“Ah, you’re back.”
PART 1: TOKYO EMERGENCY
Picture your favourite TV show. It could be a tightly-written courtroom drama or a cosy sitcom with thirty seasons. Imagine the sets: redecorate those spaces you’ve seen time and time again in your mind. Think of the characters, with whom you would drink tea and share secrets as though you were the closest of friends. Recall the soundtrack, which you’ve heard so many times you can hum along to every scene. Making time for yet another rewatch feels like coming home, the familiar sights and sounds acting as a warm embrace even in the darkest of times.
Now imagine this: years after the show’s supposed end, you hear word of a new version, one with remixed scenes and a new ‘where are they now?’ epilogue. Some of you may well be rolling your eyes, decades of ‘director’s cuts’ and ‘cast reunions’ failing to recreate the warmth of your memories.
Persona 5 is my TV show.
Persona 5 Royal is even better.
Originally released in mid-2016, Persona 5 tells the story of the Phantom Thieves, a stylish gang of vigilantes who infiltrate the hearts of the corrupt and steal their ‘distorted desires’ to trigger a ‘change of heart’. As the leader of this movement, you watch the group’s rise from scrappy schoolyard gang to national phenomenon, as well as their all-too-sudden fall from grace and eventual redemption.
This is a story about rebellion, and P5R doesn’t let you forget it: in the game’s opening hours you meet both adults and fellow students whose utter contempt for the player is laid bare, both in and out of your presence. Your daily subway commute subjects you to a predictable barrage of ill-informed gossip from the homogeneous public, and things only get worse when you arrive at school. Of course, you aren’t the only topic of discussion — my generation’s attention span is famously lithe — and putting aside from your own status as “the guy with the criminal record”, you’ll also hear rumours about the “deadbeat track-runner”, the “quarter-American slut”, the “uptight student council president” and (newly added to Royal) the “special snowflake honour student”; reductive descriptions of people who will eventually join your gang. Things need to change, and only those rejected from society are willing to do something about it.
Sounds cool, right? Unfortunately, many JRPG stories often work far better in concept than in execution, and for such an unconventional game P5R does nothing to break this trend. Almost all of the key moments in the wider story unfold during long, non-interactive cutscenes rather than in gameplay and while their glacial pace works wonders for intimate conversations between the main characters, it falls apart during the major confrontations and exposition scenes (code names, calling cards and latex are cool enough on their own, Morgana — you don’t need to explain and then re-explain their in-universe reasons for being in the game). In the original I all-too-often found myself skipping through pre-fight dialogue to get to the cool ensuing battle or cutting people’s voice lines off after they’d finished key words as a sort of timing game to keep me entertained. While this was still an issue in P5R (it was especially noticeable in the main story’s final boss, where any and all dramatic tension was ruined by corny and overly long speeches), the addition of an easily accessible AUTO toggle smoothed things out considerably. At least you can now put the controller down and eat M&M’s while the SIU director monologues about how evil he is.
“If I had a pound for every time a Palace infiltration was labelled as “one last job for the Phantom Thieves”, I would have, like, four pounds.”
PART 2: LAYER CAKE
Although its sparkling trailers and hefty second price tag suggest otherwise, Persona 5 Royal’s gameplay is largely unchanged from the original. Much like how its protagonist must live a double life as a high school student and a phantom thief, you as the player are asked to engage with two different games at once: a time management-focused life sim and a turn-based JRPG. Let’s talk about the latter first.
PART 2A: WILL POWER
The JRPG portion of the Persona series is the part that most closely resembles ATLUS’ own Shin Megami Tensei, a niche collection of apocalyptic adventures that spawned Persona as a spin-off (SMT is also one of the rare media franchises to have been overtaken in popularity by its own spin-off series, although it’s not hard to see why — Persona’s colourful aesthetics and simpler, more varied gameplay seem much easier to sell than hardcore number-crunching and whatever the hell this is. SMT’s core is very much visible in Persona, albeit with a few key changes: you must explore vast worlds made up of many layers, collecting treasure and managing your stamina along the way. ATLUS has experimented with both randomly generated and hand-crafted level design in its games, and for better or worse P5R reflects this perfectly by using a mixture of the two.
