Persona 5 Royal, one of the games of all time

It is a game of weird extremes. Great gameplay loop and extremely addicting to play (albeit the one, minor, issue is that it isn't challenging enough), as my introduction to this battle system and the fusion system it was very compelling to me, the dungeons were very well designed and unique. Obviously the ones that did something with their characters (Futaba, Sae, the Royal one) were my favs, but they were consistently great to play through (except 5 I think low key fuck that one). Bosses like I said generally were not that great but some were good and that's also honestly fine, under this system I enjoyed manipulating even mob battles and that's impressive. Obviously the confidant system is also just super cool and the way you unlock different abilities is so good, making you want to progress (the admittedly not generally that great in terms of writing) confidants. Plus some of the minigames are fun. Mementos is weird where I enjoy grinding in it because it's useful and I like seeing myself get level ups etc and it has benefits but the design is less interesting and it can get a bit grating, the unique dungeons are easily the best part of the game.

Also here's my hottest Persona 5 Royal take: the OST is only pretty good. It has a bunch of bangers and is generally great to listen to but it's not QUITE my thing.

The characters I'll get to in detail later, but one thing that's super fun and well done about the game is that the interactions between them are genuinely fun and I like that everyone in the gang brings their own unique roles and quirks, and it definitely has bits of really fun characterization, like Yusuke being, Yusuke or with Futaba where it's people helping her get over her social anxiety. So much of this game is infected with anime but this is like the one part that feels refreshingly not that (most of the time, anyways) so I appreciate it.

Storywise it's useful to break it down into Arcs and go from there

Arc 1: I think this arc has a genuinely strong setup, the social atmosphere of the school, the oppressive hold Kamoshida has over it, how literally even parents or teachers who are in on it will not call him out, and the depth of the abuse and effect on the students was a genuinely strong way to give stakes to this arc. Plus, it is quite interesting that in a way the lack of consequences for Kamoshida also distorted his desires and ego to the point of obscenity. Unfortunately, I have issues with this arc too! Ryuji is generally great here, have no problems with his role. The way he is scorned by Kamoshida by having genuine anger in an unfair situation speaks to how sometimes the emotions of people like him aren't taken seriously by adults and he's expected to be a saint in a situation where there's clearly a direct aggressor. I like how much that motivates his desire to save people from Kamoshida, despite as we'll later see, him being not appreciated by his track team even after then. So yeah he's cool! But Ann is a proper fucking mess wrt the way her sexualization and body image is presented to us, I think what the game wants to do has some good stuff but the way it gets executed ends up falling flat. Ann as a victim of a groomer who does the same thing he does to Ryuji, just in a different way that speaks interestingly to both Kamoshida and Ann herself, is genuinely quite interesting.

Ann as a victim of a groomer, also, is presented as sexy by the game consistently, from subtle things like Joker having the option to say he's jealous of Shadow Kamoshida and cognitive Ann, to direct things like Ann's incredibly sexual animations and general design and fucking her attacks (she has a whip, her follow up attack imitates a dominatrix), not to mention she is not even COMFORTABLE in the outfit, and even if you take the best faith reading of her reclaiming her sexuality, it still comes off as the game trying to justify to us hard that this high school girl is mature beyond her years and in touch with her sexuality! This is why it's ok for the game to present her as a sex object consistently. Urgh. Also this is the first time we see the signature change of heart thing and it really ends up hurting the moral conflict it could've had, which is a shame cause the arc otherwise had a pretty cool setup. But either way, some good stuff here and some awful stuff here.

Arc 2: This arc is less immediately compelling, the horrible things the villain are doing are less fleshed out and as a result the stakes don't feel as strong here, but there's a genuinely interesting aspect, to me, with the way Madarame treats his art pupils and art, speaks to how nihilistic art is in the context of extreme capitalism the way Madarame is experiencing where he makes a ton of money off of his pupils for art he doesn't make, and he genuinely doesn't regret it. Also Yusuke's conflict and its resolution is strong, he's the first character in the game I have no real problems with.

