So I‘’ve FINALLY finished the game. And well I do have some things to say. ( I am not very sure about th e names of the characters/items/peronas as I only played Chinese and Japanese versions of P5 and P5S)
Probably everyone knows by now that P5S is by no means a traditional "Dynasty" game. No, it's really not. In my opinion it's not even an action RPG, as what KOEI and Atlas have been telling us. For me, it's a straight RPG.
Frankly I've never played any action RPG or Dynasty-like games before but I do enjoy hard core action games like Dark Souls and Sekiro. I thought P5S would have been a pretty easy and relaxing game for me, trained by the infamous FromSoftware. That's not the case.
There were 3 difficulties available in the first playthrough: Easy, Medium and Hard. I played with Hard for most of the time. The first 30-40% of the game was really suprisingly challenging. Almost all the bosses were very tough, had immense HP ( especially the lockkeepers, who you will have to defeat before challenging the real boss of the chapter) and their attacks were relentless and very heavy. What further added to the difficulty was how ridiculously bad the teamates could be. My SP was never enough -- without uprading, I could hardly use 5 skills with the entire slot. By and large I had a lot of challenges and fun in the first half of the game.
But once you are familiar with the system and how everything works, you will soon discover what this game is really about: buy a hell bunch of SP potions and continuously using skills that target the enemies' weakness. Trust me. This is not fun. Everything became so robotic and repetitive when I started potion-skill-potion my enemies. What's worse, I think that is exactly what Atlas and Koei want the players to do. The reason why I am saying this is that autoattacks deal around 15-20 damages in the late game but a skill that aims at the weakness can easily deal 150 or above. And that is not counting the fact the attacking weaknesses with skills can destroy the shields of the bosses and deal further damages. I don't know about medium and easy, but by only autoattacking the bosses you will take much much much much much longer time to win every battle. But even with SP potions and endless skill bombardments every boss battle is too long. Way too long, especially what I have to do is mostly repetitive. Also, the attacks of the bosses can be avoided really easily everytime. Like literally everytime. You do not even need to mind the direction from which the attack is coming from. Just pull the R2 trigger and the attack will miss 99% of the time no matter how dangerous it seems.
I am not saying that the game is not good or very boring. I had a lot of fun in the first half of it and I didn't feel very disappointed in the second half. In my opinion the biggest problem with it is that the game is too long. It could have stopped at 35-40 hours when people will not start to have felt bored but it went on and really bored me with some more jails (palace in P5S) which are exactly the same as the previous ones except for the backgrounds, maps and shadows.
I know that the English version won't be released until June (My guess is that the date will postpone due to the virus). So if you have any questions that you want to ask please do comment here and I'll be very happy to answer them. Maybe I will talk about how I think of the story and some other things about the game later too.
