The Honest Trailers have a tendency of going all in on games in a pretty harsh way. Most times they’re actually quite honest, and they simply don’t hold back like a lot of the shills in enthusiast media. Well, for the Persona games in the Shin Megami Tensei series, Smosh Games was surprisingly benevolent to the game in terms of doling out praise and avoiding any bitingly harsh criticisms.

The Honest Trailer is only three minutes long, covering the Persona series from the time of its release on the PSX up until the recent Persona 5. It only covers the basics of the series, how players will balance the social aspects of the gameplay with the more supernatural elements, and how it all times into the battle system and religious elements. You can check it out below.

To be quite honest? I think this particular Honest Trailer was sh*t.

I know it seemed like they gave Persona more praise than ridicule like some of the other games they cover, but I almost got the impression that they weren’t very well versed in the series, and seemed to maybe skim the Wikipedia pages for each of the entries and then grabbed some footage instead of actually playing through the games.

They only barely glossed over the fact that the main characters act like 30-year-olds prescribed to a quasi-quaint lifestyle of diazapam and valium. I was also expecting a bit more of something about the deep religious themes, the whole god-killing aspect, and a lot of the subversion about suicide instead of Smosh skipping over them like pedestrians skipped over a dying man after he was stabbed trying to save a woman.

Maybe he should have identified as “Xir”, said he was gender-fluid, and called out for help on Tumblr before biting the dust by claiming that he was “raped” by a sharp object of the patriarchy. I’m sure some tumblrinas would have wobbled to his aid by furiously texting about the injustice on social media while ordering a Domino’s pizza.

Anyway, it seemed like there was a lot of material Smosh Games could have picked apart about Persona but went the easy route so as not to offend the easily offended weebs and the imageboard imps addicted to the game.

Persona is definitely a good series that touches on some important stuff happening in our everyday society that seriously needs a stronger magnifying glass from the higher-ups, but there just seemed to be a lot of other material they could have picked apart about the series that they conveniently ignored. Anyway, the Honest Trailer, despite being rather tame, was still entertaining enough.