What Games Should I Buy for my PlayStation 5?

The Game Room
21

One thing I have to say about Persona 5 Royal is that the English voice acting is terrific. I mean, the Japanese voice acting is probably also terrific, but I don’t speak Japanese, so I guess I wouldn’t know.

On this playthrough I’m going to be more thoughtful about capturing as many shadows as I can and upgrading my personas. I don’t think I did a very good job of that in my first playthrough.

Thank you @Mahaloth for your suggestions and feedback. I’ve been following your Elden Ring thread.

And everyone, please keep the suggestions coming. What’s your favorite game on the PlayStation 5?

22

I’m enjoying Hogwarts Legacy on PC, but it has an excellent PS5 version that is considered the best version of it outside buying a $3000 PC.

It’s a fun Zelda like Action-RPG and they recreated all of Hogwarts. All of it. Every door in the castle opens and it is filled with secrets. This and an adequate, but not mind-blowing, open world make the game a lot of fun.

Some are boycotting it over JK Rowling and her anti-transgender statements. I don’t know if I’m a hypocrite for buying it, but I did($48 on PC) and it is great.

Again, I hear the PS5 version of it is one of the best. Offers Ray-tracing, etc.

I’m 10 hours in and it is fun.

23

Not the kind of thing you’ve mentioned yet, but the best city builder game Cities:Skylines has just announced a remastered edition for the PS5.

No exact release date mentioned yet, but I guess it can’t be long.

24

I just finished Persona 5 Royal. It took me about 140 hours, and I absolutely did not do everything I could have, nor did I max out my relationship with every character. But it was fun, and I’m glad I played it. Having played the base Persona 5, I think it was worth it to buy the Royal version. And I did get the good ending, thanks in no small part to the tips from @Mahaloth.

So what’s next, everyone? I’m thinking maybe Tales of Arise or Ghost of Tsushima, since I own both of them. But maybe someone out there has a better suggestions.

And thanks to all of you who have replied and offered your suggestions.

25

I really want to recommend Persona 5 Strikers. It is a continuation of Persona 5 with Joker and the gang, but:

  1. It does not include Royal content, so no Kasumi.
  2. It smoothly ignores everything in the third trimester. I mean, you can pretend it happened, but they don’t mention it.
  3. It is a musou game, but I want to emphasize: It is very much a Persona game and is a lot more similar to Persona than some generic musou game.
  4. Much shorter. Took me 31 hours to beat instead of the 85 or so Persona 5 Royal took.

I loved it and highly recommend it. A great game and it is fun to continue to hang out with Joker and the gang. This time, it even hands you the controls of all the characters, meaning you can run around as all of them.

It’s a great game.
I loved it, absolutely loved it.

26

I have not played Arise, but I love the Tales games I have played(Symphonia, Phantasia, Abyss) and would recommend the series in general.

27

I had to look up what a “musou game” was, but now I know.

I also read a little bit about Strikers, and I’m intrigued. Mostly an action JRPG, but with some turn based elements when using personas.

I think based on what I’ve read, how much I like the Persona franchise, and how @Mahaloth’s video game tastes seem to align with mine, I’m definitely going to pick up Persona 5 Strikers. Thanks for the recommendation, @Mahaloth.

28

Yes, and I’ll add some non-spoiler thoughts/tips:

  1. The game starts much harder than it is later on. The first “palace”(called “jails” in this game) is almost certainly the hardest part of the game.
  2. Leave the jails at savepoints. I restores your Health and SP and has almost no consequences.
  3. There is no time pressure in this game because while days on the calendar are flipping along, events are strictly pegged to story progression. This actually felt freeing to me after Persona 5. You can just play and not schedule out your day or keep track of who is free to visit.
  4. Seriously, you can change the difficulty setting. No shame in setting the game to easy at the start. It’s MUCH harder in the first jail than everything after.
  5. You can basically pause the game to choose your attack and really, just picking the weaknesses of the enemies is the key, much like Persona 5. This game looks like action game, but it is still a LOT more JPRG than action. Nicely, you automatically see enemies strengths and weaknesses, no need to scan.

Yeah, Strikers was just great. Like going on a summer vacation road trip with old friends. All voice actors return.

29

Tales of Phantasia was one of my favorite games ever, period. I played the Super Famicom version through a ROM in an SNES emulator translated to English (they never officially ported it to the SNES). I haven’t played any others in the series but if they were comparable then that would be worth checking out.

30

Yes, I did the same back around 2000 and I agree it is terrific. I hear good things about Tales of Arise, but I can confirm that Tales of Abyss is excellent and Tales of Symphonia is also really solid.

Tales is kind of an underrated series of JRPG’s.

31

I’ll just toss in that I’m having a good time with FF7 Remake, also free on PS Plus. It the first FF game I’ve played since FF6 (FF3 in the US).

32

Please share your thoughts as you play.

