WARNING WALL OF TEXT INCOMING -
This is likely to be my longest review yet since it is going to go over quite a bit including:
1) My original review of the initial 2017 PS4 release from GGAPP.io for context/archival purposes.
2) A basic overview of how I feel Persona 5 Royal handles its themes.
3) An overview of general series mechanics and how I feel about them both as artistic/literary tools and as a form of entertainment.
4) Miscellaneous observations about JRPGs as a genre I feel Persona 5 best gives me the contextual opportunity to talk about in a public forum.
ORIGINAL PERSONA 5 REVIEW FROM GGAPP.IO
“Played on:
Playstation 4 (Regular Version)
Some cognitive dissonance with themes of the games (especially in regards to social links since that was handed off to a b-team) and Okamura's dungeon being a slog means I probably never finish this but out of the 100s of games released in the era of Trump and global rightwing populism resurgence, this is the only one that feels like it tackled the issues without kiddy gloves on. Worth a playthrough at least. Don't bother with the non-confidant sidequests though.”
SUMMARY
Persona is an anthology series of turn based Japanese role playing games centered around a crew of high schoolers coming of age in contemporary Japanese society with a tarot card/psychology motif. The plot of this entry largely revolves around a wrongly convicted high schooler on parole coming across a magical world of the collective unconscious and using it to fix injustices in Japanese society with a band of like minded individuals.
The main hook of Persona over its competitors in the genre is a calendar system used to interact with your party members and a host of non-playable characters outside of dungeons for additional narrative context, world building, and dungeon resources. Persona 5 specifically adds several interesting ripples to the basic formula first setup in the third entry. Most notably a revamp of the dungeon design to include flashier setpieces, a basic stealth mechanic to fit into the game’s heist motif, gun attacks, an upgradeable attack chaining system, status ailment chaining, and a revamp of creature acquisition to make it slightly more inline with the first two games.
GAMEPLAY & DIFFICULTY BALANCE
If this sounds like a lot to keep track of for as a casual player you would be correct and I suspect this is why I struggled upon playing to a certain point in my original run as I mention in that initial review. I am happy to say that the rebalance of the Okumura dungeon (Haru’s elemental attacks can kill the strongest enemies that you encounter in the dungeon and technical damage is more clearly explained during the Kamoshida tutorial) did wonders to the mid to late game portion of the story. Pretty much the only part of the game I found to be particularly unfair to the player this time around is the first phase of the true final boss (which given the narrative and design context is fine I just don’t have an issue admitting I lowered the difficulty to safe from normal for that fight).
That being said, the game is no walk in the park either. I’d say the game’s combat is very deliberately designed to make you pull every lever at your disposal ranging from elemental weaknesses to party member attributes. Kanesiro’s dungeon for example forces you to learn the importance of debuffs and status healing items in order to fight his pig robot without bleeding the additional SP and HP you’ll need to survive the direct fight with the head honcho and his enforcers. This might be one of the most satisfying turn-based systems I've seen in that specific regard. I can firmly say the battle system,while perhaps a tad repetitive during field battles for a 100ish hour affair (honestly though this is a statement I can attach to much of the genre and the stealth mechanic at least alleviates this slightly), gets the job done. I wish I could say the same for the calendar system though which I found to cause the game to suffer from story pacing problems.
TAKE YOUR TIME
As mentioned previously the Persona games are known for their time management mechanics. The protagonist can perform several activities in the real world that aid him in his vigilante work as a Phantom Thief. Persona 5 operates off a system in which you can largely do two social activities per day with dungeon exploration needing to take up at least the first slot if you chose to enter that day. When in the overworld you can either earn money for shopping via a part time job, build friendships with locals for combat buffs, craft items, or increase stats. Every story arc has a deadline of X amount of days to complete a dungeon before getting a game over screen. If you finish ahead of time you have a ton of spare days to do as you wish. If you are a skilled player that has prepared accordingly you will likely complete a dungeon in two time slots (dungeon bosses are almost always a second day).This causes two issues:a trivialized confidant time slot economy and repetitive dialogue. First of those is rather simple; it removes a lot of potential for interesting choices in the confidant system as the litany of time slots opened up by one day dungeon clears means you can easily get the social stats and rank up events for every confidant rather easily in a single playthrough (an issue exacerbated by Royale’s extra stat boosting events and extra semester of calendar days).
