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Persona 5 Royal is the new hotness, bringing the hit JRPG sensation back with additional content and quality of life changes. However, I will not be talking about Persona 5 Royal. I thought that an interesting thing would be to talk about the original Persona 5; one of the few games I have a platinum trophy in. Another staffer is probably going to write their own review of Royal to act as a second opinion and a look at how the game may have improved between versions.

Persona 5 is the fifth (well, sixth) entry of the Persona series by Atlus, and it is easily the most successful RPG that Atlus has put out. Persona 5 starts in medias res, where you play as a young boy referred to as “Joker,” trying to escape a casino of monsters with his motley crew known as the Phantom Thieves. While his friends escape, he does not and ends up being detained. Sae Niijima, a local prosecutor who has spent the past few months following the case of the Phantom Thieves, sits him down to explain his case. So, he starts recounting his story from the beginning.

The Phantom Thieves are a gang of regular high schoolers facing different forms of abuse from society and power, and they intend to change society through supernatural means. Joined by a strange cat named Morgana, the gang heads into the Metaverse, this other realm that reflects the thoughts and desires of people in reality. Within the Metaverse, the worst people (well, mostly) have things called Palaces, which are dungeons that are specifically designed around them. At the heart of these Palaces are treasures that, when stolen, force those people to repent for their crimes. Calling upon the spiritual powers of Personas, the Phantom Thieves set out to forcibly bring these people to justice.

Persona 5 starts out strong with the first arc, dealing with an abusive coach named Kamoshida. Kamoshida presents very personal stakes, holding a seat of power that hurts Joker and the first two big party members, Ann and Ryuji. He is physically abusive to his male students and sexually abuses his female students, presenting players with a horrible yet down-to-earth villain. It becomes even more personal when his behavior leads to a student attempting suicide, which is what mobilizes the protagonists to action. He’s awful, he’s despicable.

Moreover, he sets the bar too high. One of my biggest problems with the story of Persona 5 is that nothing comes close to reaching Kamoshida for a long, long time. The other villains are still bad, but it also lacks the more personal edge Kamoshida provided. Every other Palace owner after Kamoshida just has beef with the character of that particular arc, with retaliation against the rest of the party being more out of association than anything. Getting threatened with expulsion by a physically abusive teacher strikes closer to home than, oh, this famous artist is going to make an exaggerated claim about breaking and entering. All of them are more powerful and present higher stakes, yet I lack the same kind of emotional investment I had with Kamoshida.

The game also starts with a general theme of rebelling against society, which given the turbulent politics in the last few years, is something that a lot of people can get. Toward the end of the story, the theme is expanded on, pointing out that it isn’t enough to get rid of bad actors in society, but society must change as well. However, Persona 5‘s solution to that just doesn’t feel adequate. It makes the vague allusion to systemic change, but we never see the results of the Phantom Thieves attempt to deal with that. One of the final villains is shown to be arrested, but it feels hollow when the system was canonically shown to be corrupt. There’s no indication that anything changed outside of Sae, and it feels more as a result of her personal experiences than a change in society.

I’ve been thinking about the characters of Persona 5 more, and I’ve concluded that the main cast is the safest cast in the post-P2 era. For one thing, most of the characters fit into an archetype that the past two games presented. Ryuji is the best bro character, like Junpei and Yosuke before him, with some of Kanji’s hot-bloodedness mixed in. Ann is the vanilla Lovers girl, like Yukari; While lacking a conflict that adds depth to Yukari’s character. Morgana is the mascot character, like Teddie, and debatably Koromaru. Makoto is the smart exposition girl, like Naoto. Haru is the rich girl, clueless about normal things, like Mitsuru.

Yusuke and Futaba feel more original compared to the rest of the cast, but they also play it safe with those characters. After his arc is done, Yusuke is just the weird funny artist, while Futaba is a standard anime hacker girl.

Speaking of Yusuke, that leads into another problem I have with the cast; After their initial character arcs are done, they kinda lose their sense of presence in the story, to me. Haru, in particular, has it bad as it feels like she’s just there. The sole exceptions are Morgana, whose confidant story advances with the main story, Makoto, and Futaba, whose roles within the Phantom Thieves ensure that they always have relevant screen time. Speaking of confidants, it feels like the developers wanted the confidant stories for your party to replace extended character development, except since these stories are off to the side and don’t end up reflecting back on the main story in any meaningful way, it doesn’t feel like an adequate replacement.

