As I write this, it's been as long since Persona 5 first came out as the entire time between Persona 4 and Persona 5, which is also the same timespan as the one between P4 and Persona 2: Eternal Punishment. The thirteen years since development on the original version of P5 began is longer than the time between Persona 1 releasing and Persona 4 releasing. In that time, nothing has been said at all about what a potential Persona 6 might look like, despite P5's ridiculous success making a sequel a no-brainer, at least from a marketing standpoint. Which I guess just goes to show both how much longer development takes on big games these days and how much Atlus/Sega has been leaning on P5 and its assorted spinoffs as money sources.
Anyway, the game. Persona 5 is the sixth numbered Persona game because numbers are fake, and Persona 5 Royal is the rerelease of it that does Atlus Rerelease things. In this case, they add a few new characters and their associated story, change up a couple mechanics, cut and/or alter a handful of really homophobic jokes literally everyone hated, add an entire new town area to explore, and give the English script a much-needed additional editing pass.
That last bit deserves to be elaborated on a bit, because it's the entire reason I did this playthrough in Royal instead of vanilla. If you've never experienced vanilla P5's English script, you can consider yourself lucky because damn did they ever fuck that one up. There's not a whole lot of conventional mistranslations, mind—it's more a systemic issue with how lines are phrased, particularly in the early game. It has all the grace and mastery of the English language of a low-to-mid-tier scanlation, but at least in those you don't have voice acting reinforcing all the fuckups. Thankfully Royal does a lot to cut down on those issues—you'll never be told that your enemies are serious to kill you, for instance, and there's less bizarrely tortured use of the word "aesthetics." They didn't get everything, and some lines I'd have thought were so obviously fucked nobody would miss them managed to escape reworking, but Royal overall has a much more readable English script.
But what's the game about?
The story of Persona 5 starts out with your character, who I'm just gonna call Joker because they gave him that codename specifically to be able to sometimes write around the whole renamable protagonist issue, making a dramatic escape from a casino he's just robbed—only to get arrested anyway when the cops show up. The framing device for most of the game, then, is an interrogation by prosecutor Sae Niijima, who finds herself confused by reports of a bizarre other world and being able to physically steal people's hearts and would very much like to know if any of that bullshit can be trusted.
The story actually begins, then, with Joker's arrival in Tokyo. He's on probation for a year after being convicted of assault in a sham trial (what actually happened was he saved a woman from a sexual predator who turned out to have some dangerous connections) and needs to avoid getting in any more legal trouble, though there's not a whole lot of tension there since we already know he gets arrested again. On his first day at school (at a high school whose name is a pun on the Japanese word for a prisoner, because subtext is for cowards) he and another student accidentally wander into another world where their school is a castle and the predatory, abusive gym teacher is its king. There they awaken to the power to summon beings called Personas from within their hearts, along with meeting a bizarre talking cat named Morgana who seems to know a lot about this situation. Morgana tells them that the castle is what's known as a Palace, and it formed in the alternate world known as the Metaverse (they had the term first, Zuckerberg can go fuck himself) due to the gym teacher's (as they put it) distorted desires warping his cognition—he sees the school as a castle where his word is law, and that creates an actual castle in the Metaverse where the school would be. Taking the Treasure that serves as the Palace's core will cause it to collapse and rid the owner of the distortion that created it, and once our heroes do this to the gym teacher and realize it works they start to think: Couldn't we use this to take down more bad guys and help people?
Thus are born the Phantom Thieves of Hearts, as they call themselves, and they immediately start actively looking for more targets. This will inevitably get a lot of eyes on them, put them under a lot of suspicion, and draw them into an increasingly large conflict. That's just how it goes.
Persona 5 isn't exactly subtle about its themes of fighting back against a corrupt and unjust society. The Phantom Thieves and their allies are all outcasts of various stripes—their members include a former track star who was framed for supposedly attacking the aforementioned evil gym teacher, a girl who was one of the targets of said teacher's sexual predation, a young artist whose mentor takes all his work and passes it off as his (the mentor's) own, and so forth, while the allies you make include a doctor who was disgraced after apparently causing the death of a patient, a politician who got thrown out of his party due to scandals and now wants to atone, a model gun seller trying to escape his dark past, and other such figures. The game's also very willing to draw from real incidents—the gym teacher I mentioned is pretty blatantly drawing from a real Olympian-turned-coach who ended up being a sexual predator, for instance, and I doubt it's a coincidence that they included an art plagiarism sequence so soon after the Mamoru Samuragochi scandal broke either. And when it turns out they called Japan's in-universe ruling party the Liberal Co-Prosperity Party? Pretty sure they've tossed subtlety out the fucking window at that point.
Ultimately I feel like a lot of P5's plot would work better for me if I hadn't already played Demons Roots, which covers a lot of similar themes but does a better job of sticking to its guns about them. But that's partly a me problem—Persona 5 may have trouble sticking the landing with the whole social reform thing, and it may end up falling back on more generic themes at times, but it still does more than you'd expect, especially coming from Persona 4 and its whole "I'm rebelling against society's expectations to find my true self but it turns out my true self is just conforming to society's expectations" thing.