33

All right, what follows is a long somewhat rambly post.

I checked the two video game stores closest to me, and neither of them have Persona 5 Strikers in stock. I normally prefer to buy the majority of my video games on physical media, but this time I made an exception. I didn’t feel like waiting to have physical media shipped, so I purchased Persona 5 Strikers as a digital download for my PlayStation 5.

As I mentioned previously, I had played the base Persona 5 before playing Persona 5 Royal and beating it last weekend. The game is beautiful with a unique art design, and anime cutscenes throughout. The game is meant to look like you are playing a comic book (or manga, I suppose–I don’t speak Japanese). It is flashy with vibrant colors and animations. I like the way Morgana the cat looks in the real world; I want to find some art of him to have in real life outside of the video game.

I enjoy the deep character development of most of the players in the game, or at least the eight characters that comprise the Phantom Thieves. In many RPGs, or at least the classic RPGs I played growing up, there was not a lot of discussion of how the protagonists of a party came to know each other, or why they were fighting together. This is all explained in Persona 5 Royal, and the characters change and grow, and their connections to Joker develop over the course of the game. I thought I would dislike the aspect of managing a teenager’s social life in the game, but in reality this is how you deepen your bonds with the other Phantom Thieves.

I dislike the fact that at times in Persona 5 Royal there are some truly long stretches of time in which there are cutscenes or otherwise stretches of dialogue in which you have nothing to do other than advance the narrative. I mean truly unacceptably long stretches of time in which you are not controlling anyone’s actions, you are not moving, you are not performing any action, you are simply reading. I found this agonizing, and it happened several times. They seriously could have cut some of that out, or interspersed these times better. I understand the narrative helps to develop the plot and is part of developing the characters, but it should have been handled better.

I also found two of the boss fights to be rather cheap. The very last boss fight in particular probably took me a dozen times before I figured out the vine mechanic that is not well explained, and finally beat the game. I also do not understand why Morgana the cat is a male in the game while having a female name while being voiced by a (wonderful) female voice actor. As I mentioned earlier, the English voice actor for Morgana is Cassandra Lee Morris, a woman. I mean, the voice of Morgana is clearly that of a woman, so it seems weird that the cat is male in the game.

But I have come to love one aspect of Persona 5 Royal (and Persona 5 Strikers) more than any other: the songs with vocals in the game are spectacular. Growing up, no video games had vocal sores (that didn’t sound like robots–you know what I mean, people), at least until, say, the PlayStation came out, or thereabouts. But the vocal tracks for these three games are wonderful songs in their own right. The Persona 5 Strikers digital download that I purchased came with additional content which included some behind the scenes footage of the music production for Persona 5 Strikers. All the vocals in the Persona 5 series music are by the Japanese vocalist Lyn Inaizumi. Here are YouTube links to my favorites: Life Will Change, You Are Stronger, Colors Flying High. There are others. Persona 4 had good music, too.

So, that brings me to Persona 5 Strikers. I’m less than three hours in right now, so I am still forming my opinion. But I can already tell that the “smash square a million times to kill everything on the screen” is . . . not my favorite. I knew this was a part of the game going in, as @Mahaloth explained, so it’s not like this was unexpected. But I do not like it so far. It is the opposite of a turn based JRPG. I understand that there are mechanics that pause time, allow you to switch characters, match your persona’s spells to shadow’s weaknesses, etc. And I also know that I have not mastered these mechanics yet. But they will have to grow on me if I hope to like this game as much as its predecessors.

So, that’s where I stand right now. I will keep posting as I play more of Persona 5 Strikers. And thanks to all who have replied and offered feedback and suggestions.

34

If you haven’t played GTA V and are interested, the PS5 version has some features customized for PS5 over the original.

First of all, for all the latest consoles/PC they have upgraded the graphics to work better with modern hardware.

In the case of the PS5, they’ve also added additional haptic feedback to various events, and the center pad even flashes red and blue when the cops are chasing you.

Granted, I haven’t played GTA V myself on any platform, so I can’t comment on the game personally, but it’s gotten good reviews on the whole.

35

It’s a fun game and I only played it about two years ago(it was already 8 years old).

Lots of shooting and honestly, the racist language in the opening segments actually bothered me. Anyway, it smooths out fairly well and I thought it was pretty fun. I’m not eagerly anticipating GTAVI or anything, but I’d probably grab it on sale.

I should point out that GTAV was free for PC when I grabbed it. I paid nothing for it, but I’d pay $30 for the experience I had.

36

Yeah, I picked it up free when Epic had it as their weekly freebie, but I’ve actually yet to play it.

37

Shoutout for Ghost of Tsushima. I loved that game, finished it several times. Great story and very satisfying to be the most badass samurai in the world. The fighting system was approachable but deep and extremely fun. The graphics, especially in PS5 4k/HDR, are amazing.