Persona 5 Royal Review/Rundown

It’s very difficult to describe the rush of dopamine that you feel when you’re really into something. Whether it be a Netflix TV series, a good book, or a video game, I’m sure that most people from my generation can relate to feeling so immersed in a piece of media that you feel borderline addicted. When you feel so attached to all the key elements in it that you dread the end of it. For me, playing Persona 5 Royal for PS4 during quarantine encapsulated that sensation, as I felt so addicted that I couldn’t put it down. 

So, what is Persona 5 Royal? I’m sure most everyone reading this has absolutely no clue what the heck I’m talking about. Persona 5 Royal is essentially a substantially updated re-release of Persona 5, which is the 5th (Well, technically 6th) mainline installment in the JRPG (Japanese-Role-Playing-Game) series called Persona. Persona 5 Royal centers around a player-named protagonist, who has been wrongfully arrested for assaulting a man who was forcing himself onto a woman. Although he doesn’t end up getting jail time, he ends up being put on probation for a year, and in that year he is forced to move away from his town to the big city of Shibuya. In Shibuya, he transfers to Shujin Academy, the fictional school where the majority of the game will take place. On one fateful day, a smartphone app is mysteriously installed on his phone, and it gives him access to another world called the metaverse. It is through this world where he can enter areas called palaces, and these palaces are essentially the materialization of a person’s distorted desires. Typically, those with these desires tend to be notorious who conceal their crimes through manipulation and secrecy in a corrupt society. If one successfully infiltrates one of these palaces, then they can steal their distorted desires away, making them have a change of heart. If you successfully manage to steal a person’s desire, they will also end up confessing what they did, and they will more than likely end up turning themselves into the police. Palaces can take different shapes or forms depending on what the Palace ruler’s specific distortion is. For example, in one part of the game, you infiltrate the palace of a drug kingpin, so his distortion is that he views the world as his own personal bank; therefore, his palace resembles a bank. As the game progresses, the protagonist convinces more people to join his cause, and they form a team of people who have the goal of changing hearts. They end up dubbing themselves “The Phantom Thieves.” Essentially, the focus of the game is for The Phantom Thieves to infiltrate the palaces of many barons in society, and to change their heart; however, as things progress, different villains in shadows begin to emerge, and the story begins to take massive turns.

So, now that we have an idea of the setup behind the story and the premise of the game itself, let’s touch on the gameplay. Persona 5 Royal is a game that is essentially half life-simulator, and half turn-based jrpg. First, we’ll touch on the life simulator aspect. Since the protagonist is a high schooler, a good portion of the game has you essentially living out what would be similar to high-schooler’s daily life. You have the option to explore different cities in Japan, visit movie theaters, purchase things from shops, and hangout with people. The catch with all of these things is that all of these things have an impact in some way shape or form in battle, which occurs mainly in palaces and mementos. Mementos is essentially a large dungeon with a bunch of auto-generated floors, but I’ll touch on that later. For example, building bonds with many characters that you meet can cause you to learn new abilities that will go on to help you greatly when it comes to exploring palaces and fighting enemies. Buying medicine from a pharmacy in real life will allow you to use it to heal your character’s health in battle. This is one of the things that I enjoy most about this game. The fact that the real world is essentially a massive part of the gameplay in this game does wonders for the worldbuilding, and it makes the story feel so much more real. The whole real-life concept makes you feel so in control of your experience, and that sense of control, the interactions with other characters, and the superb worldbuilding that this game provides helps you feel so much more immersed in everything that’s going on, and for anyone who has played a JRPG, you know that immersion is a huge part of what keeps you hooked to these typically lengthy experiences.

