Whether you're successful or not, negotiating will get you something. There's nothing quite like winning over a succubus by playing hard to get or gaining the favour of a giant demon sitting on a toilet by telling him you, too, are a pretty easy going kinda guy. The conversation becomes a weird Q&A about your character or society a whole, and it often throws up some hilarious dialogue. If you knock down a Shadow, you'll surround it with guns drawn and can commence an All-Out Attack or simply talk to them. Negotiations from early Shin Megami Tensei and Persona titles also make a return, but the system is much improved. Persona 5's combat pulls together some of the best elements from previous games-and it's borderline addictive as a result. There's nothing more satisfying than firing off Persona spells, tagging in teammates, and wiping out waves of Shadows without them even getting a look in.

When combined with the baton passing, streamline the turn-based fights into pacy experiences that maintain forward momentum with ease. Improvements to the battle system mean that if you've already identified an enemy's weakness, instead of trawling through menus to locate the specific ability, tapping R1 takes you straight to the move you need. This triumphant animation calls to mind The Bride's iconic blue room battle against the Crazy 88 in Kill Bill, and even though you'll see it hundreds of times it never stops being cool. Once they've all keeled over, you can launch an All-Out Attack and watch as black silhouettes of your team dance across a striking red background, slicing and dicing enemies until they burst into a shower of blood. Hit an enemy weak to fire with Agi and it will crumple, giving you an additional turn to exploit another enemy's vulnerability, either by switching Persona to adopt a different elemental alignment or by passing the baton onto a teammate who can pick up where you left off. Physical moves can be used to chip away at health points incrementally, but exploiting an elemental weakness elevates battles from turn-based slapsies to a flurry of crushing combos. Here lie physical representations of people's personalities, called Personas-angels, demons, and monsters of all shapes and sizes that you battle using elemental attacks. Together with your friends, you infiltrate the Metaverse. Think Lupin the Third, but with a socially conscious supernatural twist. Here, the corrupted hearts of adults have manifested as Palaces, and the Phantom Thieves must find and steal Treasures within them to reform their marks, and by extension, society.

But by night you are the leader of the Phantom Thieves, a ragtag troupe of idealistic teenagers that infiltrate a parallel reality called the Metaverse. By day, you're a high school student-busy taking classes, visiting cafes, watching movies, and hanging out with friends. Like its predecessors, it's part social simulator, part dungeon crawler. Persona 5's gameplay systems evolve and coalesce over its 80+ hours to deliver a confidently executed role-playing experience that is not only satisfying, but worth the almost decade-long wait since Persona 4. From bold black and red menus that leap off the screen to the pop-and-lock of scene transitions that carry the player from one colorful corner of Tokyo to the next, it's a game about youthful exuberance and the power that lies within it. Persona 5 is a game overflowing with style.

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