Welcome to what I call my Persona 5 Royal Initial Impressions – part one of a two-part “review”. I’ve been playing the game a lot since getting hold of it, and I have too much on my mind to simply sum up in one article, so this time around I’m going to try something a little different. At the time of writing I’ve encountered and overcome what was the final boss in the original game, and so before I get into the new semester that I’ve heard so much about, I thought I’d collect my thoughts on the more familiar events that Royal revisits. This should at least provide some insight into the new changes without spoiling the new semester, but if you don’t want to know about those changes then you may want to stop reading until you’ve reached the point at which the original game ended. And with that, my spoiler warning ends.
Persona 5 Royal initial impressions – a primer
Persona 5 Royal is an update in the same vein as Persona 3 FES and Persona 4 Golden; the main story remains the same, but a lot of new events, characters and gameplay features have been added. Even before I get to the new semester, this game has a wealth of ideas that easily rivals FES and Golden in terms of additional gameplay enhancements. Take Mementos, for instance – once a lonely drive through barren tunnels and a few random encounters, it’s now been enhanced with flowers (collectibles picked up around each floor) and stamps (hidden interactibles with a fixed total – again encouraging thorough collection.) Both of these can be exchanged at a trading point that appears on random floors and offers special items, and they make Mementos a more engaging experience – instead of racing for the exit each time, you’re encouraged to find every collectible. Maybe you’ll flee a difficult area and miss some pickups when you’re underlevelled, and then try to mop things up later on (as the game shows the tally for each area.) It’s a simple pleasure but one that’s quite compelling.
Similarly, I can’t talk about my Persona 5 Royal initial impressions without talking about Disaster Shadows – these have a unique appearance in every battle, and destroying one sets off an explosion that damages surrounding enemies. It’s a similar thrill to the systematic process of knocking down enemies for an All-Out Attack, but the explosion damages party members as well, so there’s some risk involved. Meanwhile, the Showtime mechanic offers team-up attacks between party members introduced with amusing animated scenes and resulting in high-damage attacks. Persona 5 Royal really wants to make each battle encounter more of a spectacle, and it offers more ways to turn things around than most of the previous games ever did. However, battles are still far from a pushover, and you’ll need every one of the new gameplay features in order to make progress through the game.
Bosses and gimmicks
Most of the key storyline bosses have received an upgrade too, and they often gain an additional phase on top of everything they did in the previous game. Some of these seem a little gimmicky – the art museum boss sends out clones with varying affinities, the boss in the spaceport has a new robotic clone ally that they use against you – whilst others catch the player by surprise and offer an engaging experience for those familiar with the Persona battle system (in particular, the new phase added to the boss in the cruise ship gave me plenty to think about.) And of course, on the Phantom Thieves side we have Kasumi – she’s introduced as a Phantom Thief at the very beginning of the game, but because the events are told in media res, she leaves your party for several of the months that follow – often only appearing in story scenes or confidant events afterwards. I had no problem with the bosses or party makeup in the original Persona 5, so all of these additions are generally fine – the only complaint I can see anyone levelling against it is that the bosses already had enough phases to begin with, and perhaps the battles get stretched out a little too much for some people.
In the original game, my personal elephant in the room came from a few rooms in palaces that introduced gameplay gimmicks that got old quickly. Personas 3 and 4 used their gimmick rooms sparingly – some random teleporting here, some fake doors there – whilst 5 went all out with mice, airlocks, paintings and more. The main reason I criticised these originally was because each one temporarily introduced a different way of playing, and there’s no way that all of those new ideas would hit the mark. Indeed, I found that the airlocks in the original involved too much backtracking and the mice could get lost for a while just because you didn’t catch a small crawlspace with Third Eye. And so one of the most disappointing things I took away from my Persona 5 Royal initial impressions was that these rooms returned and they were largely unchanged. If you didn’t like them before, you won’t like them now. (In the game’s defence, I didn’t find them quite as frustrating this time around because I knew what was coming, but they still feel like they overstay their welcome.)
Persona 5 Royal initial impressions – in summary
Other thoughts? The Thieves Den is a nice little addition, and it serves a similar purpose to the TV Listings area of Persona 4 Golden – by collecting currency in-game you can unlock cosmetic items and customise a room with them. It’s a bit of a throwaway distraction but it can provide some welcome relief after you’ve been dungeon crawling for hours. Also, the Velvet Room has “Fusion Alarm” (or Fusion Alert) events where fusions made during an alarm can produce demons with new stats or skills. However, these events last until you leave the Velvet Room, and come back when the game randomly triggers them, so it encourages you to stop and think about how you could use this opportunity.
My immediate impression of Persona 5’s Royal makeover is that they’ve built a lot of interesting features around a core experience that always suffered – and still suffers – from some fundamental pacing issues. For that reason, it still won’t match the standard set by Persona 4 Golden – a game with lightning-fast exploration but still packed with challenging encounters that force players to stop and think, as well as a bunch of things to do on each calendar day. That said, it’s no bad thing if Royal isn’t the best in the series, and based on what I’ve played so far it’s still worth your time if you liked the vanilla experience and could push past the pacing issues. Thanks for reading, and if you want my thoughts on the new semester, you can read them over here.
Persona 5 Royal is out now on PS4.
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