This is gonna be one of the weirder reviews I’ve done here on MMGaming. Persona 5 Royal was honestly a pretty excellent game, one I’d thoroughly recommend (with a few caveats of course), and that’s so-far, so-standard. The game is extremely highly praised, so adding more praise on top of that probably doesn’t seem quite so far-fetched. The issue is that I suspect I’m about to spend most of the next 2000 words mostly whinging about the game and complaining about various aspects of it and then at the end somehow justify why I still liked it… Let’s just get into it and see if I can make sense of my own thoughts!
As an introduction to Persona 5, a JRPG developed by Atlus entertainment, it is part of a spin-off franchise from the apparently very popular Shin Megami Tensei franchise. I say this just to make it clear that I had to Google that and went into Persona 5 knowing absolutely literally nothing about it and having never played any of the games before; and you absolutely do not need to. To put my lack of knowledge on display I actually didn’t even realise that the Persona 5 Royal version I was playing was a completely overhauled version of the original game with a multitude of new changes and a whole extra bit of DLC added on at the end.
In Persona 5, and the Persona series as a whole, you take control of a ragtag group of teenaged misfits who can all control a magical and powerful manifestation of their psyche called a Persona. Using these personae it is possible for them to enter the warped and twisted mental worlds of various despicable evil adults, fighting their way through the “Metaverse” in order to reach the end of each adult’s mental palace and destroy the source of their twisted view on reality, causing in them a change of heart as they realise how fucked up, cruel and straight-up evil their behaviour has been.
It’s sort of weirdly reminiscent of Psychonauts to me in that you essentially enter the minds of these individuals to alter their perception of reality to make them aware of the damage they’ve caused. Where it differs from Psychonauts is that it does actually spend a good deal more time reflecting on whether they are doing the right thing in brainwashing these people, but ultimately that always rings a little bit hollow given that the enemies range from monstrous to absolutely cartoonishly evil.
The protagonist for this is Joker, a teenaged boy who is wrongly accused of a crime and moved to Tokyo with a new temporary guardian in order to… I’m not sure actually? Somehow reflect on his life by having his parents refuse to have anything to do with raising him? Japan is weird…
Moving to his new high school (because that’s the only setting that happens in Japan and anime, and everything after high school doesn’t exist) he makes a bunch of new friends who are also outcasts in various ways and in the process of trying to fight the twisted desires of adults also has to get his own life back on track.
This occurs through two main segments, there is a real-life “dating sim” type of experience where you have two periods of afternoon and evening every single day (for close to a full year’s worth of days) in which you can spend time with your friends to advance their relationships, go shopping for gear and accessories, improve your stats, balance 5 different social stats required for advancing relationships and this is also on top of having to attend school. You also then have the Persona aspect itself where you can, once per day do some dungeon delving into the mental palaces of enemies in order to effect the change of heart and in each case are given a timer in order to do-so (the timer is usually around 20 in-game days which is absolutely more than enough time).
So, a big part of the game is actually simply balancing all these various different aspects. You need to actually complete the palaces in order to complete the game and the story, but you also need to make time to hang out with each of your friends (who apparently will won’t connect with you properly if you hang out as a group), you’ll need to spend time increasing your social stats (in order to pass thresholds for your confidants as well) along with half a dozen other side things which occupy your time.
Now, my very first take-away from this was that “holy shit I have about 500 friends to talk to, I need to max out all my stats and that’s on top of actually beating the game? I will NEVER be able to do all of this.” And honestly, that lead to a lot of feelings of indecision through most of the first half of the game. I absolutely despise it when it feels like I am doing something sub-optimally, and when figuring out the actual optimal route here involves about 1000 different variables, actually doing it perfectly is damn-near impossible (albeit IS apparently doable).
However, it turns out I needed have worried too much because I did reach the end of the base game (even prior to the Royal expansion) having maxed out pretty much everything I needed to. So, that at least is something I can reassure others about. I do think the game suffers from offering almost too many options for each day, causing analysis paralysis, however if you try and simply force yourself to do something each day to progress you’ll inevitably complete most of the stuff you need to.
I also think that many aspects of this are stuff which are actively detrimental to your experience. Conversations for example will regularly have multiple dialogue options for you. These do not cause branching effects or changes in the direction of conversation, but they DO influence how your companions think about you. So, if you want to make the MOST of your time, you basically need a guide open the entire time to make sure you choose the option which best improves their opinion of you (because the rationale behind which choice is best was very often completely unclear to me).
