Persona 5 Royal Is A Superb Sequel

It’s When I finish a game that takes me more than 100 hours to go through, it’s rare that I want to play it again right away. Despite my undying devotion to Japanese role-playing games, I seldom find the opportunity to play even the best JRPGs twice.

However, Persona 5 is not your average JRPG. When it came out in 2017, critics hailed it as an exciting adventure with a stylish twist that used its actors to explore serious topics. There were some glaring annoyances in the gameplay and the story might be questioned in places, but these flaws did not distract from how great of an experience it was to play altogether.

Coming later this month, Persona 5 Royal is a reworked and improved remake of the original game with some new content tacked on at the end. The primary emphasis of this Royal review will be on the changes made from the previous edition.

This is a synopsis of Persona 5 for those who have never played the game before. You take control of a Japanese adolescent boy who, after being wrongly convicted of a crime, is forced to deal with the consequences. You find other youngsters who have been wronged by bad people, and you band together to attempt to redeem the world by defeating monsters in the brains of the bad adults, who will then feel sorrow and confess their misdeeds.

Half your time is spent in the real world, where you have part-time jobs, go to school, and make friends; the other half is spent in a fantasy realm, where you battle monsters, steal riches and recruit other teenagers and strange animals to your cause.

Persona 5 Royal

Now, I want to forewarn you that the first hundred or so hours of Persona 5 Royal will seem quite similar if you’ve gone through the original Persona 5. Although there is some new material scattered throughout the first few months of the tale and several quality-of-life changes, you could honestly repeat the same actions on the same days in Royal and have virtually the same outcomes.

Before the game’s newly added third semester, not much will have changed in terms of the plot. Most of your time in this made-up Japan will be spent seeing intriguing little adjustments rather than major redesigns.

The ambitious gymnast Kasumi and the school counselor Takuto join the Persona 5 cast as new Confidants. Despite being thrust into the story immediately, players won’t be able to take control of Kasumi—the game’s new playable party member—until the third semester. Her first performances tend to be clumsy. It’s a little strange that she’s the only major recurrent character who doesn’t appear to be vital to anything. While she is skillfully written, she only has half as many social relationships as the other characters and frequently seems out of place.

On the other hand, the introduction of Takuto into the story goes off without much of a hitch. Following the revelation that one of your teachers has been abusing kids in the game’s first dungeon, Takuto will join your class to provide counseling services. While you’re free to plan your own time with the new counselor whichever works best for you, the other members of your party will go see him on their own during the game, giving you interesting peeks into the mental health difficulties of a bunch of teenagers striving to change the world.

Detective Akechi returns in Persona 5 Royal, although his social connection has been completely redone. As with the game’s other characters, you may now choose when and how you develop your relationship with Akechi, rather than being forced to follow a predetermined storyline. New cutscenes for him add depth to his persona and provide interesting new information that veterans should look into.

You should get the most out of your new Confidants as possible before the conclusion of the second semester, which includes all three of them. This is because the player is not adequately warned that failing to level up these characters in time would lead them to lose out on crucial content in the third semester.

Certain storylines from the previous two semesters will be unavailable to the player until they complete the current semester’s tale. Think of it as a DLC for another game that can be played on its own: Third-semester assignments are interesting and will keep you busy even when they’re not directly related to the story. Try not to finish up friendships you started in the first few months of the semester.

The Persona 5 third-semester add-ons, including the new story, palace, and ultimate antagonist, are all welcome additions. Even though I guessed much of what happened by the end, the story was still wonderfully told and well worth the time it took me to go through it again. It’s more satisfying than the game’s original finale and great for anybody looking for a challenge.

I spent 120 hours on the game (including the main plot and downloadable content) and came away thinking that the chief antagonist’s reasoning in the game’s third semester was far more sympathetic and understandable than that of the main game. It was more satisfying to me as a reader that the villain really believed they were the hero of their own tale.

As well as these more noticeable features, Atlus has made other subtle changes to the game’s larger context, all of which improve the experience of playing the game in the here and now. Confidants now phone you after hangouts, helping you gain their level more quickly, while Morgana no longer constantly yells at you to go directly to bed.

Previously silent plot-important sequences now contain full voice acting. Even if you’re too weary to go out every night, you’ll always have the option of staying in and boosting your stats by doing things like watching TV, studying, reading a book, constructing tools, or preparing coffee. To say how relieved I was to no longer be ordered to go to sleep when all I wanted to do was walk downstairs and make coffee would be an understatement. All of these tweaks make the Royal realm seem less stiff and more vibrant, which in turn improves the game’s flow.

The Palaces, the difficult dungeons in Persona 5, have also benefited from the quality of life updates that have been implemented. In a welcome development, I found that my gun’s ammunition automatically replenished after each fight. Despite doing a lot of damage and being able to be loaded up with status effects, firearms in the first Persona 5 were mostly ineffective due to their limited ammunition.

