Where do I even start? There is SO MUCH game in this game. That being said, I can't say it was "too long", and it managed to stay fun and engaging for almost all 150 hours of my run (might need a fact check on that duration). I'm typically not a huge fan of games where you develop social rep with the NPCs, but exploring confidant relationships was quite enjoyable. Combat strategy was interesting when it came into play, the story was bumpin', and the characters were interesting and well-written. There were a few things I didn't particularly care for, but all in all a very positive experience for a game of it's length, especially from a genre I don't typically engage with.
I don't want to linger on this for too long when I have so much else to talk about, but I'd be remiss not to mention the UI. I think it's probably the most stylin' UI I've ever seen in any game ever, which is a great match for a menuing simulator. I think it goes beyond just looking nice, I think if the menus looked more generic it would genuinely make the whole game less enjoyable since we spend the majority of our playtime interacting with them.
While I did find deciding what to do with my free time rather stressful at times, I like that there was a variety of things to do and places to go. If I knew from the onset what I know now, I probably would've spent my time a lot differently early-on, but the only way to learn is by playing I guess. I don't really have a ton to say about the free time activities, but I did think the movies were fun, and I liked how as you played the game you could explore to unlock more things to do depending on what stats you wanted to increase. I do kind of wish that more of the free time activities had little minigames (such as the baseball minigame or the shmup simulator), I liked the few that were included because they broke up the standard gameplay loop a little. Then again, it's difficult to argue for the inclusion of anything that unnecessarily adds playtime. I do find it odd that the game frames employment as something that's going to be important, but you're basically just a millionaire for the entire game after the 1st palace. I can't even conceive of what I would've spent all that money on, and it made it so that working was never worth my time unless I needed a job for a certain mementos quest.
I know I missed out on a lot of the confidant stories I wasn't able to max out, but the ones I did get to experience I quite enjoyed. I do think I would've done more of them if I understood the time crunch I was in for some of them. I didn't really care for the "filler" interactions, like when you need to take someone to the park 5 times to bring about their next major life event, I understand not wanting people to speed through all the ranks, but I feel like I would've rather spent the every "take Ann to the cafe" session doing some other free time activity, maybe a good spot to implement theoretical extra minigames. The stories that I did get to see through were all pretty engaging, I completed rank 10s less so for the abilities and more-so because I cared about seeing the end of their arc.
I do like that leveling up a relationship often grants a new ability. It provided incentive to play through the 1st few levels of most characters so I could pick the most interesting ones to keep leveling. I also liked how leveling relationships with the members of The Phantom Thieves would grant them battle abilities and rankup their persona at max. Good incentive to continue to engage with team members even if you didn't particularly care for their story at first, the payoff was always worth it (though, thinking back, I'm pretty sure I neglected Haru for the entire game, oops).
I did not much care for Mementos. I liked how it was implemented into the story (both in the Vanilla story and Royal Exclusive content), I even liked the requests system, and the little boss battles therein. I just didn't care for the actual location. Like, I suppose it was nice that you basically get passive XP, money, and items while you're driving around looking for your target, but it's just kinda boring. To it's credit, I think that it's a pretty good way to give the player a chance to grind, the fact that I could gain experience simply by driving to the person I was there to fight was nice, and the fact that I didn't have to enter combat with every shadow really saved this part of the game for me (thank you, Ryuji). I guess the Jose thing was nice? I hated the character but appreciated the drop boosts. He also sold me a Soma at one point if I recall, which was nice of him. I think some of the little bits of dialogue they put in are actually pretty fun, unfortunately you run into shadows so frequently that I feel like I almost never got to listen to a full audio clip. All in all though, a grind is a grind, and driving through mementos was not even remotely engaging (not to mention all my least favorite tracks on the OST live there). Ah well, at least we don't need to visit it that often if we build up a few requests before each visit.
