Persona 5 Royal
The Premise
You play as Joker, a high schooler who after a tussle with a man heckling a woman—gets sent off to Tokyo to stay with a family friend, Sakura Sojiro… with a new and shiny criminal record to boot.
On the first day of school you meet your soon to be best bro Sakamoto Ryuji, and somehow accidentally—you end up in the game’s first dungeon.
And so the story begins… not quite yet. The start of the game is painfully slow, though that is a problem with all the Persona games (excluding 1 and 2, those are way more bearable.)
It takes a couple of hours of tutorials and confused characters to actually finally start the first dungeon of the game—which you now know of as a “palace…”
Palaces
Kamoshida’s Palace and story is the main hook of the game. It’s the beginning dungeon obviously, but I do believe it’s also one of the best and of course it’s what sets the story in motion and helps form the Phantom Thieves.
Compared to the rest of the palaces it is a lot more basic with not a lot of special mechanics, but it doesn’t need them. The story establishes Kamoshida as a villain from basically the start and it feels so good to finally take his ass down.
It’s always best to beat a palace immediately—go in on day one and make it to the treasure in one day, then the next you send the calling card and get it over with in 2 days. The reason being is that you will get the most free time in this way to do over-world activities.
I believe in the original this was a lot more difficult, however Royal made it a piece of cake to do this and it really isn’t that much of a challenge. Which kind of sucks but I will talk about that later in this post.
Each palace has its own special mechanics and all of them have absolutely amazing environments and art of course. They all offer unique challenges through puzzles and other sorts of mechanics, though most of the puzzles are not difficult. The puzzles do get more complicated as you progress through the game—with the last palace in the game, all the way in the second semester having the hardest puzzles in my opinion… though they’re still not too difficult which sucks. That being said the palaces are obviously super fun to navigate and offer enough challenge to keep you entertained.
The Overworld
In between dungeon exploration and story cutscenes—you get to free roam the Tokyo overworld, with more and more places available to you as you progress through the story. This is where you will be spending a lot of your playtime, doing confidants—leveling up your social stats and preparing for the various dungeons of the game.
The environments are obviously amazing, I mean especially in this art style the environments just feel awesome to be in and explore. The place you’ll be visiting most often is one of the streets of Shibuya and the underground mall—it’s the first place you’re introduced to outside of the school and Leblanc.
The Confidants
There are a total of 23 confidants in the game—and they are 100% possible to max out on your first play-through, and it’s super easy too, compared to the original Persona 5, you get way more time to do stuff in Royal. You don’t even need to follow a guide to the T or anything you can just wing it and you’ll probably be fine as long as you follow a few principles and know about some important mechanics. I’ll write another article detailing those and link it in the Related Articles at the bottom!
I did them all before even finishing the first semester so I even had a lot of time left over
The Difficulty
The biggest issue the game has in my opinion is that it is easy. The only boss that gave me trouble the first time I played the game was Okumura and even then it was not that big of a deal—I just was not prepared for the fight at all was the issue.
Especially if you know what you’re doing the game becomes a pushover—though that’s not that big of a deal. Even with the game not being super difficult you can make it more challenging for yourself if you add a few restrictions.
If it’s your first playthrough and care about difficulty—I recommend playing on hard and not merciless, the reason for that is that merciless also doubles all damage on weaknesses, technicals and all that stuff… including the damage you and your party members take from these. However this is a blessing that makes fights a lot easier if you know what you’re doing. Hard doesn’t have this so it’s probably the hardest difficulty.
All in all the difficulty isn’t really an issue as the game isn’t meant to be the most difficult. I heard that the original is harder. Part of what makes it harder is that you get kicked out of the palace when you reach 100% on the security gauge so you have to be careful of that and it can ruin your 1 day run. Royal doesn’t have this so reaching 100% security gauge will do nothing more than increase the amount of enemies you fight.
The Soundtrack
Persona 5 Royal has one of my favorite soundtracks in any game and I still listen to songs from it regularly. It’s an amazing soundtrack that fits the vibe of the game perfectly and adds so much charm to the game it’s absolutely amazing. During battles I was just singing along having the time of my life listening to the songs. And near the end of the first semester the main boss theme changes and hearing it for the first time while fighting these cool-ass bosses was so awesome.
Beneath the Mask is an amazing song that fits the night Tokyo vibe and the theme of the game a lot, and the rain version without the lyrics is just chefs kiss, the cherry on top.
Oh yeah speaking of the rain + Beneath the Mask is such a calming combo the first time I played the game when I was no-lifeing it, I would just fall asleep with the game in the background on a rainy day.