Often times during these dungeon arcs you will get messages and party meet ups pestering you to go to the dungeon on days where you haven’t finished the mission yet, in the event the player has finished these events effectively become victory laps where the other Phantom Thieves talk about how you dodged a bullet with that last target. Due to how the game flags story progress this means you could end up with large stretches of time where you are just button mashing through phone conversations that repeat the same plot points you just saw while you wait to gain control of your character for social activities. These events really do not add much characterization to any of your party members and do not respect the players time. These sequences could be cut and nothing is lost.
Perhaps the most annoying aspect of this is the fact it really doesn’t even feel necessary design wise outside the first arc. If a player has beaten Kamoshida chances are they comprehend the objective deadlines and don’t need to be treated like a kid playing his or her first JRPG for the rest of the game. This also extends to the various cutscenes that point out obvious puzzles inside dungeons. Yes, I realize the irony in an entire long ass paragraph for what effectively amounts to “Bro, get a better editor for your script!” but I felt it needed to be said. Especially when Persona 5 otherwise takes great strides with respecting the player in other aspects it just becomes a flaw made more glaring.
“LOOKING COOL JOKER!”
The game’s presentation has an incredibly snazzy graphical & audio design with a vivid pop art flair that does a great job of capturing the game's “rage against the machine” attitude. Unlike other flashy user interfaces this also mostly aids the game’s conveyance of information. I never really questioned why something was or wasn’t visible or under a certain category cough smash bros “games & more” cough. Plenty of quality of life shortcuts also are provided that are meant to reduce downtime during gameplay. You will automatically be prompted to upgrade gear when you find a better piece of equipment in a dungeon chest or shop for example and fast travel drastically cuts down on the tedium that might otherwise exist during the overworld time slots.
I AM THOU THOU ART I
Overall I’d say my biggest gripes with the game’s otherwise well thought out presentation come down to two aspects: the fusion system’s stylistic execution and the lack of soundtrack variety.
The velvet room gives you the ability to combine and edit various monsters under the protagonist’s control for extra strategic options and firepower. (There is more to it than that for analytical purposes this is all you really need to know.). This seems like a slam dunk of a mechanic right? Give the player a ton of levers to pull to create a party of creatures synergized for the needs of the moment. The problem lies in the way the player interacts through this menu system and lack of player intuitiveness in fusion results.
Simply put there isn’t really a great way to just work out what creates a given Persona without remembering a bunch of mythological creature names from the fuse by result screen. A problem further exacerbated by the eclectic origin of the monster designs. Since most of the creatures are pulling from real life cultures directly you end up in a scenario where most of the creatures don’t have an easy to infer crafting recipe to follow. How does a water yokai (Genbu) mixed with a jewish demon in a jar (Agathion) logically create an Irish ghost horse thing (Kelpie)? This is a type of clunkiness present in a lot of this system that can be directly tied to the choice to use super faithful mythological designs. Looking at other monster battling JRPGs it is usually easy to infer gameplay consequences of your party choices via the character design. What niche does Squirtle usually occupy in Pokemon Blue Version? Well given the blue coloring, turtle shape, and hard shell we can probably infer it’ll be a defensive water type by the end of its evolutionary line even if I haven’t seen a picture of Blastoise in my life. This character design choice basically heavily incentivizes you to brute force the entire system by just fusing stuff without much thought in a guideless run (or in a worse case scenario making you just skip the fusion process all together and opt to just use weaker negotiation encounters). This is honestly a shame given how I can see this system synergizing well with confidants to create a highly replayable game if the kinks with both systems were given more attention. Imagine a version of this game where you had to face bosses in radically different ways based on how you allocated your time before the end of each arc. It would’ve added an additional layer of replayability and playthrough individuality to the whole affair. This is without even going into how it makes the optional crafting focused strength arcana confidant that serves as a chekov’s gun for late game plot points into a slog that isn’t worth your time.
TAKE OVER
On a more surface level note the game suffers from a dismal track variety that is only exacerbated by changes in Royale that reduce the prominence of several tracks in favor of more instances of the song “Take Over”. When you are in battle you are going to hear that particular song a lot and it can get very grating after a while. This can be rectified somewhat with the game’s costumes for the previous protagonists that play past series battle themes but this comes at the cost of player expression as those custom’s must be equipped for the themes to play. These themes also inherently clash with the presentational cohesion Persona 5 strives for by virtue of being composed for games with different narrative themes, stylistic choices, and tones so they aren’t a perfect solution to the issue of battle track variety. This is rather unfortunate as what is here is generally pretty well made and catchy. I just wish there was more of it and what is there is stretched for 70 hours of play.
