I really enjoyed my time playing P5R, but it was something that, despite my enjoyment, all my grievances come to mind first.

I am someone coming into Persona 5 Royal with practically no experience with the base game. I have played a couple of Shin Megami Tensei games; I enjoyed them, but not overly so. I have played Persona 4 before, and it is my least favorite game ever. I didn't expect to come back and try out P5 ever again, but it happened for some reason. Due to my experiences with P4, I came in with really bad impressions, but I quickly found myself very addicted to the gameplay loop.

Just in terms of gameplay, I think P5 is very impressive and stunning. I have a lot of respect for the series for recognizing that things can be done to make its systems better, but not jumping to overhaul every single thing. I like turn-based combat, and I think the transition to everything becoming action RPGs is a little sad. I appreciate that the SMT series kept its core. I really like the technical status effect mechanics, I love everything with the guns, and I am very overjoyed to see demon negotiation and enemies that are not gloves and tables.

Palace designs are equally fun; even the typical SMT-type bland-ish dungeon, Mementos, is not boring to explore. Not all puzzles are winners, but most do not overstay their welcome. I think they also do a good job of changing up the palaces. By the time things get stale, they introduce Futaba’s palace, which is a very big shakeup. Afterwards, even the return to the more common type of palace is a little different due to how Haru was integrated and introduced.

The gameplay is near perfect, but turning to the story is where things get a bit troubling. P5 has a very similar issue to P4 in the way that it can be very hypocritical.

I think the most defining moment of P5 is when Ann is telling Kamoshida off for the way he treats women and minors, and then the game transitions into the battle screen, where Ann is always positioned bending over with her ass out in the camera. Ann is repeatedly made uncomfortable and harassed for “humor”. There are instances where control is taken away from the player in cutscenes and the main character makes Ann uncomfortable, and the player is invited to be creepy to her.

Kamoshida is a good villain, his palace is good, and he serves to show a real problem in the world, but it is hard to take the game seriously when it is often just as bad as him. He sexually harassed teenage girls; the game sexually harasses teenage girls. He abused the young men on his team; the game often has Ryuji getting hurt as a joke. He is a teacher that has relationships with his students; you can have a confidant with your homeroom teacher and date her. P5 wants to talk about issues in society when it cannot recognize that it itself, as a series, has existed making fun of minorities, being weird about women, and overall just putting people down.

Ann's arc is especially frustrating as the game opens by detailing the sexual harassment she faces, and the game follows this all up by introducing Yusuke through sexually harassing her. Yusuke's introduction is very aggravating, as he is not a standard "pervert character". He is a joke character in his introduction, and the joke is that he is so socially unaware that he sexually harasses Ann. Ann is told to repeatedly put up with it by her friends so they can get information on their next target, even though the entire opening of the game was about holding Ann's sexual harasser accountable and bringing his abuse to the public's attention. Overall, it is terrible to Ann's character for putting her through more abuse just for the sake of it, and it is terrible to Yusuke's character for treating his neurodivergencies as a joke and creepy.

I feel as though Persona's misogyny problems cannot go away due to how essential sexism is to the way Persona operates. Women cannot just exist in Persona. Women cannot just be friends, they cannot just be teachers, they cannot just be sisters, they must all fit into the dating simulation format; and they must all secretly want you no matter what. It frustrating. It feels like all of the girl's confidants cannot be serious and complex, as they all need to end with them confessing their feelings, since, as the protagonist, you are always effortlessly perfect, wanted, and irresistible.

I think the hypocrisy is the worst issue, but I also think it is sometimes hard to take the game seriously with how on the nose it is. It does do a lot of interesting things, but it doesn't seem to have a lot of faith in itself or the player. In Futaba’s Palace, each mural describing her life is described to you by the characters. When you hear about someone doing bad things in the world through a Mementos request, all of the characters reinstate multiple times why what the person is doing is wrong. In the late game, I had a lot of issues with how "society" was represented in the game. Some things really reminded me of those "people are being controlled by their phones" type comics.

Once you meet Yaldabaoth, and it is introduced as the true main villain, you learn that its stance is that society is a mindless mass; the game rejects this, and yet this is directly how it has been portraying the people of the world. A mindless mass that will follow even the cruelest of people. There are multiple reasons why bad people get support besides direct approval. There is fear, oppression, coercion, restriction of knowledge, and a multitude of other things. P5 will sometimes acknowledge these things, but for the most part, the way it portrays the general masses of people in the world lacks nuance. Many of the scenes in between days or loading screens showing dialogue between people were very weak. The game's messaging feels very sloppy in terms of its final boss.

