Persona 5 Royal Review

Look, I’m not gonna pretend I was always a massive fan of the Persona games, in fact, before the protagonist of this game was added to Nintendo’s own Super Smash Bros Ultimate, I wouldn’t have given the Persona series any thought at all. Luckily for me, my ears picked up on a couple of songs from this game’s soundtrack and enjoyed them enough to gauge interest in the game itself. Cause if I’m not a sucker for a superb game soundtrack, what am I.

I am beyond happy that I decided to give this game a try, as what I presumed would be a decent but perhaps “not for me” type of game, has become one of the best games I have played in years. Persona 5 Royal is an astonishing achievement for narrative storytelling in a video game. It took me over 100 hours to complete this primarily dialogue reading game, and not once was I bored, in fact, I was tempted to play it all again before I realised I needed to go outside. Now, if someone had told me that it would have taken me that long to beat, I would have been deterred from even buying it, I mean that’s quite an undertaking. If I’m going to put triple digits into a game, I want it to be because I enjoy it enough to do so, not because that’s how long it takes to complete. It’s why I’ve put an embarrassing 750 hours into Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, a game that can technically be “beaten” in around half an hour. So spending around 15 hours between the game’s main dungeons (if we’re using RPG lingo) might seem like an annoyingly long waiting time right? Well, it’s not, because get this, in between, you get to go to school and take the subway. Wait, it’s more fun than it sounds.

The biggest strength this game has, is in its expansive list of characters, and the diversity amongst them. The Confidants, as this game labels them, all have their own questlines, alongside the game’s main storyline, and it never feels like too much to take on at once, especially given the choices you have to make in regards to time management. The game operates a day at a time, allowing you to choose who you want to spend time with and get closer to. This is seamlessly interwoven into the game’s unmissable main content, meaning you don’t avoid anything crucial, but you get to choose what additional story you want to see played out.  The sheer amount of time playing this game means that you really do come to care about the main characters. I miss the outcasts and misfits that make up the Phantom Thieves. They all progress as people, growing thanks to the help of your characters’ presence and it’s a really rewarding thing to watch.

Now, Persona 5 Royal is an enhanced version of the original Persona 5, this means it adds an additional final school semester of story, new characters, and expands the roles of previous characters’ interactions, specifically that of Akechi, one of the games’ strongest presences. While I can’t personally comment on how these new editions change the original experience, having never played that iteration, I will say that the previously mentioned features as well as other gameplay tweaks and additions make this game a hugely complete package. I’ll also add that the new, final semester feels slightly weaker when you reach it but this would make sense as it isn’t as connected to the overall plot that the original Persona 5 built up so perfectly. That’s not to say the seeds aren’t sown throughout the original content, with the new characters teasing their heavier involvement, later on, it just feels more of an epilogue than anything else.

The game’s narrative deals with the moral dilemma of right and wrong, free will, and vigilante justice as the main gang of ‘thieves’ enter the minds of wrongdoers and force them to change their ways. In the long span of this game’s storyline, the exploration of a person’s psyche is very cleverly interwoven between enticing turn-based combat and the exploration of the seven Mind Palaces. This is by no means the first game to use this clever setting of levels within a character’s consciousness, Double Fine’s classic Psychonauts did it 10 years prior, but its execution is excellent all the same.

Having played this over a solid week while having Coronavirus, I felt as though I was living in Tokyo alongside Joker, and for the amount of content in this game, I could definitely delve deeper, but as this is just a review and not a deep dive, I’ll wrap up by saying: this game surprised me in the best kind of way. While it’s definitely not for everyone with how long it takes to complete, it is more than worth it if you have the time. It feels fitting that I became so obsessed with a game about stealing hearts, and the Phantom Thieves over at ATLUS have surely convinced me of just how much I can enjoy a JRPG.

9/10