Parents' Guide to Persona 5

There's a lot going into this complex RPG that can absorb your time completely, but some missteps lightly tarnish this mature game experience. In reality, Persona 5 is a dungeon-crawler, social simulator, and time-management headache all wrapped up in one package. This is what the Persona series always has been, and part of what makes this latest entry excel and shine so much more are, curiously, very tiny touches. For example, the game's user interface has a funky '70s aesthetic (including the soundtrack), adding a much-needed splash of style and grace to the simple act of level grinding, managing items, and even buying weapons. The game always plays with your screen's real estate -- borders swirl and sway, picture-in-picture events occur suddenly, and so on. It's a game that is truly fun to play and watch.

Though appropriate to its being a teenage drama, the game takes itself very, very seriously. It thinks its story is far more interesting and complicated than it is: Large sections grind to a crawl when cut scene after cut scene occurs in succession, hammering on a plot point that occurred only a moment before. This may be the biggest strike against the game, when everything else has such an eye toward presentation and mindfulness of the player. The combat is fun, the open-ended nature of the world when it finally does open up is fun to poke around in, and the sheer variety of playing in the Persona realm and out in the real world is fun. The cut scenes are always optional, but you will be lost without them. If you can take the bad with the good, Persona 5 is a funky good time.