The stellar pace and production of Persona 5 did not require adjustments and additions to its one hundred hour run time. And yet here is Persona 5 Royal, presenting that package with integral new characters as it remodels the structure, combat, and whimsical ephemera that binds them all together. Persona 5 Royal is the most articulate and realized expression of Persona's ethos, provided one has the time (and patience) to see it through.
Persona 5 was not a game left wanting for content. Traversing seven Palaces throughout the Metaverse and forging bonds with sixteen Confidants across eight months consumed an enormous amount of time. These proper nouns only make sense if you have already been absorbed into Persona 5’s world and are prepared for its studious blend of visual novel story sequences and dungeon crawling deep dives. So too, presumably, is the appeal of making it through to the other side and still desiring more. Persona 5 Royal was created to fill this very specific need. It’s Persona 5 with the addition of new characters, remixed systems, and more of Persona 5’s breathless storytelling and obsessive monster mashing. Royal’s thesis is that there can never be too much Persona 5 and its objective is to prove it is still worth your time.
Royal is the latest baroque adjective fixed to a Persona game. Persona 3 FES remixed Persona 3 and added an epilogue while Persona 4 Golden embraced its moment and dramatically enhanced Persona 4’s beloved ambience. By now, one should expect an enhanced rendition of every numbered Persona title and, as the first to appear on a modern console, the black-and-red of Royal has the task of creating meaningful criteria for someone to spend $60 in order to play a significant amount of the same game a second time.
Royal is ultimately a success, but not without a series of qualifications. The entire time I played—one hundred and two hours across sixteen days as the United States crashed into a legitimate pandemic—I was trying to figure out whether or not what I was doing was worth my time. I want to make sure that it would be worth your time. For a broader reading of Persona 5’s strengths and weaknesses, please look to my original review of Persona 5 from 2017. The remainder of this text will (I hope!) focus on Royal’s extensions and whether or not they benefit Persona 5’s operation.
The most present and attractive additions to Royal arrive with its two new Confidants. It’s noticeable in the opening cinematic, where, halfway through Casino Palace escape, Joker encounters a brand new ally during the tutorial. Kasumi Yoshizawa, in full Phantom Thief attire, wields a rapier and saves Joker’s ass in a brand new sequence. And then she’s gone. When Royal finally settles into a groove and starts operating day-to-day, Kasumi is revealed as a first year student and gymnast at Shujin Academy. She hangs out for social encounters at Kichijoji, Royal’s premier new location. Kasumi’s integration into Persona 5’s action, however, isn’t without its strange incongruity.
While I hesitate to call Kasumi a bait-and-switch, she’s not as present in the narrative or Metaverse exploration as the other Phantom Thieves. She encounters Joker in the hallways at Shujin on a handful of dates. She shows up in Hawaii in September on the class field trip. Kasumi’s presence is occasionally a topic of conversation among the rest of the crew, but she isn’t an active party member until Royal’s exclusive content, the third term of school, starts up after the (former) conclusion of Persona 5 in late December. Her Bless-based skills are much appreciated, as is her style and physical strength, but as a front-facing emblem of Royal’s identity, Kasumi’s presence underwhelms.
Kasumi feels better positioned as an accessory to Royal’s other new Confidant, Shujin’s new school counselor Takuto Maruki. As an aid to Shujin’s students in the wake of the Kamoshida fallout, Maruki is a sensible addition to Persona 5’s framework. These kids absolutely need professional help after Kamoshida’s gross wrath, and Royal takes time to allow every one of the Phantom Thieves, even with non-Shujin students like Yusuke, to have a session with Maruki. Kasumi’s neurosis with self-doubt and living in the shadow of her sister are particularly relevant, and form the crux of the third term’s conflict.
Kasumi and Maruki’s integration into Persona 5 is the best that could have been expected without completely upending Persona 5. While their existence is ultimately tied to Royal’s brand new content, they have enough of a presence in the main game—they pop up here and there in Joker’s story sequences and both have full Confidant evolutions—to not feel like accessories. They’re deeper and better incorporated than Marie’s presence in Golden and better positioned to impact the story than Persona 3 Portable’s female protagonist. Persona 5 feels better with their inclusion and, like so much of Royal, I wonder if a new audience would even notice that neither Kasumi nor Maruki were there the first time.
