Persona 5 Royal, released just three years after the original in Japan, is what Atlus defines as the ultimate version of the JRPG and is sold to you as such.
However, as digestible as they made the gameplay experience, I sincerely cannot see this as an improved version of what was Persona 5. Since its release, I've been going back and forth on this game, and it's become, perhaps, the most divided I've ever been about a videogame. Over 4 years later, this release haunts me, eating at my head to sit down and figure out just why I feel so dismissive of this game.

The gameplay has been grossly simplified and streamlined, starting with what is immediately apparent. Fights are easier, Persona fusion is much more accessible, inherent traits make Personas far more useful and worth keeping, technical damage is stupidly overpowered and over-rewarding, guns are no longer as limited as they used to be, network fusion is less of a coin toss, and much more.

In this sea of gameplay improvements, there are a few things to note as negative.

Persona fusion is simplified and aided by the presence of “Fusion Alarms”. At random times, often more than you’d think, the Velvet Room will enter a state of “alarm”. During this sequence, fusion will be considerably more rewarding and unique, often yielding results that are insanely beneficial, and not in a particularly balanced way. Even if your fusion ends up botched, you’ll get excellent fusion fodder that you can use to build whatever you’d like. On paper, this sounds fun, and for the first few moments it truly is, until it starts to get redundant and hand-holding, completely disallowing the game to pick up in difficulty even up to the very end. Fusion Alarms are FREQUENT, way, way too much. In a JRPG, it’s simply not fun to melt anything in your way because the game throws what’s optimal at you, and you’d need to be seriously stupid to not pick up what it’s giving you or to find yourself in a situation where you’ll have to do some serious fusion planning.

Technical damage is much more rewarding than simply striking a weakness, and this makes complete sense. What doesn’t, however, is just how devastating landing a technical is. This ends up making Merciless a cakewalk with the increased weakness damage, which in and of itself is an already deceivingly easy difficulty.

On the gameplay side, this is all I can really complain about. Other than that, it’s worth noting just how much more digestible a game it’s become. The grapple hook allows for some creative and fresh detours, and the added free time makes the whole game feel a little less strict. There’s something to note about the inherent traits as well, as well as how party members start with Baton Pass rather than earning it.

If Royal’s only issues lay in the gameplay, I would’ve loved this game to bits, despite how permissive it was. But as I went on and on, the game started to weigh me down, confuse me, and irritate me.

Palace after palace, going through the motions, you’ll start to feel something off, especially if you’ve played the original game.

Persona 5 Royal doesn’t feel like Persona 5, and you can cut the two apart so well that it’s disheartening. It’s right there that you start to realize that P5R isn’t an improvement; it’s an addition. It’s something separate from the original that doesn’t want to improve anything of its original self; it only seeks to grow until it’s entirely overtaken the flaws that were there, and it hopes to god you won’t notice that by the end, you’re playing a different game entirely.

The first disservice P5R does to its predecessor is how badly it waters down its aesthetic and artistic direction.

From the title screen, Persona 5 makes its aesthetic and style known almost immediately. “Phantom” starts playing; it's bass-heavy and jazzy; its sounds are deep and simple; and it stays subtle. You’re met with nine figures in red. The only thing that’s clear about them is their masks, and as a new player, it’s left entirely to your imagination what these characters will look like later on or what purpose they’ll serve within the game. The backdrop is a train station, and while it’s simple, it’s also so well represented that it makes these characters pop out so much more. This title screen is stylish and subtle; it knows what it’s doing, and it doesn’t need a lot of spectacle to get a message across.

Persona 5 also sports an excellent intro, which is only there to introduce some very surface-level information about these characters and show you what this game’s art style is about. The animation purposefully picks some very specific coloring, making some things pop more than others, and displaying these characters in an elegant, almost theatrical approach. Want to find out more? Play the game yourself. And every time you pass by that intro, you’re going to be thinking about the next party member, what they’ll be like, and what they’ll bring to the plot.