The shift toward firearms with automatic reloading makes gun modification not only more practical but also more financially rewarding. Guns were a supplementary source of status ailments that helped me get through key parts of Royal even though I scarcely utilized the gun store owner, Iwai, on my first playing.

In Royal, each persona now has a unique natural feature that affects how much SP it takes to use their ice techniques or how resistant they are to physical damage. Persona fusion allows you to pass on these characteristics to the emerging character, adding a new dimension of character customization as you figure out how to best bestow a certain skill on the desired character. Before the late game, I didn’t pay much attention to these attributes, but by then I was consciously fusing persona to attempt and bestow a certain feature on a particular high-level monster.

All playable characters now have access, without having to unlock it, to Baton Transmit, which allows them to pass control to another character for a free attack after landing a particularly effective strike on an adversary. Visit the new zone Kichijoji to play darts and level up Baton Pass to the next level.

In the long run, it may be used to reward characters with perks like HP restoration, which will encourage them to continue their Baton Pass chains. Kichijoji is a village with new stores and side quests, but the main reason I stopped there was to increase Baton Pass’s use.

New players will note that the Palaces have been rearranged somewhat to make room for Royal’s grappling hook. Compared to other upgrades, it doesn’t seem all that significant; in fact, utilizing it for traveling seems nearly superfluous. Royal introduces a new item called Will Seeds, which may be used at certain grappling hook spots to access secret areas.

Each one you find will replenish some SP to help you clear the dungeon in one sitting, and if you find all three, you’ll unlock a powerful in-game item. The difficulty of tracking down these seeds is ideal for a side quest in a dungeon. In each dungeon, the last seed is guarded by a very difficult foe, one that may prove to be even more of a challenge to vanquish than the dungeon monster themselves.

Boss battles in Royal have been significantly redesigned in comparison to dungeon exploring, and for the better. Some bosses, like the perverted art merchant Madarame, used to alternate between two forms, but now they only do so once, or they introduce new forms that fit better with the story of the opponent in question. One method to add variety to boss battles I was previously familiar with, while still fitting in well with Madarame’s character arc, is to have him produce progressively bad fakes of himself.

Negotiation discussions with new Personas are the only genuinely horrible part of dungeon exploring; they were dreadful for some reason in the first game and haven’t been any better in Royal. I still find them to be written inexplicably, with Personas asking questions that have no corresponding responses in the conversation tree. Considering how well-written the rest of the game is, this is a mystery in terms of its stilted prose.

Even while Mementos, the game’s randomly generated, lengthy dungeon, is still rather lengthy and confusing, Atlus made several minor improvements to make it more bearable to go through. A major step toward relieving my ennui was the introduction of progressive changes to the music as you progressed further into the game.

The dungeon also has a new NPC named Jose, a little kid who can be found exchanging flowers and stamps for experience bonuses, extra money, and unique loot. Because of this, I no longer felt the need to hurry to the end of each Mementos layer but rather to take my time and explore the whole structure. Even though Jose doesn’t serve as a social connector, his presence as a non-player character (NPC) with a store and some underlying drama makes Mementos seem less alone.

There’s also another aspect of the tale that, in my opinion, must be included. Atlus made a big issue on the internet about how the English translation team was going to change a contentious scenario in the original game before the release of Royal. The localizers made some adjustments, but they weren’t enough to save a not-great scenario.

In the original Persona 5, two adult homosexual males go up to the adolescent protagonist Ryuji, comment on how attractive he is, admit that they know he’s too young for them, and then grab and pull him away. Two of the few homosexual characters in the game kidnap a child who shows no interest in them. It’s an unsettling, awkward, and pointless scenario, yet it’s important to the plot of the game.

The new version of the sequence doesn’t improve on the original. The two guys think Ryuji is like a drag, but he’s too ashamed to confess it. Once again, they disregarded his refusal and dragged him away to be dressed in women’s garb against his will. The scene when two adult homosexual men kidnap a young man and compel him to engage in sexual activity with them is still revolting and disturbing. Don’t buy Royal if you’re looking for a significant change in that scenario; it still ruins a game I had a lot of fun with again.

My impressions of Persona 5: Royal is, on their whole, somewhat simplistic. If you like the first game and have been considering a repeat, you will be pleased to know that many gameplay issues have been addressed and that the third semester adds some fantastic new material.

There’s a lot of stuff you’ll have to do again, but the game’s new plot beats, characters, and gameplay tweaks are well worth it. This is the ultimate method to play Persona 5 if you’ve never played it before and the notion of a long JRPG about forming friends, having wicked adults acknowledge their misdeeds, and battling monsters appeals to you.

There are still some unresolved issues with the narrative, so be cautious. However, the game is visually appealing, packed with content, and remains one of the most intriguing JRPGs of the current generation of consoles.

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