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.

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.