Platform: Windows PC, Game Pass
Completion Time: 64 hours, 52 minutes
Difficulty: Easy
Rating: 5/5
Summary: Persona 5 Royal is the best Anime you can play. Unmistakable visual identity, all-time original soundtrack, fast and forgiving JRPG mechanics, and an engaging-turned-lovable cast of characters all coalesce into an unforgettable work of art worthy of your time and, likely eventual, fandom.
Mask Off.
I played the original Persona 5 for approximately ten hours in spring 2018, two days after Wario64 announced it was on sale digitally for $9.99 via the PlayStation Network, and three months after the vast consensus on Twitter had convinced me this fifth installment in an established JRPG series was something special, and particularly inviting to newcomers.
The First Surprise.
The first few notes of Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There instantly demand your excitement, in addition to your attention. This song’s hot-blooded synth chords sound like they’re magnetically pulling a smile from you. Those same notes are deliciously paired with a red canvas—immediately filled with Tokyo’s buildings and blossoming atmosphere; the effortless parkouring talents of our central cast. I remember how strong my reaction was to this opening cinematic five years ago—seemingly compelled to move and root for these masked heroes while knowing nothing about them. The opening, produced by the anime studio Production I.G, is Persona 5’s thesis statement: lyrics of change, identity, and promises of real progress if you surrender to this upcoming adventure are coupled with these heisting high schoolers. They dance, jump, and float all around spaces inside Tokyo—locations you the viewer will soon become intimately familiar with. All to the tune of a powerful opening number composed by Shoji Meguro.
I had a very similar, exciting experience seeing Persona 5 Royal’s opening cinematic in 2023. This time, our heroes are towering over the city, each in a new wardrobe, playfully taking down the skyscrapers and buildings with bats. We hear another up-tempo song, Colors Flying High, lyrics sung again by the iconic Lyn’s vocals blaring at you. The similarity between these cinematics? The absolute blast our protagonists are having. This is a joyous time for the Phantom Thieves, and I could not wait to be “in” on their plans and collective smirks.
Confidants
Being around any group of friends for a not insignificant amount of time teaches you a lot about voice; particularly your own. In Persona 5 Royal, you are a high school student immediately surrounded by two budding friendships and subsequently buttressed by one additional friend, or “Confidant”, for nearly each of the game’s seven distinct dungeons (read “Palaces”). These Confidants, like most good casts, each showcase one primary personality trait, for instance: aspiration, angst, agency, obedience, isolation, nurturance, and righteousness. Typically, the player character’s personality will land somewhere toward the center of gravity of all these people. This is probably a result of the more nuanced dialogue options we receive while interacting with the story’s and side quests’ requests for our responses. It’s possibly also because the game does a masterful job at posturing the stakes of each character’s goals in relation to the group’s and in relation to our own. Slowly, the player finds their footing role-playing as a Vash-The-Stampede-esque high school student whose falsified, ne’er-do-well reputation precedes them. Among teachers and unknown citizens of Tokyo, perhaps they answer questions vaguely or over-politely, as to diminish any scrutiny towards their double life as a bandit of souls. Around friends and trusted adults, however, perhaps answers are more fluid and sarcastic. Or maybe the player simply finds virtual people-pleasing so appealing that they run around each visitable ward of Tokyo, reading a guide on each NPC’s preferred hang out spots, just to maximize the happiness of whoever they’re talking to. Or maybe I just spent 64 hours and 52 minutes 100%-ing a JRPG, making sure I didn’t say anything disagreeable to my digital best friends with the help of a website displaying the correct replies and I want to feel somewhat justified about it.
Persona 5 Royal’s gamifying your team’s stat increases essentially through a streamlined dating simulator shows us the developer gingerly supporting one of its central messages: we all have fronts that protect us from ridicule and rejection; you as a individual have the power, every day, to make an incremental positive difference in your loved one’s lives. Allowing the player to spend as much if not more time not gaining strength through violence than when you do illustrated to me the importance of exploring more games like this. That I spent the majority of my formative year almost exclusively playing “white guy with beard shoots stuff and wins” style games is as much a reflection of my own interests at the time as it is a reflection of what publishers/marketing teams thought I would like. And sometimes those games own, don’t get me wrong. But I do lament at the now-gone years I could have spent playing weird, unique, games like those in the Persona series.
