This seems like a good place to gush about Fire Emblem: Three Houses... It's probably received enough praise already and doesn't need my recommendation, but man, having recently finished it on Golden Deer route I
adored this game. I've loved Fire Emblem's gameplay for a while and it has played around with letting the player feel a closer connection with its characters for some time, but it'd gotten a bit awkward lately, whereas this time around I think they really nailed it with the character writing and Persona-like social sim. Really good game to play if you're into tactical RPG gameplay and are a sucker for a good cast of characters. It hit hard coming to the end and suddenly not having those characters around anymore.
Can someone explain Persona series to me? Persona 5 in particular?
I've only played 4 unfortunately, and I haven't completely finished it. But the Persona series is a half-school life simulator, half-dungeon crawler JRPG which heavily borrows from Jungian psychology. The idea is that repressed parts of the psyche manifest as Shadows, but certain people have these manifestations of their psyche called Personas which they can control to fight Shadows and stop them from negatively affecting the physical world. I'm not that great at explaining it, but this Extra Credits video might help you:
In the life simulator part of Persona, you interact with different people to forge Social Links (called Confidants in P5, apparently) each indicated by one of the major arcana from a tarot deck. Social Links give you benefits in the dungeon-crawling part of the game, and one of the requirements to progress Social Links is that you need to have a strong persona in the corresponding arcana. So there's this interesting kind of interplay between the life sim and dungeon-crawling parts.
For the most part the stories of the different games are separate, but there are a couple of elements which are constants across all the games. Persona is a spinoff of the Shin Megami Tensei series, and the demons which appear in that series are the same as the personas that the player character can use in each entry of the Persona series. There's also the Velvet Room, managed by this guy named Igor, which is kind of like a dreamspace where you manage your personas.
Persona 5 in particular has the theme of a heist story. The cast of characters calls themselves the 'Phantom Thieves', and they fight various antagonists by going inside their mindspace and defeating their Shadow. That's about what I know of it.
@Grade E cat, 80 days sounds really cool! I have such fond memories towards the book from when I read and loved it as a kid. I'll have to remember to check that one out.
