Persona 6 is currently one of the most anticipated JRPGs, despite it not actually being officially announced. Persona 5 gained a large swathe of fans from around the globe, meaning its fully-fledged successor has a lot of expectations to live up to. Atlus is more than up to the task, as has been proven in recent years, but while the fifth mainline game is special it's not without some drawbacks that will need to be addressed.

Like others in the series, Persona 5 has plenty of floors of dungeons to explore and overcome, be it in one of the many beautiful palaces, or in the hard depths of Mementos. Each is not without merit, but Persona 6 has to find a way to merge the two ideas to ensure that it is as enjoyable as possible, the whole way through.

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Persona 5 Has a Mementos Problem

The palaces in Persona 5 are meticulously crafted, and each feels different from the last, both in visuals and mechanics. Kaneshiro's bank is a wholly different experience from Futaba's pyramid palace, meaning players are always kept guessing about what comes next, and how it will unfold. It's a massive improvement on Persona 4's dungeons, which had their own style but were procedurally generated and thus largely forgettable.

Persona 5 uses both philosophies, separated into two different entities; whereas the palaces are deliberately designed, Mementos is one big dungeon that adheres to the procedural generation of previous games.

It gives players a means to grind for levels and is intended to be accessed periodically through the story, chipping away at its floors to get to the bottom in good time. However, it can get repetitive quickly, and so some players have taken to ignoring the feature, only to have to return to it at a later stage and consume it in one fell swoop. The disconnect between what is mandatory to complete and what is seemingly optional poses a problem late-game, and so Persona 6 has to find a way to make its dungeons all fit seamlessly.

Persona 6 Could Take Cues from Persona 3 Reload to Make Dungeons Better

One of the biggest strengths of Persona 3 Reload was the way it changed Tartatus, installing scripted moments into a dungeon that would otherwise have been hundreds of floors of randomly made zones. It means that the place where story battles take place is the same as the area where players can grind for levels, so there's no way of forgetting to tick floors off the list elsewhere. Persona 5 was a valiant effort and made strides to craft memorable environments and moments within them, but its successor has to do more in this regard to make it even better and avoid the need to grind through combat zones in the game's closing stages.

Persona 6 has to find a way to make a dungeon that is a significant time sink, while also prompting players to complete segments in time so as to not back-load the latter stages of the story with a mountain to climb before the credits roll. Mementos isn't nearly as engaging as palaces, so when players have to clear potentially dozens of floors it can be frustrating when they'd rather be socializing.

Tartarus was much the same in the original Persona 3, but the recent remake made it one of the game's greatest strengths. Persona 6 has to feel like an advancement over what has come before because the pressure on the Atlus-developed series is only getting greater as it becomes more of a household name.