The meme is dead. 6 years after I pre-ordered it and 3 years after I actually started it, I have finally beaten Persona 5 Royal. It was a long, emotional, and incredibly fractured journey, but here I sit, after clocking in a whopping 93 hours and some change. This is easily the longest game I have ever played and it could’ve been longer if I was the type to fill out long games like this.

This game was awesome from start to finish, more or less. This is an updated rerelease of Persona 5 with a lot more content and some QoL. The first 70-ish hours were just me replaying the OG Persona 5 with some cool stuff added, like new confidants, changed boss fights, and some dlc personas. The last 23 were the extra semester added to the game in this release. It’s easily the strongest portion of the game, with a cool final boss, great character work, and strong story beats. The highlight of an already amazing game.

Gameplay

Persona 5 was my first proper crack at turn-based gameplay. Obviously, I’ve played Pokemon before, but that was back when I was a kid with a gameboy plus, my brother’s friend was kind enough to clear through anything that actually gave me trouble. Thank ya, Jacob!. FFXIII-2 had it’s Active Battle whatever it was called to add wrinkles to it, so I consider P5 to be my first proper traditional turn-based experience. It’s kind of similar to Fire Emblem Three Houses in that it gives you a lot of ways to just bust the combat open. Persona’s signature thing seems to be “One More"s, these extra actions/turns you get once you hit an enemy’s weakness or otherwise knock them down. Persona 5 builds on this with Baton Passes, passing the new turn to another party member while buffing said receiving party member. You can’t keep getting One Mores or doing Baton Passes forever in one proper turn, but they’re essentially always on the table and can allow for pretty insane damage numbers and setups. Hell, Baton passing is quite literally the answer to the hardest story fight in the regular portion of the game and the final boss of the added semester.

The social sim stuff is very nice. I didn’t min-max it at all, so I didn’t end up maxing or even doing all the available social links, but there were enough that I was plenty satisfied with what I chose to do. Social Links, in addition to letting you learn more about and get closer to the associated character, give game-play perks. Whatever Arcana they represent receives an exp boost every time their link grows stronger, they offer unique game-play buffs to your player character, and maxing them out unlocks the ability to create the strongest persona available for that Arcana.

My Favorite Personas

The standouts for my run with the game would be Shiki-Ouji, Arahabaki(The Shido killer himself!), Black Frost(My GOAT!), Sraosha, and Yoshitsune.

I used some DLC Personas like Thanatos, Izanagi, and Tsukuyomi, but the guys who ended up bringing us home were the ones I listed. There were others, of course, but those were the ones I liked the most and did some of the biggest lifting in my playthrough.

Characters

This cast is great. They’ve got a ways to go if they wanna contend with my favorite casts ever, but it’s just undeniable that Persona 5’s cast is great, and they got even better with Royal. Some are noticeably weaker than others, but overall, characters are fine at worst and amazing at best.

My least favorite was Morgana, for reasons very obvious to anyone who has played the game. He has nice moments and eventually chills out, but he is directly responsible for the one period in the game that borders on un-enjoyable. I like Futaba, I really do, but I also feel like they speedrun dealing with her problems and she just ends up being quirky gamer hacker chick. Leaves a weird tatse in my mouth. My favorite ended up being Akechi in this version. In the original release, I think Ryuji ended up being my favorite. He’s just the homie.

Akechi

No character in this game receives a bigger glow-up than the Detective Prince himself. In the original game, Akechi was prominent, but not personal. He was a nice idea with pretty underwhelming execution. We didn’t interact with him enough for his rivalry with Joker to feel real, and we didn’t know enough about him for that tragic angle they clearly wanted to go for to properly hit. This has all changed now that he has a confidant. It’s optional; you don’t have to see these new scenes with him, but they fix the aforementioned problems. Akechi and Joker have a proper rivalry, and we learn about his past before our showdown with him.

He’s also the 2nd strongest character in the new semester, becoming Joker’s 2nd-in-command and just generally standing on business. Akechi went from an awkward stub in the original game to one of the highlights of Royal.

Kasumi

Kasumi is a nice girl, and her story arc is very good. I ended up satisfied with her character and story once I had beaten 3rd semester.

The problem is how she is handled up to that point. In contrast to Maruki, the other character added to the game, Kasumi is very blatantly stapled onto the main story. her scenes in the main game are very nice, but they always feel off. More damning is that anything with her just unceremoniously disappears after a point. Akechi leaves for very obvious reasons, and Maruki formally exits stage left once his tenure working at the school is up, but Kasumi,,,just doesn’t show up again.

Wonderful character, but everything about her before the new content leaves much to be desired.

Maruki

The highlight of the new semester is Maruki, whose social link you have to max out in order for it to happen(if he’s not maxed before mid november, you will basically beat the game as if it was just regular P5). Maruki shows up as a researcher who ends up being assigned as the school counselor, and his social link has him cooperating with Joker to complete his research paper.

Maruki in the main game is just a nice little addition. While his being at the school is, in-universe, a half-assed attempt at the school to look like it’s doing something for its students(he is, again, a researcher who deals with Psychology, not a practicing Psychologist or therapist), he does try to genuinely help the people that walk in his office while he’s there. Eventually, his contract is up, and he formally leaves after giving a nice little speech.

The 3rd semester brings him back in a big way and he just turns into the highlight of the whole game.

Hifumi

Best girl. Argue with a fucking wall.

The Journey Ends

When I finally beat the final boss, I got to do what I did when I beat Persona 5 all those years ago - walk around town one last time and say bye to all the characters whose social links I maxed out. I thought I would hold it together, I really did. And then I got the option to hand Sojiro Joker’s diary and the tears started falling. I’m walking around town, crying grown man tears while I say goodbye to all these characters I’ve spent 93 whole hours with. Persona 5’s ending is great, man. 7 years later, it still just punches me in the gut. They even update the ending for Royal just to tug on the heartstrings even more.

I am so so so so glad I finally finished this game. It was amazing. Stole my heart for sure.