I have a bit of a strange relationship with Persona 5. I played a pretty decent chunk of it when it first came out, but dropped the game about halfway through Sae’s palace and never went back to it. Later on, I played Persona Q2, which is pretty heavily focused on the Phantom Thieves, and Persona 5 Strikers since I like musous and already had been spoiled on all of P5’s main plot points. I liked both, but never really felt the need to retry the original game. Then at the start of this year, I picked up the Switch release of 5 Royal, thinking I’d play through it once I finished Trails from Zero. It sat on my shelf for seven months before I even opened it. But once I did, I basically played it nonstop for a month. I can’t really say why I bounced off of the game the first time I played it, especially since most of the issues I had with the game are still present in Royal and it’s by no means a flawless game, and I also can’t really say what it was that made my time with the Phantom Thieves so captivating this time around, but I can say that I think Persona 5 Royal is great.
This review is based off some pretty rambling notes I took over my month with the game, but I’ll try to roughly structure it into a game-based and a story-based part. To begin, I think I should say that the Switch port of P5R is excellent. It runs smoother than most first party titles, and outside of a somewhat noticeable resolution drop in handheld mode and random NPCs still appearing as gray silhouettes until you’re pretty close to them, none of the style that Persona 5 has built its reputation on was sacrificed. It makes a lot sense since the original P5 ran on a Playstation 3 and all (and the port of Catherine Full Body is excellent), but since ports of way less technically demanding games can and often do turn out like dogshit, I thought it was worth mentioning. I also had some problems with audio sounding a little compressed after reaching the Depths of Mementos, but I think that was because I played through that segment up to Maruki’s palace while traveling with nothing but a $20 pair of headphones I normally use to listen to music while doing yardwork. It was nowhere near as bad as something like the Dark Souls port, but I still figured it was worth mentioning. Outside of the Switch related stuff, the presentation is still phenomenal. The game is bright and oozes style, and its jazzy, vocal heavy soundtrack was stuck in my head whenever I wasn’t playing. I would have liked if it had one or two more tracks for the sadder moments in the story and I think Last Surprise is a better song than Take Over (yes I know LS still plays when you don’t ambush an enemy, but it’s so easy to pull off that the overwhelming majority of your encounters will be ambushes so you’ll hear TO way more often), but those are pretty minor complaints.
Moving on to the actual gameplay, I had a lot of fun with it, even if it was super easy by SMT standards. I played through the game on hard since apparently the hardest difficulty is actually easier due to some issues with EXP scaling, but I barely struggled with enemies. That was probably in part due to me having a pretty good understanding of SMT’s core battle systems (abuse buffs and debuffs, charge/concentrate before attacks whenever possible, exploit enemy weaknesses, etc.), but also because of some mechanics. First is the change to how guns work from the original Persona 5. Since they now reload after each battle, they went from being almost useless to a reliable source of free damage at the start of each fight. This saves a lot of SP over the course of a Palace, which meant that I was able to finish each one in a single day (or the lowest possible number of days for once where you needed to leave for story events), which itself led to a glut of free time which trivialized the social sim aspects of the game. Morgana not pestering you to go to sleep nearly as often also meant that I had way more free time than I needed, even when factoring in the new activities in Kichijoji and the new events that were added in Royal. The SP replenished by picking up Will Seeds also kind of played into that, but I normally had to spend way more on the fights to get the seeds than what was replenished, so that balanced out for me. The thing that really made the game easy, though, were the unique abilities tied to each Persona. They ranged from simply cutting the cost of certain elemental skills, to tripling the effects of charge and concentrate, to boosting your attack further after a baton pass, to Alice’s unique ability that reduced the cost of instant death skills to 0. These made most fights painfully easy and even made most bosses feel unthreatening. Yeah it’s fun to wipe out enemies instantly or do 3000 damage in a single attack, but I would have liked a little more challenge. The palaces themselves were fun enough to explore and I liked some of the puzzles, but they also never really offered any kind of challenge. Safe rooms were frequent enough that I was never at risk of losing any real progress from a party wipe, and the enemies were almost always weaker than my party. Ryuji’s confidant ability that lets you skip encounters if you’re ten levels higher than the highest leveled shadow also made things super easy, especially in Mementos. The fact that you’d gain EXP and money from those fights is the biggest offender, though. Whenever I’d go to Mementos for a few quests, I’d end up leaving like five levels higher and with enough money to just pay to fuse a Persona that was 20 levels higher than what I could normally make. By the time I was doing the part of Mementos that opens up in the third semester, I was only like level 75, but I already had a maxed-out Lucifer. You could say it’s on me for using it and making the game so easy and you’d be right, but at least in a game like SMT3 I had to work to get Masakados and become an unstoppable demigod. In P5R, it kind of just happened.
