Persona 5 Royal is a game I was very excited to get my hands on, especially considering my sheer love for the original Persona 5. While the idea of an enhanced re-release is nothing new, not just to Atlus or the SMT/Persona series, what matters is HOW the re-releases are handled and made, and I think with Royal - you are given the absolute most definitive Persona 5 experience yet.

With this review I will try my best not to delve into spoiler territory, but as with everything - take it with some caution.

Story
Persona 5 Royal's story largely follows the same structure as Persona 5 did though it has been tweaked here and there. Much like Persona 4 Golden before it, P5R adds a few new characters to the base Persona 5 story that extends the runtime of it by a significant margin while also adding additional content by the endgame.

The short premise of the game is that you tried to stand up to a drunk guy on the street who was harassing a woman on the street and end up arrested for it & sent to Shibuya under probation for a year. You discover some sexual abuse going on at your new school as you attempt to readjust to your new life for the next year and awaken your Persona. From there, the rest is up to you to find out.

I really wish I could talk about the story more but this is one of those games that you really need to play for yourself and experience. But to those who played the vanilla Persona 5, be prepared for the amount of changes to the story, in a good way of course.

Gameplay
Gameplay is where P5R truly shines in its improvements compared to P5. There are so many great QoL additions and tweaks to the overall gameplay throughout the palaces, such as the grappling hook, Will Seeds & the ABSOLUTE OVERHAUL AND IMPROVEMENT OF MEMENTOS, THANK YOU. Mementos was easily the lowest point of the original game, P5R actually improved it by giving you more collectibles and rewards for said collectibles, which effectively let you catch up with stuff you may have missed out during your playthrough.

Combat itself also received a huge improvement. The best improvement made to the combat is the fact that you no longer need to raise your confidants extremely high to perform a Baton Pass, it's now a default option in a fight and it improves the flow of battles by a ton. Another great improvement is that ammo for your gun is no longer a per-palace requirement, which in the original game made them near useless. Guns, this time around, are handled per-battle, meaning after every single fight your ammo replenishes, which...THANK YOU. God, THANK YOU.

These improvements to what was already an amazing gameplay loop made it so much better, to the point where I find it genuinely difficult to go back to the original game, nor see much of a point in doing so.

Graphics, Sound & Optimization
The style that both P5 and P5R go for is, at this point, iconic. The red & dark aesthetic, with each menu, character, animation and background detail having so much love, care and attention to detail added that, no matter where you look, you will always find something new to spot. This game looks great. It genuinely does in every sense of the word, this game looks amazing.

For sound, this is another case of a sheer slam dunk. The sound design in this game is wonderful and impactful. Every little & big thing has presence, and the art of sound design cannot be overstated, as it's one of the key components that brings the world to life. Don't get me started on the music either. To this day "Take Over" is still a song I listen to on the regular. And the ending theme for the whole game? Beautiful.

As for optimization, I played this game on the PS4 and not once have I ever noticed any kind of issue with the game at any point. No crashes, no save corruptions, no sudden framerate drops, etc.

I cannot comment on the PC version, or on any other version of the game for that matter, but the experience on the PS4 is phenomenal.

Overall
If you're looking for a solid 100+ hour game to sink your teeth into, Persona 5 Royal is a game that NEEDS to be added to your list. It's one of the very VERY rare games that I don't have practically anything negative to say about, and that on its own makes the game worth recommending.

Play Persona 5 Royal. Seriously.

I own this game on so many platforms - PC, PS2, PS3 - and have even bought several copies on those platforms. The game has issues and you can easily tell it was a rushed project with so many unfinished features. But the reason I give it a high score is 2 reasons: nostalgia, and speedrunning. No joke, this game is one of the most fun games you can speedrun due to its relative low difficulty. And you can learn a lot about racing games with this game. I love NFS Carbon. It's a mess, but it's a lovable mess that I revisit even now.

I've spent over 600 hours on Persona 5 on both PS3 and PS4 and I love this game. I really do. It's a fantastic JRPG to get on either platform, especially now that it's so cheap. HOWEVER, if you have a PS4 or any later generation console, I strongly recommend just getting Royal instead, since Royal is everything that was in the original game, just so much better with so many QoL features that it's hard to go back to the vanilla game. But if you have a PS3 and you are looking for a solid 100+ hour game to play on it, Persona 5 is a no-brainer.

