Persona 5
Royal by developers and publishers Atlus
and SEGA—Sony
PlayStation 4 review written by Pierre-Yves
with a copy provided by the publisher.
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
Having stolen the hearts of thieves and the title of 2017 game of the
year, Persona 5 Royal is an enhanced and reimagined form of Persona
5. With loads of new content and re-worked quality of life features,
it gives both fans of the original and those who've been thinking
about it a good reason to jump in especially with everything
currently happening in our real world.
2017 has been a great year for gamers, and as we sit around the
one-third point, there are already some Game of the Year contenders
starting to shape up. Right now, Persona 5 is the leader in that
race, and for me it’s not even close. Memorable characters, an
engaging storyline, fantastic systems and fluid combat all come
together to create a fantastic experience.
Nick 2017 Persona
5 Review
When the original announcement stated that Royal would be a separate
instance from the original and that certain elements wouldn’t /
couldn't carry over, some people were a little less than impressed.
Being a bit like Persona 3 FES or Persona 4 The Golden, Persona 5
Royal adds in new dialog, adds in new features, and unlike Persona 3
PSP which added in a female protagonist to play as, P5 has added a
new character to the roster that gets embedded into the already
existing story. While this alone could amount to why there’s a new
version to start from scratch, with the tons of other changes
including new parts to dungeons and new features to Mementos, it’s
worth starting back up from the beginning.
On its original launch, Nick and I shared progress updates for about
maybe the first ten hours as I went through the introduction and the
first dungeon. Unfortunately after that point, I got busy with other
titles and have since just wanted to go back and restart from
scratch. Having amazingly been given this chance, there were several
features that were immediately noticeable while others felt so
integrated I had to look up the checklist of new features to see if
they had been there in the first place. Overall, a lot of smaller
ticket items will just blend in but some of the bigger ones really
come out to play starting between the 25-40 hour marks depending on
how much time you’ve spent doing what until the start or end of the
third major Palace Dungeon.
Not holding anything back, the newest member of the Phantom Thieves
shows up to lend a helping hand in the opening sequence which on its
own was already hosting a bit of the change in direction. Acting is a
bit of a tease, and not wanting to spoil any more of it, it isn’t
until much further down in hours that you actually get to start
spending time getting to know this person alongside the others that
you’ve befriended through school, part time jobs, buying “weapons”
or lab experiments with the doctor that sells you healing items.
While things are expensive and while you may want to get a job to
fund your piggy bank, if you’ve already played any part of Persona
5, you’re in for a bonus and getting 50,000 Yen to start off? Made
the opening Palace a little easier to get started.
For the most part, things are playing out the same. You get up from
Monday to Saturday, you go to school, you can do something after
school, and eventually once you get the keys to where you’re
staying, you can head back out into the evening. What you do in this
time is generally up to you. Hang out with friends. Hang out with
other people like the Doctor to increase your Persona ranks of that
specific type. Challenge yourself to eating a gifreakingnormous
burger. Go to the batting cages. Catch a movie. Work out. It’s a
simulation of time management and it’s time that should not be
wasted as you need to get smarter, faster, stronger if you’re going
to survive the real world as much as the shadow one. What about
Sundays you ask? Those are entirely up to you!
While managing your time, reading books, playing games and learning
how to make coffee in the real world, you’ll also be dungeon
crawling into the shadow’s realm. Now whether you’re exploring
someone truly awful’s Palace to give them a change of heart or
you’re diving into Mementos to explore the depths or perform
smaller changes of hearts, aka side quests, the premise is about the
same. You uncover the map in order to move forward, you defeat
shadows, you level up your characters and you acquire new Personas
which in this case, are masks to be worn. Now while sharing a lot of
similarities, there’s a distinct difference between exploring a
Palace or diving into Mementos.
Inside of a Palace you’ll be sneaking through trying to not raise
the alarms. If you’re spotted, if you’ve accidentally moved into
a security camera or tripped a sensor, the alarm rate will go up. The
only way to bring it back down is to defeat enemies by sneaking up on
them and not being noticed. In Mementos however, you’ll be driving
around in a large “van” that can crash into shadows and if
there’s enough of a level difference? Take them out entirely
without having needed to fight. Moving into one of the smaller newer
features, is that now when you’ve finished a battle? It’s one
press of a button to get back to the action instead of one for the
exp, one for the money, one for the items. Even levelling up is a
quick screen before getting you right back and into it.
Before you get experience though, you need to beat up some shadows
and this too has seen a bit of an upgrade. Taking a little longer to
get to as it only starts to show up in the third Palace are Showtime
attacks. These are over the top cinematics in which parts of your
team perform crazy stunts in order to damage the entire enemy
retinue. These cost nothing to do so there should never be a
hesitation to perform them. What’s the catch? Showtimes show up
when they show up so they should really not be one of those things
that you bank on for defeating tougher foes.
Compared to Showtimes though, while it may not seem like it’s a big
thing, guns now basically have “infinite” ammo as they’ll
refill as soon as the battle is over, not once you’ve left a
dungeon so you don’t even need to craft it anymore. Using firearms
should really be brought into the mix for your approach alongside
elemental attacks as they now basically cost you nothing in order to
help you get the upper hand in battle.
Persona 5 wasn’t a short title and having added even more content
in? Persona 5 Royal is going to take a lot more time than its
predecessor even if you have a pretty good idea of what you’re
doing which leads into one of the last two things that are going to
be worth your time. The first of these is that each Palace now has
new rooms that can be discovered that contain seeds of the palace
owner that when combined can give some pretty neat items. More than
that, when you pick up these seeds you’ll get some SP back which is
often one of the reasons to call a dungeon session to a halt because
no one wants to tackle foes on martial might alone.
The other feature that makes things interesting is that there’s now
someone that you can meet up a resident of the area named Jose.
Riding along on his own little car / kart, you can trade newly
acquirable flowers to Jose for items of varying degrees. While this
itself is neat, it’s the other feature through Jose that can make
Mementos really worth spending time inside. Now available on each
floor are stamps that can be collected in order to permanently
increase the rates of acquiring experience, money and items.
Finally, the last little neat feature is a location called the
Thieves Den which is accessible from your main menu and it lets you
deck it out with Personas, Bosses or locations that you’ve
explored. Paying for these though is not going to be “cheap” as
you need to complete challenges to gain the currency required. Bonus?
Most things aren’t that expensive, but you’ll really need to go
out of your way to complete the challenges if you want to add more
stuff for your den or unlock artwork that you could use as wallpapers
for your PSN themes / Profiles. If none of this is your thing? Then
there are some card games that can be played against your fellow
Persona users to wind down from a tough dungeon crawl.
And ALL OF THIS is wrapped into an amazing blend of story,
characters, music and visuals that sing so well together. I think it
goes without saying, Persona 5 Royal is a shining example of what
both an RPG and a revamp of an already stellar RPG should be. With
the plenty of amazing dialog, emotions, environments and the general
crazy that comes with a Shin Megami Tensei, the return of the Phantom
Thieves may yet again steal away that Game of the Year title as right
now? It’s currently mine!
Score: 10 / 10
