Persona 5 Royal

4 July 2026

The thoughts I have about Persona 5 Royal could probably fill a gigantic book. At first, a couple days ago, I thought my opinion was that this was not a very good game. It was a fine game, but it wasn't very good. I then realized that has to be silly. I wouldn't be closing in on nearly 90 hours of gameplay here if it wasn't very good. I've bounced out of "better" games in far less time. So what does it do well?

The characters are the stars of the show here, which is both good and disappointing since they're 90% of the way there overall. There are enough interesting characters to pull you through, and there's probably something for everyone. Characters I didn't much care for are probably someone else's favorite. But the character interactions feel thin, there aren't durable changes to how they act around you in other scenes. All of both their personal growth and your relationship is totally siloed. That's a huge miss for me.

The game has a very strong one more turn loop. The social days I continually found myself going "oh, but I need to do this before I forget! oooh, I have a new interaction opportunity with Makoto, I can't stop now."

The early game has this Ann/Kamoshida/Kawakami problem. The Kamoshida story is really good and I think tackles some important stuff. The problem is that the game is tone deaf to it and at the same time, sexualizes Ann. It tries to have its cake and eat it too by having Ann try to use her sexuality as empowerment, but it cannot stop being extremely male gaze-y at her, and the other characters continue to sexualize her against her will, there are some randos, but also Ryuji and Morgana. It's really gross and I don't like it, especially because they're all minors.

Kawakami's story is also weird as hell post Kamoshida. This is an adult teacher getting involved with her minor student. I don't want to stigmatize her sex work, there's a story here about teachers not making enough money they have to supplement it with work that they would consider degrading, the problem is the interaction with the minor student especially after we just had a looooong story about how inappropriate that is. It's just male gaze-y fantasy "oooh hot for teacher." It reminds me of that South Park episode where the cops just keep saying "Nice."

That goes for ALL OF THE ADULTS who are happy to get into a relationship with a minor (Ohya, Chihaya) but the Kawakami one is by far the worst because of the Kamoshida story. It just undercuts her story so much and she could have easily been a diner waitress, or hell, just a regular non sexy maid who doesn't get romantically involved with a minor (at least ten years her junior I would guess?) and the story would have lost so little.

The game stops shoving that contradiction in your face so much as the story progresses.

The story is overall fine and the messages it pushes are good, but it does make it a little clean and easy on itself. There's no possibility of friendly fire, they know their target is a bad person because they have a palace so you can take em down guilt free. There isn't an acknowledgement of conflicting perspectives or shades of gray, just a determination of the righteous from the corrupt handed from on high. If only life was so easy.

Maruki may end up being the best arc of them all, it includes most of my favorite characters front and center (Akechi and Kasumi/Sumire) and Maruki is an interesting, somewhat sympathetic villain (even though a counselor telling Sumire to live a fantasy life as her dead sister is just so fucked up) but it at least poses an interesting question. I almost forgot about Sae's story, that one was also really good and I feel like the transition of post Sae was the story hitting on a lot of cylinders. It actually felt like...you know, a heist movie.

That's where I am right now, I'll likely beat the game tonight or tomorrow and I'll revise these thoughts.

Okay, I beat it. Maruki's arc is among the best in the game, maybe THE best, like I predicted. My favorite characters front and center, a villain who's actually sympathetic, and it poses a real question instead of just pointing at another generic bad guy. Sae's relationship also develops into one of the best in the post game. She feels like someone you genuinely changed for the better, and notably, she isn't trying to inappropriately have sex with a minor. Low bar, this game keeps tripping on it anyway.

But the ending. The ending is literally HOURS of cutscenes, and I think I might like the game less now because it cannot stop talking. The right ending was sitting right there: Joker walks out of jail, his friends are waiting for him, roll credits. Hope, possibility, their stories unwritten, they could do or be anything. Hell, the end of Maruki's palace is literally them rejecting a world where their futures were decided for them. That's the cliffhanger to end on. Their stories aren't written.

Oh, but actually they are. In excruciating detail. Over the next few hours.