On the story side of things, I thought the game was pretty good. I enjoyed the core cast of the game and thought that most of the villains were solid. Akechi in his calculating, outspoken rejection of the Phantom Thieves (and him just being a sociopath but hiding it) made him a great foil for Joker. Shido was an unrepentant asshole, which makes for the best kind of main antagonist in a RPG, and even the finale with the God of Control and the reveal that the Igor you had been interacting with the whole game was well done. There was also a little more thematic depth to the story than “adults suck”. Yeah that’s a big part, but its ideas of rebelling against an unjust society and staying true to your ideals went at least a little bit beyond that. I don’t think it was high art or anything and I probably wouldn’t rank it among my favorite RPG stories, but it was enjoyable enough and any dull moments were made up for by the cast.
That is until the third semester. Man I loved the third semester. Yoshizawa was already a likeable character and surprisingly unintrusive for an Atlus rerelease girl, but it was nice to finally get an arc dedicated to her overcoming her past and finding her resolve. I adore Maruki as a villain since he’s so completely different than the rulers of the base game and his worldview is actually fleshed out. I know Atlus was going for a whole law vs. chaos thing with P5’s story, but I think that fell kind of flat in the base game. Then Maruki came along and presents a world of eternal happiness, a true paradise, that the player is forced to reject in the name of individual freedom. You’re made to experience this world, to see how everybody really could just live in bliss if they let Maruki control things from behind the scenes. The parallels with the God of Control are obvious, but Maruki is acting out a true desire to help people instead of a misplaced arrogance. He doesn’t think that people can’t lead themselves or that they’re worthless. He thinks that the world itself is unfair and that everybody deserves something better. As a benevolent god, Maruki promises a world of joy and tranquility, but one where your actions aren’t truly your own. When deciding to confront him, the Phantom Thieves, and by extension the player, are made to acknowledge his viewpoint and even to agree with it to some extent. However, as group of people who pushed against what society thought was best for them and found their own resolve, the Phantom Thieves decide to challenge Maruki in order to protect a future where everybody is free to find their own path and to grow stronger through their hardships. Unlike the final confrontation with the God of Control, the final fight against Maruki is a clash of two equally valid but mutually exclusive ideals. The game presents Maruki’s view as “distorted”, but in the finale Morgana outright acknowledges that a lot of people would be better off in his reality, so it’s not being entirely condemned either. It’s classic SMT, but brought outside of the traditional heaven vs. hell/non-Abrahamic mythology framework of the main series. The third semester is actually a lot like Catherine in that way. It’s taking the core philosophy of SMT but using it to convey a completely different set of themes, and it does an excellent job of doing that.
It’s two in the morning. I’m tired but I really don’t want to leave this review for tomorrow. I really don’t know how to end this, so I’ll just leave you with a story. When I was in college, I worked at a movie theater. One of my coworkers would always bring a Morgana plushie with him and would keep it in the little lockers we had to store our things. On breaks, he’d take it out and talk to it like it was his girlfriend. Some days he’d even try to feed it popcorn. He was really good at cleaning up theaters, though, so I just kind of went with it. I can’t help but think of him whenever that stupid cat is on screen, so I ended up giggling to myself for a good quarter of my playthrough because I couldn’t stop remembering the dude with the Morgana GF.
This review is based off some pretty rambling notes I took over my month with the game, but I’ll try to roughly structure it into a game-based and a story-based part. To begin, I think I should say that the Switch port of P5R is excellent. It runs smoother than most first party titles, and outside of a somewhat noticeable resolution drop in handheld mode and random NPCs still appearing as gray silhouettes until you’re pretty close to them, none of the style that Persona 5 has built its reputation on was sacrificed. It makes a lot sense since the original P5 ran on a Playstation 3 and all (and the port of Catherine Full Body is excellent), but since ports of way less technically demanding games can and often do turn out like dogshit, I thought it was worth mentioning. I also had some problems with audio sounding a little compressed after reaching the Depths of Mementos, but I think that was because I played through that segment up to Maruki’s palace while traveling with nothing but a $20 pair of headphones I normally use to listen to music while doing yardwork. It was nowhere near as bad as something like the Dark Souls port, but I still figured it was worth mentioning. Outside of the Switch related stuff, the presentation is still phenomenal. The game is bright and oozes style, and its jazzy, vocal heavy soundtrack was stuck in my head whenever I wasn’t playing. I would have liked if it had one or two more tracks for the sadder moments in the story and I think Last Surprise is a better song than Take Over (yes I know LS still plays when you don’t ambush an enemy, but it’s so easy to pull off that the overwhelming majority of your encounters will be ambushes so you’ll hear TO way more often), but those are pretty minor complaints.
