When I downloaded Persona 5 from the PS+ collection last January, I figured it’d be a nice distraction while I wait for the release of Horizon Forbidden West and Elden Ring. After all, the game was free, what harm was there in trying it? I loved it so much, I bought Persona 5 Royal, the definitive edition of the game, and spent over 110 hours to reach the “true” ending. Persona 5 Royal is now one of my favorite games of all time, much to my own surprise.
I have a love/hate relationship with JRPG’s, especially turn-based ones. Outside of Pokemon and Fire Emblem, I haven’t had much interest in the genre. Generally speaking, JRPG’s tend to be long and tedious, the pacing of the game slowing to a crawl amongst drawn-out cutscenes. Their stories start off grounded and relatable, but by end-game, they veer off into insanity. Gameplay-wise, turn-based battles are far too tedious compared to a good action-RPG. Why watch a character do cool things when I can be the one actually doing them?
Yet Persona 5 managed to appeal to me when Final Fantasy 7 or Legend of the Heroes: Trails in the Sky failed to. As with most JRPG’s, the plot and characters are the main highlight of the game. Persona 5 follows the story of Ren (you can change the protagonist’s name) as they become a a famous thief named Joker. After getting kicked out of your old school over a false assault charge, you move to Tokyo and attend a new high school. After a run-in with a sexually abusive gym teacher, you discover that you can enter the “Metaverse” an alternate world made up of people’s dreams, desires, and cognitive biases. You discover that you can enter a person’s metaverse and steal their desires, literally rewiring their brain. What starts as a story about stopping a teacher from abusing their students soon becomes an urban fantasy epic about defying destiny and stopping a national conspiracy.
The story and characters are probably the biggest selling point of Persona 5. The theme of revolution is pervasive here, each character you encounter is tied down by some sort of oppressive interpersonal or societal expectation, whether its a girl bound by her traumatic childhood, a student too scared to report their abusive teacher fearing retribution, or a straight-A student too scared to disappoint anyone. Each part of the story focuses on these characters realizing their oppression than making the decision to rebel against it, growing as a result.
The story is organized like an anime or manga, with self-contained story arcs chained together that lead to the final conclusion. The result is that playing Persona 5 is similar to watching a really good shonen anime. Similarly, the characters are a highlight. All of the main phantom thief characters are incredibly likeable; they each have their own quirks, goals, and ideals. The game devotes a significant amount of time to having the phantom thieves interact with one another, creating an authentic sense of camraderie.
Much of my love for the story is personal bias. I’ve always loved stories about teenage heroes; especially ones where the characters are forced to juggle their personal lives with their secret identity. I was sold the moment the game puts me in the shoes of a character like that.
The gameplay is split between Joker’s alter egos. In his normal high-school student identity, the game is similar to a visual novel. You run around a rendition of modern Tokyo, chatting up classmates and various city-dwellers, forging strong relationships. You can also level up your social stats such as Guts, Charm, or Intelligence by engaging in various activities such as reading or studying.
When Joker dons his phantom thief mask, the game becomes a dungeon crawler as you navigate huge levels and fight monsters in turn-based combat. The “palaces”, the game’s main story-dungeons, are sprawling levels that will take a while to complete. Luckily each palace is joy to play in; they each have their own soundtrack and the levels are fun to navigate. The main hook is that Persona is partly a monster-taming game.
The titular Personas are spirits based on various world religions and mythologies. You can capture Personas, similar to Pokémon, and use them in combat to cast magic and provide stat bonuses. You can then fuse Personas together to make more powerful ones. The Personas have great designs, I eagerly anticipated each new palace to capture and unlock new Personas to use. The process of min-maxing them was really fun and encouraged experimentation.
The interesting part is seeing how your actions in real-life directly impact your performance in the metaverse. Taking time to properly stock up on supplies makes completing the extremely long dungeons much easier. Forming a strong bond with a team member makes them more useful in combat. Similarly, your actions in the metaverse, such as stealing someone’s heart will impact that person in real-life. There’s satisfying sense of immersion; I felt like a real-life phantom thief as I meticulously prepared for each dungeon run.
Persona 5 is a game that oozes style. You see this from the moment you open the game and an anime opening appears, with gorgeous animation and great music. Every aspect of the game is stylized, from the user interface (UI), to the battle system, to even the text messages characters send each other. At no point during this game does it feel like the developers said “eh, that’s good enough”. You open the menu: another game might have a simple, if bland-looking UI showing you options. Persona 5 gives you specific animations and artwork as you flip through the menu, the mere experience of flipping through the menu is cool. You go to a merchant, you get a personalized musical track for that merchant, as well as stylized animations for them as you flip through their catalogue.
Persona 5 is the perfect example of how aesthetic appeal can take mundane tasks in a video game – like opening the menu, item management, buying items – and make it fun. This is especially important in a turn-based JRPG like Persona, where so much time is spent in menus, adjusting character loadouts, and choosing commands. Stylization also improves the visual presentation when Persona’s 5 graphical fidelity falters.
Persona 5 is a game with very few weak points. It does overstay its welcome somewhat, 100+ hours on a single playthrough is a lot to ask, regardless of how enjoyable the experience is. This is magnified when considering that most of that play time is spent in dialogue scenes. For that reason, I doubt I’ll replay the game anytime soon. Its also worth noting that accessing the Royal edition content, which contains a whole extra story chapter, requires you to fulfill specific requirements in-game, and if you don’t you’re locked out of that content permanently, so be aware of that.
Despite that, Persona 5 Royal is a game that accomplishes everything it sets out to do. If enjoy JRPG’s or anime at all, then Persona 5 will likely appeal to you. Even if you don’t, you might still enjoy the game, it has a way of worming past your biases. Here I am, someone who couldn’t get into Final Fantasy, but considers Persona 5 Royal to be one of my favorite games of all time.
Dar Al-Tadabur 