WINGS OF REBELLION
Persona 5 is kinda a fascinating mess on a thematic storytelling level. I don’t wanna dwell on this point too much as many have already beaten this concept like the dead horse it is but it bears mentioning. For 75% of its runtime Persona 5 focuses heavily on how nihilism combines with ends justify the means moral justifications to create self propagating cycles of internalized persecution. Every palace leader is basically someone that sacrificed everything for their desires in a broken system. Kamoshida gave into his vices to keep his reputation as a volleyball coach and thus his ego from his days as an olympian intact, Madarame needed to have every artistic success in his own name (regardless of how) to avoid being a starving artist, Kaneshiro constantly projected strength and hoarded wealth to avoid being branded a weakling by society. I could go on and on but you see my point. During the final two dungeons this sorta awkwardly shifts into an anti-populism message where the likes of Yaldabaoth and Doctor Maruki are presented as naive at best micromanaging narcistits for wanting to make society better. I guess according to Persona 5 if you legitimately want fundamental changes to make the world better fuck you. I play games to avoid shallow conservative and neoliberal dominated political discourse for a few hours Atlus.If you are gonna have overt political messaging in your games don’t be so milquetoast about it. It’s worth mentioning This is just one aspect. I could go whole hog on the games anti-populism message contradicting its treatment of female characters and LGBTQ+ issues in a right leaning populist way but there are several video essayists and journalists that have covered that topic from a far more informed angle then I can offer as a straight dude (links in bottom of review). The long and short of my point though? Persona 5 narrative addresses a systemic issue and offers no solution which gives off the vibe of Katsura Hashino and company being rather passive storytellers for 70+ hours.
If the game hadn’t done such a good job making the core party of phantom thieves into such a memorable cast with this motif of political corruption I might not care about this point much and would just chalk it up as another JRPG targeted at teenagers with vaguely anti-nihilism message but the fact the game comes this close to doing something different and chooses not to is frankly a little annoying. Especially when Persona 3 + 4 largely nail the deeper writing side of this memorable JRPG equation but fuck up in the gameplay areas Persona 5 largley excels in. It feels like we were a few writing tweaks and playtests away from the definitive game in the series and honestly that makes said flaws stick out more. I hope P-Studio learns the right lessons from this game and makes the next game the series’s magnum opus.
PLUGS FOR FURTHER READING
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzdylKgPjNI
https://www.polygon.com/2020/3/31/21199516/persona-5-royal-edits-changed-scene-ryuji-homophobia-controversy
This is likely to be my longest review yet since it is going to go over quite a bit including:
1) My original review of the initial 2017 PS4 release from GGAPP.io for context/archival purposes.
2) A basic overview of how I feel Persona 5 Royal handles its themes.
3) An overview of general series mechanics and how I feel about them both as artistic/literary tools and as a form of entertainment.
4) Miscellaneous observations about JRPGs as a genre I feel Persona 5 best gives me the contextual opportunity to talk about in a public forum.
ORIGINAL PERSONA 5 REVIEW FROM GGAPP.IO
“Played on:
Playstation 4 (Regular Version)
Some cognitive dissonance with themes of the games (especially in regards to social links since that was handed off to a b-team) and Okamura's dungeon being a slog means I probably never finish this but out of the 100s of games released in the era of Trump and global rightwing populism resurgence, this is the only one that feels like it tackled the issues without kiddy gloves on. Worth a playthrough at least. Don't bother with the non-confidant sidequests though.”
SUMMARY
Persona is an anthology series of turn based Japanese role playing games centered around a crew of high schoolers coming of age in contemporary Japanese society with a tarot card/psychology motif. The plot of this entry largely revolves around a wrongly convicted high schooler on parole coming across a magical world of the collective unconscious and using it to fix injustices in Japanese society with a band of like minded individuals.
The main hook of Persona over its competitors in the genre is a calendar system used to interact with your party members and a host of non-playable characters outside of dungeons for additional narrative context, world building, and dungeon resources. Persona 5 specifically adds several interesting ripples to the basic formula first setup in the third entry. Most notably a revamp of the dungeon design to include flashier setpieces, a basic stealth mechanic to fit into the game’s heist motif, gun attacks, an upgradeable attack chaining system, status ailment chaining, and a revamp of creature acquisition to make it slightly more inline with the first two games.
GAMEPLAY & DIFFICULTY BALANCE
If this sounds like a lot to keep track of for as a casual player you would be correct and I suspect this is why I struggled upon playing to a certain point in my original run as I mention in that initial review. I am happy to say that the rebalance of the Okumura dungeon (Haru’s elemental attacks can kill the strongest enemies that you encounter in the dungeon and technical damage is more clearly explained during the Kamoshida tutorial) did wonders to the mid to late game portion of the story. Pretty much the only part of the game I found to be particularly unfair to the player this time around is the first phase of the true final boss (which given the narrative and design context is fine I just don’t have an issue admitting I lowered the difficulty to safe from normal for that fight).
