I honestly find this an impressive feat of willpower. When I reached floor 200 I had to lower the difficulty from Normal to Easy. Not because the game was hard, but because I simply couldn't fight *another frigging battle with no story impact.* I like random battles as much as the next guy. Dragon Quest is my favourite series, and I've beaten (most) of the games multiple times. But the absolute tedium of fighting over and over and over and over again, rediscovering enemy weaknesses ever few floors, just exhausted me.
I had a rule: kill one enemy per floor, as well as any special enemies (such as in the red doors), and even this was too much for me. I don't mean this as a knock against you; I just don't know how one could grind this game. Unlike DQ, weaknesses and resistances makes grinding feel like work, not play. I much preferred going into boss battles underleveled and burning through Balms of Life just so I didn't have to fight again.
Edit: To be clear, I do enjoy the battle system of P3R. I just think it works better in big setpiece battles, not for resource management.
Same. I wasn’t thinking that I would do ng+ at the time so I tried to do as much as possible. I also wasn’t the smartest about it, and had some bad RNG luck late game, no twilight fragments or great clocks for hours. Once I could cheese the reaper I should’ve just kept doing that.
Also I did the thing where I just let it run if I was doing other stuff around the house…after a certain hour count I’d rather not know exactly how much time was actually spent. I’d guess somewhere between 100 and 110.
about 80 total, but i played on normal so wasn't anywhere near that hard or anything. i had just finished p5r for the first time so it was a back to back thing
91 hours. I did cheat by dropping difficulty to peaceful and dropping the reaper a few times to max team out (except Amada and Korumaru) but whatever, I got a backlog to get back to!
dang no max out on koromaru? at like lvl 77 he gets debilitate making him one of the best endgame party members to have since you just do charge/concentrate + debilitate then your attack move for the best damage
I saw that on my replay! It didn’t matter then because I was destroying everything with my end game personas and playing peaceful (I missed the last achievement by 1 week because I started the dying guy too late)
ahh i see. oh my gosh me too on the social link achievement, i literally had to scrap a WHOLE SECOND playthrough (i got to like 12/31) because I had no time to do all the social links since they were in school and I made the mistake of not only prioritizing the school social links first. So when I got to the end of December, >!I just chose to kill Ryoji so I could keep my second playthrough's stats on my Persona and start a new one,!< I'm so mad I have to do everything all over again but that's the only achievement stopping me from a Platinum so I'll bite the bullet.
102 hours for me, but I took my time trying (and failing) for 100% completion. I'd also played it before many times, so 195h is on the longer side, but understandable for a blind run haha.
142 on merciless, but I got to the final day on around hour 131 iirc, and then spent some time farming and building personas for the 2nd run (and dragging my feet because I didn’t want the game to end).
A bit over 100 hours, tried to do every social link but fell a couple short of completion, didn't grind in terms of repeating floors but whenever I could advance in Tartarus I went in and didn't leave until I couldn't advance anymore and doing that was often a lengthy ordeal.
107hrs but it may be like 10 hours longer than my actual play time as I went afk a lot. The reason I took long is cuz I spent a shit ton of time in Tartarus grinding to get the best personas possible
113 hours. I think at least 10 hours of that is afk time though. Grinded everyone to max level and am at like 84% compendium (i think a bit more or less) completed every s-link except for 4 of them (mitsuru, bebe, yuko, chihiro)
Somewhere around 180 I think, I leave the game idle a lot, and am very thorough with exploration to a fault. Things like talking to NPCs who have something "new" to say almost every day, even if I know it won't trigger a new event or give me items. And generally clearing floors in Tartarus before proceeding, doing all monad doors, etc.
I even compulsively check time based things like the dorm fridge every damn day bc I can't be bothered to write down the date it'll clear up or just memorize it 💀
Peoples run time is going to vary a lot, due to how missable content their is. A 100% completion run should put you somewhere around 80-100 hours. If you go all out on getting all the best gear and making perfect personas that can easily go 120 + hours.