Moving on to the actual gameplay, I had a lot of fun with it, even if it was super easy by SMT standards. I played through the game on hard since apparently the hardest difficulty is actually easier due to some issues with EXP scaling, but I barely struggled with enemies. That was probably in part due to me having a pretty good understanding of SMT’s core battle systems (abuse buffs and debuffs, charge/concentrate before attacks whenever possible, exploit enemy weaknesses, etc.), but also because of some mechanics. First is the change to how guns work from the original Persona 5. Since they now reload after each battle, they went from being almost useless to a reliable source of free damage at the start of each fight. This saves a lot of SP over the course of a Palace, which meant that I was able to finish each one in a single day (or the lowest possible number of days for once where you needed to leave for story events), which itself led to a glut of free time which trivialized the social sim aspects of the game. Morgana not pestering you to go to sleep nearly as often also meant that I had way more free time than I needed, even when factoring in the new activities in Kichijoji and the new events that were added in Royal. The SP replenished by picking up Will Seeds also kind of played into that, but I normally had to spend way more on the fights to get the seeds than what was replenished, so that balanced out for me. The thing that really made the game easy, though, were the unique abilities tied to each Persona. They ranged from simply cutting the cost of certain elemental skills, to tripling the effects of charge and concentrate, to boosting your attack further after a baton pass, to Alice’s unique ability that reduced the cost of instant death skills to 0. These made most fights painfully easy and even made most bosses feel unthreatening. Yeah it’s fun to wipe out enemies instantly or do 3000 damage in a single attack, but I would have liked a little more challenge. The palaces themselves were fun enough to explore and I liked some of the puzzles, but they also never really offered any kind of challenge. Safe rooms were frequent enough that I was never at risk of losing any real progress from a party wipe, and the enemies were almost always weaker than my party. Ryuji’s confidant ability that lets you skip encounters if you’re ten levels higher than the highest leveled shadow also made things super easy, especially in Mementos. The fact that you’d gain EXP and money from those fights is the biggest offender, though. Whenever I’d go to Mementos for a few quests, I’d end up leaving like five levels higher and with enough money to just pay to fuse a Persona that was 20 levels higher than what I could normally make. By the time I was doing the part of Mementos that opens up in the third semester, I was only like level 75, but I already had a maxed-out Lucifer. You could say it’s on me for using it and making the game so easy and you’d be right, but at least in a game like SMT3 I had to work to get Masakados and become an unstoppable demigod. In P5R, it kind of just happened.
On the story side of things, I thought the game was pretty good. I enjoyed the core cast of the game and thought that most of the villains were solid. Akechi in his calculating, outspoken rejection of the Phantom Thieves (and him just being a sociopath but hiding it) made him a great foil for Joker. Shido was an unrepentant asshole, which makes for the best kind of main antagonist in a RPG, and even the finale with the God of Control and the reveal that the Igor you had been interacting with the whole game was well done. There was also a little more thematic depth to the story than “adults suck”. Yeah that’s a big part, but its ideas of rebelling against an unjust society and staying true to your ideals went at least a little bit beyond that. I don’t think it was high art or anything and I probably wouldn’t rank it among my favorite RPG stories, but it was enjoyable enough and any dull moments were made up for by the cast.
That is until the third semester. Man I loved the third semester. Yoshizawa was already a likeable character and surprisingly unintrusive for an Atlus rerelease girl, but it was nice to finally get an arc dedicated to her overcoming her past and finding her resolve. I adore Maruki as a villain since he’s so completely different than the rulers of the base game and his worldview is actually fleshed out. I know Atlus was going for a whole law vs. chaos thing with P5’s story, but I think that fell kind of flat in the base game. Then Maruki came along and presents a world of eternal happiness, a true paradise, that the player is forced to reject in the name of individual freedom. You’re made to experience this world, to see how everybody really could just live in bliss if they let Maruki control things from behind the scenes. The parallels with the God of Control are obvious, but Maruki is acting out a true desire to help people instead of a misplaced arrogance. He doesn’t think that people can’t lead themselves or that they’re worthless. He thinks that the world itself is unfair and that everybody deserves something better. As a benevolent god, Maruki promises a world of joy and tranquility, but one where your actions aren’t truly your own. When deciding to confront him, the Phantom Thieves, and by extension the player, are made to acknowledge his viewpoint and even to agree with it to some extent. However, as group of people who pushed against what society thought was best for them and found their own resolve, the Phantom Thieves decide to challenge Maruki in order to protect a future where everybody is free to find their own path and to grow stronger through their hardships. Unlike the final confrontation with the God of Control, the final fight against Maruki is a clash of two equally valid but mutually exclusive ideals. The game presents Maruki’s view as “distorted”, but in the finale Morgana outright acknowledges that a lot of people would be better off in his reality, so it’s not being entirely condemned either. It’s classic SMT, but brought outside of the traditional heaven vs. hell/non-Abrahamic mythology framework of the main series. The third semester is actually a lot like Catherine in that way. It’s taking the core philosophy of SMT but using it to convey a completely different set of themes, and it does an excellent job of doing that.
It’s two in the morning. I’m tired but I really don’t want to leave this review for tomorrow. I really don’t know how to end this, so I’ll just leave you with a story. When I was in college, I worked at a movie theater. One of my coworkers would always bring a Morgana plushie with him and would keep it in the little lockers we had to store our things. On breaks, he’d take it out and talk to it like it was his girlfriend. Some days he’d even try to feed it popcorn. He was really good at cleaning up theaters, though, so I just kind of went with it. I can’t help but think of him whenever that stupid cat is on screen, so I ended up giggling to myself for a good quarter of my playthrough because I couldn’t stop remembering the dude with the Morgana GF.