After years of silence, I finally get courage to make a review… let’s go them.

Persona 5 Royal is, by a landslide, the best game I played in my entire life. It hits me in almost every weak point. Persona 4 is my favorite Persona, but is impossible to me to down P5 by anything, and FFXIV tried a lot.

The art style, the soundtrack, everything in P5 technical department is made by godly hands. Jazz is the Shoji Meguro’s favorite style, but damn he was having a blast doing it. Lyn is unbelievable.

Combat is the best in the series. It is fast, it is stylish and it is satisfactory. Yes, it is easy, but after P3, Persona is completely independent of SMT, and should not be compared by difficulty, it is not the focus of the game to be hard, and I don’t think is easy per se, but they give you so many ways to play and to abuse the system, that for a experienced player, they will use to make everything look like a joke (give them myriad truths!).

The characters of P5 are the middle ground of the self development from P3 to the chemistry of P4. I try to not use Strikers memories to review them, but by the vanilla game, they are good enough. Now, the phantom thieves are the best group, not questions. The calling cards, the outfits, this gentleman thief thematic… amazing all of it. It has the best overall confidants (or Social Links if you want) from the series. Not everyone of them is the peak of writing, but no one of them is useless or completely boring like some from P3 and 4, and thanks to the bonus system, they are useful to be leveled.

The story of vanilla P5 is decent. The first arc is one of the best first arcs in any jrpg i played, you will easily get hooked. Many people hate the “comically evil” villains, but for me, they are not entirely unrealistically or boring. Of course, humans are not that simple, but they do exist, and for me, as a Brazilian, after the last few years I found real P5 comically evil villains more than I would like to. You are not wrong to dislike them, just know that they are like many comically evil villains from classic heroes comics, that P5 heavily is inspired from. And yeah, society is the root of the problems, we know that, and the game does a good job in making corny or cliché things like that to be hell of cool.

Now, the beast: The Royal. P5 is a amazing game by itself, but some time of reflection and by getting new references, I don’t think I would like P5 this much if I only have played vanilla. Royal is the “expansion” P5 deserved, even if I still hates how Atlus handles this. The content is diluted by the base game, by the new confidants and by the new “third” semester. It feels natural, Kasumi is a friend of Joker, and only him, so it feels right that she does not jump right to the Phantom Thieves. Every other character from Royal is a spoiler, so the only thing I say is that a character from vanilla completely changes from water to wine in Royal, and the antagonist? Hoo Boy… I do think that Royal ending does not fit right to the ending of the story of P5, but I was so destroyed that I don’t care.

As you can see I can talk about P5 for hours and would still not be enough. It is easy the best Persona game, it is an evolution in every technical way and it’s undeniable. No game has this feeling that only a persona game could give, and I will pay Atlus for every Remaster I can, because I am stuck in this loop. Good luck for them to try to get near as high in P6 as they got in this game, but even if takes more 10 years of copium, I will be there for the next P5 milk.

Take Your Time.

Reviewed on May 11, 2023


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