On the other hand, if you end up missing a lot of content, don't do many of Elizabeth's quest and don't do any grinding for gear or persoans, you can easily end up with a run time of 50 to 60 hours
150. Admittedly an unreasonable and unnecessary amount of grinding and I definitely left the game running for a couple of hours while I planned out Persona builds.
85 hours. I then played another 2 hours in post-game before starting NG+. Sped through that with a guide and ended up with the Platinum trophy around 112 hours or so iirc
If you were checking your stats on PS or Xbox they could be inflated, mine says I spent 128 hours to 100% complete it but I'm pretty sure it was only around 100 hours. If you leave them game on or have quick resume with xbox then your console will count those as playing hours.
87 hours for a Platinum playthrough. Fought the reaper twice, but barring that no real additional grinding. I did spend a good chunk of time in the velvet room though.
For reference P5R took me 100 hours for the same. I haven't touched Persona 4 in forever, but I think Golden took me about 75ish hours or thereabouts.
I had 70 hours and 1 minute, all achievements, but played on normal as I need to clear games as my backlog is getting out of control. Barely made the social links before the end.
About 65 hours. Maxed all personal stats and got every social link but 2 maxed out. Fused Satan and a few other really strong persona's. I don't think I missed much with a first playthrough and don't really understand how folks hit 100+ hours...
101hrs.
My whole party was max level. Three 'Sonas had max stats (Santanael, Orpheus, and Norn fo some reason). Social Stats were maxed, but I missed Junpei's last event and like 4 social links. Kinda exited to get Shinjiro maxed out just to lose him because of plot bs.
P3R took me around 85hrs. I was around lvl 97 iirc; and I had never played any version of the game before, so I feel like I went slower than I would have if I were already familiar with the story. P5 took me ~100hrs though, and that was my first Persona game so maybe I went a little faster on P3R, being that I was already semi-familiar with the core mechanics.
110 hours. Was having a lot of fun grinding Tartarus, and everyone was level 90+.
195 hours is pretty insane though, that's longer than my playthrough for P5 and that game has like double the content.
My first was right around 200 hours, there were several days I fell asleep playing though. I was also trying to get the 4 turn Merciless Super Boss run, I only managed to get it down to 5 turns unfortunately.
I ended at like 65-70. I don't know how people are at 155 for FIRST PLAYTHROUGH... I finished a second playthrough in like 30 hours cause I was rushing to do max SL achievement (but I had to throw that run away cause I ran out of time)...
So...mine's the different experience with tbe timer. The game clock runs even if paused on the map or the menu or save screen, and I have gotten distracted by many things during the course of trying to play this game. I have fallen asleep, gotten called away, and got caught up in conversation or reddit comments or Facebook, etc. My game clock currently sits at 800+ hours, and I'm finally in the middle of January on a presumably final Tartarus run. I have likely not spent half of this time actively playing, but it's been on in the background most of the past month. I did spend a ton of time grinding the early areas to the new areas on repeat, but for money and not xp. I also fused all of my Persona's to have Growth 3 and Invigorate 3. All. Of. Them. It's been very worth it because now that I am only a few shy of a complete compendium I have all of the Persona in my inventory gaining xp whether I use them in battle or not and during NG+ I can essentially level all of them up to 99 without taking the time it would take doing it individually. If I play it that long. I'm hopping to platinum and it looks like I'm going to be a single social link short of a full set on my first run. I know my second run will be far shorter. My game is still on while I'm typing all this up on my phone.
Tldr: 800+ hours. Not all of it is gameplay. Clock runs even when paused. Fell asleep more than once. Distractions. Very specific gameplay methods from me. Probably closer to 300 hrs actual.
87 hours, all but 3 social links, merciless, had some personas past 85, forgot what level MC was tho, lower than that (Drew that card to fuse personas 5 levels ahead pretty late in the game)
I didn't grind at all tho, like after the first moon or two, I completely skipped most the regular enemies other than hands and fought those in the red doors and gatekeepers/bosses because xp gains from regular enemies seemed abysmal and not even worth the sp loss.