Now, let’s talk about the combat and dungeon-crawling parts of this game, which all take place within the metaverse. There are two main areas you can enter inside the metaverse, one of which being whatever palace you are targeting at a certain time, and the other being mementos. I already touched on what palaces are from a story perspective, but from a gameplay standpoint they are essentially massive dungeons that are themed around the distortion of the person who is the source of the palace. Typically, they’re filled with puzzles, enemies called shadows, boss fights, and loads of items to collect. As for Mementos, it is less structured and puzzle-solving based as a palace, as the places you explore are just auto-generated floors filled with shadows and a few new collectibles. From a story perspective it is essentially a representation of the collective unconscious of the public, meaning that as the morale of the general public changes, so does Mementos. In the end, there are two main reasons two explore Mementos. One is the endless supply of money and experience that you can obtain here, as there are countless amounts of enemies on pretty much all of the floors here. Additionally, Persona 5 Royal adds stamps and flowers to Mementos, which are collectibles that can be found by exploring the auto-generated floors in the dungeon. Their main purpose is to be turned into a mysterious new character named Jose. Jose frequents Mementos, and in exchange for giving him flowers, you can purchase items, and in exchange for giving him stamps, you can purchase boosts to your experience, money, and item gain in mementos.  Another reason to explore mementos is due to the “Mementos Requests” that are attained within the real world. Via an online website, the Phantom Thieves receive anonymous requests from people to change misguided people’s hearts. This changing of these people’s hearts can only be done through Mementos, and not palaces, as the desires that these people have aren’t nearly as distorted as those of notorious criminals; therefore, these people’s desires don’t take the forms of massive palaces, but they simply take the forms of shadows in Mementos. You can successfully change a person’s heart in Mementos by defeating their shadow in a boss. 

Combat in this game is done essentially exclusively through personas, which are kind of like mysterious creatures whom the party members can use to battle with. Personas all have a set of attacks, and they all have their own strengths and weaknesses to different affinities. Each member of the Phantom Thieves is limited to one set persona, which controls what moves that specific party member can use. The protagonist, however, is an exception as he is the only character who can use multiple personas at once. Persona’s can be collected from battling shadows, and then you can fuse those personas together to create even stronger personas. The whole concept is very difficult to explain in detail, but it can be a very addicting system once you get the hang of it. Just imagine something similar to Pokemon, but much more complex. The actual battle system feels somehow even better than it did in the original. For one, the baton pass mechanic is unlocked right from the get-go which is very convenient, also abilities have been added to personas as well, which helps to further deepen the whole system involving collecting and fusing personas, as more thought is now required when considering what specific personas you would like to fuse together to an ideal end result. These abilities also help deepen the battle system as well, as there are more wacky combinations of moves and such that are viable now due to abilities. Many more personas are viable on harder difficulties now, and experimenting with the unique creations that you may have made is a ton of fun. I personally think that it is so much fun that it increases the replay value of this game significantly. Upon completing Persona 5 Royal, I still felt like there was still much I hadn’t done with the battle systems, and in the original, that certainly wasn’t the case, as the personas felt a little too similar to warrant further experimentation. The addition of abilities ended up sneakily becoming one of my favorite new additions to Persona 5 Royal, and enhanced my enjoyment of the combat tremendously.

Next, I’m going to touch on the story a little bit. To try to avoid spoilers I’m going to keep this very vague, but in short, Persona 5 does some of the best storytelling out of any piece of media that I know. I have never been so emotionally invested into characters like I have in Persona 5, and I don’t think any other game will ever make me feel what I felt while playing this game. Even though the majority of the 1st chunk of the game is mainly the same as the original, I still felt like I was getting emotionally attached to everyone all over again despite the fact that I knew exactly what was going to happen for the most part. As for the new story content, a new 15-20 hour long third semester has been added, a new palace shows up, and a brand-new fleshed-out party member has been added. Again, I’m not going to touch too much on the details, but the third semester somehow surpassed my sky high expectations for it, mostly due to the grey nature of the conflict. Not everything is black and white, and the decisions that you make will make you ask yourself whether or not what you do during this time is good or bad. For me atleast, it was an emotional rollercoaster, and it fleshes out certain characters from the original game while also putting more spotlight on the characters who were newly introduced in the Royal version of the game. Honestly, it all feels like such a masterclass in game design, and I wouldn’t change anything about it.

Overall, Persona 5 Royal takes what is in my eyes already a masterpiece of a game and somehow makes it even better. The music is still phenomenal, and some of the new songs in the game are somehow even better than the old ones. For those who played the original Persona 5 and enjoyed it, I say that this game is worth your time, and for those haven’t played the original and are into this sort of thing, I highly suggest that you try it out. Even if you are turned off by some of the potential complexities in the gameplay, just know that there are difficulty options in the game that are intentionally designed for those who simply want to enjoy the story of the game, and not focus too much on gameplay. Yes, the game can be very…. Japanese at times, but I promise if you can get past the few anime tropes that this game has to offer then you can enjoy a game that tells an incredibly engaging and unpredictable story with a bunch of deep, symbolic undertones to its themes and its worlds. I don’t personally like anime, but I thoroughly enjoyed Persona 5 Royal, regardless. To me, it truly was an unforgettable experience.