Persona 5 Royal

Persona 5 is a really fantastic Japanese RPG. Originally releasing 10 years ago, this game has directly influenced a lot of more recent RPG's that you may have played. Claire Obscure: Expedition 33 being one of the very direct ones. This Royal edition adds the DLC for P5, notably an extra semester and new characters. The game is extremely stylish and explores sociology well. This review is after rolling credits and getting 100% on the achievement list, which took me 134 hours. [h2] What makes Persona unique? [/h2] So the last Persona game I played was Persona 2: Eternal Punishment back when it was new on the PS1. There's a few things that standout to me as hardcoded in the Persona game DNA: [b] The real focus of the game is on saving individual people. [/b] In this game, really each major mission is about changing someone's mind. [b] You can talk with your enemies in combat. [/b] You can recruit them like in Pokemon or shake them down for money or items. Interestingly the first Persona and the first Pokemon came out in the same year. The enemies have opinions and moods, they are living their life too. This is a game that unironically wants you to feel like you live in a society. Since I skipped 3 and 4 and went straight to 5 there a few things that have changed that jumped out at me from the start. The story is less "casually dark". If you don't know what an invoker is don't look it up. Dark stuff happens, but when it does it is given weight. And the dungeons are less "Wizardry" and more "Earthbound". Instead of bumping around corridors in first person, you are in third person and can see the encounters walking around. The social link system is something that was added sometime after 2 as well. Each person that is in your social circle is given a Tarot that can be leveled up. Leveling up that relationship gives you abilities like "Make Curry" or "Grow Plants" or in combat things like "Change Party Members" or "Chance to Remove Status Effects". And story beats, each person has their own thing going on. Those story beats are really the heart of the game. [h2] What is playing the game like? [/h2] Combat is more fun the more attention you pay to it. Enemies often have a weakness to a specific damage type. If you hit them with that weakness, they fall down and you get to "Pass the Baton" to one of your other party members. That boosts that characters' stats and lets them take their turn now as well as later. You can do this 4 times per move, but you can only knock down each enemy once. So combat is super exploitable. If you knock down the whole team then your entire team gets a large, very effective attack on the whole other team. The game can turn into a puzzle to figure out how to win on turn 1 so that they don't get a turn, which keeps it interesting. So that said, I found the actual combat to be pretty easy. I expected that going in and set the difficulty to Hard at the start and never changed it. As best I can tell, "Hard" means that you'll just sometimes get one-shot. It didn't do it so much that it felt cheesy to me. I started on Hard based on my experience in the first 2 games. I was expecting for combat items and status effects to be crazy good when used correctly, and I was right. It is worth calling out too, there are no real-time elements that I remember in the combat. No dodge/parry or other things needed. The rest of the game is time management, which is better than it sounds like. The base game is April - December and the expansion is January - February. You will play each day as a Japanese teenager, so you are going to school and you (the player) will take part of their exams. Most days you will have an afternoon time slot and an evening time slot. At those times you'll need to go meet with individual people in your social circle, work a job, shoot pool or play darts, do your laundry, or explore dungeons. I am probably not selling this part very well, but it really is the best part of the game. The Pokemon aspects are a little different than in other games like that. Instead of growing one and getting attached to it, you need to cycle through those constantly. That system is really deep for those of you who want to explore it, which is optional. Did I mention the music is fantastic? Because it is. [h2] Take your time [/h2] It is worth calling out specifically that this is a long game. It needs that room to work. If you try to rush it, I doubt you will have a good time. So go into it knowing that. Which brings me to criticisms: [b] Its starting to feel a little dated [/b] There are a lot of games that have been influenced by this game since it came out and they have made some improvements. E33 as mentioned above is a good example of that. Make no mistake, this is a 10 year old game now. [b] Sometimes you get stuck in a long section of talking [/b] Sometimes the game decides for you that you need to do a certain thing on a day, or that you can't go out tonight. This is not a 'Save Anywhere' game so you may end up stuck in a long section when you are needing to stop playing for a while. [b] The menus are stylish but can be annoying to navigate [/b] And they use a lot of Japanese words. There were times where I was looking for the item that did 50 Psi damage or Bless damage and I would have to go through every item's description to find them. Those are Psy Magatama and the Happy Bomb btw. [b] You will probably want to use a wiki to navigate the persona upgrade system [/b] And there is a fantastic one out there. The system is complex and deep. [b] You can accidentally miss the 3rd semester DLC [/b] The game does not make that clear. It is easy to get into it though, just make sure you spend a lot of time with your school's guidance councilor. Otherwise the game is pretty easy to 100% in one playthrough. [h2] So wrapping this up [/h2] This is one of the most "Japanese" JRPG's out there. It does a really good job of telling a lot of smaller-scale personal stories. You'll get attached to each of the 23 confidants. I feel like I could go on, but instead I'll just express that after finishing the game I am sitting here trying to figure out what I should do now. Typically I am ready to move on to a different game when finishing one, especially after longer games like this. I have not really felt like this since finishing Elden Ring, which I think is the biggest compliment that I can give.

after more than two years, i have finally finished persona 5... i bought this game first, played two hours of it and loved it so much i wanted to save it for last. i then went on to play persona 4 golden and persona 3 reload first, then turned to persona 5 royal. this is the longest, but also the best, game in the franchise so far. its characters are so charming and its writing is so good that even with spoilers, i still managed to be surprised. the palaces were the most fun dungeons so far, although mementos was still very much an annoyance. when i was nearing the end, i did end up feeling a little annoyed with how much it was dragging on. however, i feel like the royal content is a must for the development of a lot of characters. i liked the moral questions asked within the game. in short, i would encourage anyone to give this game a try. i think i will have a hard time finding a jrpg i enjoy just as much. i now have metaphor refantazio and persona 3 portable lined up lol ily atlus ALSO SPECIAL MENTION TO THE SOUNDTRACK???? ATLUS COOKED.

My first and favourite persona game, got obsessed with it and played through the whole game in like a month. PEAK. It does use denuvo though which kinda sucks.