I’m not going to be the first person(a) to sing the praises of Persona 5, and I’m surely not going to be the last. There’s a reason this game caught on fire when it first released in the West in 2017, and it’s 2020 update Persona 5 Royal polishes off the remaining rough edges and brings out a finely tuned adventure that you can’t help but give yourself over to. And give myself over to it I certainly did. For about 4-ish months to be exact. P5R as I’m going to call it for the rest of this, is possibly the longest game I’ve ever played. I bought it on sale and started playing on New Year’s Eve of 2020 and didn’t finish the final piece of it until mid-April, barely playing anything else in between. It got its hooks into me that good.
I’ve never seen a game before with such a cohesive art direction to where even the menus are stylized in such a way that they jump off the screen at you. Every single piece of P5R is just dripping with style. Everything from the character design to the alterative reality of the metaverse, to just the sheer amount of writing and story that this game contains is simply insane.
Persona 5 takes place basically over the course of an entire year. You’re a 16-year-old kid from rural Japan that gets arrested and basically kicked out of town after you break up a sexual assault you witnessed. The problem being though, the piece of shit that was assaulting the woman turns out to be a very influential politician, so you are the one who gets arrested after all of that. You’re sent to Tokyo under the guardianship of a café owner, and you are to be supervised at the high school you’re now forced to attend. Constantly hanging over you is the threat of being arrested again, because it you slip up just once, it’s going to be all over for you. Right from the very beginning of this game, the themes of injustice and wicked adults abusing their power is crystal clear.
At your high school though, things start to get… well unusual. A mysterious app shows up on your phone that you accidentally realize allows you to pass into an alternate reality version of Tokyo, the metaverse. You eventually learn about the mysterious nature of the metaverse, how it’s spawned, you make friends that are equally disadvantaged by powerful people around you, and you eventually build a team that allows you to hop in and out of the metaverse at will. You get very, very good at fighting. At the heart of the metaverse are structures called palaces, strongholds that spring forth from the corrupted subconscious of wicked individuals. Your goal is to change the heart of each palace ruler by infiltrating the palace, defeating shadowy monsters and demons that occupy the world, and eventually defeat the alternate-reality version of the palace ruler, so that the real-world version of that person confesses to their crimes. All of that is set up within the first few hours of the game and the story only gets stranger and more complicated after that.
Combat wise this is a JRPG through and through, but it is by far the best implementation of turn based combat that I’ve experienced. Fights are quick, snappy and it’s using an elemental system that is easy to get your head around, but much more difficult to master. You’re going to fight thousands of times as you just in and out of the metaverse, and for me it’s a system of combat that never got old. Every enemy can be captured through a negotiation process, and you can recruit them to join your team as a persona. You as the protagonist are the only member of the team that can hold multiple personas, and this is a skill that’s going to come in very handy.
In typical JRPG fashion, the story begins small and by its climax, you’re fighting an actual god-like figure. The way the action and story ramp up towards the end of the game will leave you wanting to blast through to the end as quickly as possible. It was an incredible experience, and I was hooked. Playing P5R had the same effect on me as watching about 8 seasons of TV series and witnessing its climax. Just unbelievable stuff. After the big climactic fight in the original game, the story continues but from a gameplay perspective it truly is the end. Not so in Royal. An entire new semester has been added, easily tacking on an extra 20-30 hours on top of what is already a beast of a game. I must say that Royal’s conclusion felt more like a true ending, and after spending 140 hours with these characters it was a bit of an emotional one for me. After seeing the credits roll, I couldn’t help but feel a bit empty realizing that this long journey was now over. It’s a testament to how well actualized P5R’s characters are that you feel you understand each of their quirks and personalities so well. Since RDR2 I hadn’t seen video game characters this well actualized on screen.
Persona 5 is a hell of an experience and Royal only further adds to that. It’s a world you’re going to want to sink so much time in, and there is no wonder why this series is so immensely popular now outside of Japan. If you’re a fan of JRPGs and you’ve never jumped in on Persona, you’re missing out my friend. I would hold this up and not just my favorite game of this past year, but also perhaps my favorite game of all time.
