• Hey everyone, staff have documented a list of banned content and subject matter that we feel are not consistent with site values, and don't make sense to host discussion of on Famiboards. This list (and the relevant reasoning per item) is viewable here.
  • Do you have audio editing experience and want to help out with the Famiboards Discussion Club Podcast? If so, we're looking for help and would love to have you on the team! Just let us know in the Podcast Thread if you are interested!

StarTopic Persona 5 Royal |ST| It's Time to Unveil the Hype You've Been Waiting For

Is this your first time playing Persona 5?

  • This will be my first time playing Persona 5 in any form

    Votes: 62 36.7%

  • First time playing Royal, I have played the original Persona 5

    Votes: 46 27.2%

  • This is the first time I have played ANY mainline Persona game

    Votes: 36 21.3%

  • I have played Persona 5 and Royal before, I am replaying it on Switch

    Votes: 25 14.8%
  • Total voters
    169
Played and beat the original Persona 5 and thought it was pretty much a waste of my time after a very strong start. Had it been 40 hours I would probably have enjoyed it very much.

So I see this in the OP "it addresses a lot of the infamous pacing issues the original Persona 5 had" - and I'm curious how? It appears Mementos is still there - which was the worst part of the base game, and represented filler that had no business being in a game that was already so overlong. How can an extra 30/35 hours improve the pacing with stuff like that still there?

Also, all of the 30 hours of new Royal content being locked behind true ending requirements is such bullshit that I can't actually believe they could get away with it. Imagine playing for 80 hours and being locked out - this WILL happen to some people. It's crazy.

One thing is for sure, though - it is a high, high quality piece of software, so if it's your thing you'll enjoy it. The music and UI design are almost worth the price of admission alone.
 
I'm sorry Mario + Rabbids, I just started the game but my excitement got the hold of me and I started P5R.

I honestly can't believe it, I'm actually playing this game lol.

So far, the vibes, music and VA is really top notch.
 
0
Decided to go with the Switch version in the end.

Pro tip, not sure if it has been mentioned yet, but disable the camera shake setting in the options. It makes the backgrounds stay static and you don't see all those crazy edge artifacts shimmering all over the screen. It definitely makes it way easier on the eyes.
 
Heron said:
So I see this in the OP "it addresses a lot of the infamous pacing issues the original Persona 5 had" - and I'm curious how? It appears Mementos is still there - which was the worst part of the base game, and represented filler that had no business being in a game that was already so overlong. How can an extra 30/35 hours improve the pacing with stuff like that still there?
Click to expand...
Honestly, the pacing is still bad IMO. But it also didn’t kill the experience for me, and once you get into a flow and can keep the momentum going it’s not terrible. The low point is probably around the 5th palace and if you can make it that far it’s smooth sailing to the end (as long as you have been keeping up with Mementos, of course).

Mementos isn’t fun to explore and the game is extremely long, but there are abilities that let you do things like hold R2 and run into an enemy in a palace or Mementos to insta kill them and get EXP / money which removes at least some of the grind. There’s also a new character, Jose, and you can collect things for him in Mementos that then allow you to slightly alter the rewards over time.

If Mementos was a problem that ruined the game for you then no, this version won’t fix it. It just makes it slightly less of a pain.
 
Belinda Blumenthal said:
Honestly, the pacing is still bad IMO. But it also didn’t kill the experience for me, and once you get into a flow and can keep the momentum going it’s not terrible. The low point is probably around the 5th palace and if you can make it that far it’s smooth sailing to the end (as long as you have been keeping up with Mementos, of course).

Mementos isn’t fun to explore and the game is extremely long, but there are abilities that let you do things like hold R2 and run into an enemy in a palace or Mementos to insta kill them and get EXP / money which removes at least some of the grind.

If Mementos was a problem that ruined the game for you then no, this version won’t fix it. It just makes it slightly less of a pain.
Click to expand...
Heron said:
Played and beat the original Persona 5 and thought it was pretty much a waste of my time after a very strong start. Had it been 40 hours I would probably have enjoyed it very much.