Over the course of the main story you’ll infiltrate seven ‘Palaces’: intricately designed, visually fascinating worlds that represent the twisted hearts of the Phantom Thieves’ targets. While they may seem great at first (“Woah, dude! It’s just like Inception!”), they quickly outstay their welcome thanks to their languid puzzles and extreme length, resulting in heists that feel more and more like a formality as the game goes on. If I had a pound for every time a Palace infiltration was labelled as “one last job for the Phantom Thieves”, I would have, like, four pounds. Of course, no discussion about repetitive design would be complete without Mementos, the much-maligned, randomly generated bonus Palace which you’ll visit at least a dozen times, only to be met with the exact same sense of crushing indifference with each trip. Royal tries to mix things up by spewing collectable flowers everywhere, but you’ll still spend hours and hours trawling down identical-looking tunnels in search of a way out, only to be met with yet more tunnels.
However, this side of the game does have one saving grace; one that I never expected. Since this is a video game, the Metaverse is crawling with enemies, and you will be forced to murder swathes of them in order to progress (once again, because this is a video game). Violence and video games are unfortunately a near-ubiquitous pairing, and I’ve played enough AAA blockbusters to give me the same sense of eye-rolling cynicism that Nathan Drake has as he nonchalantly utters “we got company” before filling said company with lead. Going into Persona 5 Royal, I expected to feel the same way, especially after having given up on other JRPGs like Octopath Traveller and Ni No Kuni out of boredom. I couldn’t have been happier to have been wrong.
P5R’s combat floored me. I mean that both literally and figuratively. The decades-old, rock-solid Shin Megami Tensei formula has been shaken down to its bare essentials and infused with the very best aspects of Persona to create a rare type of JRPG battle system that is both aesthetically beautiful and immensely satisfying. Much like SMT, battles unfold in ordered turns and revolve around finding and exploiting enemy weaknesses. If you can knock an enemy down, either by hitting an enemy’s weakness, scoring a critical hit or using special technical attacks, you will be able to not only deal extra damage (as in many other RPGs) but crucially mess up the turn order, granting you an extra move (called a ONE MORE) while rendering the knocked down enemy (or enemies) useless for one full turn. You can donate this turn to your other teammates to increase your options (and further increase your damage), allowing you to further knock down (or outright kill) additional enemies and gain even more free turns. Knock down all the enemies in a battle at once and you’ll trigger a HOLD UP, giving you two additional choices. The first allows you to talk with enemies where, in another system taken from SMT, you can coerce them into giving you money or joining your team. The second gives you the chance to instantly finish a battle with an ALL-OUT ATTACK, with the caveat that if it fails, all enemies will be stood back up again.
However, no written description of the combat system would ever be able to truly do it justice, as this bevvy of interlocking rules and systems is supported by ATLUS’ not-so-secret audio-visual ingredient: style, and lots of it. Characters are smothered in a bold layer of button icons and text while you plan your next move. ONE MOREs and HOLD UPs are announced with huge motion graphics fashioned from magazine letters that cover the screen, accompanied by shouts of amazement from your teammates. The game’s most iconic visual, the ALL-OUT ATTACK, is a shapeshifting blur of black and red brilliance which seems destined to be found as a GIF in a Twitter thread about how Japanese games are cool actually (it also makes for a pretty great Super Smash Bros. attack). Despite my using it hundreds of times, the ALL-OUT ATTACK never lost its lustre, and hitting TRIANGLE right as the battle music reaches its chorus is the video game equivalent of getting double bounced on a trampoline: first you lurch, then you soar.