Arc 3: Unlike Arc 1 or 2's villains, there's nothing about Kaneshiro that is worth talking about at all, the game essentially goes gangs are evil and greedy and bad you guys 😭 but what I do like is Makoto's conflict and the way she, initially presented as a villain to us, comes to manifest the will of rebellion because she's sick of the weight of expectations on her, and of adults exploiting her, so we get another character who is like, good here!

Arc 4: Finally, some good fucking food. Not only is the setup of the arc unique (there's no (underwritten) villain to take down, it's someone who wants their heart stolen by the Phantom Thieves, meaning it's ripe for character exploration), but we get some pretty shocking yet cool development for Sojiro as well, adding dimension to him when he sorely needed it. Futaba is naturally the star of the show, her entire condition and the way she convinced herself of her being hated by her mom just because of the sheer trauma she went through by losing her, and the way that the resolution of the arc is actually her taking the initiative and being the main player in stealing her own heart, is good (if I don't specifically call it out like this, assume I think the change of heart plot point is bad!). Plus, it's great that the aftermath of the arc shows us just spending time with Futaba and rehabilitating her into society, very heartwarming and it makes me happy.

Arc 5: This arc is extremely fucking funny. What is Morgana's arc you were already the least likeable being in the universe and now you're suddenly trying to make me feel sorry for you? Even disregarding my personal opinion on him uptil then, his "arc" is really not well setup at all and the resolution is also naturally liked, rushed lol.
We have the other focus "character" Haru, and she's also fucking funny. I like her character in concept and I would like her beyond that concept too if an entire character wasn't resolved in a single scene and pretends like that's enough. Also Haru's dad is a Kaneshiro tier villain "what if Jeff Bezos was evil". That being said, Arc 5 has one good aspect, and that is the ending. The way the situation was turned completely on the Phantom Thieves and it feeds into the fact that their pursuit of villains whose heart to change was in fact slowly descending into jerking themselves off for fame rather than genuinely social change is cool! Still a bad arc though

Arc 6: More good fucking food. Not only does the set up of the arc lead on from the end of 5 in a cool way, Akechi taking center stage here is awesome. The way he has the PT in his palms and essentially teams up with them because he agrees with them in this instance and is willing to do this to take down Sae (or is he..?). And this is even without mentioning the star of the show: Sae! Sae is a very well fleshed out villain, which I didn't expect after the entire game doing its hardest to make sure I can't take her seriously outside of scenes with Makoto. Her relationship with Makoto is genuinely cool but I'd say this benefits Sae more than it does Makoto. The way she's bought into an inherently unfair system and the way she believes this so strongly because the person she loved the most died for going against this kind of system, the way she as a woman in a male dominated world would have even more reason to buy into the inherently ruthless system that would already discriminate against her for being "soft", and above all the consistently clever presentation of the palace as a metaphor for the legal system, all of this is great stuff and I could write even more about her if I wanted to. The ending of this arc, finally allowing us to see what happened after the flashback, was cool! The twist that Akechi was a villain and the twist that they knew all along is pretty cool, the details of the plan are fun, but I'm mainly interested in Akechi here. The twist (even without future content of his) is such a massive shock to the system and in a way recontextualization of what he's been doing so far, and uptil then he was already a pretty interesting character in the way he opposed the Phantom Thieves yet he himself also followed a greater power structure in the cops mostly uncritically. Yet we see that there's something greater at work here and this was all intentional deceivery. Pancakes. Fucking Pancakes man.

Arc 7: This is good fucking food but in the capacity that if you pretended that.

OK imagine this. You order an appetizer, a main course item 1, main course item 2 and a dessert. And the main course item 2 is the best thing you've had but everything else is bland. This is how this arc is good food, it's not as good as 4 or 6 due to the lack of consistency. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Shido is a return to form for this game, a boring villain with very basic and toothless social commentary like Kaneshiro or Haru's dad. He sure is a powerful politician with power over people and he also sure orchestrated everything in the game (which is probably something people more invested in the plot loved, but I felt like was boring and not that interesting at all, like who cares he's still cookie cutter). Shido's content stretches across most of the arc, being a significant part of the lead up to the palace, and a significant player in the calling card + boss stretch.