This is the exact same failure as the Ann/Kamoshida problem: the game makes a point and then immediately undercuts it with its own hands. You spend the whole third semester fighting a guy whose crime is writing everyone a comfortable, well-intentioned ending, you win, and then the epilogue writes everyone a comfortable, well-intentioned ending. The only difference between Atlus and Maruki is that Maruki gets a boss fight where you can tell him no.

And the futures it writes? Everyone kind of ends up on the same path they were already on. There's all this talk about breaking free and doing what you want, and it turns out most of what people want is what they already had, they just own it now. Ann still wants to be a model, but now she's in charge of her sexuality. Ryuji still wants to run, but now he actually tries instead of moping. Yusuke paints, Sumire does gymnastics, etc etc. The Phantom Thieves don't really change anyone, they restore them. The only main characters who actually change direction are Sae and Futaba, and their starting states were the wound itself, so removing the wound produced real change. Everyone else's wound was next to their dream, so fixing it just handed the dream back.

Nobody actually rebels. Not one person says fuck the system, I'm blazing my own trail. If even ONE character had done that, you could say the story was showing different forms of rebellion. Instead the only characters who genuinely reject the path society handed them are Akechi, Maruki, and Shido, and the game kills, defeats, and imprisons them. Rebellion is villain-coded. The heroes rebel as a phase and then get back in line. Joker's big noble moment is voluntarily going to jail so the paperwork comes out right. Even Futaba, who is one of the most capable hackers alive and does not NEED any of it, gets marched back into high school and it's framed as healing. This is a very conservative story wearing a punk jacket, and I don't think I fully saw it until the epilogue rubbed my face in it.

Makoto's ending bugs me the most. I get the intended read, reform the rot from inside, pick up the fight that killed her dad. But the game spent 100 hours showing me the police are corrupt from the SIU director down to the interrogation room where detectives drugged and beat a teenager, and her takeaway is: join up. Meanwhile Sae, with twenty years inside, concludes the system can't be fixed from within and leaves. These two sisters came at this exact problem side by side, through the same events, and walked out with opposite conclusions, and the game never stages that conversation. They live in the same apartment! One dinner table scene would have turned the contradiction into a thesis. Instead both arcs resolve in isolation, which is my siloed-relationships complaint again wearing a different hat.

Honestly I think they gave the sisters each other's endings. Sae has the rank, the connections, and the guilt to be the insider reformer, that's penance, that's a real arc. And Makoto's entire contribution to the team is investigation, she tails people, builds case files, connects dots. She should be a journalist, exposing corrupt institutions from the outside. That's the legal version of a calling card. Instead she gets "police commissioner," a job she can't hold for twenty-five years of rank-and-file rule-following, which is exactly the failure mode her whole arc warned about.

On romances: I don't even know which one I like best, because almost none of them feel earned. They're all friendship arcs with a fork at the end. Rank 8 hits and suddenly it's "hey btws I love u, do u love me?" out of nowhere. Makoto's is the most natural, the fake-boyfriend-to-real-boyfriend thing reads real because the romance has somewhere to live before the fork. Sumire's gets uncomfortable the more you think about it, half her confidant happens while she is not in her right state of mind, sincerely being a person who doesn't exist. "Took advantage of" isn't the right phrase for the player, but it might be the right phrase for what the game did to the scenario. Futaba is real little-sister vibes the entire way and the hard romantic pivot actively weirded me out. All the adults remain crimes, see above. Ann is structurally the cleanest option, same age, same trauma survived together, no power imbalance, and the game STILL makes it weird because the camera can't stop leering at her.