As for the game itself, you're looking at the same sort of PERSONA PERSONA PERSONA PERSONA PERSONA SOCIAL LINKS SOCIAL LINKS SOCIAL LINKS gameplay loop that the other Hashino-era Persona games use. When you're not going into Palaces you've got a life sim to deal with, where you're trying to build up connections with other people and raise social stats to be able to build those connections further. The social link system returns, letting you make exactly twenty friends who represent the major arcana (plus two more for Royal who use cards from more obscure tarot decks), though this time around they call them Confidants to fit the whole phantom thief theme. You need to build up relationships with them to be able to make better Personas of each arcana, and this time around they also grant you other mechanical benefits that range from nearly useless to completely changing the way the game works on a fundamental level. The trick, of course, is that hanging out with your friends means you aren't making progress on whatever you're supposed to be doing, and you always have a deadline for completing whatever Palace you're infiltrating—unlike P3 and P4's organic deadlines, these are imposed by the villain of the month threatening something they'll do to you if you don't steal their heart in time.
There's also the ability to explore Mementos, a dungeon full of randomly-generated floors that's basically a manifestation of the collective unconscious. This is for both grinding and doing sidequests where you hear about a minor target who hasn't formed a full Palace yet and go after them. It's not exactly the most interesting thing in the world, really.
This is probably the easiest Persona game to max out all your social links in, giving you a ridiculous amount of leeway if you know what you're doing at all. Even without a guide I had plenty of free time towards the end, which honestly might not be for the best since the game still runs on a schedule and having nothing to do but advance the plot means having to waste days. I ended up with a week left on the clock after maxing all the social links, finishing up everything in Mementos, and clearing the final Palace. This meant I had a week where nothing happened and I was just waiting for the plot to advance, which is an unfortunate situation to be in for sure.
Palace infiltration is a departure from how P3 and P4 did their dungeons, because with all the random generation offloaded to Mementos, the Palaces are instead all bespoke dungeon crawls. Enemies are placed non-randomly, and you're expected to stealth around in order to get past or ambush them. There's also the odd puzzle here and there to shake things up. I like how this works out! Even the generally agreed worst Palaces are leagues better than P4's generic corridors and rooms that had the same structure everywhere, and when they're good, they're really good.
The battle system is gonna be familiar to anyone who played the previous Hashino-era Persona games, at least on a basic level. For starters, your stats and available skills are still dependent on what Persona you're using—party members other than Joker still only have one option each, while Joker can have a bunch of Personas and switch between them as needed. Allies and enemies take individual turns in an Agility-dependent order, as in previous games. Also as in previous games, you can knock down enemies by hitting their weaknesses or getting critical hits, and any time you knock them down you get a free turn. Knock every enemy down, and you can do an All-Out Attack that hits them all for huge damage! That's the basics of it, and the follow-up attacks from P4 also return, but P5 adds a couple of new tricks. The big one is the Baton Pass, which lets you give your free turn from hitting a weakness to another party member for a power bonus. Chain more Baton Passes together, and you get increasing amounts of bonus damage. It's a neat feature, but honestly suffers from the same problem as the rest of the 1 More system where it would massively trivialize a lot of boss fights, so your ability to actually use it on bosses is limited outside of situations where you're expected to use it.
You've also got guns now! Yes, returning to the Persona series after having previously only been in the very first one is the ability of all party members to equip a gun in addition to their main weapon. The justification for this is amusing: you're fighting in worlds based on what their masters see the world as, so realistic-looking air and model guns can fire real bullets because the enemies think they're real, thus allowing a bunch of high schoolers from a country where guns are illegal to carry guns anyway. The downside to guns is that they have limited ammo, which works differently in each version: in vanilla, your ammo is replenished when you leave the Palace you're in, while Royal gives you less ammo but replenishes it for each battle because your enemies will expect you to have a full clip when they see your gun. The downside to the latter is that they decided to make guns in general weaker to compensate for being able to use them whenever, but they can still do a lot of damage very quickly.
The other big change is what happens when you knock everyone down, because instead of doing an All-Out Attack you can choose to negotiate with your enemies! Persona 5 replaces the bizarre abstract designs of the Shadows from the previous two games with standard Megaten demon designs, but in exchange you get to negotiate with them and recruit them as new Personas by talking to them, completely replacing the Shuffle Time system you had to deal with in those games. It's honestly the simplest negotiation system in the series, with questions that always have the same answers and it generally being pretty easy to figure out what to say. It is nice to have negotiation back in a Persona game, though.
Fusing Personas together to make new ones is the way you get your real power, and it works much the same as always. You do it at the Velvet Room (which here looks like a panopticon-style prison because subtlety is just plain dead at this point) with very standard Megaten fusion mechanics (combine two options to get a third one based on the combination of arcana and average base level of the materials). On a basic level it's exactly the same as how it was in Persona 4 Golden, giving you the ability to choose a few skills from the materials to inherit. You can also turn your Personas into items, which naturally include everyone's ultimate weapons, or sacrifice one to give experience to another. There's also a new system where you can leave a Persona behind to have it learn passive resistances and use stat-boosting items, but you basically never have to care about that.
A new gimmick Royal adds is Fusion Alarms! These happen whenever you fight however many battles without fusing something and make your fusions better, but also less stable. Your newly fused Personas get more stats, you can make them into better items, and so forth...but there's a much higher chance of accidents that give you something you didn't want, and if you use the same option more than once in a row or re-fuse something you already fused in the same alarm, you're practically guaranteed an accident. They're neat, but don't end up making much of an impact on the system as a whole.
I'd say Persona 5 in general is the most mass market-friendly Persona game. That's not to say it's bad, but the rough edges previous games had are sanded down, the difficulty's generally very manageable, and it generally provides an easily digested experience. I don't think its themes suffer too much for this, though, and I would very much recommend it. Not that I need to, given its popularity