But there's a player I failed to mention. Goro Akechi.

Goro Akechi pops off so hard here it isn't even funny. The more we learn about his character, the way his image was a constructed facade under Shido, the way it relates to his complex of being an undesired child and hating the way he was controlled by his father, the sheer recontextualization of his character is unimaginably fun and awesome, like the way he is presented throughout the game is so fucking unique and it comes to a head here. And the boss fight with him, wow. It's such a tragic scene, the way he clearly wants a better life for himself and to be loved, yet thinks he's too far gone and undeserving of the attention. Goood stuff my man goood stuff. His sacrifice too.....
Arc 8: This is weirdly good food, and this may be my actual hot take, but this arc is honestly quite good! I think there's really something awesome about the way this arc examines an idea that, maybe the change of heart ideology was bad actually. It's not allowed to be effective because the way this arc just presents the idea and plays it straight falls a little flat owing to the fact that it just wasn't a natural progression of the idea, but for what it is worth it's actually quite cool that the game suddenly allows itself to be self critical about its perported ideology. I'm trying to think about something else this arc did, but I can't come up with it. I suppose it did the classic JRPG trope of take down god in a massive supernatural final dungeon type space but like I don't care about that. Again, the inherent fact that this game is Persona 5 Royal keeps this arc from being more effective than it could, but it's otherwise quite interesting imo.

Arc 9: Holy shit holy shit. I am not okay after experiencing this arc, on multiple levels. The way it is set up as a metaphor for regrets in life and averting your eyes from the trauma, first, even on a surface level without involving Maruki, is genius. The way Akechi is alive here after saving you at what should've been the end of base P5 reads as a clever metacommentary on that particular ending, the way the phantom thieves mostly accept their fate in this world initially, the way at the end of the arc Joker faces the real consequences of undoing Maruki's world and how they have to put in actual effort to get him back! It's already solid as even the Phantom Thieves' shenanigans reinforce the sheer thematic value of this arc. But then we're obviously ignoring the main stars of the show here: Sumire, Akechi and most of all, Maruki.

I haven't brought up Sumire or Maruki much in this review, because their main plot relevant roles are in this arc. And like, that's an issue for Sumire, while it isn't for Maruki, but I'll get into that later cause it's more of a focused character review thing.

Sumire's role in this arc is quite good, the recontextualization that the role she was performing was her dead sister's, all because Maruki literally changed her cognition lends it credibility and uniqueness as a plot point, and the way this feeds into it all being a long term trauma response because she couldn't fucking stand living with herself after what happened? And the fact that this feeds into Maruki's characterization, like the fact that he saw a traumatized girl and thought yeah I should do this to her, makes it interesting on its own. And like, the best thing about this relationship between the two is, like Maruki, the game depicts it in a morally nuanced way. It doesn't pretend that the cognition didn't help Sumire in its own way, because it definitely acted as a stopgap for her trauma and allowed her to live a happy and fulfilling life, yet this clearly isn't the best thing long term because it's running away from the truth and like, the writing in this arc is so clever because I just end up fucking describing Maruki again by describing his relationship with Sumire and hfhhdhhds THIS ARC IS SO GOOD.

Akechi on a surface level is already great in this arc because all pretense of him being a nice boy detective on your side is dropped, leading him to show his unhinged murderous side stoked by Shido's errands free, and holy shit is this entertaining. I genuinely wished this arc would only progress with Sumire and Akechi because Akechi's lines replacing what would normally be Makoto's/Futaba's/Morgana's are so extremely entertaining and hilarious!
He give me Nagito vibes in this aspect, in a very good way.

