CHENNAI: Persona 5 Royal feels like an anime mega-serial in a video game format, and I have probably only managed to finish 30 episodes at the time of reviewing the game. With the gameplay extending over a hundred hours, the game does cover a lot of story. Persona 5 Royal has a painstaking amount of narration over each dialogue and interaction, including elaborate cut-scenes (there’s one every two minutes almost!).
But I am getting ahead of myself. I hardly knew what to expect of P5R when I first started playing it; I haven’t played any of the previous games in the series at all. P5R is a quintessential Japanese role-playing game. The underlying philosophy of the game’s story involves regular people adopting psychological personas — shuttling between the real world and a fantasy universe. P5R is situated in fictional Tokyo, and I fall into the universe as a “Phantom Thief” with a sordid past. After an initial action-packed tutorial, I start searching for context. I learn that I was a young student in a new school. Circumstances throw me into having a double life, and I moonlight as a powerful Thief that overcomes the corruption in the hearts of people.
The gameplay involves a lot of exploration and combat. And the combat is as straightforward as it gets in most RPGs: it evolves as I level up, learn and master new skills, and overcome new enemies. I didn’t care much about the actual combat-based aspect of the gameplay itself, but I do appreciate the excellent job the game does intermingling the past and the present, the fantasy world and real life.
I love the anime art style. I like the game’s menus, and the little achievements I get at the end of the battle. I like that I must take extra efforts to befriend other characters and that I can develop my own odd lifestyle routine within the game. It gives a detailed simulated insight into the life of a normal student who has a weird side job that involves defeating monsters. P5R took a lot of effort to make, and it shows.
Persona 5 was first released in 2017 for the PlayStation. The definitive edition of Persona 5 Royal is relevant this month because they launched a console port, making it available on the Switch, Windows, and Xbox.