So I see this in the OP "it addresses a lot of the infamous pacing issues the original Persona 5 had" - and I'm curious how? It appears Mementos is still there - which was the worst part of the base game, and represented filler that had no business being in a game that was already so overlong. How can an extra 30/35 hours improve the pacing with stuff like that still there?

Also, all of the 30 hours of new Royal content being locked behind true ending requirements is such bullshit that I can't actually believe they could get away with it. Imagine playing for 80 hours and being locked out - this WILL happen to some people. It's crazy.

One thing is for sure, though - it is a high, high quality piece of software, so if it's your thing you'll enjoy it. The music and UI design are almost worth the price of admission alone.
Click to expand...
The pacing isn't fixed in terms of changing the pace at which the plot happens - that's the same. But a lot of small things here and there have been streamlined to be easier and less... friction-y; they added more to do and mess with in Mementos (plus changing up the music and colors and such by sections, which helps a lot), etc. Honestly, they mostly ADDED things to the game, not removed them (there's tons more to do especially once you get into the game a bit more), but the old things are faster and quicker for the most part to make up for it. They also removed a lot of the "you're required to go to bed and not do anything tonight" parts, which was one of the most common complaints to the original.

But if your main issue was that the main plot doesn't happen fast enough and there's too much downtime/time to do your own thing, or there's some filler-y sections, this version probably isn't going to fix those complaints. The game is designed kind of like an anime series (a slow build up of the main plot over a series of episodes, some of which will be more important ot the plot than others!), so it's meant to be played over a very long period of time and really bask in the atmosphere and, well, take your time!
 
Maybe it’s just a personal preference, but I’ve never had issues with the pacing. I love slow burn games that let me get invested in the world, and Persona 5 is one of the best in that regard.
 
Last edited:
Thunder84 said:
Maybe it’s just a personal preference, but I’ve never had issues with the pacing. I love slow burn beamed that let me get invested in the world, and Persona 5 is one of the best in that regard.
Click to expand...
I didn’t mind the slow rollout of the plot, for the reasons mentioned above your post by SammyJ9. But I think Mementos is just a drag, especially given the palaces themselves aren’t short. Feels like if you added Persona 3’s Tartarus to Persona 4, but left in Persona 4’s existing dungeons… just too much imo. The changes to Mementos in Royal while welcome kind of just tart up what is still a slog imo.
 
Belinda Blumenthal said:
I didn’t mind the slow rollout of the plot, for the reasons mentioned above your post by SammyJ9. But I think Mementos is just a drag, especially given the palaces themselves aren’t short. Feels like if you added Persona 3’s Tartarus to Persona 4, but left in Persona 4’s existing dungeons… just too much imo. The changes to Mementos in Royal while welcome kind of just tart up what is still a slog imo.
Click to expand...
The biggest thing to make that better, IMO, is using Ryuji's insta-kill while driving. Makes it a breeze, but also means you need to be a bit overleveled when you're in there.
 
Heron said:
Played and beat the original Persona 5 and thought it was pretty much a waste of my time after a very strong start. Had it been 40 hours I would probably have enjoyed it very much.

So I see this in the OP "it addresses a lot of the infamous pacing issues the original Persona 5 had" - and I'm curious how? It appears Mementos is still there - which was the worst part of the base game, and represented filler that had no business being in a game that was already so overlong. How can an extra 30/35 hours improve the pacing with stuff like that still there?

Also, all of the 30 hours of new Royal content being locked behind true ending requirements is such bullshit that I can't actually believe they could get away with it. Imagine playing for 80 hours and being locked out - this WILL happen to some people. It's crazy.

One thing is for sure, though - it is a high, high quality piece of software, so if it's your thing you'll enjoy it. The music and UI design are almost worth the price of admission alone.
Click to expand...
Others have already answered this question and they've made some great points, but I'll chime in with my two cents anyway.

