Persona 5 Royal

Persona 5 Royal is a second release of Persona 5 which originally launched worldwide in 2017. I had Been exposed to the first launch of Persona as two of my former roommates played and discussed the game. I was familiar with the broad strokes of the game through osmosis and I was familiar with the battle system as I had previously played and completed Shin Megami Tensei Four: Apocalypse and Devil Survivor Overclocked. It was not until this June that I had sat down and played the game for myself.

This review contains spoilers for the entirety of Persona 5 Royal.

My first impressions of the game were less than favorable. I find the game to have poor pacing. It drags out its narrative over a nearly unbearable stretch of time. It was not until the twelve hour mark that I felt the game moved out of tutorials and into the meat of the game. It starts with a bang as Joker escapes from the casino palace only to immediately get captured by the police. However, it then grinds to a halt as the narrative is then told through a series of flashbacks with brief cuts to the interrogation room.

This framing device entirely undercuts the tension and the stakes of the story. If the party finds themselves in danger, such as the threat of legal action from Madarame or the extortion of Kaneshiro, the player knows that they will make it out freely because they only get arrested after the heist on the casino. And when you finally do enter the casino palace, the player is aware that they will be betrayed and fall into police custody so they are expecting to fail. By framing the story in this way, the game removes any investment the player may have in making sure that they succeed. Why should we care about staying safe from danger if we are already aware that any threats that come in the intervening time between the start and the casino. Narrative tension is rooted in uncertainty. Uncertainty is not introduced into the story until over 70 hours into the game.

In addition to the pacing of the main narrative, the pacing of the secondary support conversations with your teammates are also paced very slowly. In Persona, you are given two time slots per day to fill with whatever actions please you. These can range from working a shift at a part time job, playing video games, or spending time with your party members. However, usually you can only increase your support level with one party member in a day as they almost exclusively want to spend time in the After School time slot. This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that increasing your support level with teammates directly grants you statistical benefits and more tactical options during combat. For example, I wanted to explore a deeper relationship with Yusuke. However, his next support rank would not grant me a tactical benefit, and since losing in battle would erase time I spent playing, I decided to spend time with Ryuji, who I did not care about as much, instead of spending time with a character I was interested in. This became a repeated occurrence to the point where I reach the 95 hour mark of the game with only rank 5 out of 10 with Yusuke’s support chain.

Persona is lauded for having deep and complex characters, however I disagree with this characterization of the game. Many of them are flat and one dimensional. Ryuji’s the angry one, Ann’s the bubbly one, Yusuke’s the artsy one, Makoto’s the smart one, Haru’s the nice one, Futaba’s the techie, and Morgana’s annoying. Even in their support chains, their personalities are hardly developed beyond a secondary motivation for the actions they were already taking. Nearly without exception, Persona takes the route of adding backstory instead of developing the characters through new action. And what precious little development of the characters you do see in their support chains is not reflected in the main story because the narrative has no mechanism of telling how far down each support chain a player has progressed. This renders the development they’ve gained in those support conversations noncanonical and hard locks them into their assigned character trait.

Returning to the topic of time being erased, I had the worst possible experience with the first palace. The game explicitly tells you that you should spend as much time as you can preparing for infiltration. So I took that advice to heart and spent almost all of my time preparing by buying items, raising stats, and gearing up to infiltrate. However, the game willfully kept a crucial piece of information from me. I needed to wait an entire day after sending the calling card to infiltrate the palace and steal the treasure. I waited until the second to last day to send the calling card, unaware of this stipulation. It was then that the game told me of my error and I was forced to rewind an entire week. This obliterated six hours of my life that I spent playing Persona Five. I was rightly angry at the game for intentionally withholding this information from me. Quite frankly, this is an unacceptable decision on the part of ATLUS and the design team. At a certain point, a system message needs to pop up and tell me that if I continue down this path, I will fail the mission. This may seem like an obtrusive and blunt solution, but Persona has no qualms with bombarding the player with system messages for every other minute detail.

Even the combat of Persona is monotonous. Once you determine an enemy’s weakness, you are able to run roughshod over them and since each dungeon contains the same handful of enemies, you can easily switch your team and personas to exploit their vulnerabilities and become functionally invincible. Only once was I required to formulate a strategy that was more than simply brute forcing my way through an enemy’s weak points and that was due to a gimmicky condition of the battle that would cause it to restart if the condition was not met and not inherent to the base mechanics of the battle system.

The well drawn character portraits and animated text boxes at the bottom of the screen draw your eyes towards those polished pictures and away from the flat, unexpressive 3D character models and bland, stale cinematography of the cutscenes that comprise the overwhelming majority of the game. This visual sleight of hand deprives the game of a crucial visual element that can elevate the story and raise the emotional impact of scenes in a way that a sudden close up of a two dimensional drawing cannot. This is explored very briefly in Morgana’s nightmares, however the dynamic cinematography that is on display in those scenes lasts for precious few seconds and is almost never seen elsewhere.

There is a dramatic mechanism that was pioneered by Oscar Brownstein called the Perception Shift. While it may seem strange to introduce dramatic theory into a review of a video game, I believe that Persona is attempting to do something similar to a piece of theatre. So while the comparison may not be perfectly one to one, I assert that it is an apt one. The perception shift is a moment where the audience has a realization about a sudden, significant relationship between two seemingly unrelated objects or individuals. The perception shift typically occurs at the climax of the story. In Persona, the party is betrayed by Akechi, who has been working for the mastermind behind the mental shutdown epidemic. However, this twist is poorly executed. In Brownstein’s model of the perception shift, a sense of expectation, or futurity, is created in the audience through the use of narrative plants. A perception shift, or a twist, must be foreshadowed. This primes the audience to make the connection which triggers the perception shift by connecting all of the evidence that you have laid out for them up until that point.

However, Akechi’s betrayal is not foreshadowed save for one minuscule line that is incredibly easy to miss if you’re not paying incredibly close attention. And all of the planning to subvert Akechi’s betrayal happens off screen without any of it being shared with the player until after the fact. The betrayal shocks, but it does not produce any dramatic action within the player. There is no possible relationship between the dramatic elements of Persona that can be created in the audience for they never had the necessary plants to develop their futurity. The twist is therefore rendered ineffective due to the deliberate exclusion of important dramatic elements that would have created the necessary dramatic structure for a perception shift. The game does explicitly tell you that you were betrayed in the opening sequence and then again after you escape from the casino palace and are taken into custody. However, simply being told that you are going to be betrayed does not create futurity. Futurity needs uncertainty and suspense to be effective.

In conclusion, Persona 5 Royal, is a slow, bloated game that undercuts the very narrative that it prides itself on and erases the development of its own characters. There is a difference between a long, carefully constructed story and a story that has been spread out over more than 100 hours of time simply for the sake of being long. Persona 5 would be better suited as a movie or a series rather than a video game, especially since I spent more than half of my over 100 hours of play with my hands off the controller, watching cutscenes than actually controlling Joker.

Final Score: 18%

Time To Complete: 107 Hours