History Gush / Atlus

** The most awesome characters ever like Aigis, Akihiko and Junpei, and damn, everyone is awesome after awhile. Most social links have downright heartwarming and redeemable backstories, like fascist dictator disciplanary man or elementary school kid Maiko. Hell, there are places where the game lags...that combat system is atrocious and the personas look like they fell straight off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down. The boss battles are awful. I hate the use of Japanese suffixes in an English localization. But then there are moments like September 23rd when you take Shinjiro out to the Film Festival and it warms your heart that you guys just bro'd out and watched 2 hours of Little Pet Adventures.The characterization and overall feeling of immersion makes this one of the best [=RPG=]s ever.

** It is also really nice to see that in a market where many games, [=RPGs=] or otherwise, try to be 'edgy' by trying to tackle big topics like religion, race, and all that. And while there are some games that pull this off well, alot of them don't know how to tackle in any meaningful way.. Persona 4 and the other Persona games by extension, has it's issues and conflicts small yet meaningful, the interpersonal relationships, the troubles each of your social links face, the Character Development, heck, even just the main cast stressing about the next test in school is pretty refreshing. And near the end, when it does tackle bigger issues, mainly the truth and "do not lie to yourself", it pulls it off excellently.
** ''Persona 4'' has challenging though fair gameplay, a quirky storyline, and 3-dimensional characters that you will fall in love with by the end of the game. However, it's the way the game handled it's theme of truth that left this troper awestruck. The gameplay constantly pushes the player to find this truth whether it be through completing social links, solving the murder case, or obtaining the True Ending. It's one of the few games that actually uses game mechanics to explore its themes which makes it in this troper's opinion nothing short of a masterpiece. If this troper ever has any children, she will make sure that they play this game. Creator/{{Atlus}}, thank you so much for this wonderful experience...

* ''VideoGame/{{Catherine}}'''s gameplay, albeit hard, was fun, the story kept me on edge, the characters were fun and three dimensional and the voice acting was top notch.

* VideoGame/{{Robopon}}. A {{Mons}} series with robots that manages to be highly entertaining and playable. I still love my good ol' Golden Sunny from the first game. And it had an awesome villain in Dr. Zero!

** For those who thought Persona 4 was too "happy", the overall tone of Persona 5 is definitely darker. The main color of Persona 5 is a vivid red, and fittingly for the color, the game doesn't shy away from depicting the protagonist being brutally beaten by the police and Persona awakenings are shown to be painful and somewhat bloody. The story also doesn't shy away from addressing corrupt authorities, police brutality, and the effects it has on everyone. However, at the same time it doesn't descend down into grimdark depths. Each of the Phantom Thieves qualifies for TheWoobie, but they all try to remain positive and use their experiences as motivation to reform the world around them rather than mope about it, and even though the world is shown as flawed and that those in power can be corrupt, it also shows that there's still hope so long as there are people willing to do something about it.
** Story dungeons are more dynamic, featuring unique puzzles, parkour and stealth mechanics. And for those who preferred to explore randomized dungeons, there's Mementos which is an area like ''Persona 3''[='=]s Tartarus where you can explore, grind and perform sidequests.
** All Social Links (called Confidants in this installment) now provide additional benefits beyond Fusion EXP bonuses and Ultimate Personas. Need better weapons? One of the confidants is the weapon shop owner, and leveling his Confidant gives you discounts and new items in his shop. Need SP recovery? You can learn how to make SP recovering items from Sojiro. Need time to craft those items? Your homeroom teacher can cancel class in order to give you that time. Need to copy skill cards? Not only does leveling Yusuke's Confidant make him a better party member, it also gives him the ability to copy skill cards.

*** The game highly encourages switching out party members. Each of the party members are balanced with no single party member being overly broken like Akihiko, or too niche like Naoto in the original Persona 4. You can freely switch around party members out of battle (and in battle with the right Confidant) and inactive party members can receive EXP (up to the full amount depending on how high the Moon Confidant is).
*** Like in Persona 1, each party member carries both a melee weapon and a gun. Guns are an entirely separate element and each party member has a gun that works differently (the protagonist's pistol hits single enemies, Ryuji's shotgun hit everyone, Ann's SMG has tons of ammo but hits randomly and has lower accuracy, etc).

* ''VideoGame/{{Persona 5}}'' takes the formula of the previous two installments, cherry-picks the best elements from all the past games, and spins it all into one great game:

** Story dungeons are more dynamic, featuring unique puzzles, parkour and stealth mechanics. And for those who preferred to explore randomized dungeons, there's Mementos which is an area like Persona 3's Tartarus where you can explore, grind and perform sidequests.

** Persona 5 is as stylish as a piece of Banksy graffiti in video game form. It positively overflows with cool, from the more caricatured appearances of the characters, to the more cartoonish art style, to the red, white and black of the menus combined with smooth animations and a dishevelled look that resembles [=2D=]-rendered FashionableAsymmetry. Put all that in a blender with the game's score, which combines smooth jazz with rock'n'roll with J-pop, ending in [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGX8rvO0q40 "With The Stars and Us"]], which takes the usual bittersweet tones of [[VideoGame/Persona3 "Kimi no Kioku"]] and [[VideoGame/Persona4 "Never More"]] and adds some of the finest use of a bass guitar I've heard in any soundtrack, full stop.

* ''VideoGame/ShinMegamiTenseiStrangeJourney''. The story takes the traditional law-neutral-chaos axis from the first two games and turns it UpToEleven by having some of the best reasoning behind each of the three alignments, and some kick ass endings to boot. Couple that with some really unique level design (How many other dungeon crawlers take place in A shopping mall, A giant computer and A red light district?) and gameplay that's different from every other game in the series and you have one of the best games on the [[UsefulNotes/NintendoDS DS.]]