That being said, the game is no walk in the park either. I’d say the game’s combat is very deliberately designed to make you pull every lever at your disposal ranging from elemental weaknesses to party member attributes. Kanesiro’s dungeon for example forces you to learn the importance of debuffs and status healing items in order to fight his pig robot without bleeding the additional SP and HP you’ll need to survive the direct fight with the head honcho and his enforcers. This might be one of the most satisfying turn-based systems I've seen in that specific regard. I can firmly say the battle system,while perhaps a tad repetitive during field battles for a 100ish hour affair (honestly though this is a statement I can attach to much of the genre and the stealth mechanic at least alleviates this slightly), gets the job done. I wish I could say the same for the calendar system though which I found to cause the game to suffer from story pacing problems.
TAKE YOUR TIME
As mentioned previously the Persona games are known for their time management mechanics. The protagonist can perform several activities in the real world that aid him in his vigilante work as a Phantom Thief. Persona 5 operates off a system in which you can largely do two social activities per day with dungeon exploration needing to take up at least the first slot if you chose to enter that day. When in the overworld you can either earn money for shopping via a part time job, build friendships with locals for combat buffs, craft items, or increase stats. Every story arc has a deadline of X amount of days to complete a dungeon before getting a game over screen. If you finish ahead of time you have a ton of spare days to do as you wish. If you are a skilled player that has prepared accordingly you will likely complete a dungeon in two time slots (dungeon bosses are almost always a second day).This causes two issues:a trivialized confidant time slot economy and repetitive dialogue. First of those is rather simple; it removes a lot of potential for interesting choices in the confidant system as the litany of time slots opened up by one day dungeon clears means you can easily get the social stats and rank up events for every confidant rather easily in a single playthrough (an issue exacerbated by Royale’s extra stat boosting events and extra semester of calendar days).
Often times during these dungeon arcs you will get messages and party meet ups pestering you to go to the dungeon on days where you haven’t finished the mission yet, in the event the player has finished these events effectively become victory laps where the other Phantom Thieves talk about how you dodged a bullet with that last target. Due to how the game flags story progress this means you could end up with large stretches of time where you are just button mashing through phone conversations that repeat the same plot points you just saw while you wait to gain control of your character for social activities. These events really do not add much characterization to any of your party members and do not respect the players time. These sequences could be cut and nothing is lost.
Perhaps the most annoying aspect of this is the fact it really doesn’t even feel necessary design wise outside the first arc. If a player has beaten Kamoshida chances are they comprehend the objective deadlines and don’t need to be treated like a kid playing his or her first JRPG for the rest of the game. This also extends to the various cutscenes that point out obvious puzzles inside dungeons. Yes, I realize the irony in an entire long ass paragraph for what effectively amounts to “Bro, get a better editor for your script!” but I felt it needed to be said. Especially when Persona 5 otherwise takes great strides with respecting the player in other aspects it just becomes a flaw made more glaring.
“LOOKING COOL JOKER!”
The game’s presentation has an incredibly snazzy graphical & audio design with a vivid pop art flair that does a great job of capturing the game's “rage against the machine” attitude. Unlike other flashy user interfaces this also mostly aids the game’s conveyance of information. I never really questioned why something was or wasn’t visible or under a certain category cough smash bros “games & more” cough. Plenty of quality of life shortcuts also are provided that are meant to reduce downtime during gameplay. You will automatically be prompted to upgrade gear when you find a better piece of equipment in a dungeon chest or shop for example and fast travel drastically cuts down on the tedium that might otherwise exist during the overworld time slots.
I AM THOU THOU ART I
Overall I’d say my biggest gripes with the game’s otherwise well thought out presentation come down to two aspects: the fusion system’s stylistic execution and the lack of soundtrack variety.
The velvet room gives you the ability to combine and edit various monsters under the protagonist’s control for extra strategic options and firepower. (There is more to it than that for analytical purposes this is all you really need to know.). This seems like a slam dunk of a mechanic right? Give the player a ton of levers to pull to create a party of creatures synergized for the needs of the moment. The problem lies in the way the player interacts through this menu system and lack of player intuitiveness in fusion results.