Story (Mainline)
I don’t need to outline the broadstrokes of the plot for this review—better writers than I have distilled the essence of the plot. And I truly think the story takes a back seat to the budding relationships the main character explores with the main cast. I do want to touch on one area, though: the basic structure of missions. These rituals never lost their spark for me. The stylish ‘MISSION START’ showing up in the universe, so to speak, like the classroom’s chalkboard and the floor of my room. I also didn’t mind the in-game text messaging system. Your friends spend a lot of time inviting you to side quests as well as providing relevant banter toward whatever Palace you’re on. Pretty soon, you’ll hit your stride of balancing school, brewing coffee at LeBlanc, dates with your friends around Tokyo, and working part-time jobs. All of these have relevant consequences toward your performance in the Palaces. The fact that your social life and treatment of your real world friends have measurable impact on how well you’ll fair against a fantasy boss is part of true charm of this game.
The traditional, mainline route of Palaces in Persona 5 Royal mirror the entire experience of Persona 5. I enjoyed the following three the most: 4, 6, and 7 (particularly the “unveiling” of 7). It was a warm, welcome feeling to arrive to a fully animated cutscene at the beginning of a Palace’s experience. You come to trust that there will be trick after trick up Atlus’ sleeve, just waiting for you to follow their hand when AHA—the real spectacle was right in front of you all along. And... cue the unique Palace theme music. It’s all just a tremendous roller coaster ride.
Last Train Stop to Gush
I originally had many more topics to cover that I decided to cut because I think they all generally boil down to: I want to complement a handful of moments/mechanics in the game, before I talk about additional content in Royal that wasn’t in Persona 5’s story. I do recommend you avoid this section and anything remaining in this review if you are trying to avoid the more substantial spoilers. So here they are, in less rambling form than I previously outlined:
• The All Out Attacks, better described better by RelaxAlax in relation to how they improve your game’s pacing experience, are all so expertly crafted toward the traits of each Phantom Thief. I felt like I was watching Joker’s for the first time, every time.
• The Velvet Room as a mysterious hub world that you’re constantly hinted toward learning more about, especially as a newcomer to the series, loomed like a carrot on a stick that I couldn’t stop chasing.
• The fact that one Palace isn’t an enemy at all and your infiltration is related to their rehabilitation rather than bringing them to some sort of justice.
• Being able to completely avoid enemy encounters in Palaces and Mementos should be in every game, not just cool Dragon Quest games and newer Pokemon titles.
• With the narrative device stringing you along the majority of the story, you begin to develop theory after theory of what really will happen and why your character is located where they are.
• Voice acting for Sojiro.
• How earnestly each character pleads with their network or strangers around town to defend your name and release you from detainment. And each vignette of their attempts perfectly match their skill set (a teenage character might try to gather signatures in support of your release; an adult might try to pull strings and contact more powerful movers/shakers).
• Royal Additions –here’s a few things specific to Royal that we need to list:
• New Original music from ATLUS Sound Design Team for Royal:
o Royal Days (just hang out in this song, man)
o No More What Ifs
o Kichijoji 199X
o Mementos: Lower Area (and the fact that the new Mementos songs were included at all)
o So Happy World
• It’s Showtime. I really enjoyed the in-battle system of ‘Showtimes’. They are similar to the ‘all out attacks’ but seemed to lack the level of playful fun of those finishing screens. All out attacks showed the phantom thieves completely in a state of joy! This was their essence, which highlighted their personality as a Phantom Thief. This was in contrast to the Showtimes, which try to showcase the character looking dramatically powerful/determined or making homages to cinematic classics, or even extreme violence. Ultimately I prefer the all out attack because it is an end in itself: 1) it reduces battle time, 2) silhouettes the violence rather than dramatize it and 3) places a full stop on the action by distilling the respective character's most simple attribute--or desire: justice, truth, trickery, victory, beauty, dignity, they're all SMILING ear to ear in a state of euphoria. And Showtimes were content with the snapshot of ‘will they or won’t they toss this looney toons explosive device.’ I do think both styles were able to highlight the most important thing: when the team is really flowing, even in the Metaverse, their stress strips away and they’re simply their most rebellious self.