Another game of its era. It was revolutionary and did a lot of new things that, to this day we feel effects of. But revisiting this game, you quickly notice how poorly this game aged with its progression system, star rating system and archaic ways of making use of the open world. Without mods, this game is horrendous to revisit. Usually I play up to unlocking Jackson Heights and I stop playing afterwards. I realize mods nowadays can improve things significantly, but that doesn't change my opinion on the fact that this game aged pretty poorly.

This is, hands down, to this day, the best game in the entire series. While the story is laughably cheesy and the progression of the game could get easily repetitive, this game single-handedly has the best gameplay in the entire series. Cars control beautifully, racing is fun, and the cop chases are unmatched by ANY game to this day. A lot of this is nostalgia talking, sure, but even when I replay this game in the modern day, even after speedrunning it so many times - I play this game with a smile on my face. This game is amazing and definitely worth a play.

Hm. This game is objectively bad. The graphics suck. The gameplay is slow. The framerate is choppy. And the overall artstyle of the game clashes with everything around it.

But the thing that carries this game for me is the story. Much better than what Re;Birth1 offered with a deeper dive into how the in-game world's politics and just a darker tone overall throughout the whole thing.

You can feel how depressing everything is in the game because the story itself is dark, dreary and depressing. Unlike in Re;Birth1 where everyone becomes your friend rather quickly, that doesn't happen in the original. No one wants anything to do with you because everyone has better things to do and more pressing, urgent matters to attend to. The game makes it a point to highlight that the other goddesses are LEADERS OF THEIR OWN NATION AND HAVE THEIR OWN THINGS THEY NEED TO ATTEND TO, rather than how the later games threw that notion out.

The original Neptunia definitely has a soft spot in my heart. A bad game overall, but a charming one all the same.

Neptunia mk2 was a big improvement over the original game in a lot of ways. Better graphics, better gameplay, better everything. While the story was a downgrade compared to the original game, it retained the darker tone that was present with the previous game while trimming down on the unnecessary fat of it.

In a lot of ways, I feel like mk2 is a better game than its remake - Re;Birth2 - purely if we're looking on the progression side of things. Yes, both games are very similar in how you progress through them, but where they differ is in their difficulty. mk2 can be brutally difficult at times, to the point where you can easily spend several hours grinding just to progress. A lot of people will see that as a negative, I see it as a positive personally, having played Re;Birth2 and breezing by that game in about 7 hours.

The amount of endings this game has (8 in total) also make the game very replayable as you can try out several different routes through the game.

This is gonna be a hot take - this is one of my favorite Neptunia games in the entire series. Which is weird to say, because this game is VERY hated. And the hate, in my opinion, is justified, with such riveting issues as:
- Frequent framerate issues. This game struggles to maintain a playable framerate a lot of the time.
- Unnecessarily long 40+ minute cutscenes. Yes you can legitimately fall asleep to some of these, especially when they bring nothing of value.
- Brutally difficult gameplay that, much like its predecessor, requires hours upon hours of grinding to progress.

But then why do I consider it one of my favorite games in the series? Two things:
1. The redesigned gameplay that became a staple of the series that later games and re-releases would adapt and iterate on.
2. The story itself.

Yes I did say the cutscenes can be unnecessarily long and bring nothing of real value to the player. But to me, they are the reason I love this game so much. In this game, Neptune gets transported to a dimension that starts from almost 0. It starts out parodying the video game crash of the 80s, and picks up right when only Sega and Nintendo were the big shots. And, throughout the game, you get to see the rise of the gaming industry and see not only the new consoles (nations) that rise up, but also the problems they encounter on the way.

This game is fantastic. It is memorable and just fun to revisit. I have gotten every single ending in this game and have finished 4 separate playthroughs of the game, totaling to about 450 hours in this game. I enjoyed it and I really loved it.

One of my favorite games I've ever played, and I don't even play RTS titles. I have never played something like Age of Empires or anything similar to it - to this day EE2 remains the only RTS I've ever played, learned and invested stupid amounts of hours into.

The biggest "pro" this game has going for it is its ease of access. This game is very beginner friendly and very easy to grasp, even if you're not an RTS player, like myself. But if you're willing to learn and go the extra mile with the game, you can go for some insane builds that really reward you if you specialize in certain areas, like air combat or nukes, for example.

I enjoy periodically revisiting this game, especially with the community fixes that are available in the modern day that fix the game to work on modern PCs. It's a fun RTS to play and revisit. If you've never tried it, I recommend it.