A more radical change has been applied to Royal’s flow of time. In Persona 5, agency was frequently taken away from the player under the justification of being too tired to go out at night. It was all part of a balancing act to guarantee tension between Joker’s stat building and his relationship with Confidants (if nothing else, modern Persona games thrive on making the player balance time between narrative and combat). It feels like Royal makes the most concessions to boosting Joker’s five stats, opening up the cooped-up evenings in Leblanc to reading, training, studying, and making SP-restoring coffee as a means to contribute to Knowledge, Guts, Charm, Proficiency, and Kindness.
There are also a bunch of new places to go and activities around Persona 5’s slice of Tokyo. Playing Darts at Kichijoji’s Penguin Sniper bar boosts up to three levels of the Baton Pass battle mechanic for each character, creating bonuses for damage and SP restoration. Billiards is also available, albeit only boosting Confidant points in canned sequences. Joker can also visit Kichijoji’s Jazz Jin, a music club, with a member of his crew bestow their respective personas with permanent stat boosts. Kichijoji also houses a temple where Joker can meditate and raise his SP, a store to sell sooty armor, incense to purchase and use in the Velvet Room, and a special shop that sells elemental Amp accessories. Kichijoji’s annoying to visit in the rain, when Joker has to keep deploying his umbrella when he runs out of roof, but it’s a positive addition to the flow of Persona 5. There are a million shades to Tokyo and it’s nice to have Kichijoji alongside settings like Shibuya and Akihabara.
Royal is also rife with opportunities to add more points, those blue musical notes that spill out of smiling faces, to Confidants. Nineteen of the original twenty one Confidants remain identical, but each rank-up event is almost always followed-up with a phone call when Joker checks back into Leblanc for the night. Every phone call is an accessory; Confidants either thank Joker or double-down on their current anxiety, but successful answers add two or three points and can minimize the otherwise ancillary hangouts between rank ups. Like a lot of Royal, everything I just said is incomprehensible to a person not deeply invested in Persona 5’s infrastructure, but it’s a godsend for the player’s time management.
The two exceptions to this are Akechi’s Justice arcana and Caroline & Justine’s Strength arcana. With Caroline and Justine, it’s simply a matter of a different set of Velvet Room fusion tasks. Akechi, on the other hand, is no longer an automated rank-up and requires Joker to hang out with him in Kichijoji as if he were any other Confidant. The same general arc is there, Akechi remains an incredibly annoying and extremely creepy “detective,” but his relationship with Joker is projected as more personal and antagonistic. Akechi’s uncomfortable instability is now his defining trait, allowing him to give into the archetype of Unstable Guy who you’re always sure is about to laugh sadistically and lick some kind of sharp blade. In any case, Royal benefits Akechi more than any of Persona 5’s characters.
Persona 5’s seven Palaces have also been reworked. Some layouts have been modified to facilitate Joker’s new grappling hook, a tool ostensibly created to lend Persona 5 Scramble additional credibility. The rafters in Madarame’s treasure room, the exterior of Shido’s cruise ship, and some of the tombs in Futaba’s pyramid now have defined grapple points for additional exploration. Each Palace also has three hidden Will Seeds that almost always require the grappling hook to access. I had no trouble finding any of these, Persona 5 is rarely oblique, and collecting all three eventually grants an accessory that auto-buffs the party. In rare cases, like the airlock sections in Okumura’s Space Port, some entirely new maps are in service to finding Will Seeds.
A greater and more significant change comes with each Palace boss. At least one phase of each encounter has been reworked, and not often for the better. Madarame closes out with clones that demand different elemental attention, requiring the player to actually employ the Baton Pass. Okumura’s robots are in greater number and punish the player for not finding a way to kill them all within two turns. Sae’s roulette wheel has expanded to shift her affinities. Persona 5 already had trouble with respecting the player’s time and many of these modifications only draw out boss fights that were already too long. Royal certainly felt compelled to change as much as it could. I’m impressed so many core aspects got so much attention. Boss fights don’t seem to benefit from this objective.
Mementos has also seen a significant remodel. In addition to some new music, a new character, Jose, patrols random floors. Jose collects (and apparently eats) flowers that are scattered as collectibles all over Mementos. The player can also find stamp stations, and Jose can trade stamps for boosts to experience points, money, and item drops. Some new Requests, via Mishima, are present as well. Mementos still feels like an anachronism tied to Persona 3 and 4’s procedural dungeons, but it’s still a valuable way to level up outside of the Palaces, especially when you can hold R2 in Mona’s van and automate the whole experience grind.
