There’s a lot of things I could say about how wonderful Persona 5 Royal is. The new areas to explore, the new minigames, new dungeon quirks, new battle features. All of these things add up to make a pretty definitive upgrade to the vanilla Persona 5 experience. But what really pushed it up for me are the new confidants and the third semester. It’s impossible to really talk about why I love these here without getting into full spoilers. What I can say is that P5R explores some very powerful themes and some characterization that I consider to be the peak of Persona. While there were some aspects of the base game’s narrative that left me a little unsatisfied, Persona 5 Royal shows off that there are people who work at ATLUS who still know how to write a damn good story and character arcs. It gives me hope for the future of this series and I really can’t wait until my friends finally do get around to playing this.