So for me, pacing isn't a function of story length, it's more a function of story construction. You can absolutely have shorter stories that are terribly paced, and longer ones that are incredibly well paced. Within movies, something like The Godfather Part 2 is impeccably paced, even though it is very literally over 200 minutes long; something like Justice League (the Whedon cut at the very least) is short, and still has shit pacing. Within games, we can see Uncharted 4 or God of War (reasonably short games) have significantly worse pacing than, for example, Ghost of Tsushima or Assassin's Creed II (both much longer games).

By story construction I am referring to narrative progression, repetition, spacing apart of major events, and a proper bell curve intro/build-up/crescendo/payoff/epilogue format. In games, this is further complicated because the interactive portions of the story (the actual game part) are in and of themselves pacing elements, and require specific attention paid to their own pacing as well.

So, with that extremely lengthy preamble out of the way, let me explain how and why I think Royal thoroughly improves the original game's terrible pacing. It's no one big change, it's a butterfly effect of a bunch of smaller changes that come together to have a significant impact on how things go:

  • The first big one is, a lot of the fat is removed in Royal. Yes, it adds about 30 hours of extra content, but the final play time of Royal is only very marginally more than the vanilla game in spite of the massive volume of new content, the reason it achieves this is that it gets rid of a lot of repetition and streamlines a lot of story elements to keep it moving quick (HLTB reports 97 hours for P5, and 103 hours for P5R, to give you hard numbers);
  • The new content that is introduced has a second, extremely significant effect on the story: it actually helps space out a lot of the scenes and dialog in the original game that could feel endlessly repetitive. For instance, in the original game, you could have a 5 minute long conversation with your friends going through something in excruciating detail. When that was finished, you'd get home, and you'd have that exact same conversation, but now it's a group text When that was done, you'd have to go to bed, but before doing that, you and Morgana would recap that same conversation for a third time. And this sort of thing happened in it a lot. Royal spaces out a lot of this repetition. Adding in new scenes with other stuff happening, new characters, new story developments, and just other stuff in between helps space those conversations out, and helps those repeated conversations a) feel more organic and b) less repetitive and less of a waste of time unlike in the original game.
  • A very small thing, but for me this is fairly important, is that the new content that is added actually helps broaden the game's story and character focus a bit. The original game has an almost single minded and dour focus on the exploits of the Phantom Thieves. You get zero downtime from that. You don't get to get away from it at all. No matter where you go or what you do or who you do it with, inevitably it circles back to the main plot line (and as discussed, in turn can lead to a lot of the repetition I discussed in the previous point). This can just add to the overbearing sense of the story, and exacerbate pacing issues. In Royal, there's actually a lot of narrative downtime from the main story's events. You have actual new story content that doesn't tie into the main quest, it's just friends hanging out or doing their thing or whatever, and this sort of thing greatly helps the story feel better paced (this ties into the whole bell curve intro/build-up/crescendo/payoff/epilogue format I mentioned for pacing earlier. Persona 5 vanilla does not allow the story to breathe, it just adds more on top of the already existing stuff until it becomes untenable and starts to buckle under its own weight. P5R gives its story and characters actual breathing room, and that greatly helps the pacing).
  • The last thing I will say with regards to the pacing is that the gameplay changes help with it too. Again, returning to the repetition in the original game, it can often be have conversation -> be forced home-> have group conversation repeating the same points -> be forced into bed -> have that same conversation again. Royal just removes the whole "forcing you" part. You can still do stuff after you get home, you can still go hang out somewhere else after you met your friends, there are new locations, new places, things to do, and just by engaging with all of this content, you sort of... end up pacing the story better yourself, as a player. Simply by actually letting you play the game, the pacing of the story improves. Because right now those repetitive conversations aren't happening one after another (only to be followed by another repetitive series right after), they're being spaced apart by a lot of stuff you chose to and wanted to do, and that helps the pacing feel more engaging (and also personally authored by you as the player).
Okay, so that's the stuff about the pacing, I also want to address your concerns about Mementos, because I feel like that too did see a lot of changes for the better that help it be a better experience in Royal than in the original game. Of course, remember, Mementos is procedurally generated, so if that is at the core of your problems with it, then nothing can really fix that. However, if you don't mind procedurally generated dungeon crawling in principle, and had more issues with the execution with Mementos, then Royal has a spate of fixes that can help:

  • Firstly, most obviously, but also significantly, it gets rid of the audiovisual repetition. Mementos was, what, ~100 floors in the original game, all looked the exact same, all sounded the exact same, the same dreary music playing constantly? Every block of Mementos has its own aesthetic and its own music now.
  • As the player, you are given significantly more to do in Mementos now, which actually lets you engage with it on your terms. You're not just looking to get through the floor now, you are given secondary and tertiary objectives to engage with, doing so can give you rare and useful items, and more importantly, actually lets you alter Mementos itself, in the form of EXP, Item, and Money multipliers (again, letting you tailor it to your preferences at least a little).
  • It's a lot more dynamic now! There are random events that can happen when you enter a new floor - like the whole floor might have a blackout, forcing you to navigate in low visibility, or there may be a lot of rare shadows (to farm EXP and money) or tough shadows, or no shadows, or a lot of rare items. Again, this helps break the dreary monotony of "get into Mementos, get through the floor, get through the next floor, get through the next floor, get to the roadblock, exit" that the original floor had, because Mementos in and of itself just offers a lot more to do now.
In the end, I was someone who was famously mixed on Persona 5 vanilla, I liked it a lot, but I didn't really think it was what it set out to be (or on par with its predecessor). Royal is just such an improvement in every way, it makes the original game feel like a sort of mistakenly-released beta (which I realize can sound absurd and hyperbolic when referring to a game as polished and content packed and well made as the original P5 was, but Royal really is that much better). I wrote a fairly long review when Royal came out detailing all the changes and how they work and how they make it better, if you wish to read it, it's here.
 
Last edited:
Phantom Thief said:
Others have already answered this question and they've made some great points, but I'll chime in with my two cents anyway.

So for me, pacing isn't a function of story length, it's more a function of story construction. You can absolutely have shorter stories that are terribly paced, and longer ones that are incredibly well paced. Within movies, something like The Godfather Part 2 is impeccably paced, even though it is very literally over 200 minutes long; something like Justice League (the Whedon cut at the very least) is short, and still has shit pacing. Within games, we can see Uncharted 4 or God of War (reasonably short games) have significantly worse pacing than, for example, Ghost of Tsushima or Assassin's Creed II (both much longer games).

By story construction I am referring to narrative progression, repetition, spacing apart of major events, and a proper bell curve intro/build-up/crescendo/payoff/epilogue format. In games, this is further complicated because the interactive portions of the story (the actual game part) are in and of themselves pacing elements, and require specific attention paid to their own pacing as well.

So, with that extremely lengthy preamble out of the way, let me explain how and why I think Royal thoroughly improves the original game's terrible pacing. It's no one big change, it's a butterfly effect of a bunch of smaller changes that come together to have a significant impact on how things go:

  • The first big one is, a lot of the fat is removed in Royal. Yes, it adds about 30 hours of extra content, but the final play time of Royal is only very marginally more than the vanilla game in spite of the massive volume of new content, the reason it achieves this is that it gets rid of a lot of repetition and streamlines a lot of story elements to keep it moving quick (HLTB reports 97 hours for P5, and 103 hours for P5R, to give you hard numbers);
  • The new content that is introduced has a second, extremely significant effect on the story: it actually helps space out a lot of the scenes and dialog in the original game that could feel endlessly repetitive. For instance, in the original game, you could have a 5 minute long conversation with your friends going through something in excruciating detail. When that was finished, you'd get home, and you'd have that exact same conversation, but now it's a group text When that was done, you'd have to go to bed, but before doing that, you and Morgana would recap that same conversation for a third time. And this sort of thing happened in it a lot. Royal spaces out a lot of this repetition. Adding in new scenes with other stuff happening, new characters, new story developments, and just other stuff in between helps space those conversations out, and helps those repeated conversations a) feel more organic and b) less repetitive and less of a waste of time unlike in the original game.
  • A very small thing, but for me this is fairly important, is that the new content that is added actually helps broaden the game's story and character focus a bit. The original game has an almost single minded and dour focus on the exploits of the Phantom Thieves. You get zero downtime from that. You don't get to get away from it at all. No matter where you go or what you do or who you do it with, inevitably it circles back to the main plot line (and as discussed, in turn can lead to a lot of the repetition I discussed in the previous point). This can just add to the overbearing sense of the story, and exacerbate pacing issues. In Royal, there's actually a lot of narrative downtime from the main story's events. You have actual new story content that doesn't tie into the main quest, it's just friends hanging out or doing their thing or whatever, and this sort of thing greatly helps the story feel better paced (this ties into the whole bell curve intro/build-up/crescendo/payoff/epilogue format I mentioned for pacing earlier. Persona 5 vanilla does not allow the story to breathe, it just adds more on top of the already existing stuff until it becomes untenable and starts to buckle under its own weight. P5R gives its story and characters actual breathing room, and that greatly helps the pacing).
  • The last thing I will say with regards to the pacing is that the gameplay changes help with it too. Again, returning to the repetition in the original game, it can often be have conversation -> be forced home-> have group conversation repeating the same points -> be forced into bed -> have that same conversation again. Royal just removes the whole "forcing you" part. You can still do stuff after you get home, you can still go hang out somewhere else after you met your friends, there are new locations, new places, things to do, and just by engaging with all of this content, you sort of... end up pacing the story better yourself, as a player. Simply by actually letting you play the game, the pacing of the story improves. Because right now those repetitive conversations aren't happening one after another (only to be followed by another repetitive series right after), they're being spaced apart by a lot of stuff you chose to and wanted to do, and that helps the pacing feel more engaging (and also personally authored by you as the player).
Okay, so that's the stuff about the pacing, I also want to address your concerns about Mementos, because I feel like that too did see a lot of changes for the better that help it be a better experience in Royal than in the original game. Of course, remember, Mementos is procedurally generated, so if that is at the core of your problems with it, then nothing can really fix that. However, if you don't mind procedurally generated dungeon crawling in principle, and had more issues with the execution with Mementos, then Royal has a spate of fixes that can help:

  • Firstly, most obviously, but also significantly, it gets rid of the audiovisual repetition. Mementos was, what, ~100 floors in the original game, all looked the exact same, all sounded the exact same, the same dreary music playing constantly? Every block of Mementos has its own aesthetic and its own music now.
  • As the player, you are given significantly more to do in Mementos now, which actually lets you engage with it on your terms. You're not just looking to get through the floor now, you are given secondary and tertiary objectives to engage with, doing so can give you rare and useful items, and more importantly, actually lets you alter Mementos itself, in the form of EXP, Item, and Money multipliers (again, letting you tailor it to your preferences at least a little).
  • It's a lot more dynamic now! There are random events that can happen when you enter a new floor - like the whole floor might have a blackout, forcing you to navigate in low visibility, or there may be a lot of rare shadows (to farm EXP and money) or tough shadows, or no shadows, or a lot of rare items. Again, this helps break the dreary monotony of "get into Mementos, get through the floor, get through the next floor, get through the next floor, get to the roadblock, exit" that the original floor had, because Mementos in and of itself just offers a lot more to do now.
In the end, I was someone who was famously mixed on Persona 5 vanilla, I liked it a lot, but I didn't really think it was what it set out to be (or on par with its predecessor). Royal is just such an improvement in every way, it makes the original game feel like a sort of mistakenly-released beta (which I realize can sound absurd and hyperbolic when referring to a game as polished and content packed and well made as the original P5 was, but Royal really is that much better). I wrote a fairly long review when Royal came out detailing all the changes and how they work and how they make it better, if you wish to read it, it's here.
Click to expand...
Imo, P5R feels more like a proper follow up to P4G than P5 did
 
MSnap said:
Imo, P5R feels more like a proper follow up to P4G than P5 did
Click to expand...
Agreed! Hell, even how the games handle NG+ sort of tips us off to that haha

At this point vanilla Persona games are pretty concretely flawed experiences that their re-releases clean up for them.
 