Royal’s Additional Palace and “True” Ending
I similarly don’t feel the need to detail every encounter and game design decision of the last dungeon, either. More talented individuals on the internet and YouTube do that already, in great amounts and greater detail. But I do want to express the experiential elements of this ‘victory lap,’ dungeon, as it were. The developers of Persona 5 Royal, having already released the original Persona 5, likely assumed that the majority of players would already know the core missions and original ending. But for me, playing Persona 5 Royal instead of its older sibling, this last dungeon was like floating on my back after finishing a heated swimming lap. That is to say, playing Royal all the way through made the final ‘extra’ dungeon feel like a celebratory cake walk. I knew how to dodge encounters I didn’t want, I knew how to speed up or slow down the traversal of the layout, and I knew the general pace of reaching a final boss. I enjoyed this feeling—as if for the first time I was really ‘playing a game’ at some appropriate pace.
Once you complete this final Palace, you spend the remaining in-game calendar days discussing with your friends the reflections on your collective time together. If, like me, you were able to reach ‘max stats’ on each Confidant, those characters will be waiting for you on the last playable day all over Tokyo. They each have these wonderfully human analyses of your impact on their lives. Characters that may have been the heel/comic relief for the majority of the run time now solemnly honor how different they are precisely because of your role in their lives. Thanking your character, while you silently scream at your monitor wishing you could thank them for their impact on your time here.
Finishing the last dungeon and recognizing I would likely see the ‘True’ ending of this game (an accomplishment I have only achieved in 2 Halo games and no other time in my life) felt almost embarrassing. A video-game imposter syndrome flashed on top of me: how could I be worthy of seeing the secret cutscene saved for the savvy few who could digest all of this game’s mainline content? This luckily dissipated quickly with the score and atmosphere of these final story hours. The game celebrated this achievement with me. I sat and truly multi-tasked: playing the game in real time, and slowly reconciling the feelings about my own life and connections I have made. The potential to foster strong relationships, and the inspiration to fan the flame of new sparks became so clear it felt hilariously obvious. But I don’t know if I would have found this clarity without spending over five dozen hours with virtual high schoolers. And any game that does half of that to a person is deserving of the title “possibly one of the greatest games of all time.”
The Show’s Over
This could possibly be the final time I give a numerical score to a video game, and possibly any media. We can talk about that some other time (maybe after I finish Roger Ebert’s autobiography). Finishing this game and its review seem to be restoring some vitality towards my consumption of video games. Thanks for reading.
Completion Time: 64 hours, 52 minutes
Difficulty: Easy
Rating: 5/5
Summary: Persona 5 Royal is the best Anime you can play. Unmistakable visual identity, all-time original soundtrack, fast and forgiving JRPG mechanics, and an engaging-turned-lovable cast of characters all coalesce into an unforgettable work of art worthy of your time and, likely eventual, fandom.
Mask Off.
I played the original Persona 5 for approximately ten hours in spring 2018, two days after Wario64 announced it was on sale digitally for $9.99 via the PlayStation Network, and three months after the vast consensus on Twitter had convinced me this fifth installment in an established JRPG series was something special, and particularly inviting to newcomers.
The First Surprise.
The first few notes of Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There instantly demand your excitement, in addition to your attention. This song’s hot-blooded synth chords sound like they’re magnetically pulling a smile from you. Those same notes are deliciously paired with a red canvas—immediately filled with Tokyo’s buildings and blossoming atmosphere; the effortless parkouring talents of our central cast. I remember how strong my reaction was to this opening cinematic five years ago—seemingly compelled to move and root for these masked heroes while knowing nothing about them. The opening, produced by the anime studio Production I.G, is Persona 5’s thesis statement: lyrics of change, identity, and promises of real progress if you surrender to this upcoming adventure are coupled with these heisting high schoolers. They dance, jump, and float all around spaces inside Tokyo—locations you the viewer will soon become intimately familiar with. All to the tune of a powerful opening number composed by Shoji Meguro.
I had a very similar, exciting experience seeing Persona 5 Royal’s opening cinematic in 2023. This time, our heroes are towering over the city, each in a new wardrobe, playfully taking down the skyscrapers and buildings with bats. We hear another up-tempo song, Colors Flying High, lyrics sung again by the iconic Lyn’s vocals blaring at you. The similarity between these cinematics? The absolute blast our protagonists are having. This is a joyous time for the Phantom Thieves, and I could not wait to be “in” on their plans and collective smirks.
