180) and tied for 3rd on wins (92). Most used emblem was Ike.

Similarly, Yunaka, who I thought might have the most battles and/or kills, had 166 battles and 92 wins. She was great, just not able to outdo Alear’s protag privilege or Alfred seeing a lot of action through Ike. She used Lyn most.

Alcryst had 150 battles and a whopping 107 wins. The boy killed. A lot. His most used emblem was Leif since I appreciated being able to switch weapons and fight back if attacked up close as well as potential Luna procs on Quadruple Hit.

I seriously undervalued how much use I got out of Clanne. He was 5th for both battles (127) and wins (89). Even though he’d fallen off by the end due to subpar magic attack, he did pretty well in early and mid game. His most used emblem was Micaiah.

As for other notable fighters, Citrinne, Diamant, Fogado, Rosado, and Kagetsu each had 100+ battles and 60+ kills. Everyone else either only achieved one of those feats, or neither. So these 5 finish out the “top ten” for my units, I guess.

I maintain that Hortensia is an MVP in her own right as a healer, but tragically the game doesn’t track that so her stats are poor since she didn’t fight much. Seadall was also essential to my team.

Finally one last fun statistic - the EMBLEM that achieved MVP the most was Sigurd. He contributed to 7 wins. I guess it’s not surprising considering he was the “most used” Emblem for 3 of my heavy hitters - Alear, Kagetsu, and Rosado.