Persona 5 Royal takes a different approach, not only in its menu but also in its intro. “Colors Flying High” is fine on its own; it’s not a particularly good song, nor is it all that bad. It’s hard to match the energy and style of the original, and besides, Persona 4 Golden hadn’t really hit the same heights as its predecessor either. However, what’s really an issue is the opening animation itself, which not only has embarrassingly bad animation (compared to the original), but also (hilariously so) makes it its sworn duty to show you Ann’s ass as one of the first scenes, reinforcing one of the biggest disservices Persona 5 ever did to its characters. The rest of the intro is so forgettable that I had to watch it at least three times to even write this, and it loses direction once they just start... smashing shit? In their new winter outfits, no less, for some reason beyond me. It’s loud, flashy, and lacks direction.

Persona 5 Royal’s menu is another massive miss on my end. The secluded and mysterious subway station has been replaced with the bustling streets of Shibuya; our red figures now wear their whole ass outfits; and the music replacing “Phantom” is “Royal Days," a higher-pitched, more vivacious track. This track, just like the majority of the new additional OSTs, while fine on their own, always left me with the impression that they tried too hard. This doesn’t ease you into its aesthetic; it doesn’t leave you guessing either. This title screen and intro flaunt themselves so clumsily that they fall flat almost immediately. There’s an insurmountable lack of class and elegance, stuff that Persona 5 held. We’re talking about phantom thieves here, and the word “phantom” should be reflected in what I’m seeing pretty accurately; they lay low, they’re underground, there’s no need for this level of spectacle. They were in a subway station for a reason; they didn’t wear their Metaverse outfits for a reason.

P5R plays mostly the same as its original; very little is altered aside from gameplay, for better and for worse. The 3D models are still just as hideous as ever, with Kasumi and Maruki obviously being better made than the rest of the cast. Some of the errors in the English localization weren’t even addressed, and the new text options leave much to be desired. The Italian localization, for instance, bases itself off of the English script, and this is probably true for the rest of the other languages, and excuse me for not trusting the same localization team that gave us “This isn’t small potatoes.” and “Prosecutor turned lawyer.”. I don’t have to explain what losing things in translation is, but it happens quite often in Italian, with a fair share of horrendous misspellings too. I know Persona 5 has tons of text, but this isn’t and should never be an excuse for poor quality.

On the topic of plot, P5R disappoints me so greatly that it’s clear why it’s so engraved in my memory as one of the most saddening experiences I’ve had in gaming. To keep this as spoiler-free as I can, I’m going to speak vaguely but also very angrily.
A narrative that has nothing to do with the original premise of the game forgets to even make itself gray enough to give you a choice, and that is so deathly afraid of doing so that it forces you to make the “right” decision by offering you insanely high stakes. Bad ending content was cut, further showing just how incompetently the consequences of this ending were handled and how pointless the entire dilemma ends up being. Kasumi is a scapegoat for the plot, waifubait, and an overall bleak and uninteresting character.

Atlus and its formula of re-releases encourage a lazy, unhealthy, and deceitful practice of game development. Why buy this game when you can wait three years and play an “objectively” better version of it? The implication that the devs didn’t do their best this time, but they might later, or that they might get their grubby hands on something that was already flawed and glue shit on top, is simply disheartening.

Takes upon the original's less detailed sections and greatly improves them, while also incorporating the rest of the compilation in a (MOSTLY) organic manner.

However, I don't quite appreciate:
- Dead gacha references, even when they're somewhat contextualized.
- Mandatory minigames that suck ass.
- THE PROTORELICS.
- An overall anticlimactic and extremely unclear ending, past the simple cliffhanger.

Toshihiro Nagoshi inventing minigames was a blessing and a curse.

Re-log of this game, updated with some additional thoughts.

Although the pacing is, by far, the worst part of this game, I sincerely hope they'll keep going down this path in some way. Going at a new genre for the first time isn't easy, but I always encourage long-standing series to branch out and try new styles, and this is the way to go.

Just, for the love of god, better pacing next time.