There are thousands of games out there that are absolutely well worth your time. But because they’re so big, people avoid them. “I don’t have time to finish that,” the reasoning goes, and so they sit on the physical/virtual shelf, unplayed.
There’s two things I think at play here. We tend to look at things by their enormity, rather than the size of our interactions with them. I’ve played thousands of hours of Counter-Strike — probably tens of thousands over the last twenty years. But I didn’t do all of that in, say, a year, two years, or three years. It’s bits and pieces across a long period of time.
Singleplayer games are the same. You play them in one, two, three or four hour chunks. Sometimes you binge a lot over a weekend. Sometimes you crunch the living shit out of it over five or six days.
But like any problem, breaking it down into its smallest parts makes its more manageable. And in Persona 5‘s case, more achieveable. The game’s approach, blending Pokemon-esque battles with a high school slice-of-life simulator, is perfectly suited to be enjoyed in chunks.
More people should enjoy it in chunks. Whether you finish it or not doesn’t matter, as long as you enjoyed the time you spent with it. It’s not hard to get value out of Persona 5, especially since it’s free — PlayStation Plus subscribers automatically have access to Persona 5. And it’s not like Persona 5 isn’t enjoyable from the off.
It’s just a big game. And, secondly, it’s easy to assume that big games need a ton of time before they become worth it. Persona 5, from the 25 hours I’ve spent with it so far, isn’t that. It’s so good. And it’s so annoying that it’s not on PC yet, either. (Or the Switch.)
But that’ll happen soon enough.
So, as I work my way through more days of high school and furiously swear at the fact that I forgot to go get juice on Sundays, what will you be playing this weekend?
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