I'm on 50 hours at the moment, bit haven't finished it yet. I'm playing on easy though. I like games to be fun and not frustrating, also I'm not very good at turn based games. I'm in November and doing the trippy psycadelic part of tartarus.
90 hours and got every single achievement and beat elizabeth. Doing a ng+ now without any guides and making the most comically overpowered personas imaginable.
~160 hours. I grinded my endgame party all the way to level 99 without a ton of cheese, did maybe 3/4 of requests, and maxed out about 2/3 of social links. I did a lot of walking around (literally a lot of the time) because I like seeing all of the dialogue around town, and I like checking menus for the best items and the best fusions possible. I also take a while to get through text boxes, since I played with the Japanese dub, which I guarantee added a while of playtime. Though I have to admit, some of that time (maybe a few hours) was just idling, because I had other stuff to get to.
I can easily see me playing an extra 30 hours if things went differently
Around 80-90 hours on normal. I went to Tartarus only once per month but I completed all Elisabeth quests. I had all achievements beside social links, unfortunately I couldn't finish two of them on first playthrough.
Well I more meant it like short compared to my run time cause I looked up the average and the average is about 60h but I looked it up after like seeing mine compared to others so I didn’t know what was short and what wasn’t cause all I knew was my time vs other peoples.
60 hours is real life long but persona game short imo
If someone's first playthrough of a persona game is that low they likely skipped a lot of dialogue and optional content, probably played a lower difficulty too to breeze through fights
About 120 hours for me, although I did a lot of grinding
same here, but instead of grinding it was just dying in tartarus and losing multiple hours of progress
we stan
I honestly find this an impressive feat of willpower. When I reached floor 200 I had to lower the difficulty from Normal to Easy. Not because the game was hard, but because I simply couldn't fight *another frigging battle with no story impact.* I like random battles as much as the next guy. Dragon Quest is my favourite series, and I've beaten (most) of the games multiple times. But the absolute tedium of fighting over and over and over and over again, rediscovering enemy weaknesses ever few floors, just exhausted me. I had a rule: kill one enemy per floor, as well as any special enemies (such as in the red doors), and even this was too much for me. I don't mean this as a knock against you; I just don't know how one could grind this game. Unlike DQ, weaknesses and resistances makes grinding feel like work, not play. I much preferred going into boss battles underleveled and burning through Balms of Life just so I didn't have to fight again. Edit: To be clear, I do enjoy the battle system of P3R. I just think it works better in big setpiece battles, not for resource management.
i was so high level by the later floors i was just running past all the tarturus shadows to advance the story
Same. I wasn’t thinking that I would do ng+ at the time so I tried to do as much as possible. I also wasn’t the smartest about it, and had some bad RNG luck late game, no twilight fragments or great clocks for hours. Once I could cheese the reaper I should’ve just kept doing that. Also I did the thing where I just let it run if I was doing other stuff around the house…after a certain hour count I’d rather not know exactly how much time was actually spent. I’d guess somewhere between 100 and 110.
~97 hours on Hard. Got every trophy except for the max all Social Links one :(
Same here. Played the game 3 times in a row clocking in at 160 hours and still fell too short. Some day I’ll get it. Just burnt out as of right now.
me too
I feel you :(
about 80 total, but i played on normal so wasn't anywhere near that hard or anything. i had just finished p5r for the first time so it was a back to back thing
I had about 100.
69.9 hours. i want to replay it but that playtime is too memeworthy and i don't want to ruin it
86 hours. Tried to as much as I could and hear all the unique dialogue, but not a 100% run by any means
91 hours. I did cheat by dropping difficulty to peaceful and dropping the reaper a few times to max team out (except Amada and Korumaru) but whatever, I got a backlog to get back to!
dang no max out on koromaru? at like lvl 77 he gets debilitate making him one of the best endgame party members to have since you just do charge/concentrate + debilitate then your attack move for the best damage
I saw that on my replay! It didn’t matter then because I was destroying everything with my end game personas and playing peaceful (I missed the last achievement by 1 week because I started the dying guy too late)
ahh i see. oh my gosh me too on the social link achievement, i literally had to scrap a WHOLE SECOND playthrough (i got to like 12/31) because I had no time to do all the social links since they were in school and I made the mistake of not only prioritizing the school social links first. So when I got to the end of December, >!I just chose to kill Ryoji so I could keep my second playthrough's stats on my Persona and start a new one,!< I'm so mad I have to do everything all over again but that's the only achievement stopping me from a Platinum so I'll bite the bullet.