And then there's Hifumi, who I completely forgot about because I pushed her confidant early and never had a reason to go back. (Time-gate more of these, Atlus. Keep people relevant across the whole calendar.) She might quietly be the best one? Playing a two-player game together over and over is genuinely how people get close, it's private, it's intimate, you actually learn who someone is across a board. And her arc is the one "return to your path" story that's actually earned. She loved shogi the entire way through, the game itself was never at odds with her story the way modeling is the crime scene for Ann. Her mom corrupted the fame around shogi, not the thing itself, so when it all collapses she chooses to earn it back from the bottom on her own merit. That's what re-choosing your path looks like when it costs something. Everyone else in the epilogue got Hifumi's ending without doing Hifumi's work. The funny thing is the game did to me exactly what it does to its characters: it restored my original opinion, I'm just more conscious of it now.

Notes from the playthrough

Written as I went, before the essay above. I didn't have the daily writing system in place yet, so this was it.

It continually bothers me that these kids are high schoolers

It's impossible for me to get over how shitty a teacher Kawakami is and I want to root for her redemption but she's also a sex worker (I have no problem with this) who is getting entangled with a student (I have a problem with this) and it's just hard to see past that.

It feels like there are a lot of issues where the fact that these kids are high schoolers is an unnecessary problem and it would fix a lot of shit for me.

In a lot of ways I feel like this game is its own worst enemy. The Kawakami thing seems to directly just undercut itself. She has a story that is sympathetic and yet it is totally undercut by becoming a sex worker who is involved with a student. Why? Why? I don't get it. It's needless and it just makes the story worse.

The story is also just so childish at times. The way it's just like, "Oh well, what a smoke show," about some of the characters. That's like, "Don't need to do it," and again they're fucking high schoolers.

I also really don't like the long unpredictable stretches where it just doesn't let you go through the loop and the day-to-day stuff just plays out like one long semi-interactive cutscene. I would like to build my confidant scores and stuff like that.

Okumura's Palace is a slog. The random puzzle you can just accidentally lock yourself out of and the first boss fight that you can't just face roll? Why the sudden jump with zero warning?

I kind of have already felt like the palaces are kind of the weakest part of the game, they're just too long and the "puzzles" just feel time wastey. Like they're just linear and obvious for the most part, but this big step up didn't make it better. The airlock puzzle just isn't fun or interesting.

I really dislike how often the game locks you out of doing shit. Like I would like to save more often and then also it just eats up multiple days in a row without letting you do the loop.

I think some characters are just added too late to be meaningfully impactful or have nearly the same weight. Like Haru? Akechi and Kasumi are at least important characters even if they don't join the party. I think Futaba was kind of the last chance to get on board.

When you max out your confidant your further interactions are so underwhelming.

I also feel it slow rolls itself well enough, which is another thing I think cuts both ways. I liked Kasumi/Sumire's story, I thought Akechi was great, but those characters really only hit that level right at the very end, and it would have been nice to play with them more, early on. However, I do think that adds a lot of continual novelty to the game. Even though you've seen most of what it's going to do mechanically, it still finds ways to keep you invested.

The linearity is, to my surprise, something I think is actually beneficial here. The game has a straight line to go through narratively, you cannot get bogged down or overwhelmed by infinite side quests. The sidequests that exist (Mementos) even encourage you to just maximize your time by doing as many as possible at once, and again, the process of doing them is linear. You cannot have decision paralysis of which quest to do because this one takes you that way, this other one takes you another.

My #1 thing is that the game doesn't respect your time well. I found palaces/mementos waaaaay too long and the combat is not as deep and interesting for the amount of time devoted to it. Further, the dungeons give you "puzzles" which are really just pretty linear anyways. If it's going to be linear, I feel like we can cut to the chase a lot faster.

There are also just a lot of social day scenes where I feel like it could cut to the chase too. There's a section right at the end where you have to meet with all of your teammates again to see how they're doing in the reality and you have to go to sleep and walk through the subway like seven times on subsequent days and deal with all the load screens and animations.

Similarly, I found combat just FRUSTRATING sometimes, especially at the end. Oh great, this thing has no weaknesses, I've fought it a bunch, and now I just need to grind it out again. I'm looking at YOU Abbadon you asshole. There's very little value in fighting it so many times.

Let's get to The Story here because I feel like I've largely forgotten about the problems I initially had with it, and it's not because they went away, they just stopped showing up.