Confidants
Being around any group of friends for a not insignificant amount of time teaches you a lot about voice; particularly your own. In Persona 5 Royal, you are a high school student immediately surrounded by two budding friendships and subsequently buttressed by one additional friend, or “Confidant”, for nearly each of the game’s seven distinct dungeons (read “Palaces”). These Confidants, like most good casts, each showcase one primary personality trait, for instance: aspiration, angst, agency, obedience, isolation, nurturance, and righteousness. Typically, the player character’s personality will land somewhere toward the center of gravity of all these people. This is probably a result of the more nuanced dialogue options we receive while interacting with the story’s and side quests’ requests for our responses. It’s possibly also because the game does a masterful job at posturing the stakes of each character’s goals in relation to the group’s and in relation to our own. Slowly, the player finds their footing role-playing as a Vash-The-Stampede-esque high school student whose falsified, ne’er-do-well reputation precedes them. Among teachers and unknown citizens of Tokyo, perhaps they answer questions vaguely or over-politely, as to diminish any scrutiny towards their double life as a bandit of souls. Around friends and trusted adults, however, perhaps answers are more fluid and sarcastic. Or maybe the player simply finds virtual people-pleasing so appealing that they run around each visitable ward of Tokyo, reading a guide on each NPC’s preferred hang out spots, just to maximize the happiness of whoever they’re talking to. Or maybe I just spent 64 hours and 52 minutes 100%-ing a JRPG, making sure I didn’t say anything disagreeable to my digital best friends with the help of a website displaying the correct replies and I want to feel somewhat justified about it.
Persona 5 Royal’s gamifying your team’s stat increases essentially through a streamlined dating simulator shows us the developer gingerly supporting one of its central messages: we all have fronts that protect us from ridicule and rejection; you as a individual have the power, every day, to make an incremental positive difference in your loved one’s lives. Allowing the player to spend as much if not more time not gaining strength through violence than when you do illustrated to me the importance of exploring more games like this. That I spent the majority of my formative year almost exclusively playing “white guy with beard shoots stuff and wins” style games is as much a reflection of my own interests at the time as it is a reflection of what publishers/marketing teams thought I would like. And sometimes those games own, don’t get me wrong. But I do lament at the now-gone years I could have spent playing weird, unique, games like those in the Persona series.
Story (Mainline)
I don’t need to outline the broadstrokes of the plot for this review—better writers than I have distilled the essence of the plot. And I truly think the story takes a back seat to the budding relationships the main character explores with the main cast. I do want to touch on one area, though: the basic structure of missions. These rituals never lost their spark for me. The stylish ‘MISSION START’ showing up in the universe, so to speak, like the classroom’s chalkboard and the floor of my room. I also didn’t mind the in-game text messaging system. Your friends spend a lot of time inviting you to side quests as well as providing relevant banter toward whatever Palace you’re on. Pretty soon, you’ll hit your stride of balancing school, brewing coffee at LeBlanc, dates with your friends around Tokyo, and working part-time jobs. All of these have relevant consequences toward your performance in the Palaces. The fact that your social life and treatment of your real world friends have measurable impact on how well you’ll fair against a fantasy boss is part of true charm of this game.
The traditional, mainline route of Palaces in Persona 5 Royal mirror the entire experience of Persona 5. I enjoyed the following three the most: 4, 6, and 7 (particularly the “unveiling” of 7). It was a warm, welcome feeling to arrive to a fully animated cutscene at the beginning of a Palace’s experience. You come to trust that there will be trick after trick up Atlus’ sleeve, just waiting for you to follow their hand when AHA—the real spectacle was right in front of you all along. And... cue the unique Palace theme music. It’s all just a tremendous roller coaster ride.
Last Train Stop to Gush
I originally had many more topics to cover that I decided to cut because I think they all generally boil down to: I want to complement a handful of moments/mechanics in the game, before I talk about additional content in Royal that wasn’t in Persona 5’s story. I do recommend you avoid this section and anything remaining in this review if you are trying to avoid the more substantial spoilers. So here they are, in less rambling form than I previously outlined:
• The All Out Attacks, better described better by RelaxAlax in relation to how they improve your game’s pacing experience, are all so expertly crafted toward the traits of each Phantom Thief. I felt like I was watching Joker’s for the first time, every time.
• The Velvet Room as a mysterious hub world that you’re constantly hinted toward learning more about, especially as a newcomer to the series, loomed like a carrot on a stick that I couldn’t stop chasing.
• The fact that one Palace isn’t an enemy at all and your infiltration is related to their rehabilitation rather than bringing them to some sort of justice.
