Persona 5 Royal is in my opinion the perfection of turn based combat as well as an excellent social sim. It has a huge cast of unforgettable and well realized characters (and the SIU director), some incredible dungeon designs (visually and gameplay wise), the best video game soundtrack of all time, and a story that even with its 100+ hour runtime leaves you wanting to do it all over again. You will laugh, you will cry, you will probably cringe at some point (just being honest). Most importantly though, the game will assuredly leave an impression on you if you reach either the game's original ending or the "new" Royal ending.


The story of Persona 5 is expertly crafted. The game starts in medias res, showing our protagonist, Joker, escaping from a casino while guided by his teammates. Joker is captured while escaping, and brought to an interrogation with prosecutor Sae Niijima. She proceeds to ask him questions that we as players don’t know the answers to yet, but those questions peak the player’s interest. She talks of stealing hearts and another world as though we should be aware of the meaning behind her words. Then we are thrust back in time to April of the same year.

What then follows is 100 hours of riveting story arcs, with incredible party members, interesting supporting characters, and immoral villains. You discover another world called the Metaverse and learn that you have the power to change society by infiltrating palaces (a.k.a. RPG dungeons) and stealing the treasure of the ruler. Without spoilers I will just say that the game just gets better and better as it goes, culminating in a final act that is my favorite ending to any game. You will know all of these characters as people by the end of the story, and you will feel both extreme satisfaction and a bitter hollowness knowing that your time with them is at an end.

Combat in Persona 5 is a very fluid affair. Rather than navigate menus and sub menus constantly. Most basic actions are just bound to single keys or face buttons on a controller. This makes the pace of battle incredibly quick, as by the end of the first palace you will likely have a handle on which button does what and never need to think about it again. Grinding is not really required at all, it is possible to beat the game without doing any (I know, I've done it). However, there is an instakill ability unlocked by progressing through the game that makes you instantly win battles with enemies far below your level and you still gain the experience and money from the fight. This makes leveling incredibly quick in the late game so no need for hours upon hours of mashing the attack button on stuff that poses no threat to you.

The major mechanic that differentiates the combat from other JRPGs is the "one more" system. Hitting enemy weaknesses causes them to be knocked down and triggers a "one more" allowing you to take a second turn or hand that turn off to another member of the party for increased damage. These can be chained together through your entire four person party, culminating in your final party member doing massive damage for 0 cost.
These mechanics and controls culminate in the best feeling turn based battle system I have ever used. Nothing I have played before or since has felt as good as this system has to control. Whether against common enemies roaming the palaces or the corrupted rulers of those spaces the game feels fun to play from beginning to end, which is incredibly important in a game of this length.

An important aspect to mention when talking about how the game plays is the dungeon design. In game the dungeons are referred to as palaces, and without spoiling things I will say that they are all ruled by the villain of their respective story arcs. These are not randomly generated hallways and rooms that you will see repeated ad nauseum. Each palace is hand crafted and they are all visually distinct from one another. You’ll solve puzzles, sneak around, and do some minor platforming between the various bits of combat. No two palaces feel the same, which is impressive considering that they are at minimum around 4-5 hours to complete each on a first playthrough, with some being considerably longer.

The combat isn’t the only gameplay however. Many of the ingame days have Joker just living out his life as a high school student. You do various activities like work out, study, eat, read, watch movies, etc. These activities raise Joker’s social stats, which in turn allows him to do more activities. Talking with your confidants (major NPCs that Joker has a meaningful connection to) will level them up, unlocking new abilities for Joker and his party to use while in the game’s palaces. Some have more use than others, but in the Royal version of the game, rarely is there an ability that is not useful in some way. Some of these confidants are locked behind social stat requirements. Making raising them important to making sure that you are as powerful as you can be.
Throughout the game you unlock more and more places to explore outside of the palaces. These new places in turn open up new opportunities to raise social stats, provide new vendors for items, or serve as hangout spots for Joker and his confidants.

The last thing to talk about regarding the game itself is the presentation. Everybody on the internet has heard people talk to death about how good Persona 5 looks. Unfortunately for everybody, I’m about to jump on that bandwagon as well. The art style on display here ensures that the game will never age. I’m not an art or graphic design major by any means so I don’t properly have the words to describe it, but just seeing the game in motion will convince anybody that art style is more important than raw graphical power.

Likewise I’m not a music major either, so I can’t dive into the technical reasons behind why the music is so good. The soundtrack runs the gamut from slow somber tracks for the nights spent exploring Yongen-Jaya, to intense boss themes, and jazzy battle tunes. There are some true standouts that still hit me hard to this day after hearing them in their original context. I can listen to almost any song off this soundtrack anytime and never get bored of it.

Everything stated above is just my opinion. I know over the years it has become trendy to hate Persona 5 and the Royal version for various reasons. However for me, this game hit at just the right time in my life and it hit me hard. I flat out hated JRPGs and Anime before playing this game, I thought of them as just “weeb ♥♥♥♥” and said that they “weren’t for me”. I only tried Persona because I had friends tell me that they loved it and that I would probably love it too. I went in with lower than zero expectations and came away not only willing to play more JRPGs, but also to watch anime that I had never given the chance before. For all the reasons that I have tried to list in this review, I was left completely floored by an experience I thought I was going to hate. I ended up loving the characters, the world, the gameplay, the music, the art, everything about it. It was the best possible experience to have as an introduction to the genre. I think a lesser game would have repelled me off and I would have kept believing that games like this just “weren’t for me”.

I started writing this review intending to just say “game good”. I didn’t post that though. I wanted to make sure that for a game that had such a profound impact on me, I had a review that could possibly convince somebody to play it. I don’t have any delusions that this will be the top rated review on the steam page. It is more than likely that nobody will ever read this. If by some chance you do see this though, and you haven’t given this game a shot, I implore you to please give it a shot. If you don’t have friends like mine who pushed me into playing the game, let me be that for you. This game is worth taking a chance on.