Herb Alpert said:
Nope.
It's the steel box with a card board sleeve.
Click to expand...
edamame said:
No, it's just the steelbook case with a sleeve over it.
Click to expand...
emoji-disintergrating.gif
 
I have no shame in admitting that I never believed the mainline Persona games would ever come to a platform outside of Playstation so it's strange to see the icon for P5R on my Switch. The last time I played P5 was on the PS3 and never made it that far since playing RPGs on home consoles is a slog; can't wait to finally dig in like I did with TMS.
 
Weebos said:
I'm going to actually try Merciless this time, though I have heard it's easier in some ways due to the weakness multiplier.
Click to expand...
Merciless makes it so ridiculously easy to steamroll regular enemies that its kinda insane

I did a mix of the two: Hard for general palace exploration, then switched to Merciless for major boss fights, and I thought that worked really well
 
Phantom Thief said:
Others have already answered this question and they've made some great points, but I'll chime in with my two cents anyway.

So for me, pacing isn't a function of story length, it's more a function of story construction. You can absolutely have shorter stories that are terribly paced, and longer ones that are incredibly well paced. Within movies, something like The Godfather Part 2 is impeccably paced, even though it is very literally over 200 minutes long; something like Justice League (the Whedon cut at the very least) is short, and still has shit pacing. Within games, we can see Uncharted 4 or God of War (reasonably short games) have significantly worse pacing than, for example, Ghost of Tsushima or Assassin's Creed II (both much longer games).

By story construction I am referring to narrative progression, repetition, spacing apart of major events, and a proper bell curve intro/build-up/crescendo/payoff/epilogue format. In games, this is further complicated because the interactive portions of the story (the actual game part) are in and of themselves pacing elements, and require specific attention paid to their own pacing as well.

So, with that extremely lengthy preamble out of the way, let me explain how and why I think Royal thoroughly improves the original game's terrible pacing. It's no one big change, it's a butterfly effect of a bunch of smaller changes that come together to have a significant impact on how things go:

  • The first big one is, a lot of the fat is removed in Royal. Yes, it adds about 30 hours of extra content, but the final play time of Royal is only very marginally more than the vanilla game in spite of the massive volume of new content, the reason it achieves this is that it gets rid of a lot of repetition and streamlines a lot of story elements to keep it moving quick (HLTB reports 97 hours for P5, and 103 hours for P5R, to give you hard numbers);
  • The new content that is introduced has a second, extremely significant effect on the story: it actually helps space out a lot of the scenes and dialog in the original game that could feel endlessly repetitive. For instance, in the original game, you could have a 5 minute long conversation with your friends going through something in excruciating detail. When that was finished, you'd get home, and you'd have that exact same conversation, but now it's a group text When that was done, you'd have to go to bed, but before doing that, you and Morgana would recap that same conversation for a third time. And this sort of thing happened in it a lot. Royal spaces out a lot of this repetition. Adding in new scenes with other stuff happening, new characters, new story developments, and just other stuff in between helps space those conversations out, and helps those repeated conversations a) feel more organic and b) less repetitive and less of a waste of time unlike in the original game.
  • A very small thing, but for me this is fairly important, is that the new content that is added actually helps broaden the game's story and character focus a bit. The original game has an almost single minded and dour focus on the exploits of the Phantom Thieves. You get zero downtime from that. You don't get to get away from it at all. No matter where you go or what you do or who you do it with, inevitably it circles back to the main plot line (and as discussed, in turn can lead to a lot of the repetition I discussed in the previous point). This can just add to the overbearing sense of the story, and exacerbate pacing issues. In Royal, there's actually a lot of narrative downtime from the main story's events. You have actual new story content that doesn't tie into the main quest, it's just friends hanging out or doing their thing or whatever, and this sort of thing greatly helps the story feel better paced (this ties into the whole bell curve intro/build-up/crescendo/payoff/epilogue format I mentioned for pacing earlier. Persona 5 vanilla does not allow the story to breathe, it just adds more on top of the already existing stuff until it becomes untenable and starts to buckle under its own weight. P5R gives its story and characters actual breathing room, and that greatly helps the pacing).
  • The last thing I will say with regards to the pacing is that the gameplay changes help with it too. Again, returning to the repetition in the original game, it can often be have conversation -> be forced home-> have group conversation repeating the same points -> be forced into bed -> have that same conversation again. Royal just removes the whole "forcing you" part. You can still do stuff after you get home, you can still go hang out somewhere else after you met your friends, there are new locations, new places, things to do, and just by engaging with all of this content, you sort of... end up pacing the story better yourself, as a player. Simply by actually letting you play the game, the pacing of the story improves. Because right now those repetitive conversations aren't happening one after another (only to be followed by another repetitive series right after), they're being spaced apart by a lot of stuff you chose to and wanted to do, and that helps the pacing feel more engaging (and also personally authored by you as the player).
Okay, so that's the stuff about the pacing, I also want to address your concerns about Mementos, because I feel like that too did see a lot of changes for the better that help it be a better experience in Royal than in the original game. Of course, remember, Mementos is procedurally generated, so if that is at the core of your problems with it, then nothing can really fix that. However, if you don't mind procedurally generated dungeon crawling in principle, and had more issues with the execution with Mementos, then Royal has a spate of fixes that can help:

  • Firstly, most obviously, but also significantly, it gets rid of the audiovisual repetition. Mementos was, what, ~100 floors in the original game, all looked the exact same, all sounded the exact same, the same dreary music playing constantly? Every block of Mementos has its own aesthetic and its own music now.
  • As the player, you are given significantly more to do in Mementos now, which actually lets you engage with it on your terms. You're not just looking to get through the floor now, you are given secondary and tertiary objectives to engage with, doing so can give you rare and useful items, and more importantly, actually lets you alter Mementos itself, in the form of EXP, Item, and Money multipliers (again, letting you tailor it to your preferences at least a little).
  • It's a lot more dynamic now! There are random events that can happen when you enter a new floor - like the whole floor might have a blackout, forcing you to navigate in low visibility, or there may be a lot of rare shadows (to farm EXP and money) or tough shadows, or no shadows, or a lot of rare items. Again, this helps break the dreary monotony of "get into Mementos, get through the floor, get through the next floor, get through the next floor, get to the roadblock, exit" that the original floor had, because Mementos in and of itself just offers a lot more to do now.
In the end, I was someone who was famously mixed on Persona 5 vanilla, I liked it a lot, but I didn't really think it was what it set out to be (or on par with its predecessor). Royal is just such an improvement in every way, it makes the original game feel like a sort of mistakenly-released beta (which I realize can sound absurd and hyperbolic when referring to a game as polished and content packed and well made as the original P5 was, but Royal really is that much better). I wrote a fairly long review when Royal came out detailing all the changes and how they work and how they make it better, if you wish to read it, it's here.
Click to expand...
I just started royal for the first time tonight on Switch, only had time to play an hour or so, but this was good to read and really raises my enthusiasm for the game.

I played vanilla at release back on 2017 and I had a lot of issues with 5 versus 4. The constant railroading me into bed drove me mad, "hey we have to meetup with the gang tomorrow to discuss something after school, time to go to bed early" drove me insane. But more than that the phantom thieves never really gelled for me as being a group like the investigation team did. I'm glad to here that this gets addressed in Royal.
 