Oh, that’s right! How did I forget about the music?! P5R’s themes of youth and rebellion depicted in the game’s story and bright red colour scheme are further emphasised by its much-loved soundtrack, which, in Persona series tradition, takes on an entirely different genre from its predecessors. This time, composer Shoji Meguro and his team looked to the ‘acid jazz’ works of Jamiroquai and Incognito, club-friendly groups who mixed funk, soul, disco and (of course) jazz. Each song is a great in its own right, in ways that music analysts far smarter than me have discussed in detail, yet what stuck out the most was their collective use in the context of the game. Sure, P5R may not have a soundtrack as vast or genre-diverse as high budget efforts like 2020’s remake of Final Fantasy VII, but despite its hundred-hour play time the repetition never grated on me. Many songs are remixed and rearranged based on what the weather is like, or what day it is, or how deep you’ve delved into a palace, or (in the best case) what phase of a boss fight you’re on; changes which hold up the game’s best moments and which the player excitedly notices since they’ve listened to the originals so many times. Your favourite Persona song doesn’t just represent a melody you like. It represents a memory you love.
Okay, music tangent over. What were we talking about again?
PART 2B: BENEATH THE MASK
The combat’s unrelenting sense of style extends to the ‘real world’ portion of the game, too: your aforementioned Anime Buddies™ will ask you to hang out using a messaging app so flashy that fans have re-made it for their own personal use, while traditionally mundane tasks like studying or watching crappy TV dramas will shower you in golden music notes that feed into a star-shaped personality chart. Even obligatory RPG features like stat menus and dialogue prompts are a joy to navigate thanks to gorgeous artwork and smooth transitions. It’s a rose-tinted depiction of teenage life that strips out all the homework and ugliness, presenting only the briefest facsimiles of chores and the most meaningful of conversations between friends. Every day is productive: you choose from a vast array of activities that all either improve your character’s personality or grant you some new ability, and unlike real life there’s no option to lie on the floor crying. That almost all the activities you can do are both massively helpful for your phantom thief adventures (spending enough time with ex-track runner Ryuji grants you the near game-breaking ability to skip most battles) as well as being entertaining in their own right (watching ‘The Cake Knight Rises’ in the Shibuya cinema was a personal highlight) is what makes the limit of only being able to do two activities per day so fascinating.
“These aren’t invincible heroes with ATTACK AND DETHRONE GOD written next to GET MILK on their to-do lists. These are real people with real flaws and for-real catchphrases that are just as funny the first time as they are the twenty-first.”
You’ll constantly be asking yourself questions like “the bathhouse is extra warm today so I’ll get bonus CHARM points and be able to impress that Shogi player everyone’s talking about, but the high school detective Akechi has invited me for a game of billiards and that’ll allow me to spot an enemy’s weakness before a battle begins! What do I do?!” Tying combat abilities to conversations between friends sounds like a tired, video game-ey trope that the industry has been trying to expunge in its pursuit of being seen as ‘high art’, but the interplay between these two very different types of game is precisely what makes Persona so interesting. You want to get through the Palaces efficiently so you’ll have more time for real-world activities, and you want to do these activities so you can unlock abilities to use in the Metaverse.
It helps that there are people beneath the cool masks and ability unlock trees, and in series tradition P5R’s main cast consists of various Japanese teenagers who are at once universally likeable* and impossibly insecure. Sure, dropping everything to hang out with newcomers Kasumi and Maruki (as well as best boy Yusuke) probably wasn’t the most ‘optimal’ way to play, but I still gave up my precious time slots simply to hear what they had to say.
Splitting the combat and character development into two equally engaging, systems-focused games rather than stuffing the latter into non-interactive cutscenes is a captivating core idea, one that brings a sense of humanity to its characters rarely seen in Japanese RPGs. These aren’t invincible heroes with ATTACK AND DETHRONE GOD written next to GET MILK on their to-do lists. These are real people with real flaws and for-real catchphrases that are just as funny the first time as they are the twenty-first. Some people will find this annoying and abrasive. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
PART 3: LIFE GOES ON
While writing this review, one question remained at the back of my mind: why did I come away only lightly positive from the original Persona 5, but feel confident declaring Persona 5 Royal as an all-time favourite? Most of the praise I’ve given for the game could be applied to both versions, and I even mentioned in the opening paragraph that playing Royal felt like watching an old, beloved TV show. So what’s changed? My answer: more than I thought.
