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Persona 5 is not too easy, it's accessible

And I'm not one of those people that thinks buying a game should equate to completion (something something IGN cuphead review). However, I am a sucker for a good tutorial. I often get turned off to games that leave the player to work out the basic game mechanics. However, I'm not advocating for hand-holding. Endless "Immersion Breaking" moments such as tutorial text are obviously uncalled for in JRPGs. I'm speaking more to helping the player use basic game mechanics to their advantage.

Persona 5 is the first game that comes to mind when talking about hand-holding in video games. It's recieved heavy criticism for holding the player's hand with an above average amount of tutorial text not only in the beginning of the game, but also going well into the middle of the game. Despite this criticism, Persona 5 had one of the most successful breakthroughs in the West recently (of course it's hard to rival Pokemon, Dark Souls, and the like), so clearly it did something right.

There's too much to do

First of all, Persona 5 (or really any modern Persona title) doesn't have a "normal" amount of content. It's an endless sea of social links, demon taming, city exploring, and time management all set to a reasonably compelling story to motivate the player. It takes ~11 playthroughs to see every cutscene (mostly due to romance options, but still) and at least two playthroughs to get every achievement. So, with all things considered, the harmony of the game mechanics should require a more than normal amount of tutorial text to explain. This isn't the main reason why Persona 5 gets hate, but I decided to touch on it as it can't be ignored.

Imagine being new to Persona

If Persona 5 is the first JRPG or Persona game you've ever played, it's unlikely you just discovered it on your own. Persona fans definitely praised the series when it was announced, and Atlus did a good job shoving Persona 4 characters into the internet's faces over the years. Many prospect fans heard of Yu Narukami and the Investigation Team, but few actually played the game through after hearing about those characters. This is obvious since by the time Persona 5 was announced, the definitive way to play Persona 4 was only available on a dead handheld and illicit emulators.

Despite Persona 4 selling barely over a million copies worldwide, the stage was set for Persona 5 to be successful, and it ended up selling triple the copies. Hundreds of thousands of new fans, many of which might not have played a JRPG before beyond Pokemon, were now turned loose in Shibuya. They had eight dungeons worth of shadows to slay, treasure to steal, a God to kill, 21 social links to max out, five social stats to max out, 100 personas to fuse, and a mystery to solve. These new players have no idea what they got themselves into, and it could be very easy to become mislead.

Friendship is Magic

Veteran players comment on how the social links in Persona 5 make the game too easy. In previous titles, only the core party members' social links gave the player abilities to take advantage of in the shadow world, and the only purpose of the other social links was to create powerful personas of those arcanas. In Persona 5, however, each confidant gives Joker an ability that either makes managing time in the overworld easier, or slaying shadows in dungeons easier. This is on top of the core party members having more game breaking abilities than ever before (mainly Baton Pass, which wasn't present in the other games). At a first glance, these abilites make the game insanely easy for the returning Persona players. The veterans know that managing time with social links is the key to success in the dungeons, but think about how easy that is to miss...

Sure, the game tells the player that increasing confidant levels gives fusion bonsuses and abilities, but many social links can be easily ignored. You don't actually need Iwai's gun customization and discounts or Chihaya's money boost, but the game wants to encourage the player to keep coming back to those confidants to max them out, and persona fusion bonsues aren't the best way to incentivize that. Persona 5 doesn't want the player to have to discover a hidden 5 SP soda vending machine that restocks on a certain day of the week, it wants there to be SP regeneration abilities in a confidant. The players get to see more dialogue and important character arcs, and they get the abilities as a bonus for coming back, thus creating more of a harmony between dungeon crawling and confidant boosting.

Of course, as veteran persona players, we already knew that maxing out social links was the core of the game. When we got all these bonuses for doing something we were already going to do anyway coupled with the grindy minmax nature of JRPG players, we would obviously see the game as too easy. I personally think a new player would need those boosts that we wouldn't need, because a new player is not going to see a majority of the absurd amount of content in the game like veteran players would.

My experience

In my first playthrough of Persona 5 I maxed out all of the social stats and social links except for Ohya, Shinya, and Haru (I think) and yeah, it was easy. I think I did a lot more than the average player in their first playthrough. I found every nook and cranny of the city and did my confidants in an optimal order to break the time economy. I did every dungeon in the minimum number of days and put the late game bosses in the trash can. At the time I didn't think much of it, since I still sunk 100 hours into the game, but looking back at my playthroughs and the criticism I see, I completely understand the perceived hand-holding of Persona 5. It has an anxiety-inducing amount of things to do, and it can be easy to lose sight of how to spend time without the game incentivizing you to spend it in certain places in the form of confidants.

Ok I'm done

The next time you say "Persona 5 bad, Persona 2 good" on Twitter, no matter how right you might be, just shut up. Persona 5 brought a franchise to hundreds of thousands of people that had minimal interest beforehand, and we're lucky to have it. It's not perfect, but it has good examples of what we should be looking for in titles that introduce genres to new fans. If you want an artifically hard game, go play Dark Souls. Peace.