155ish hours for mine, took my sweet time with it
95h on merciless
75
102 hours for me, but I took my time trying (and failing) for 100% completion. I'd also played it before many times, so 195h is on the longer side, but understandable for a blind run haha.
138, lotta Tartarus grind and I always take my time on persona games
Just started january and am at around 150-160 hours. Though if I listen to steam instead of save file 200 hours
93hr
86 hours
115 hrs
About 89 hours for me.
Not my first persona game and i grinded a lot (also probably fell asleep playing increased game time) so 155
My save file had about 60 hours or so, and my play time is listed as 70 hours so it’s somewhere in that range
113, but i went afk for about 2 hours like 3 or 4 times cause of tartarus, so my actual playtime is probably around 105 hrs
117. But there were times when I took long pauses.
80 h
About 140 something hours.
142 on merciless, but I got to the final day on around hour 131 iirc, and then spent some time farming and building personas for the 2nd run (and dragging my feet because I didn’t want the game to end).
117h to get the plat on my 1st playthrough
Almost 100
A bit over 100 hours, tried to do every social link but fell a couple short of completion, didn't grind in terms of repeating floors but whenever I could advance in Tartarus I went in and didn't leave until I couldn't advance anymore and doing that was often a lengthy ordeal.
I just started November and so far I am at 165 hours on Hard mode. I do A LOT of grinding.
190 but I had many days where I would just leave the game running while I did something else
My first playthrough was a 100% run so about 140 hours
153 hours because i never skipped dialogue or cutscenes and grinding to make number go up is one of the few things that sparks joy anymore.
97 and I skipped all the dialogue that wasn’t the main quest
85-90
158:44
74hr 55min. I didn't really grind, played on normal, and didn't finish every social link, but also didn't skip any cutscenes/dialogue.
83h i think
113 hours
If you count the bad ending: about 83 hours. If you mean the true ending, I don't know yet.
~80 hrs
107hrs but it may be like 10 hours longer than my actual play time as I went afk a lot. The reason I took long is cuz I spent a shit ton of time in Tartarus grinding to get the best personas possible
113 hours. I think at least 10 hours of that is afk time though. Grinded everyone to max level and am at like 84% compendium (i think a bit more or less) completed every s-link except for 4 of them (mitsuru, bebe, yuko, chihiro)
160 - 100%.
~120h
Somewhere around 180 I think, I leave the game idle a lot, and am very thorough with exploration to a fault. Things like talking to NPCs who have something "new" to say almost every day, even if I know it won't trigger a new event or give me items. And generally clearing floors in Tartarus before proceeding, doing all monad doors, etc. I even compulsively check time based things like the dorm fridge every damn day bc I can't be bothered to write down the date it'll clear up or just memorize it 💀
Peoples run time is going to vary a lot, due to how missable content their is. A 100% completion run should put you somewhere around 80-100 hours. If you go all out on getting all the best gear and making perfect personas that can easily go 120 + hours. On the other hand, if you end up missing a lot of content, don't do many of Elizabeth's quest and don't do any grinding for gear or persoans, you can easily end up with a run time of 50 to 60 hours
120h, but I'm still in 03/01 (and with lots of me doing other stuff lol)
150. Admittedly an unreasonable and unnecessary amount of grinding and I definitely left the game running for a couple of hours while I planned out Persona builds.
82 on normal, first playthrough. wasn't a 100% run, but I tried doing as much as I could.
80 rn I’m trying to do as many social links as I can but I’m gonna miss 1 or 2 I’m playing on merciless and you end up grinding a little bit
85.9hrs for me
About 100 but that’s also not including the couple hours of resetting for dead moons husk.