Sure, P5R is bursting with small, tasteful improvements — your gun ammo is limited to one clip but now refills after every battle, and your cat tells you to go to sleep a whole lot less — but in just as many ways, developer ATLUS has let the world do the changing for them. In the three years between P5 and P5R’s releases, we’ve seen America delve deeper and deeper into fascism at the hands of an openly hateful leader, we’ve seen countless women sharing their own harrowing experiences of men who abuse their positions of power (as well as those who knowingly stay silent), and we’ve seen the rise of drama-as-play, an online phenomenon which may allow prominent figures to finally face the consequences of their actions, but one which also encourages its audience to view sensitive issues as mass entertainment. If you’ve played the game, chances are that this all sounds pretty familiar: conservative politician and all-round arsehole Masayoshi Shido is blatantly evil yet still retains his rabid fanbase, the game’s first and scariest villain is a sexually abusive P.E. teacher whose star status shields him from consequence, and after a botched heist halfway through the story we see the general public’s adoration for your group turn to unwavering hatred in the blink of an eye. What were once innocuous ideas that passed me by have now become major themes that I closely associate with the main story, making the game infinitely more interesting as a result.
Of course, not all of the game’s themes have aged this well: ATLUS have an unfortunate reputation for their poor depictions of women and LGBTQ+ groups, and while its most explicitly offensive scenes have been altered, P5R does nothing to change any of its less obvious issues. There’s still frequent objectification of the girls in your group, there’s still no option to enter a romantic relationship with any of the boys, and there is very much still the option to romance adult women (including your own teacher), which is just as creepy as it sounds. For a more in-depth critique of the game’s bizarre romance system, you can read Jessica Howard’s piece on the subject here.
There’s an uncomplicated appeal to reviewing games in a vacuum, using clear-cut categories and number scores to judge a game’s value. Many people use games to escape to another world and live a life different from their own, and simply want to know if a particular game is quote-unquote “worth their time”. You could even argue that reviews like these allow people to better form their own opinion of a game, since they can play without having any pre-conceived ‘hot takes’ to think about.
However, I disagree. The fact is that games aren’t the only thing that matters, far from it, and to pretend otherwise would be an act of ignorance. Like with a good meal, the where and when of a work is just as important as the work itself. Do we love our favourite games because they’re great in isolation, or do we love our memories of where, when and with a whom we experienced them? I know how I feel.
“Your favourite Persona song doesn’t just represent a melody you like. It represents a memory you love.”
Running home to find a Switch with Breath of the Wild on launch day. Crying through the final hours of Undertale on my busted old laptop. Crowding round the same school table each lunchtime to play Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and flushing our worries away under a deluge of back throws and bob-ombs. Marvelling at an old friend’s ill-gotten diamond collection as I played Minecraft with him on his Xbox 360, glow-in-the-dark Mad Catz controller in hand. I cherish these memories, just as I cherish P5 having now revisited it in a new light. Of course, not all my feelings towards the game are positive — there’s the aforementioned capital A, capital N Anime Nonsense™ and those big green robots can go to hell — but being able to love something while acknowledging the things that aren’t so great can only be a good thing.
Wait, isn’t that the ending of Pixar’s Inside Out?!
(PS4)
(*Mishima doesn’t count. He sucks.)
(NOTE: One of P5R’s most prominent features is its new epilogue section. While I absolutely loved this final chapter, I chose not to discuss it in this review, both to avoid any plot spoilers and because its themes and message are radically different from the rest of the game. Where P5’s story is one of clearly established heroes and villains, the epilogue is far more morally grey, and I felt that I wouldn’t be able to do it justice without writing an entire extra essay. I don’t plan on doing that any time soon.)
