In Persona 5, you play as a high schooler, who - after trying to place an attempted rapist under civilian's arrest - is sent to live with an uncle. 

Rumours about what really happened spread around the school and marginalise you, leading you to form a tightly knit group of friends of other outcasts.

You all band together as the Phantom Thieves of Hearts vigilante group to engage in battle in the cognitive realm - an alternate dimension where the twisted desires and tormented wishes of others manifest physically. As time goes on, you discover a massive conspiracy that you have to stop before it destroys the world.

There's a lot going into this complex RPG that can absorb your time completely, but some missteps lightly tarnish this game experience.

In reality, Persona 5 is a dungeon-crawler, social simulator, and time-management headache all wrapped up in one package.

Persona 5 is an absurdly imaginative game.

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 aesthetics (the soundtrack, too), 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 to watch.

Though appropriate for its subject matter of being a teenage drama, the game takes itself very, very seriously.

Large sections of the game grind to a crawl, hammering on a plot point that just occurred a moment before.

The combat is fun, the open-ended nature of the world when it finally does open up is satisfying to poke around in, and the sheer variety of playing in the Persona realm and also out in the real world is fun.

The cutscenes 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.

Available now on PlayStation 4

 - MCT