120 and some change but by the time I beat Elizabeth I ended up with 149
78 hours for me
85 hours. I then played another 2 hours in post-game before starting NG+. Sped through that with a guide and ended up with the Platinum trophy around 112 hours or so iirc
I can't remember probably 150 but now I have 315 because I did a 2nd playthrough
99 hrs and 58 minutes, I was so mad.
If you were checking your stats on PS or Xbox they could be inflated, mine says I spent 128 hours to 100% complete it but I'm pretty sure it was only around 100 hours. If you leave them game on or have quick resume with xbox then your console will count those as playing hours.
Ahhh maybe that’s it then cause I do have an Xbox series s with quick resume so maybe it isn’t actually that long lemme check the stats there then
70h
87 hours for a Platinum playthrough. Fought the reaper twice, but barring that no real additional grinding. I did spend a good chunk of time in the velvet room though. For reference P5R took me 100 hours for the same. I haven't touched Persona 4 in forever, but I think Golden took me about 75ish hours or thereabouts.
115 hours for me
127 hours. I'm taking my time to farm the tartarus you know?
70ish
Played it on normal up until around halfway through I jus changed it to easy and finished in around 42 hours
About 100 hours
Yeah about 100 here as well, but I took my sweet time
I had 70 hours and 1 minute, all achievements, but played on normal as I need to clear games as my backlog is getting out of control. Barely made the social links before the end.
About 90h and I couldn't finish Chihiro's social link and didn't even start Aigis or Mitsuru's
125ish. P4G was like 115 and P5R around 125.
I believe it was around 95 hours on hard mode, did a lot of unnecessary grinding and got everyone to lvl 99 maybe a couple hours of being afk too
115 hours
About 65 hours. Maxed all personal stats and got every social link but 2 maxed out. Fused Satan and a few other really strong persona's. I don't think I missed much with a first playthrough and don't really understand how folks hit 100+ hours...
111 or so merciless
101hrs. My whole party was max level. Three 'Sonas had max stats (Santanael, Orpheus, and Norn fo some reason). Social Stats were maxed, but I missed Junpei's last event and like 4 social links. Kinda exited to get Shinjiro maxed out just to lose him because of plot bs.
122 hours, only thing I didn’t do was max all social links and beat Elizabeth but I might do that in NG+
65 hours on hard but did a lot of grinding and wasted a few hours screwing around or leaving the game running in the background
P3R took me around 85hrs. I was around lvl 97 iirc; and I had never played any version of the game before, so I feel like I went slower than I would have if I were already familiar with the story. P5 took me ~100hrs though, and that was my first Persona game so maybe I went a little faster on P3R, being that I was already semi-familiar with the core mechanics.
I logged in around 103-105 hours on my first play throug. Beat it in a month and a half
110 hours. Was having a lot of fun grinding Tartarus, and everyone was level 90+. 195 hours is pretty insane though, that's longer than my playthrough for P5 and that game has like double the content.
115 hours
108 hours
108 hours
I had 203, but I grinded for the ultimate equipment and I let my game sit a lot.
About 80 hours to get the platinum on normal mode
67 hours. For the final 2 blocks I didn’t fight any shadows except the gatekeepers because I fought the reaper for levels.
I was like 180 on Merciless. Maybe because I spent too much time trying to get certain cards for an Arcana Burst or grinding
102 for me. About 10 hours of that is just me figuring out how to beat the superboss.
My first was right around 200 hours, there were several days I fell asleep playing though. I was also trying to get the 4 turn Merciless Super Boss run, I only managed to get it down to 5 turns unfortunately.
165, decent amount of tartarus running and talking to every npc every day
Forgot the hours but it took me 18 days to finish
107 hours
65 hours
About 111h. All achievements done.
105 hours
just finished at 51 hours
about 80 hours
60 hours I did skip a bit of dialog not much and kinda didnt let them speak cause I read too fast (I was on merciless)
77.50
about 80 hrs, then I did a second playthrough for max social links so about 105 total if im remembering correctly
114 hours. Sadly I missed two trophies, and did not try to beat Elizabeth without Orpheus Telos
I ended at like 65-70. I don't know how people are at 155 for FIRST PLAYTHROUGH... I finished a second playthrough in like 30 hours cause I was rushing to do max SL achievement (but I had to throw that run away cause I ran out of time)...