I know that during my playthrough I dreaded every visit to the guillotines, but I don't think this is because the mechanic of combining/improving personas was inherently flawed. There was just so much to it, and it was a little overwhelming for me my first time through. I think I'd appreciate it more on a 2nd playthrough. Fusion is no doubt a super powerful tool that gives the player a lot more agency over their team. I think it's a good mechanic and that a player other than myself would've quite liked it, I did notice that it kind of stopped mattering in the later parts of the game though. Once I had my Black Frost, I simply didn't see an opportunity to fuse a better persona for the rest of the game. I think I went through the game worrying that I'd regret any given choice I made in persona fusion, but I really don't think it was all that important. I probably would have been better off just making things and seeing what worked, especially considering I was always able to purchase a persona I had fused away if I needed it back. That being said, the Okumura boss fight literally requiring certain attack types to defeat did feed into my concerns. I felt like I had to constantly juggle my abilities because who knows when Joker will need to have a certain attack type in battle? I didn't really enjoy this mechanic, but I don't think it would be fair to hold that against the game, it's just a matter of personal opinion.
I think the combat in this game was interesting and engaging to an extent. There was just a little too much of it. I know it was like, part of the core gameplay loop, but as I have said: there is a LOT of game.
I found in the typical fashion, there would be a handful of unique shadows in each palace, and the ways they were grouped were what made combat interesting. You'd have to choose your attack order strategically to best counter a given group of enemies. Unfortunately, there simply weren't many unique groupings. I didn't want to be underleveld, so I would usually try to take every fight I encountered in a given palace as I first explored it, trying to only avoid combat while backtracking or dangerously low on SP, and I don't feel like I was way overleveled so I suppose that's what I was expected to do. The crux of the issue is that once you understand how to fight a certain grouping of shadows, that grouping no longer has anything to offer. Typically you spend the first 5 or so encounters in a palace learning about the strengths and weaknesses of every unique shadow in the normal encounters, and once you've finished this "information collection", you develop strategies for the different groups you encounter. The problem arises because once you have a game plan for a given grouping of shadows, fighting that group again becomes a chore. I don't know how many unique encounters there were in each palace, but it felt like 4 or 5 tops per area. When you're just trying to progress in the game and you have to pause every few seconds to make the same exact sequence of inputs and watch the same exact animations, it gets kind of grating. It's not engaging to already know how to fight an encounter and then see it 7 more times before the game shows you anything new. To that end, I didn't find the guesswork-until-I-know-everyone's-proficiencies part very engaging either, but at least it gave me something to think about. You really only get like, 2 or 3 interesting encounters with a given grouping of shadows, and you will encounter each grouping around a dozen times give or take. That repetition really felt like a drag, especially in later palaces when even the act of discovering a strategy was starting to get repetitive. That all being said, the unique or rare encounters within each palace were actually rather fun. Fighting a Will Seed door guard, miniboss, or even the "challenging" shadows in a given area was usually an interesting fight, and obviously the palace owners were all great boss fights as well.
The game's combat system shone the brightest when you had to learn and adapt on the fly with the tools you had at your disposal to defeat the final encounter of a palace. I think the only notable exception to great boss design for me was Okumura. Most of the other bosses put a unique spin on combat and require you to develop your strategy in real time. Okumura kind of just says "fuck you if you don't have this specific attack type available" and you may need to play the fight 3 or 4 times just to learn all the different types of attack you actually need in order to win. This is in contrast to other bosses where you typically have a fighting chance to win on your first try, and if you are to lose, you usually get some idea of how to evolve your strategy to secure a win on your 2nd attempt. Worth noting that I reached the Okumura fight before I was able to swap out my party members on any turn, which I don't know if I was meant to have yet or not but would've made the battle a lot more interesting by adding a new dimension to the strategy. All in all, the combat system was interesting, fun, and well thought out, but the low-level encounters lacked variety and got very dull the longer I played.
