When Persona 5 was released in 2017, it was showered with praise and top ratings. Many players consider it one of the best JRPGs of this generation. An expanded version now appears with Persona 5 Royal. But does it also make it worthwhile for players of the original to play through again?
Persona 5 has its own unique, yet difficult to understand, fascination. It has endearing characters, an interesting world and a dramaturgy that will inevitably cast a spell over the player at some point. However, it is also damn long. The original included a minimum of 80 hours of playing time. You should plan even more time for the extended version. Still, Persona 5 Royal exerts an irresistible pull – even on me, who has spent over 120 hours on the original. To understand this fascination, you have to get involved with the game and accept its idiosyncrasies.
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Persona 5 creates a crazy mix of genres that at first sounds much stranger on paper than it turns out when playing. Half of it consists of a kind of everyday simulation of a high school student. The other half gives you a dungeon crawler that roughly resembles an adult version of Pokémon. But in between, so much more happens, and the player is allowed to decide what to focus on. In order to understand Persona 5 and its peculiarities, certainly also peculiarities, we have to start from the beginning.
The nameless protagonist, who will later be given the alias Joker, comes to a new city and school. From there you will experience everyday life with everything you do as a high school student: learn, work, make friends, buy a plant for the attic or buy new video games. And immerse yourself in the subconscious of disturbed personalities using a mysterious navigation app on your cell phone. The usual.
Each month or chapter basically consists of three phases: everyday life at high school and in leisure time, the deadline for the task and finally the actual adventure in the dungeon. Every month you have to deal with a different villain, in the tradition of the "Monster of the Week". Many, many hours of play pass before a narrative thread spins out of it and reveals the true antagonist who is pulling the strings in the background.
In the case of newcomers to the series, this can tug at the motivation, especially since the game is extremely gaunt, leaves many connections in the dark and for a long time withholds an overarching goal. The feeling of being caught up in a routine that repeats every day determines the first hours of persona. But when the story really hits, it happens with a force that suddenly reveals the sophisticated methodology behind it: like a spider, the story weaves out of its thread secretly a web in which one has long been trapped without realizing it .
In the course of the plot, Joker and his friends, the “phantom thieves”, are confronted with new and particularly depraved people: the sadistic sports teacher who abuses his students, a criminal artist who forges his works, and finally even a Yakuza boss. Persona 5 doesn't do things by halves. Once you have identified the person, the next phase begins: stealing that person's "heart". This heart is a treasure, which is located in the "palace" of the person concerned, a kind of symbolization of their subconscious, the role-playing dungeon, into which the phantom thieves have to penetrate in order to steal the treasure and thereby the psyche of all evil influences free him so that he is converted to good.
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It is precisely this interplay of everyday life, the multi-layered characters and the classic role-playing adventure that draws the player so deep into the world of Persona 5. The player spends the days with friends, deepens relationships with them, engages in various recreational activities to improve their character stats, and finally continues with the story when the time is right. Until then, he has to endure seemingly endless deserts and dialogues.
Even if Persona 5 has one of the most interesting video game stories in recent years, it tells it in a very idiosyncratic way. The majority of the dialogues do not advance the plot, but merely depict the mood of the situation, provide insights into the inner life of the numerous secondary characters, or exhaust themselves in repeating what has already been said. That happens often. Very often. Every day. Till the end of the month.
It takes a long time for the story of Persona 5 to get going. For the first 40 hours, it seems as if the individual chapters are simply lined up together. But as soon as its common thread is revealed, it will grab you. Promised! At least for newcomers. For those who have already played Persona 5, it will take a lot longer to see new story content that was not in the main game and takes longer than a dialogue sequence. Meanwhile, you spend the days doing activities to develop your character in the best possible way.
Everyday life is an important part of Persona 5. Even if you are offered many opportunities to do something in the game world, this part does not reach the relevance or depth as, for example, in an animal crossing. In Persona 5, the range of everyday activities ranges from interesting occupations to opportunities to only collect experience points for certain values.