But the way his deeper more important plot relevant role is depicted came as a genuine fucking shock to me and in a way that deepened my love for his character. The fact that he in the real world is in fact dead, knows this and does not fucking care because he'd rather be dead then be under the thumb of another shitty controlling person in power, and the fact that he decides to help you rebel against Maruki even though you'd think he has no real stake in this, the fact that he doesn't care about his life despite you pointing out to him that his life really is not a trivial matter, doesn't matter to him. Because the kind of person he is, the kind of things he went through, none of these allow him to just simply accept a life in this world (i.e., an actual fucking LIFE), because he'd rather be dead than do that. God this man makes me so emotional. And all while being the kind of person to call an enemy a sad little weakling. He is so fucking good.

And Maruki... I honestly don't know if I have all the words to do Maruki justice here, but I will sure as hell try. Building off of what is the best confidant in the game already, Maruki's characterization here comes front and centre as we go through his excellently constructed palace. Let me take a moment here to describe how genius his palace is, the way it is designed to slowly get us used to his ideology and why he did it. The way you have to literally analyze his character to get through the exam room sequence. God it's all so fucking good and like. Maruki. Maruki. I need to calm myself down, but Maruki. Him being so deep into his being wounded by his girlfriend's "death" that he takes it upon himself to study cognitive psience to help people never feel pain again, by averting people from the truth and eliminating every source of pain in their life. It is painfully, tragically sympathetic, even for how overtly bad it is. Like I said this arc is amazing at depicted him in a nuanced way.

The sheer depth of how far gone he is, where he essentially views pain as something that should be removed and optimized, and how the only thing that you deserve is to live a happy life and go through nothing hard, I feel like I am underselling how good he is by writing it like this, I just don't have the proper wording to describe it adequately. I just love him and the way he behaves as a very reasonable villain who still is presumably willing to kill the Phantom Thieves when they don't conflict his vision for the world.

And the fact that he is in some way more complex than he lets on, the recontextualization that he is also running away from trauma via him inducing a very unsuccessful experiment in his most desperate hour on his girlfriend means that in some way he too is a hypocrite, he is unsuccessful at repressing the trauma he thinks no one should have, yet in being motivated by this he inherently has to acknowledge that it exists and hurts him.. to that end he now comes of as someone who sacrifices his own happiness for the greater good of everyone else's happiness, and like man isn't this dude extremely normal?

I think I'm running out of ways to talk about Maruki that won't come off as repeating what I already said, so let me highlight two things:

a) the final one on one with him is so fucking raw. It is a pure expression of emotions from a man who knows he has failed in his grand quest that he put so much emotional stake on, and it is an amazingly performed scene. R.I.P Billy Kametz and his amazing performance as Maruki.

b) him removing the source of his girlfriend's trauma by rewriting her entire cognition of her life, having done it after forming a contract with a Persona... hey doesn't this sound an awful lot like the Phantom Thieves? This I think further reinforces how genius this arc's writing is. It reads as another criticism of the Phantom Thieves' ideology by displaying another logical extreme of it. And like, Yaldaboath's arc did this too, but it was more in a large scale, metaphorical sense, and while that doesn't make it bad, tying it here to an amazingly written character and making the stakes and thematic criticism feel that much more personal means that this arc is a much better thematic conclusion (imo) to Persona 5. At this point the only issue is again the progression isn't natural but like literally who cares when this arc is so amazingly written!

I think this also speaks to an awesome aspect of his character that I didn't mention so far in detail, that is his confidant. His entire confidant is essentially him getting to know Joker and talking to him about the Phantom Thieves and their MO, and it's like so clever that we see he already knew who exactly he was talking to at that point, because it means all this time he was projecting his own ideology and desire to actualize his ideal world onto them, because they in essence also do the thing Maruki is doing just in a different context and with different steps. And damn if this doesn't make Maruki even more peak fiction??????????