I made this a while ago and it still stands pic.twitter.com/ZUlgHk4IcT

— Raphaels bursting shirt buttons (@RaphaelsStan) April 7, 2020

Also, Morgana, I hate this guy. He’s probably the worst main character in the series. The good parts of Morgana is a retread of Teddie’s story in that he’s trying to understand his place in the world and questioning his existence as a shadow/shadow-adjacent creature. As for his bad parts, he’s kind of an annoying mascot character, and while he isn’t as horny as Teddie, his horniness for Ann feels worse considering that one of the major themes of the first arc of the game is “seeing high school girls as sex objects is a bad thing.” What seals it is that he’s just kind of a tool to Ryuji for no reason through many in-game months, and then ends up spending a whole week being sullen about Ryuji calling him useless.

Besides being used as a replacement for character development, I overall enjoyed the confidants in Persona 5. I was more divided on the social link/confidant casts in the past games, but I generally liked the characters you get here. Sure, some of them are a bit basic, like the Sun confidant just trying to be a good politician, but they aren’t main characters, so it’s more excusable.

I will say, though: Even though I appreciate the characters, I dislike the game allowing your character (a high schooler) to get into romantic relationships with the grown women confidants. Sadayo’s story even acknowledges it as a bad thing, but, you can romance her anyway. It all feels weird when you know, even if you, the player, are a grown adult.

Part of why I like the confidants in Persona 5 is that they introduce additional gameplay benefits the more you level up your relationships to these characters. In previous games, leveling up Social Links just gave bonus EXP when fusing a Persona of the equivalent arcana and making an extra Persona available. Now though, there’s an extra gameplay element to encourage players to seek out building relationships. For instance, building relationships with the shopkeeper confidants provides discounts, extra services, and items, which makes seeking them out a priority.

So, let’s finally talk about the gameplay.

Dungeon crawling is a mixed bag. When it comes to the main Palaces, they’re actual dungeons, which immediately makes them better than those of the past two Persona games. Previously, they were just themed randomly generated layouts. However, that aspect still lives on in Mementos, the gigantic side dungeon where you do many of the game’s sidequests. Granted, it does have more character than those past games because you get character banter while driving around Mementos, but this place still sucks.

As for the Palaces, they all have distinct designs based around what its ruler perceives the world around them as. For example, Kamoshida’s palace is at the school, which takes the form of a castle because he sees himself as the “king” of the place. It does get a little on the nose after a while. For example, the courthouse’s form in the Metaverse is a casino because the law is rigged, do you get it? A lot of the later dungeons have some kinda puzzle mechanic, which ranges from “really easy” to “I hate this.” The dumb puzzles in the space station Palace help make that the worst dungeon in the game, especially combined with the lack of hiding places; It’s also where Morgana’s dumb arc happens, so it’s just a bad arc of the game all around.

Speaking of which, traversing the Palaces are a bit of a stealth mission. At certain points, you can zip Joker into hiding places and around corners to duck around patrolling enemies. If you’re actually seen by an enemy, an alert level goes up and if it hits 100%, you’re immediately booted out of the Palace. In concept, it’s neat, but in practice, it’s incredibly easy to avoid this happening; though, I heard that one of the changes in Royal addresses this and makes the stealth more meaningful. You can lower the alert level by ambushing an enemy, via hopping on them from out of the shadows when you’re not in sight range.

With that, the battle begins! So, standard combat in Shin Megami Tensei/Persona games focuses on hitting enemy weaknesses, while also making sure they don’t hit your weakness. As standard for modern Persona games, hitting an elemental weakness grants the user another turn. Persona 5 adds another layer to it with the Baton Pass mechanic. Upon hitting a weakness, you can switch to another character with some boosted stats. With this, you can strategically pass control around until you knock down the whole enemy team and finish them off with a stylish all-out attack. The action is snappy and the Baton Pass mechanic kind of gives this strong feeling of the Phantom Thieves acting as a coordinated team.