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Even if the game world looks very authentic, because it is strongly based on the real Tokyo, the individual locations only form isolated, small sections of a city that you never get to see in its entirety. In contrast to the Yakuza series, which also takes Tokyo as its setting, Persona 5 is not an open world game, but a typical RPG with a fragmented overworld.
Let's execute them!
As important as everyday life is for the gaming experience, the real heart of Persona 5 is the role-playing dungeons, the so-called palaces: manifestations of the subconscious mind of depraved personalities. Depending on the antagonist, these take on the most varied and mostly very imaginative forms: sometimes that of a royal castle, sometimes a museum or even a casino. Even if they give the impression of openness at first glance, they mostly run along a linear corridor.
In the palaces, Personnel 5 in the Royal version finally launches its first small innovation, although it is so marginal that it is hardly worth mentioning. You now have a grappling hook at your disposal to get to new collectibles at predefined locations. However, he does not bring greater freedom in movement and exploration.
As previously mentioned, Persona 5 looks like an adult version of Pokémon in some ways. Inside the palaces you will encounter numerous different monsters on every corner, which are extremely creative and varied. You can defeat them in battle, but it is smarter to weaken them and then … to persuade them to join you. Persona brings a long overdue innovation in the genre of "monster catch" games, which has been shaped by Pokémon for more than 20 years and has always been kept simple. In addition to the tactical battles, which reward the player with additional moves if he exploits the weak points of the opponents, the dialogues with the opponents bring much more depth and, above all, charm to these encounters.
A big difference between Pokémon and Persona 5 is how you develop the trapped monsters. You catch and train them in Pokémon. In Persona 5 you catch and fuse them to create stronger beings. It does so by being executed. In this respect too, Persona 5 doesn't do things by halves. Personas are beheaded, put in solitary confinement, or land on the electric chair.
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The game does have an overwhelming number of over 200 different personas. However, only the protagonist may take different personas into the fight. The remaining party members each have only one persona for the entire game, which greatly reduces the characters' possibilities in combat. That's why the fights are very often the same.
It is so … smooth.
Persona 5 is pure art design. Every movement, every attack, yes, even (and even more so) every menu is presented in such a stylish animation that the sight of the game is a delight at all times. Especially the transition from the fight back to the dungeon is staged with such a coolness that it carries over even if it should have been annoying after the hundredth time. But even if the anime look of Persona 5 is stylistically beyond any doubt, the graphics look like from the last generation of consoles in purely technical terms. The new Royal edition does not change anything, but leaves the original completely untouched.
The sound is in no way inferior to the brilliant art design. Persona 5 has a damn good soundtrack and knows how to use it. This ranges from dreamy-melancholic, lively and jazzy sounds to – of course – pure coolness. Many situations and locations have their own musical background, but especially the emotionally more intense moments are saturated with melodies that you will remember for a long time after playing.
At most, the same piece of music during the fights wears out after countless hours. Persona 5 Royal has another theme for the fights, which alternates with the other. That is not a lot, but it does bring a welcome change.
What is so royal about it?
Updates are nothing new for the Persona series. With Persona 4 Golden and Persona 3 FES, the predecessors each received an expanded version that improved and expanded the main game. This also applies to Persona 5 Royal. However, the innovations only include marginally more content. New characters are added, including a female character who joins the party around the protagonist. There are also a few new locations and cutscenes, including Thieve's Den, a new room that can be accessed via the main menu and can be set up yourself. There you can distribute figures for decoration, watch video sequences again or play cards with other characters. The in-game achievements can also be viewed here.
The Royal version of Persona 5 has a specific release date as of March 31, 2020.
Apart from the new intro and the additional female figure, the innovations are too small and sporadic to make a striking difference. Despite the surname Royal, Persona 5 is still the same game as three years ago. A major and noticeable innovation only takes place towards the end. What was shown in the original as a final sequence in the fast run takes another fully playable semester in Persona 5 Royal, which allows you to spend a little more time in the world and to say goodbye to the characters you love. To do this, however, you have to go through almost 100 hours of almost exactly the same game.