• Being able to completely avoid enemy encounters in Palaces and Mementos should be in every game, not just cool Dragon Quest games and newer Pokemon titles.
• With the narrative device stringing you along the majority of the story, you begin to develop theory after theory of what really will happen and why your character is located where they are.
• Voice acting for Sojiro.
• How earnestly each character pleads with their network or strangers around town to defend your name and release you from detainment. And each vignette of their attempts perfectly match their skill set (a teenage character might try to gather signatures in support of your release; an adult might try to pull strings and contact more powerful movers/shakers).
• Royal Additions –here’s a few things specific to Royal that we need to list:
• New Original music from ATLUS Sound Design Team for Royal:
o Royal Days (just hang out in this song, man)
o No More What Ifs
o Kichijoji 199X
o Mementos: Lower Area (and the fact that the new Mementos songs were included at all)
o So Happy World
• It’s Showtime. I really enjoyed the in-battle system of ‘Showtimes’. They are similar to the ‘all out attacks’ but seemed to lack the level of playful fun of those finishing screens. All out attacks showed the phantom thieves completely in a state of joy! This was their essence, which highlighted their personality as a Phantom Thief. This was in contrast to the Showtimes, which try to showcase the character looking dramatically powerful/determined or making homages to cinematic classics, or even extreme violence. Ultimately I prefer the all out attack because it is an end in itself: 1) it reduces battle time, 2) silhouettes the violence rather than dramatize it and 3) places a full stop on the action by distilling the respective character's most simple attribute--or desire: justice, truth, trickery, victory, beauty, dignity, they're all SMILING ear to ear in a state of euphoria. And Showtimes were content with the snapshot of ‘will they or won’t they toss this looney toons explosive device.’ I do think both styles were able to highlight the most important thing: when the team is really flowing, even in the Metaverse, their stress strips away and they’re simply their most rebellious self.
Royal’s Additional Palace and “True” Ending
I similarly don’t feel the need to detail every encounter and game design decision of the last dungeon, either. More talented individuals on the internet and YouTube do that already, in great amounts and greater detail. But I do want to express the experiential elements of this ‘victory lap,’ dungeon, as it were. The developers of Persona 5 Royal, having already released the original Persona 5, likely assumed that the majority of players would already know the core missions and original ending. But for me, playing Persona 5 Royal instead of its older sibling, this last dungeon was like floating on my back after finishing a heated swimming lap. That is to say, playing Royal all the way through made the final ‘extra’ dungeon feel like a celebratory cake walk. I knew how to dodge encounters I didn’t want, I knew how to speed up or slow down the traversal of the layout, and I knew the general pace of reaching a final boss. I enjoyed this feeling—as if for the first time I was really ‘playing a game’ at some appropriate pace.
Once you complete this final Palace, you spend the remaining in-game calendar days discussing with your friends the reflections on your collective time together. If, like me, you were able to reach ‘max stats’ on each Confidant, those characters will be waiting for you on the last playable day all over Tokyo. They each have these wonderfully human analyses of your impact on their lives. Characters that may have been the heel/comic relief for the majority of the run time now solemnly honor how different they are precisely because of your role in their lives. Thanking your character, while you silently scream at your monitor wishing you could thank them for their impact on your time here.
Finishing the last dungeon and recognizing I would likely see the ‘True’ ending of this game (an accomplishment I have only achieved in 2 Halo games and no other time in my life) felt almost embarrassing. A video-game imposter syndrome flashed on top of me: how could I be worthy of seeing the secret cutscene saved for the savvy few who could digest all of this game’s mainline content? This luckily dissipated quickly with the score and atmosphere of these final story hours. The game celebrated this achievement with me. I sat and truly multi-tasked: playing the game in real time, and slowly reconciling the feelings about my own life and connections I have made. The potential to foster strong relationships, and the inspiration to fan the flame of new sparks became so clear it felt hilariously obvious. But I don’t know if I would have found this clarity without spending over five dozen hours with virtual high schoolers. And any game that does half of that to a person is deserving of the title “possibly one of the greatest games of all time.”
The Show’s Over
This could possibly be the final time I give a numerical score to a video game, and possibly any media. We can talk about that some other time (maybe after I finish Roger Ebert’s autobiography). Finishing this game and its review seem to be restoring some vitality towards my consumption of video games. Thanks for reading.