I think the framing of P5 is neat. I like the integration, and I like the suspense of knowing what's going to happen. I think they can cut back to the present too often, but for the most part, it is very good. I think Akechi is a great character. He's a perfect twist villain, though I don't feel fully right calling him that because I think the point of him is that you are supposed to know. The best parts of P5 come from it being a game about waiting for the other shoe to drop with multiple people and story beats. Talking to Akechi is tense and suspenseful since it's all about waiting for the moment when they're going to drop the character portrait where he has sharp teeth and hazy eyes. Not only that, but despite being a character you go in feeling like you know nearly everything about, he still manages to surprise by not being a sudden face-heel turn villain; he is telling you too much at every corner. Akechi is always just a couple words away from revealing it all when you would expect a character like him to keep playing dumb.

Things were nearly perfect, but then the game wanted to be smart. It wanted the player to think it was smart. I think they started to think about things on too many levels. They realized that everyone would know Akechi was a villain and didn't realize how perfect it was since they needed to be the ones on top. It feels like they wanted the twist not to be that he was villainous, but that everyone knew.

I think the story section where the game is finally in the present day is, frankly, terrible. Having the game purposely leave out things that the main characters were doing and saying, just so it can come back later and go "Of course everyone knew. Now all of the characters will explain to you all the cool stuff they did, while all the side characters comment on how cool and smart they are", is frustrating to experience. P5 so badly wants to seem smart at this moment, but it never has been. It's hypocritical, lacking in subtlety, and at this moment it's just cheap and annoying.

P5 can have small moments where it is smart or sneaky. Yeah, it's cool that there are hints at Akechi's true intentions. It's neat that the player may be able to pick up that he heard Morgana, but all of that is ruined when the game replays the "pancakes scene" over and over multiple times. It doesn't feel like a fun moment that the player may pick up on; it feels like a moment they made to rub in your face so you can praise the game. They do much better with the false Igor, which makes the fact that they did all of this so weird. Overall, it's just a very cheap and annoying part of the game.

I will be polite and end on a nicer note. Futaba’s Palace was perfect. A great shakeup and a good character study. I don't like the way the game treats Futaba like an animal that must be trained after the fact, but her palace itself is good. I equally loved Sae’s palace. I think the tension at this point is really good, and it’s just a palace kind of built for me to enjoy due to personal preferences. I really liked Akechi's purpose in the story, and I think his moment in the engine room as the climax of his character was also a highlight of the game. I think he works well as a character who has done a lot wrong but is still sympathetic and a sign of what the phantom thieves work to prevent and how many of them could have ended up if their lives didn't get better.

I thought the third semester was very good. I feel as though I have nothing to really add to the conversation there, as this is a pretty widely viewed opinion. Maruki, Sumire, and Akechi are all given a shocking amount of complexity compared to the writing of the base game. I think my one critique to give is that I wish ATLUS was braver. I think the limited party sections should have been much longer, and your other party members should have been obscured by delusions for much longer. Besides that, though, the final portion of the game is extremely enjoyable.

You always fight final bosses multiple times in RPGs. I enjoyed how the royal final fights justified themselves with desperation. I do think the game really struggles with letting itself end once March comes around, but I cannot deny P5 is talented at being sentimental.

The gameplay is incredible, and the high moments are wonderful, but there is nothing more aggravating than a Persona game during its many low points. I already want to restart and replay again, though. So despite all my grievances, I am forced to admit it is addictive and something very special.

The quality of the chapters can really fluctuate. On one hand, the near-future chapter might be one of my favorite short game stories ever. On the other hand, I found the distant future chapter so miserable that it took me a year to get back into playing the game. I would say that it is more likely for a chapter to be poor over being good.

I honestly started the game really loving it, but as time went on, I grew more and more disappointed. I found myself especially frustrated with the Middle Ages chapter. Maybe it's my fault for going in with expectations, as I heard it talked up as "a great subversion of classic SNES RPG tropes", but I find it to be either the second worst (behind the distant future) or the worst chapter. The overall routing and things you need to do can be a bit strange, but that's the least of my complaints. It feels extremely like it's contemporary (now and in the SNES era), and I'm not easily wowed by "the hero turned into a villain" stories. It felt like it thought it was something much more than it was. 

Not only that, but it's hard to take anything that is trying to be subversive seriously when it still relies on age-old, misogynist tropes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, she's not fully in line with the tropes, but does Alethea exist outside of the men that surround her? I think the treatment of women in Live A Live is something to comment on as a whole. There is one decently written girl character (Lei), which is incredibly pathetic for a game about multiple places and time periods with multiple different batches of ensemble casts.

To be honest, I actually did not 100% finish the game. I got to one of the final bosses, found it aggravating, saw that all that was left was a boss rush and a final final boss, and called it there. The final chapter felt incredibly weak with no good payoff or reason for everything to be connected. It also felt very designed around the fact that the person playing it would be in love with the game, which is a fair assumption as the person playing had gotten to the very end, but still. I like hard video games, I like hard RPGs, the first Odio boss fight felt like a boring slog and grinding around the dungeon got absolutely meager results. It was not anything i wanted to put more time into.

I wanted to like it, and the game is interesting in concept, but it weakens as it goes on, and its charm does not last. It's an incredibly disappointing game.