Its almost like some of the dev staff were a lot cooler than others or things were altered in later development.
I read Yusuke as Aroace myself (being one myself), but it's a fact that in the preceding game that was explicitly the case. Your main sidekick and man of questionable behavior was supposed to be a gay romance option. It's even been coded into the game, so that mods that restore it exist, but it was removed at some point of development.
Why not just age the characters up a bit, set it in university.
That's a super common criticism, and Persona 2: Eternal Punishment actually has its main cast be entirely adults with jobs. Its gameplay is different from P3 - P5, but it exists.
Frankly, I think nowadays that romance options in such games are kinda mid and it wouldn't be too much of a loss if they were removed and the Social-Link/Confidant system is a bad way to tell a character's story.
I like the mechanics of it. Its an interesting puzzle to balance getting all the social links with the scheduling to unlock all their abilities but I wouldn't care if that was replaced with needing the two personas to be more in tune or something. I definitely found myself fast forwarding through some of them by the end. I think part of that is just how clumsy and ham-fisted it all is. There's potential for a really interesting story about found family there, they just didn't really pull it off.
Case in point I got all the relationships up to ten and then never hung out with anyone again if I didn't have to. I wasn't interested enough in any of their stories to want to see more. My Joker was less an outsider uniting and discovering the value of friendship with other outcasts and more a manipulative bastard that dropped people as soon as he got what he wanted from them.
Maybe that's just how I played it and maybe it'd be different if I was younger but the mechanics seemed to encourage that.
I read Yusuke as Aroace myself (being one myself), but it's a fact that in the preceding game that was explicitly the case. Your main sidekick and man of questionable behavior was supposed to be a gay romance option. It's even been coded into the game, so that mods that restore it exist, but it was removed at some point of development.
That's a super common criticism, and Persona 2: Eternal Punishment actually has its main cast be entirely adults with jobs. Its gameplay is different from P3 - P5, but it exists.
Frankly, I think nowadays that romance options in such games are kinda mid and it wouldn't be too much of a loss if they were removed and the Social-Link/Confidant system is a bad way to tell a character's story.
I like the mechanics of it. Its an interesting puzzle to balance getting all the social links with the scheduling to unlock all their abilities but I wouldn't care if that was replaced with needing the two personas to be more in tune or something. I definitely found myself fast forwarding through some of them by the end. I think part of that is just how clumsy and ham-fisted it all is. There's potential for a really interesting story about found family there, they just didn't really pull it off.
Case in point I got all the relationships up to ten and then never hung out with anyone again if I didn't have to. I wasn't interested enough in any of their stories to want to see more. My Joker was less an outsider uniting and discovering the value of friendship with other outcasts and more a manipulative bastard that dropped people as soon as he got what he wanted from them.
Maybe that's just how I played it and maybe it'd be different if I was younger but the mechanics seemed to encourage that.