Palace exploration was only as interesting as there were unique rooms and things to look at. Otherwise it was just walking simulator interrupted by the combat system I just discussed. To their credit, I did like searching for the will seeds and finding hidden routes to treasure chests. I love a game that rewards an explorative player. Also, a lot of the palaces had some really neat visuals to look at. Otherwise though, I was just walking through hallways and having my teammates explain what a locked door is every few minutes; "Looks like we'll have to find another way around!" I do feel like they needed to record maybe a handful more voice lines for the characters to say during exploration and in combat. The game is VERY long and I'd already gotten sick of listening to Morgana say "It's almost scary how good I am!" by the end of the Kamoshida arc. Listening to the same voice clip 100 times is grating, especially when I feel like the combat in an area has boiled down to a grind.
I don't think I liked a single "puzzle" the game threw at me. My favorite puzzle element in a palace was probably the Futaba jigsaw panels, simply because they wasted a minimal amount of my time, but several of the other palaces had puzzle rooms that were just time vampires. They did nothing interesting or challenging and did not feel rewarding to solve. I guess the Madarame spot-the-difference game was alright? The Okumura space tunnels, the Shido rat mazes, and the Maruki light bridges were all awful. I think the light bridges could actually have been okay if not for the fact that you couldn't tell what colors were at what terminal on the map. I think planning out a solution could've been neat. Maybe. But if you didn't memorize what knobs were accessible at each terminal you just had to run around and keep checking them. It says something that the Crossword puzzles that would occasionally appear at Leblanc were more rewarding to complete than any palace puzzle room.
I think safe rooms were well placed and sometimes finding one would feel like spotting the oasis in the middle of a desert, which I think was the intent. I also think that the concept of impassable cognitive barriers was a cool idea. Most of the palaces were visually interesting, but some of them had some seriously repetitive corridors. There were also a few mazes around which I just didn't really see a point to.
I definitely understand why people complain that the story isn't that deep. A lot of the conflicts explored are pretty surface-level and easy to understand. That being said, I really enjoyed the story, I liked pretty much all the writing in the game. I feel like important story beats were delivered well, plot twists were well executed, character arcs were all good and made sense.
I did find it a bit jarring when a character's arc in the main story clashed with their arc in your confidant relationship depending on when you unlock each rank. This mostly didn't happen as certain confidant ranks were locked behind story progression, but there was certainly once or twice where I was engaged in some confidant dialogue, and they would say something that didn't really make sense in the context of the main story at that point, but ah well. I figure it would be almost impossible to sort it all out perfectly, and they did a pretty good job with sorting it as it is.
While every arc hit pretty much the same beats, they all felt different and had different contexts around them in the overarching plot, so I never felt like the writing was getting stale. I also found it hilarious that Akechi was basically Light Yagami incarnate.
I didn't really understand the beach episode, like, a game this long did not need filler, but I digress. This review is long enough without going into a full literary analysis, and I don't feel like I can say much else without doing so, so suffice to say I really enjoyed the story and it's one of the strongest components of the game.
Yeah, the music is pretty good.
Persona 5 Royal is a great game, one of the better ones I've played. I did have a few issues with it, but all in all nothing made me want to stop playing for the entire 120+ hour runtime. I do feel like I was losing steam a bit towards the very end, but even then I was still engaged and enjoying myself. The combat system was fun and interesting, despite getting repetitive at times. The story was engaging, and I enjoyed interacting with all the characters (at least the ones I opted to interact with.) and the plot beats and twists were well executed. The only reason I won't be playing the game again is it's just so gosh-darn long and I have other games I wish to play. It's pretty to look at, fun to play, and it may very well be my favorite story in any game. I'd say it opened me up to the genre, but I genuinely doubt anyone else could do it like they did it. I would recommend this game to anyone who likes JRPGs. or who likes a good story and wants to try something new. Unfortunately, they didn't let me put my gift from Hifumi on the shelf in my bedroom, despite me consistently trying to do so for the entire rest of my playtime after obtaining it, sometimes for no reason other than Morgana hates interior decorating. This transgression cannot be forgiven and I will have to dock a point.