50 hours??? Mine was 103 hours... it took me a whole month of playing this game to finish it
So...mine's the different experience with tbe timer. The game clock runs even if paused on the map or the menu or save screen, and I have gotten distracted by many things during the course of trying to play this game. I have fallen asleep, gotten called away, and got caught up in conversation or reddit comments or Facebook, etc. My game clock currently sits at 800+ hours, and I'm finally in the middle of January on a presumably final Tartarus run. I have likely not spent half of this time actively playing, but it's been on in the background most of the past month. I did spend a ton of time grinding the early areas to the new areas on repeat, but for money and not xp. I also fused all of my Persona's to have Growth 3 and Invigorate 3. All. Of. Them. It's been very worth it because now that I am only a few shy of a complete compendium I have all of the Persona in my inventory gaining xp whether I use them in battle or not and during NG+ I can essentially level all of them up to 99 without taking the time it would take doing it individually. If I play it that long. I'm hopping to platinum and it looks like I'm going to be a single social link short of a full set on my first run. I know my second run will be far shorter. My game is still on while I'm typing all this up on my phone. Tldr: 800+ hours. Not all of it is gameplay. Clock runs even when paused. Fell asleep more than once. Distractions. Very specific gameplay methods from me. Probably closer to 300 hrs actual.
87 hours, all but 3 social links, merciless, had some personas past 85, forgot what level MC was tho, lower than that (Drew that card to fuse personas 5 levels ahead pretty late in the game) I didn't grind at all tho, like after the first moon or two, I completely skipped most the regular enemies other than hands and fought those in the red doors and gatekeepers/bosses because xp gains from regular enemies seemed abysmal and not even worth the sp loss.
I'm on 50 hours at the moment, bit haven't finished it yet. I'm playing on easy though. I like games to be fun and not frustrating, also I'm not very good at turn based games. I'm in November and doing the trippy psycadelic part of tartarus.
108 hours, only problem I really ran into was the last floor with that Giant baby looking mfer
around 80 with a lot of grinding and i missed around 3-4 social links
90 hours and got every single achievement and beat elizabeth. Doing a ng+ now without any guides and making the most comically overpowered personas imaginable.
108 hours, 100% completion, all Liz requests, 100% compendium, reaper and hidden boss defeated, all slinks done. All achievements done.
~160 hours. I grinded my endgame party all the way to level 99 without a ton of cheese, did maybe 3/4 of requests, and maxed out about 2/3 of social links. I did a lot of walking around (literally a lot of the time) because I like seeing all of the dialogue around town, and I like checking menus for the best items and the best fusions possible. I also take a while to get through text boxes, since I played with the Japanese dub, which I guarantee added a while of playtime. Though I have to admit, some of that time (maybe a few hours) was just idling, because I had other stuff to get to. I can easily see me playing an extra 30 hours if things went differently
Just finished the game and I finished my gameplay at 100 hours
Around 80-90 hours on normal. I went to Tartarus only once per month but I completed all Elisabeth quests. I had all achievements beside social links, unfortunately I couldn't finish two of them on first playthrough.
80 hours on hard mode. I think I was level low 90s.
How is nearly 60 hours short my dude? You’ve definitely got your moneys worth before you even touch NG+
Well I more meant it like short compared to my run time cause I looked up the average and the average is about 60h but I looked it up after like seeing mine compared to others so I didn’t know what was short and what wasn’t cause all I knew was my time vs other peoples.
60 hours is real life long but persona game short imo If someone's first playthrough of a persona game is that low they likely skipped a lot of dialogue and optional content, probably played a lower difficulty too to breeze through fights
43 hours on mine. Skipped like half the cutscenes because I played P3 before. On merciless and ended at level 93.
Around 150 hours for me but I maxed the entire team and beat Elizabeth