by Amr (@siegarettes)

• Persona 5 Royal
• Developer: Atlus
• Publisher: SEGA
• PS4

I wanted to like Persona 5. I really did. The bold colors and lines of its master thief aesthetic and its themes of rebellion made a fantastic impression, with plenty of creative scenarios to infiltrate. It felt like a fresh take on the Persona series that brought a lot of much needed change. But 50 hours later I found myself slogging through yet another dungeon that took too long, wishing for the end but knowing I wasn’t even halfway through. 

So when Persona 5 Royal came out I thought “what the hell” and decided to take another shot at this 100+ hour RPG to see if I’d like it any better this time around. Not the smartest idea, I know. 

Thankfully, a lot of the new mechanics do make Persona 5 feel like a better, more streamlined game. Mechanics are introduced earlier, more variety has been added to battles and exploration, and it’s generally easier to see what options you have available at any given moment. Battles in particular feel a lot better thanks to new options like tag team attacks and Technicals, which reward you for striking enemies after inflicting them with status effects. Bosses have been reworked to have new mechanics or phases as well, and overall combat is a lot less rote. It definitely kept me more interested this time, especially after playing so many hours of the original’s dreary combat. 

The bigger problem is that Persona 5’s overwhelming run time still persists, and these refinements don’t really address any of the underlying problems with its structure. The combat loop begins to become tired through the sheer amount of it that exists, and as I pushed further it became clear that the combat flowchart of the original hadn’t been eliminated, but had a few more spokes added to distract from the repetition. If anything, the repetitiveness of the combat is exacerbated by the new additions to each dungeon, which expand them with new paths and alternative objectives that ask you to spend even more time in them. 

The same exasperation carries to other parts of the game, where the pace of the story becomes dragged down more and more by the additional encounters and social links. Even the optional additions take up plenty of time because of the need to introduce them. 

Do these additions create a more fleshed out, interesting world? Sort of. There’s clearly been some care taken to integrate them into the story, and they rarely feel as if they weren’t originally intended to be part of the game, even when it’s clearly the case. But they rarely feel as if they’re integral to the overall narrative, and delay a story that often had problems relaying urgency. A lot of the best additions are mechanical ones, and even those make Royal feel different, rather than better. 

And for all its themes of rebellion and gestures at breaking social taboos, Persona 5 Royal is still a game that believes deeply in the status quo. It balks at the corruption of adults, and tries to talk about dark subjects that can be difficult to bring up, but its answers to all the questions it poses lack any real transgressive ideology. “People should be better”, Persona 5 offers, “even if we have to force them to be.” It’s the bare minimum. 

That’s where Persona 5’s themes of prison and rehabilitation become pointed. Persona 5 is a game that believes in the carceral system, in the corrupt structures that allow the very problems the characters are fighting against. So I guess it’s only fitting that Royal can’t address any of the issues of the original game, only build upon them.