The other side of this coin though is that the game provides so many options which are, frankly, utterly pointless. To the point of absurdity in fact. There are at least 3 part time jobs for earning money, but you always earn MORE than enough by selling loot from the dungeons or Mementos (a randomly-generated, multi-level dungeon representing the public’s collective unconscious) so the only reason to EVER work there is to trigger access to some side quests. Of the 28 different locations you can catch the train to in-game, the vast majority are “hangout spots” for spending time with your companions and you absolutely NEVER need to actually visit them. There’s dozens of shops selling a variety of shit spread throughout several different hubs, but again absolutely most of this is just completely useless tat.
It is honestly more than a little baffling how much time was spent creating all these various shops and hangout places when I literally did not visit the vast majority of them once…
A further painful part of the dating-sim bit is that sometimes the game will go into a dedicated “story” section. This will skip several days in a row to get through some main story beats, which can be a bit frustrating if you feel you lose valuable time. What is REALLY frustrating though is how long these bits can be. One particularly outrageous segment was one towards the end of the base game where there is a literal TWO HOUR story segment. That is TWO HOURS of conversation, some cut-scenes, and absolutely no opportunity to save during it. Because who doesn’t sit down to play a game and know they need at least two hours interrupted before they can save and actually start playing again.
In the dungeons the game switches from dating-sim with time slots to what feels like a fairly standard JRPG turn-based combat system. You explore the palaces of your enemies, fighting shadows of their cognition as you do so. In combat you have bunch of different elemental styles of attack and winning fights is (at first at least) usually about finding out the hidden weaknesses of your enemies and using the appropriate abilities on them. You also need to balance your and your compatriot’s health and “mana” over the course of delving into the dungeon. This all feels pretty standard at first, but with juuuuuust enough variation to keep it diverting.
You also need to gain new abilities and powers by capturing and fusing different Personae in a very weird form of Pokemon, given that you execute two existing ones to form a new one. This is, again, another thing you need to juggle because you always need the newest and strongest Pokemon with the best damaging attacks (imagine using the ones that do status debuffs…) and it again becomes a case of “gotta catch em all”. Worse though is that in the real world, to make the most of interacting with your friends you generally need a persona that matches their “type” in your inventory. Just ANOTHER thing to keep in mind.
As an aside here, you can convince enemy personae to join your roster as well. But like with conversations with companions, passing the “speech checks” for this would feel basically like rolling the dice if you don’t use a guide.
And again, like with the dating-sim aspect this isn’t even mentioning the fact that you need to craft tools for your missions (99% pointless), find and buy new gear (largely pointless), can use personae to strengthen other ones (pointless), can “imprison” personae to strengthen them (pointless)… There is just so fucking much of it…
On standard difficulty the vast majority of the game was honestly straight-forward enough, with it only occasionally becoming genuinely challenging. Usually though these instances were causes for frustration more than anything else because it was usually caused by enemies with no weaknesses. In a game where it teaches you to attack enemy weak-spots. Just a head-scratcher for you there.
On the bright side, despite the combat sort of having a bog-standard theme to it, the actual music and abilities of it all have an extremely stylish and kinetic feeling. Every time you enter combat you are being dragged along by the fast pace of the music, bopping around as you use abilities which all feel like they explode in satisfying beat to the atmosphere. It has an almost comic-book vibe which actually fits a lot of its aesthetic, like you half expect gigantic explosions with the words “POW” in them to fill the screen when you punch someone. It’s just a delight to behold.
Stylish is a word that I think suits Persona 5 to a tee. Visually it certainly looks about as anime as it comes, but it’s still extremely vibrant and often exciting to experience. It also actually doesn’t go off the rails too-often with just how anime it is. One thing though that I do wish was that while all the music is certainly enjoyable and has an exciting feeling to it… In a game that’s about 120 hours long it BADLY needs more than like 5 different tracks (one for sadness, one for battle, one for doldrums, one for getting pumped up and one for general day-to-day nonsense). Seriously… Doesn’t matter how good the song is, after the 5000th time, it REALLY starts to fucking grate.
Generally, a big part of what drives Persona is actually this same styleishness, you want to see what’s going to happen next, you want to discover more and find more interesting stuff. Even battling new enemy personas is usually good fun because sure sometimes it might be another variation of coloured slime, but sometimes it will be a fucking gigantic cock in a chariot.
Outside of the combat, the dating-sim aspects of the game also suffer from a lot of issues that just confuse me thinking about them. Major story beats of the game are voice-acted, and the voice-acting is actually fabulous too allow me to say, but then when it comes to the individual companion stories, the only parts voice acted will be the first and max encounter levels. Instead, most of the intervening levels are just text-based while it does the “Japan” thing of each character making a “UwU” noise between each block of text.
