Welcome to what I now call my Persona 5 Royal Concluding Impressions – part two of my two-part “review”. Not only was there too much in the game to talk about in a single article (part one can be found here), but I wanted to separate discussion of the new semester from my thoughts about how Royal tweaks the existing content from the first game. What this essentially means is that you should stop reading now if you don’t want to know what to expect after you’ve beaten the returning “final boss” that came back from the original Persona 5.
When a game concludes its story as successfully as Persona 5, it makes you wonder how you could create a narrative reason for more dungeon-crawling and social activities after everything has been so neatly wrapped up – indeed, when collecting my Persona 5 Royal concluding impressions, I wasn’t sure where the new semester would take me. The answer, of course, is that an alternate reality would be presented to us. As soon as you begin the new semester you’re aware that something’s not right – party members talk about plans to see folk who we know are no longer living, or spend time with colleagues who treated them like dirt. Morgana’s real-world appearance has changed more dramatically than when he used to morph into a car in Mementos. And nearly everyone is blissfully unaware except for the protagonist and another key character from the original game’s story.
Persona 5 Royal concluding impressions – the premise
The premise of Royal’s new semester is that someone has been toying with cognition to such extents that they can alter reality to suit people’s desires, which is why everyone is suddenly talking nonsense. This provides the core narrative drive of the new semester: if cognition could be changed so that people have no recollection of painful events in their past, could you let them enjoy their happiness if you knew they were living in a lie? It also brings a new deadline – at a certain point on the in-game calendar, you will have to face the mastermind behind this change in reality, and either agree to live in an illusion or – as I chose – reject what they’ve done and demand that things revert to normal.
This sets up two dungeon-crawling objectives for the Phantom Thieves; find the palace of the mastermind behind these cognition changes and confront them… but also deal with the altered reality that the public is experiencing by returning to Mementos and exploring new areas. Some people may be disappointed at the fact that there’s “only” one additional palace, but it has a few interesting ideas, such as opening paths in the new palace by investigating certain areas of Mementos, or answering introspective dialogue-based questions aimed at “the player” but with correct answers skewed towards the beliefs of the palace owner. Of course, if a palace is built from the thoughts and feelings of an individual then the protagonist needs to reject their own instincts and think like the palace ruler. (As a gameplay feature it can feel a bit like trial and error, but the questions and answers appear to be the same every time so there’s no harm in using save files to your advantage.) More conventional “puzzles” come from a locked door situation and subsequent key hunt, and there’s one particular gameplay sequence that recalls the horrors of the spaceport airlocks; tasked with pulling switches that make certain paths open and others close, it can be a bit tedious but it’s over soon enough.
Boss gauntlets and collecting
Should you find the treasure of the palace ahead of schedule, you have plenty of time to revisit Mementos, and in-between drafting my Persona 5 Royal concluding impressions I found all of the remaining stamp pickups (because Futaba’s floor scan ability may be randomly triggered, but it triggers frequently enough to be brute-forced. Ahem.) For a while players are killing time before the deadline, but when that day rolls around it delivers a mammoth boss gauntlet. The first obstacle is similar to the final boss of the base game: it has a number of targetable areas on its body, but each area that isn’t downed grants the boss another action in its turn. Furthermore, certain targets can be brought back to life, and the elemental affinities between targets can vary, so it can feel like a boss designed to waste your time. However, the core of the boss cannot regenerate, so its up to party members to take out the targetable areas whilst chipping away at the core.
Once I had a feel for damage output, my main hurdles came from the moments where I’d run out of resources, and it’s here where Jose and Hifumi can be invaluable. If a player remembers to buy rare items such as Somas from Jose, and can learn to switch party members mid-battle with Hifumi, they can replenish their resources and tag in allies who can deal with the new affinities. It’s challenging in the same way that vanilla P5’s final boss was challenging the first time around, and it almost makes the remaining obstacles in the boss gauntlet feel disappointing. There is a “non-encounter” at the very end of the boss gauntlet, but there’s also a second boss between that and the initial encounter… and I defeated said second boss in one attempt. So it’s hardly the escalation that P5’s original finale was. (That being said, the climax of the new content has some excellent music, particularly when “I Believe” plays on the day of the final calling card, and when “Throw Away Your Mask” sets the tone for the last challenge.)
Persona 5 Royal concluding impressions – mixed success
Judged on its own, the new semester is a satisfying chunk of gameplay that bolts plenty of content onto a game that already had a pretty long runtime. Meanwhile, the more tactical moments in the final boss gauntlet are genuinely engaging if you enjoy the modern Persona battle system. However, some of the palace gimmicks aren’t pulled off that well, and so it sometimes feels like another jumble of ideas. I’d still recommend Royal if you enjoyed the base game enough to want more P5, but it doesn’t elevate an already confused game into new heights of confidence. And that’s pretty much the end of my Persona 5 Royal concluding impressions; it’s a good update to an engaging RPG but it still runs into some of the old mistakes, and the new content doesn’t always learn from those mistakes. Let me know how you feel about the game’s new semester in the comments below.
Persona 5 Royal is out now on PS4.
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