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What is Persona 5and why will gamers not shut up about it?

If you're not plugged in with Japanese role-playing games -- colloquially referred to as "JRPGs" -- then it's easy to miss Persona. The series lacks the mainstream name recognition of a Final Fantasy, and its unusual gameplay isn't easily summed up.

It's worth taking the time to learn, however. Personais a special series, and this fifth numbered game is doubly so. I'm here to make a case for playing Persona 5, even if you've never touched a JRPG in your life (but especially if you have).

Just to be clear: this isn't a comprehensive history of the series, which is an entire saga unto itself. This is specifically a look at the kind of experience you're settling into when you play.

What is Persona 5 all about?

At the most basic level, Persona 5combines elements of dungeon exploration and turn-based combat versus monsters with the time management and relationship-building of a social sim. By day, you're a Tokyo high school student -- where joining the right clubs, making friends, dating, and socializing all count for something -- and by night, you're a dungeon explorer.

Sometimes. This is where the time management comes into play. Progress through Persona 5's story is tracked according to dates on a calendar, and that calendar spans multiple months of the school year.

Time matters in this game, meaning whenever you choose to do a particular thing, you are also simultaneously choosing notto do any number of other things. If you spend an afternoon exploring a Palace -- Persona 5-speak for dungeons -- then you can't go out on the town or visit the cute doctor in your neighborhood.

In the story, your unnamed protagonist and his ever-growing circle of friends are Phantom Thieves. They have the ability to visit Palaces -- which are physical manifestations of a person's darkest inner desires -- and steal the treasure contained within. Doing so erases the IRL Palace owner's questionable impulses and forces them to face the reality of any hideous acts they've committed.

A typical day

Each day in Persona 5consists of multiple phases: Morning, Lunchtime, Afternoon, After School, and Evening. You don't always have control over what you can or can't do at a given time of day. Sometimes, certain phases won't even come up. But that's the basic shape of things.

When it's a school day, there's a scripted routine of leaving your home -- the upstairs room of a local cafe -- and taking the subway to Shujin Academy. On a lucky day, you'll nab a subway seat -- this happens randomly and automatically -- which gives you some extra time to read.

Once you arrive, there's typically a slice-of-life cutscene where something happens during class. You might chat with a fellow student and field a question from a teacher. The internet is your friend when the latter happens, as correct answers can boost your stats.

Most days, the After School and Evening hours are yours. You can visit a Palace -- which takes up both phases -- go shopping, brew coffee, work out, study, hang with friends, and more. Managing the time you spend on all of these activities -- each of which provide different benefits -- is one of Persona 5's primary challenges.

The important thing to remember when you're playing: there are so many calendar days. Yes, you're usually operating under a timeline. But that doesn't mean you should rush to complete a Palace before you're ready. Take advantage of Persona 5's glacial pace. That's why it's there.

Personas and combat

In the same way that Palaces exist as a fortress to protect a bad person's darkest desires, Personas are the physical manifestation of a person's psyche. They are both the source of your and your friends' powers and the sum total of enemies you do battle with.

Each party member is locked to a single Persona, and thus a single set of abilities. They're typically specialists of some kind or another; one party member might be your go-to for fire, another for ice, for bless, for nuclear... all the different types of damage you can do. Personas level up and gain new powers alongside their human counterpart.

Your own character is special -- for spoiler-y reasons -- in that he can wield and switch between multiple Personas during any given battle. He can only carry a set number at once, but he's able to level all of them up and even fuse them together into more powerful Personas. And of course, as that collection grows so too does the protagonist's ability to deal all the different types of damage.

That flexibility is a valuable asset in Persona 5's combat, where enemy weaknesses and strengths play an all-important role. Hitting an enemy's weakness staggers it, effectively canceling its next turn.

Stagger all the enemies on the screen during a single turn -- which ends after all your party members have acted -- and a new set of options appears. You can try to capture one and add it to your Persona collection, shake them down for helpful items, or commit to an "All-Out Attack" -- a powerful group pile-on that immediately ends most fights against standard enemies.

Here's how you know you've got the hang of Persona 5battles: most of them end before the enemy gets a chance to attack even once. Bosses and minibosses work a little differently -- they don't end as quickly -- but the premise remains the same: exploit weaknesses as you discover them.

Palaces and Phantom Thieving

Most of Persona 5's battles play out in Palaces, which you visit and slowly map out over a period of days and weeks. Your ultimate goal as Phantom Thieves is to locate a Palace creator's treasure and steal it. Once you find the treasure, you leave a "calling card" in the real world -- thus setting up your final visit to that Palace and its attendant boss fight.

Safe Rooms are your progress markers as you explore, with each one you find adding a fast travel location to your list for that particular Palace. You're not meant to map out an entire Palace in the space of a single visit, so fast travel is an essential tool -- though you can only use it when you're in a Safe Room.

There are two stats to keep in mind for each of your characters as you explore: HP and SP. The first is a measure of your health and can be restored at any time using a variety of consumables and/or Persona abilities. The latter is what you spend whenever you usea Persona ability; restoring that one is... trickier.

There's a small handful of consumables that restore SP, including one -- coffee -- that you can learn to make in the real world. Generally speaking, however, SP exists to limit your time spent in Palaces. You're not supposed to have an easy time restoring it; when one or more characters run low, that means it's probably time to call it a day and head back to the real world.

Friends and Confidants

The most important piece of Persona 5's long-term strategy is finding a balance between your time in alternate dimensions and the real world. The former is where combat, character leveling, and Persona acquisition happen; the latter is where you gather useful resources and maintain relationships.

Many of the important people in the main character's life are called "Confidants." Your means for interacting with them and building a relationship varies from character to character, but the basic premise remains the same: relationships level up as they grow, unlocking various benefits -- bonuses for Persona fusion, new items to craft (such as the aforementioned coffee) or buy, and boosts to your abilities.

Building stronger links with your Confidants isn't an exact science since your bonds are tracked invisibly. It largely depends on how you better the main character as a person across five different categories: Knowledge, Charm, Guts, Proficiency, and Kindness.

These social stats are fueled by the various things you do in the real world. Your Knowledge increases when you study or answer questions correctly in class. Guts get a boost when you participate in clinical trials or read certain books.

Figuring out how to improve different social stats is something you learn as you sample the many things Persona 5's Tokyo has to offer. Different Confidants connect to different social stats, so choosing which one to focus on improving is often a matter of deciding who you want to be closer with.

As you interact with friends in the real world, occasional pop-ups let you know your relationship is ready to improve. Those pop-ups serve as an important alert: the next time you hang out with the person in question, your Confidant rank will rise.

The most important thing to understand about Persona 5's social simulation: it's not something you can overlook. Real world activities and relationships give you the power you'll need to tackle the game's increasingly challenging Palaces and other alternate dimension locations.

In summation

I'll say this outright, just in case you haven't picked up on it already: Persona 5is a very slow, very lengthy game. Expect to spend a minimum of 80 hours digging through the story, and probably more than 100 if you're new to the series.

You're going to read lots of text and spend similar amounts of time wading through menus. This is an exciting game, but it's not focused on action. The key hooks are the story, the characters, the art design, and -- on the gameplay side -- the allure of slowly building this team of thieves and planning metaphysical heists together.

Persona 5is a very rewarding game, but it's also a commitment. All I wanted to give you here is a better sense of what you're getting into once you settle in.

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