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dkirschner's Persona 5 Royal (PS5)

[December 6, 2025 11:47:01 AM]

This game was SO friggin long. 135 hours. I have been playing it since February (it is now December). And I didn’t even do the third semester and final palace in the Royal edition, which I read add another 10-20 hours. I don’t have the motivation to do any more. I finished the main game, saw the story build-up for the third semester after New Year’s (which I didn’t know I had fulfilled the conditions to unlock), and called it done. I clocked about 80 hours in Persona 4, so 5 is over 50% longer. I loved the game overall, but it kept going and going and going; there was no need for the extreme length. There are a lot of palaces (main dungeons), a huge dungeon called Mementos (full of side quests and the end of the game; like HUGE, literally at least 55 floors [I remember a character commenting on that number]), tons of confidants (characters with whom you forge social bonds), creating and fusing personas, five social characteristics to level up, tons of dialogue (often through long text chains), and just a really long, involved story with a lot of side activities to do. It’s enormous. It reminds me of the rebooted Assassin’s Creed games that were so much longer beginning with the PS4 games compared to those before. I really liked those first two PS4 Assassin’s Creed games, but I wanted something shorter and more streamlined. If there is a Persona 6, I will be skipping it unless it is significantly shorter and changes up the formula.

There really isn’t too much to say about this that I didn’t say about Persona 3 and 4. I made an entry for Persona 4 over 10 years ago! Re-reading it sounded like I was basically describing Persona 5 back then. You’re a displaced troubled youth. Weird stuff is happening, mysterious deaths and people going insane. You meet people at school, meet a talking cat, and get a mysterious phone app that transports you to strange places. You become the Phantom Thieves, who identify rotten adults and change their hearts by going into their “palaces” (minds), stealing their treasures (desires) and forcing them to confess to their misdeeds. In so doing, the Phantom Thieves become social media famous, until the public turns against them. You survive an interrogation (a cool narrative device that lasts about half the game), meet new people, recruit them to the team, go up against bigger and badder adults as you work your way toward the true culprit behind the mysterious deaths and insanities. (That’s when I thought the game was over, but surprise, there is more plot and a true boss after what you think is the last boss, and that’s like another 10 hours of gameplay!!). Along the way, you help all sorts of people with their problems and potentially date a girl.

Combat operates pretty much the same as I remember. There are all the standard Shin Megami Tensei personas and magics. You play a game of strengths and weaknesses in combat, exploiting enemy vulnerabilities for advantage in battle. When you hit an enemy's weakness (e.g., use a fire spell on an enemy weak to fire), you knock them down and get an extra turn. If you knock all enemies down, you perform a powerful group attack. You can recruit different personas to enhance your own arsenal and can fuse personas to create stronger ones to mix-and-match skills to suit your purposes. For example, for most of the game, I created personas with a high magic stat that could use most elements. Whatever I didn’t have at the ready, I would choose party members who had what I was missing. By the end of the game, I was fusing personas focusing on buffs and debuffs because, as “exploit the weakness” combat systems always go, the toughest enemies have no weaknesses, and so you end up being better off going for pure damage, buffing your party, and debuffing the enemies. All the later bosses basically faced me at an attack power and defense deficit because I constantly debuffed them. Every time a boss raised its attack, I nullified it, and I had a few party members always ready to raise my own attack and defense and remove status ailments. Combat could be challenging at times (some particularly nasty enemies or combinations of enemies, some tough bosses), but usually it was a cakewalk, with me by the end of the game using auto-attack most of the time to win regular battles.

Outside of palaces, you are living the daily life of a teenager in Japan, going to school, playing sports, eating ramen, etc. You choose how to spend your time after school, in the evenings, and on weekends, strategically hanging out with people and engaging in activities to raise stats and strengthen social bonds. Or, you’re just really interested in all these characters’ side stories! I enjoyed all of them. One girl is an expert shogi player, but her mother wants to use her shogi fame to make her an idol. Another girl is trying to help a friend who is dating a bad guy who is attempting to exploit her for sex work. You help your best guy friend mediate conflict between his old track teammates. You meet a fortune teller who is caught up in a grift. There is a gamer kid who you train with and a former yakuza arms dealer who you go to work for. And like 15 more. There is a TON of story in this game. I really, really enjoyed the narratives, dialogue-heavy though the game is.

I guess in the end, that’s really what I was playing for was to see what would happen with all these characters and in the main story. The dungeons ended up getting pretty grindy and same-y with puzzles that just padded them out. Plus, I was way over-leveled. I got some accessories at the beginning of the game that increased experience gain by 15%. Any item that increases experience gain is an awesome long-term investment. I mean, 15% bonus XP in every battle for 135 hours, what could be more overpowered? I equipped that accessory on every character, ignoring all other accessories, such that by the end of the game, I was in the high 70s, with personas in the low 80s. The internet says you should be tackling the final boss around level 70. I completely dominated the final boss, but see how he could have been trickier if I was 10 levels lower (by the high 70s, all your party members' personas' skills are maxed out and, of course, everyone has higher stats, more HP, and more SP).

It was a fun, long ride, with great characters and interesting themes. I am teaching an Introduction to Psychology course for the first time right now, so it was cool to see how the game plays with concepts like the collective unconscious and, well, personas. Very Jungian. There is excellent story payoff at the end. You finally figure out what’s up with Mona/Morgana. However, if I knew before playing that it would be so long and so similar to previous Persona games, I would not have picked it up. Extremely glad to be done and start the next (also long, but nowhere near this long) Playstation game on my list, Red Dead Redemption 2 (also I believe the final PS4 game in my backlog and wishlist!).

PS, I forgot to mention how stylish the game is. It looks and sounds super slick. And the music is AWESOME!

This entry has been edited 1 time. It was last edited on Dec 6th, 2025 at 11:50:31.