I absolutely DO NOT UNDERSTAND this. I do not get why they wouldn’t get voice acting for the companion stories when these are, arguably, a huge chunk of why we play the game. We want to connect with these characters, make friends with them, and it’s just that much harder to do so when all they actually say is “Teeheehee” over some lines about how nice you are.
That as well actually is something that also starts to grate. I genuinely think most of the companions in Persona 5 are well worth interacting with, but every single one of them also does eventually start suffering from being far-too anime-ish. “Oh my god I have had such a hard time in my life. But because of you Joker I know I need to be strong and move forward and together we will be strong and move forward and I will rely on you to help me be strong and keep moving forward and you can rely on me as your new friend to-”
“Teeheehee”
“Be strong and move forward!”
It really do be like that sometimes.
I think this must be a Japanese thing because another aspect of this is over-explaining everything to absolute death. Like the whole “we enter a magical realm which is a manifestation of a person’s twisted internal view of the world and by beating them up with magic, we change their perspective”. This sounds super complicated, but in game terms it really could not be simpler. That doesn’t matter though because they will explain it about 1000 times. Every single time you enter a new dungeon Ryuji can go “hey how are we fixing things here” just for everyone else to go “WE’RE CHANGING THEIR HEART!”
Yes. Thanks gang. For the billionth time, that’s why we’re here, cool.
The game is also very guilty of over-tutorialising some aspects. The first mental palace you have to fight through is probably one of the biggest barriers of entry to the whole game because a fucking 20-hour tutorial before we can actually play is just… Exhausting…
There are other parts as well where things just get over-the-top weeb-y. Goro Akechi was, for about 90% of the game, my absolute least favourite character and companion because while the others felt like relatively normal (by anime terms) high schoolers. Akechi is a country-wide famous high school detective. Which just… Of course he fucking is… Sure…
The end of the base game actually also absolutely suffers from this where the whole plot changes from “we need to change someone’s heart because they are twisted and have a warped cognition of the world” to “and now we have to fucking kill God!”. And I’m only half joking…
Thankfully these two aspects are something which are DRAMATICALLY improved through the addition of the Royal expansion. Not only does Royal add the best waifu of the game, it improves Akechi’s arc by providing much more pay-off, it also adds a properly decent end-game boss. As an aside it does also add councillor Maruki who is one of the worst fucking companions (which is super frustrating because he’s also a vital one), but nothing is ever perfect.
What you have then in Persona 5 Royal is a game where you have a dating-sim which is over-filled with superfluous stuff, it makes it difficult for you to engage with the major characters and also genuinely is simply a bit too long (by the end of the game I was skipping multiple days in a row). This is combined with a turn-based combat and dungeon delving system which is really extremely simple and is only challenging when it breaks its own core rules, has dozens of methods of increasing your options all of which don’t actually achieve much, and also can sometimes go-on for just a tad too long.
So, yeah, I really liked it.
It’s extremely tough to explain honestly, but I think it comes down to two things. First, I believe that Persona 5 is one of those few games which is greater than the sum of its parts. I think it’s very common for video games to just throw a bajillion options at you and hope something sticks. Here though, it feels like everything pretty much ties together. Yeah a lot of it is unnecessary, but it’s kinda nice that it’s there. I didn’t need 10 different options for increasing each social stat, but it’s kind of cool that it does it. The turn-based combat may be standard, but when you get into it after a prolonged dating-sim bit it is just exciting and FUN to blast a bunch of enemies with magic attacks. Likewise, after a few hours of dungeon delving it’s very cool to be able to kick back and chill a bit by hanging with your bros (Yusuke and Ryuji are best bros).
The other aspect is much harder to define: heart. Persona 5 Royal simply feels like a game made by enthusiastic people who wanted others to be enthusiastic about their game, their story and world. I mention that the game itself makes connecting with characters difficult, but that absolutely did not stop me. The story may have cartoon villains but it is exciting, heart-warming and compelling and makes you want to keep on going and going (even after the two hour sections with no breaks). I even felt like a pretty terrible person when the game finally gave me my comeuppance for romancing every single female companion at the same time, because I’d connected with them!
The game is at its heart engaging and feels like it was made with passion. I’ll be the first to say that it’s flawed as balls but I’ll also be the first one to step up and say that I think you should play it regardless!
RATING: 80/100
VERDICT: RECOMMENDED
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