Funny enough, I'm 115 hours in Persona 5 and I can't sit down long enough to finish. It's the game that never ends. One day soon though, lol.
I finished Nier: Automata recently and I'm almost done with Uncharted 4. I understand how you feel about the difference in quality and creativity story-wise with US/EU studios.
Wow, you must be near the end now though, yes? The depth and richness of the content in
Persona 5 is definitely one of its strengths for me---I just wish I could tolerate the combat system well enough that I could really dive into all that stuff instead of experiencing it in the kind of piecemeal way I have been up to this point.
And yes, perhaps I would be tempted to say that there there is a difference in quality and creativity between the US and JP studios that does not favour the former. More generously, I would just say that they take very different approaches, and one of those approaches suits my tastes better than the other. At the risk of over-generalising, I would say that storylines in US productions tend to be very matter-of-fact: events usually have a single, more-or-less obvious, cause, and rarely have any significance beyond how they impact the characters in the piece. In Japanese productions, events usually have multiple, often highly ambiguous causes, and almost always have a deeper metaphorical or symbolic significance in addition to the surface-level meaning.
Another big difference I would cite is that piecing together what is
really going on beyond that surface-level of interpretation is often very involved. So involved, I would argue, that it could almost be considered part of the gameplay. Often, I'll beat a given JRPG for the first time and then realise that the real work still lies ahead of me in terms of analysing and interpreting the information I've received up until that point---perhaps even necessitating going back and doing things I missed, or doing certain things differently and so on---so that I can either make sense of the ending, or otherwise fill in those parts of the story that appear to be missing from the ending.
An obvious example of a game series which places the burden of story/lore exposition upon the player would be
Dark Souls, but one of my favourite examples actually comes from the very underrated
Dragon's Dogma (spoiler warning for what follows). Most of the major quests you're given are issued by the ruler of the game's main city, and over the course of the game they take you into ever more remote and dangerous regions. On first play through, the player is unlikely to think much of this; after all, progressively harder challenges are standard fare in any game. However, once the events of the ending unfold you come to realise that it was very likely that the reason this guy kept sending you off to increasingly more perilous challenges was because he feared that you were going to usurp his throne, and wanted you to dead as a result. This is never explicitly spelled out by the game either, it's a connection that the player has to make based on hints they're given along the way. Having recently finished
NieR Automata, you can probably recall similar examples there, where seemingly throwaway moments of dialogue delivered at the culmination of minor fetch quests ended up being highly significant in terms of explaining why certain key events transpired in the story.
And like
NieR Automata, a lot of other Japanese games seem more than willing to grapple with concepts/ideas and even entire metaphysical or philosophical systems. This does happen in Western games occasionally, but usually only to a very minor degree. And I rarely, if ever, see Western games actually prioritising philosophical/ethical/metaphysical exploration to such a high degree that they will have---very much in the style of classical-era tragedies or ancient myths---characters who, first and foremost, exist to represent some concept, ideal, virtue, or phenomena. Even in fantasy games like
Skyrim or
The Witcher 3, the writers are aiming at making the characters feel as true to life as possible. I know that a lot of people prefer this, and it makes the characters more 'relatable' for the majority of players, but given my bias towards the heritage I already alluded to, I much prefer even the most 'tropey' of Japanese characters to the 'gritty' characters in Western games.
Whew. Sorry for the long post. Oh, and
apolloa: The first
SoD was pretty good, and the sequel looks to be even better. And yes, fortunately you can play the entire offline with NPC's, if you like.