Another new mechanic introduced is the gun, a secondary weapon with limited uses. So, I remember hearing discourse on this saying that the guns are useless because the ammo management is so strict. My counter point to this is, most of the people that said that were trying to clear Palaces in one in-game day, which is a massive strain on resources in general. That said, the limited ammo does lessen the usefulness of the benefits from the Hanged Man and Tower confidants (the gun-related ones).

Another new mechanic is actually a carryover from the mainline Shin Megami Tensei/early Persona games: Negotiation. Upon downing all enemies, you could kill them all in an incredibly cool way. Conversely, you can talk things out to get items or get enemies to join up as new Personas to use.  Now, while I think it’s a welcome addition, it really does expose the fact that SMT demon negotiations are kind of just random number generation. That said, the Sun confidant makes things much easier.

Overall though, compared to Persona 3 and 4, Persona 5 has the best battle system out of all of those. There’s a lot more depth to it, and it certainly helps that you’re fighting demons instead of lame generic shadow enemies. Accompanied by nice battle music and stylish aesthetics, Persona 5‘s combat is just solid.

Speaking of which, the aesthetics. It’s hard to not talk about Persona 5 without talking about its sense of style. The game has a strong visual style with its UI that everything just feels snappy and cool. Even the mundane menu screen is cool, with a black-and-white Joker posing on the screen in accord with what part of the menu you’re checking out. It is especially strong with the battles, with the UI and battle animations lending the battle system a great sense of character. Ending a battle with an all-out attack with a character-specific victory screen as the enemies bleed out in the background never gets old.

As for the music, well, can I be honest? I’m kind of ambivalent. All the battle music is fantastic, except for the actual final boss theme? How do you follow up “River in the Desert,” the penultimate boss theme and the actual best song in the game, with something that’s just nothing? The battle themes mostly rule and “Beneath the Mask,” the theme for casually roaming around the game world, is a feel-good listen. I don’t care about any of the other music in the game. Look me in the eyes and tell me that you like a Palace theme besides the one in the casino, because I found the rest of the music in the game very forgettable. When it’s good, it’s really good, but when it’s not, it’s whatever.

Persona 5 easily has the best combat of the modern Persona games, and Royal likely improves on that. However, again, I’m not talking about Royal here. It may not be Royal, but vanilla Persona 5‘s gameplay is solid. It also exhibits a strong sense of style in every facet that really defines the game’s personality.

However, I really think that those aspects of the game help disguise the fact that the story isn’t entirely there. All the risks Persona 5 takes with its story is at the very beginning and toward the end. Everything in-between is either too safe, too obvious, or too on the nose to the degree of being a bad SNL skit. A lot of people consider this to be one of the finest modern RPGs, but I honestly don’t agree as someone that puts a lot of weight on the story when it comes to RPGs.

Does Persona 5 Royal improve on that? I don’t know, and I don’t care to know because I already spent 100+ hours on vanilla Persona 5. It’ll probably take 60+ hours minimum to reach the big new section in Royal.

Which actually brings me to my last criticism of Persona 5. Now look, I’m not surprised that Persona 5 is long, it’s a JRPG. However, my specific issue is that it goes on way longer than it feels like it deserves. Hey, you beat the villain that’s been hyped up for the last few dozen hours and had a climactic fight to “Rivers in the Desert.” Awesome, that moment rules. Then there’s a secret hidden villain? It just feels like tying up all the loose ends in a way that kinda cheapens the great climax that happened a few hours ago. In fairness, there is one actual good twist in the last few hours, but I just really wanted things to be over. In all honesty, as soon as I got my platinum trophy from the last confidant rank up, I just turned off the game without doing the actual last parts.

Vanilla Persona 5 is just kind of okay to me. With Royal out, you probably don’t need to get the original P5 anymore. However, let it be known that I don’t think the original game fully deserves the high praise it got.

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Persona 5

$19.99

7

Score

7.0/10

Pros

• Fantastic visual style
• Satisfying battle system
• Confidant system gives (mostly) engaging side stories with gameplay benefits
• The good songs are REALLY good

Cons

• Most of story doesn't match the quality of first arc
• Cast is played very safe
• Half of soundtrack honestly very forgettable
• Morgana