Jose also makes an appearance in the Thieves Den, where he kind of…hangs out? The Thieves Den is more or less a collection of Persona 5’s media, where the player can go and re-watch cut-scenes, listen to music, and view in-game assets. It’s also a greater hub for Royal’s in-game achievements, which pay out with a currency system to buy more stuff in the Thieves Den. There is also a card game, Tycoon, that I absolutely could not be bothered to learn as I digested this game again. Like a lot of Royal, I am glad something like the Thieves Den exists even if I will never visit it more than once.
There are so many aspects of Royal that different players will appreciate. Disaster Shadows pop up in enemy encounters and, if removed swiftly, explode and damage other Shadows. There are a dozen new personas to collect and fuse. Showtime Attacks, where two Phantom Thieves team up for outrageous, theatrical performances of violence, punctuate the end of tough battles. All the ladies give Joker chocolates on Valentine’s Day. The uncomfortable maid cafe has a frequent customer stamp card. The Velvet Room has an alarm mode that randomly mutates two abilities upon fusion. I don’t have much specific commentary on any of this, other than to note Royal seems absolutely obsessed with trying to better a game that was already extremely good. Atlus really wants players to know close attention had been paid to anything in Persona 5 that could have been perceived as a weakness.
And then there is Royal’s third term, content so weirdly protected that PlayStation 4 sharing is disabled and my review email states that I must warn readers I am about to talk about the third term. I don’t plan on spoiling any plot elements, but I am going to discuss its flow and structure. It’s the piece of Royal that I was most excited to play because it was all new. I had high expectations. And it’s…fine. The new content, as far as a solution to extend a game well beyond a point that seemed finite, passes as an acceptable reason to draw the gang back out in the gap that used to exist between Christmas and Valentine’s Day. It doesn’t continue the characters and dive into the lore like the pair of Persona 4 Arena games, but it’s not as disposable as Persona Q, either.
Players shouldn’t expect a term as long or as engaging as the others in Persona 5. Royal comes up with fairly inventive way to extend Persona 5’s story after December 24th, but solves the most interesting parts of its conflict within the second day. The remainder, January and some of February, is consumed by sorting out the brand new Palace and identifying Kasumi’s role in Royal’s new source of avarice. I had already maxed out my stats and all but one Confidant at this point, so I spent the majority of this time taking my friends to Jazz Jin and boosting their stats. For a majority of the third term, after a replay of Persona 5 where I tried to be as efficient as possible, I felt like I was just killing time.
The new Palace is genuinely inspired and a joy to traverse. It’s supported with the subdued Gentle Madman, one of the new musical tracks composed for Royal. The owner of the Palace (who I’m not spoiling!) differs from their predecessors by way of their ultimate goal. It’s not a clear line between good and evil, and after Royal meanders a bit in cognitive science jargon, it comes out the other side with engaging questions about free will and the desire for happiness. I still beat the shit out of them because this is a videogame and I wanted to win it, but their motivation isn’t a throwaway gimmick or recycled trope.
At the end I am left to consider if it was worth it to allow Royal to consume literally all of my free time for almost three weeks. It was especially unusual to do this as COVID-19 disrupted American infrastructure and culture while, between my job and spending time with my wife, I tried to determine if playing an enormous remixed videogame was a worthwhile pursuit. When quarantined (which I was not), many people may find comfort in returning a beloved game to relieve anxiety or solve an existential crisis. If nothing else, Persona 5 is profuse with positivity and triumph and may, at least for a while, convince its audience that everything will eventually be OK. I think there is value there.
But I don’t know. I love Persona 5. I wish more time had passed so I could have forgotten more of Persona 5. Royal won’t change the way anyone thinks about Persona 5 and it will not convert anyone to play a game they would have never played in the first place. Persona 5 is myriad content that seems to last forever and Royal is simply more of it. You already know what this feels like. It calls to mind when My Bloody Valentine released m b v and it felt like a parallel take on Loveless was rescued and transmuted from an alternate dimension. There is now another version of this weird thing that I love. In what universe would I file this as a complaint if I weren’t under the gun to experience all of it before a deadline?
The stellar pace and production of Persona 5 did not require adjustments and additions to its one hundred hour run time. And yet here is Persona 5 Royal, presenting that package with integral new characters as it remodels the structure, combat, and whimsical ephemera that binds them all together. Persona 5 Royal is the most articulate and realized expression of Persona’s ethos, provided one has the time (and patience) to see it through.