Simply put there isn’t really a great way to just work out what creates a given Persona without remembering a bunch of mythological creature names from the fuse by result screen. A problem further exacerbated by the eclectic origin of the monster designs. Since most of the creatures are pulling from real life cultures directly you end up in a scenario where most of the creatures don’t have an easy to infer crafting recipe to follow. How does a water yokai (Genbu) mixed with a jewish demon in a jar (Agathion) logically create an Irish ghost horse thing (Kelpie)? This is a type of clunkiness present in a lot of this system that can be directly tied to the choice to use super faithful mythological designs. Looking at other monster battling JRPGs it is usually easy to infer gameplay consequences of your party choices via the character design. What niche does Squirtle usually occupy in Pokemon Blue Version? Well given the blue coloring, turtle shape, and hard shell we can probably infer it’ll be a defensive water type by the end of its evolutionary line even if I haven’t seen a picture of Blastoise in my life. This character design choice basically heavily incentivizes you to brute force the entire system by just fusing stuff without much thought in a guideless run (or in a worse case scenario making you just skip the fusion process all together and opt to just use weaker negotiation encounters). This is honestly a shame given how I can see this system synergizing well with confidants to create a highly replayable game if the kinks with both systems were given more attention. Imagine a version of this game where you had to face bosses in radically different ways based on how you allocated your time before the end of each arc. It would’ve added an additional layer of replayability and playthrough individuality to the whole affair. This is without even going into how it makes the optional crafting focused strength arcana confidant that serves as a chekov’s gun for late game plot points into a slog that isn’t worth your time.
TAKE OVER
On a more surface level note the game suffers from a dismal track variety that is only exacerbated by changes in Royale that reduce the prominence of several tracks in favor of more instances of the song “Take Over”. When you are in battle you are going to hear that particular song a lot and it can get very grating after a while. This can be rectified somewhat with the game’s costumes for the previous protagonists that play past series battle themes but this comes at the cost of player expression as those custom’s must be equipped for the themes to play. These themes also inherently clash with the presentational cohesion Persona 5 strives for by virtue of being composed for games with different narrative themes, stylistic choices, and tones so they aren’t a perfect solution to the issue of battle track variety. This is rather unfortunate as what is here is generally pretty well made and catchy. I just wish there was more of it and what is there is stretched for 70 hours of play.
WINGS OF REBELLION
Persona 5 is kinda a fascinating mess on a thematic storytelling level. I don’t wanna dwell on this point too much as many have already beaten this concept like the dead horse it is but it bears mentioning. For 75% of its runtime Persona 5 focuses heavily on how nihilism combines with ends justify the means moral justifications to create self propagating cycles of internalized persecution. Every palace leader is basically someone that sacrificed everything for their desires in a broken system. Kamoshida gave into his vices to keep his reputation as a volleyball coach and thus his ego from his days as an olympian intact, Madarame needed to have every artistic success in his own name (regardless of how) to avoid being a starving artist, Kaneshiro constantly projected strength and hoarded wealth to avoid being branded a weakling by society. I could go on and on but you see my point. During the final two dungeons this sorta awkwardly shifts into an anti-populism message where the likes of Yaldabaoth and Doctor Maruki are presented as naive at best micromanaging narcistits for wanting to make society better. I guess according to Persona 5 if you legitimately want fundamental changes to make the world better fuck you. I play games to avoid shallow conservative and neoliberal dominated political discourse for a few hours Atlus.If you are gonna have overt political messaging in your games don’t be so milquetoast about it. It’s worth mentioning This is just one aspect. I could go whole hog on the games anti-populism message contradicting its treatment of female characters and LGBTQ+ issues in a right leaning populist way but there are several video essayists and journalists that have covered that topic from a far more informed angle then I can offer as a straight dude (links in bottom of review). The long and short of my point though? Persona 5 narrative addresses a systemic issue and offers no solution which gives off the vibe of Katsura Hashino and company being rather passive storytellers for 70+ hours.
If the game hadn’t done such a good job making the core party of phantom thieves into such a memorable cast with this motif of political corruption I might not care about this point much and would just chalk it up as another JRPG targeted at teenagers with vaguely anti-nihilism message but the fact the game comes this close to doing something different and chooses not to is frankly a little annoying. Especially when Persona 3 + 4 largely nail the deeper writing side of this memorable JRPG equation but fuck up in the gameplay areas Persona 5 largley excels in. It feels like we were a few writing tweaks and playtests away from the definitive game in the series and honestly that makes said flaws stick out more. I hope P-Studio learns the right lessons from this game and makes the next game the series’s magnum opus.
PLUGS FOR FURTHER READING
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzdylKgPjNI
https://www.polygon.com/2020/3/31/21199516/persona-5-royal-edits-changed-scene-ryuji-homophobia-controversy