Life Will Change Persona 5
「ペルソナ5」より
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★3 (94) |
★4 (140) |
★6 (291) |
★8 (477) |
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p5life (Persona 5 Life Will Change)Sometimes in gaming, one franchise's success leads to several spinoff projects surrounding the original series' lore but with a unique twost to it setting or gameplay-wise. Fewer times, however, said spinoffs end up in public discussion for being just as popular -if not more!- than the precursor franchise, which is what happened to developer Atlus's monster-raising RPG Megami Tensei series and its slice-of-life-flavored spionoff, Persona. These games' key difference from the originating MT titles is their focus on a fixed group of characters who battle with their own titular Persona, a physical representation of their own psyche, while alternating traditional JRPG dungeon-crawling mechanics to social-interaction-based sidequests within the same party members and several NPCs that tend to fall in later entries as your typical SoL anime routine.
Released worldwide on September 5th, 2016 after a two-years delay from its original projected launch, Persona 5 is the latest entry in the series, putting the player in the shoes of a black-haired silent protagonist who got convicted of assaulting a man who was trying to harm a woman and expelled from school, being forced to relocate to Tokyo for the time being. There, he gets teleported in the mysterious Velvet Room and gets offered by the long-nosed Igor a chance for his "rehabilitation", by giving him access with a smartphone to the Metaverse in order to scout for influent people's most ill intentions and snatch them away to make better people out of them. Accepting the task and assuming the nickname of Joker, he and a number of Tokyo school students he befriends will eventually end up banding together as a vigilante group known as the 'Phantom Thieves of Heart', jumping into the Metamerse in order to reform people of all sorts.
Originally a PlayStation 3/4 exclusive with platform-crossing side games dabbling in the rhythm gaming (Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight) and musou (Persona 5 Strikers) genres, the original game eventually received an updated version with new content called Persona 5 Royal 3 years later, with ports to other contemporary systems and PCs being released during this very year's month of October. It's really easy to go on the accolades route and list all the 'Best RPG'/'Best Music'-related awards the original game got and all the accompaning Anime/stage play material/videogame crossovers the title could garner and any wiki worth its salt could list off, so instead I'm going for a slight focus shift and talk about the rather curious "Persona 5 curse" for gacha gaming, seeing how most of the gacha games that have landed a Persona 5 collaboration event would announce their End-of-Service notice within the next year's end. Star Ocean anamnesis, Sword Art Online Memory Defrag and Dragalia Lost are only the latest victims to such a trend, with only a few other gachas surviving the permanent shutdown, Final Destination style! At least, for now...
Playing out in most of the game's dungeons once that the Phantom Thieves send their "calling card" to their next target, Life Will Change was composed by Atlus regular Shoji Meguro (目黒将司) and sung by Lyn, with a nick-named Benjamin Franklin penning the lyrics. Getting all sorts of remixes and nods to it in other Persona 5-related games, it was voted as the most popular song in one of the fan polls held within the Dancing in Starlight spinoff, eventually also becoming a playable CD in another Sega game, Yakuza: Like a Dragon. Aside from Taiko and the aforementioned rhythm game spinoff, the song was also made playable in BanG Dream! as a cover version from the game's Poppin'Party unit, arranged by Yuta Kasai (笠井雄太) from the Elements Garden unit.
Big backbeat times await this song's Oni players on Taiko, with even-note clusters paving the way to the end. It's also one of the 20 songs in its debuting game -the really recent Donderful/Rhythm Festival- to be playable in its signature Don-Chan Band mode!