I think I've ran out of words to write about the main story, which is good because I'd just ramble about the third semester all day long if you really gave me the chance to. Anyways at this point, we have some miscellaneous rankings and then further character notes to get through:

Palace ranking (overall, considering both story and gameplay):
9 >> 6 > 4 > 7 > 8 > 3 > 1 > 2 > 5
Palace music themes:
9 > 6 > 4 > 3 > 8 > 2 > 1 > 7 > 5
Palace Bosses (gameplay wise):
7 > 8 > 9 > 5 > 2 > 6 > 1 > 3 > 4

Anyways, let's do a final character roundup with thoughts I didn't have the chance to mention before now

Goro Akechi: We deserved a romance

Sae Nijima: It's the most hilarious thing in the world how she asks you about every little detail about more than half a year's worth time, all in a single interrogation session that is apparently supposed to be short, to top it all off your bond becomes fucking 10.

Futaba: I like her confidant it's super nice and just adds to the nice overall arc of rehabilitating her more into society.

Mishima: His confidant is pretty cool, I like the way he progresses into being obsessed with the fame and his eventual realization that he's fucking wrong, a breath of fresh air in the otherwise generally mediocre pool of confidants.

Yusuke: He is one of the most entertaining members of the Phantom Thieves in the group dynamic thing I mentioned earlier, he's just super endearing and even his confidant treats the fallout of his emotions from the Madarame arc really quite nicely.

Kasumi: I really wish Kasumi was in the game more, this would've made her significantly better. Like her plot beats and general personality and interactions with Joker all work quite well it's just she really does not feel integrated into the main plot effectively at all and she would've had more of an impact if she was imo. Compare this to Maruki who just chills as a school therapist in the school and his confidant is just you talking about something interesting and plot relevant for a while, heck he even has a plot relevant reason to join. Definitely liked Kasumi still but disappointed in the way they dealt with her.

Sojiro: Sojiro's confidant is one of my favourites in the game for good reason, it's just a really nice way to add dimension to his relationship with Futaba, his struggles and the way he found it hard to deal with a kid who is so clearly traumatized, and how this tied into why he took in Joker, all good stuff.
Makoto: Her relationship with her sister I want to highlight again is quite good, I like the way Sae has some very selfish yet painfully understandable feelings about raising Makoto alone, and the way Makoto both recognizes this yet is initially frustrated and hurt by this is p cool. Her confidant is very meh I don't think it has much to offer for her in the character department

Ryuji: I already talked about how I like his main story role and his confidant so let me tell you the game ruins him and he experiences a quality dip harsher than most characters in the game for it, all because the game wanted to fucking have its pervert and Ryuji dumb gags. They are one dimensional and boring and do not serve any purpose whatsoever and Persona 5 Royal is a video game it is an extended edition of Persona 5 and it sure added changes

Tae: Her confidant is like fine idk. It is a nice conflict but not that interesting

Shiho: She should've shown up more because Ann was sorely missing things that made her good.

Haru: Her confidant is as lol as her main story role idk how else to say it, talking about Haru tires me.

Kawakami: The only reason I won't rant as much about Kawakami as I do other characters is because there is another female character whose relationship to sexual roles is screwed up massively by the game but like. She is a maid enticing a minor to use her services like I know it is not intentional on either person's part on a surface level but it is like painfully fetishized even without the romance existing and not to mention she is doing sex work for money and even her confidant says how she may need to move onto more explicit sex work fields for more money and yet the game never does anything with this whatsoever. This is all to say that even without the romance she's awful so her being romanceable drives her into the ground.

Ann: I don't have any more energy to rant about Ann but her confidant is awful yeah let me keep being a sex object but this time I want to be one

Joker: Joker as a silent protagonist, an uncritically examined self-insert silent protagonist is the ultimate zenith of bad writing, there's so much to say about how hollow he is as a character and how awful the aspect of him being the best guy ever and dating multiple women despite having no character is awful but again I do not have the energy in me to explain this, I hope it's self explanatory because I am not explaining it.

Morgana: What if a mascot character was an offensive misogynistic annoying irritating perverted little shit that needs to get burnt alive 10 times over.