A lot of RPGs from the western and eastern sides of the game industry tend to be very long. It’s become something of an expectation for a role-playing game to be stuffed full of activities that allow players to fully immerse themselves in a game’s world. Relax, spend time with the characters, and grind so many side quests that the main story becomes trivial. It’s a tradition as old as the genre, and none uphold it more than the Persona and The Elder Scrolls franchises.
It does not take much knowledge about either of these series to know that picking up any one of these long RPG entries will result in a time sink one won’t be free of for quite some time. Every full game covered by these two camps takes at least 30-40 hours to beat on a very focused playthrough, and players will typically take much longer than that if they take their time and/or enjoy what they’re doing. However, a question some are curious of between this pair of related-yet-different franchises is: on average, how long does it take to beat each one? The time-tracking website How Long To Beat holds some answers.
The Persona Series
The Persona series consists primarily of linear, story-heavy turn-based RPGs, where a player’s time is split between their normal life and spelunking through monster-infested dungeons. These games, and even some of their spin-offs, are full of cutscenes, side activities, and multiple treks through dungeons that extend the length of average playthroughs enormously. The fighting game and rhythm game spinoffs are certainly shorter, but these hour counts are just for their primary singleplayer campaigns, not including the multitude of side activities and difficulty options they include. Their average lengths are as follows:
- Revelations: Persona — 37 Hours
- Shin Megami Tensei: Persona — 38 Hours
- Persona 2: Innocent Sin — 40 Hours
- Persona 2: Eternal Punishment — 60 Hours
- Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 — 87 Hours
- Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES — 92.5 Hours + 33 Hours for The Answer
- Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable — 76.5 Hours
- Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 — 81 Hours
- Persona 4 Golden — 81.5 Hours
- Persona 4 Arena — 14 Hours
- Persona 4 Arena Ultimax — 13.5 Hours
- Persona 5 — 111 Hours
- Persona 5 Royal — 124 Hours
- Persona 5 Strikers — 43 Hours
- Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight — 12.5 Hours
- Persona 4: Dancing All Night — 14.5 Hours
- Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight — 12.5 Hours
- Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth — 79 Hours
- Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth — 68 Hours
Playing through all of Persona, even if it’s limited to the most upgraded versions of the main games, would take a massive amount of time. Counting the Persona 2 duology as one continuous game, that means that every main Persona game since the Persona 2 duology has the potential for a playthrough to last over 100 hours. With spin-offs included, the Persona franchise is scraping up against seven hundred hours of playtime. That is quite the huge tally of playtime, especially for largely linear games, as there's a ton of content which can easily be missed on first playthrough of older Persona games without a guide.
The Elder Scrolls Series
The Elder Scrolls franchise is comparatively a lot more compact and straightforward, assuming players stick to the main quest. There are five main games, some with DLC or expansions, The Elder Scrolls Online MMO, and the mobile card game The Elder Scrolls: Legends. Like Persona’s fighting and rhythm games, the times for Online and Legends will vary wildly based on player engagement. However, unlike Persona, the same can be said for the main games as well. Their average lengths are as follows:
- The Elder Scrolls: Arena — 33.5 Hours
- The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall — 101 Hours
- The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind — 103 Hours
- The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion — 82 Hours + 17.5 Hours for Shivering Isles and 2.5 Hours for Mehrunes’ Razor
- The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim — 111 Hours + 10 Hours for Dawnguard and 12.5 for Dragonborn
- The Elder Scrolls Online — 128 Hours + 14 Hours for Orsinium, 8 Hours for Thieves Guild, 10 Hours for Dark Brotherhood, 46 Hours for Morrowind, 28 Hours for Summerset, 30 Hours for Elsweyr, 28 Hours for Greymoor, and an unlisted number of hours for three other expansions
- The Elder Scrolls: Legends — 28 Hours
Once again, these games get quite lengthy after their first main entry. However, it bears mentioning that How Long To Beat lists the main story for every Elder Scrolls game (save for Legends) as between twenty and forty-five hours long. This owes to the Elder Scrolls games being freeform and in no rush to have players progress through the main plot. Skyrim even had a miniature expansion dedicated to giving players the chance to build their own house.
As these games are not eternally marching forward, they can potentially be explored for far more time than the Persona series — or far less. Regardless, players who take their time in every entry and then dive into The Elder Scrolls Online could spend well over six hundred hours with the franchise, a number that’s nothing to sneeze at.
Comparing the Two
From looking at these statistics, it appears that beating the main story, and only the main story, of any given mainline Persona game takes at least twice as long as its Elder Scrolls counterpart. Persona games are, by nature, story-driven RPGs where players must live out a chunk of their protagonists’ everyday lives, making successive dungeon forays along the way.
Meanwhile, The Elder Scrolls games are much more open in what they allow players to do, meaning that a player who wants to clear the main story of one and little else can do just that with minimal resistance. However, a player who gets thoroughly sucked into the world of Elder Scrolls can potentially spend as long, or even longer than in a Persona game. The sheer volume of side quests, side dungeons, loot, NPCs, enemies, and the massive world itself can keep players coming back for more.
When it comes to choosing a series to play based on a certain length, there’s no clear winner. Elder Scrolls games can technically be completed in less than half the time of their Persona counterparts, but that would involve skipping so much content that the experience is hardly worth it. On the other end of the spectrum, beating a Persona game is a long, satisfying experience — but an Elder Scrolls game can last much longer, as those games only end when the player decides they do.
Which one a player selects is up to personal preference, as they will take 50+ hours per main game no matter which series is chosen. It’s rather surprising that these series have comparable hour counts at all, given their extremely dissimilar approaches to story progression. At least franchises that long are still able to serve good content for most of their runs.
Source: HowLongToBeat