Belinda Blumenthal said:
Honestly, the pacing is still bad IMO. But it also didn’t kill the experience for me, and once you get into a flow and can keep the momentum going it’s not terrible. The low point is probably around the 5th palace and if you can make it that far it’s smooth sailing to the end (as long as you have been keeping up with Mementos, of course).

Mementos isn’t fun to explore and the game is extremely long, but there are abilities that let you do things like hold R2 and run into an enemy in a palace or Mementos to insta kill them and get EXP / money which removes at least some of the grind. There’s also a new character, Jose, and you can collect things for him in Mementos that then allow you to slightly alter the rewards over time.

If Mementos was a problem that ruined the game for you then no, this version won’t fix it. It just makes it slightly less of a pain.
Click to expand...
Well, you certainly haven't convinced me with this! But kudos for being honest.

(Not that I was considering a replay / playthrough of Royal, but still.)

SammyJ9 said:
The pacing isn't fixed in terms of changing the pace at which the plot happens - that's the same. But a lot of small things here and there have been streamlined to be easier and less... friction-y; they added more to do and mess with in Mementos (plus changing up the music and colors and such by sections, which helps a lot), etc. Honestly, they mostly ADDED things to the game, not removed them (there's tons more to do especially once you get into the game a bit more), but the old things are faster and quicker for the most part to make up for it. They also removed a lot of the "you're required to go to bed and not do anything tonight" parts, which was one of the most common complaints to the original.

But if your main issue was that the main plot doesn't happen fast enough and there's too much downtime/time to do your own thing, or there's some filler-y sections, this version probably isn't going to fix those complaints. The game is designed kind of like an anime series (a slow build up of the main plot over a series of episodes, some of which will be more important ot the plot than others!), so it's meant to be played over a very long period of time and really bask in the atmosphere and, well, take your time!
Click to expand...
This is a very good point. It's just a personal preference, but I hate episodic storytelling where each episode doesn't tightly align to the end goal. This is why I can't enjoy the Dragon Quest series at all. I've tried many times, I can't stand the way those games approach narrative. I disliked Xenoblade 3's episode-like approach, too (go to colony, meet hero, defeat consul). I don't watch anime, I don't watch episodic TV. It's not my thing.

So yeah, this is a personal preference thing and it can't really be changed. I just wasn't expecting it, going into P5, because I felt like P4 (which I loved) did a good job of having every section pretty tightly focused on the "who is the killer" Scooby Doo aspect of the game.

My other problem was the repetitiveness of the dialogue. Characters repeated themselves all the time, sometimes 4 times in an hour. It felt like the designers were terrified someone would pick the game up not having played in a couple of days and not know what was going on, but if you were powering through it the whole game felt like it desperately needed a dialogue editor.

Phantom Thief said:
Others have already answered this question and they've made some great points, but I'll chime in with my two cents anyway.

So for me, pacing isn't a function of story length, it's more a function of story construction. You can absolutely have shorter stories that are terribly paced, and longer ones that are incredibly well paced. Within movies, something like The Godfather Part 2 is impeccably paced, even though it is very literally over 200 minutes long; something like Justice League (the Whedon cut at the very least) is short, and still has shit pacing. Within games, we can see Uncharted 4 or God of War (reasonably short games) have significantly worse pacing than, for example, Ghost of Tsushima or Assassin's Creed II (both much longer games).

By story construction I am referring to narrative progression, repetition, spacing apart of major events, and a proper bell curve intro/build-up/crescendo/payoff/epilogue format. In games, this is further complicated because the interactive portions of the story (the actual game part) are in and of themselves pacing elements, and require specific attention paid to their own pacing as well.

So, with that extremely lengthy preamble out of the way, let me explain how and why I think Royal thoroughly improves the original game's terrible pacing. It's no one big change, it's a butterfly effect of a bunch of smaller changes that come together to have a significant impact on how things go:

  • The first big one is, a lot of the fat is removed in Royal. Yes, it adds about 30 hours of extra content, but the final play time of Royal is only very marginally more than the vanilla game in spite of the massive volume of new content, the reason it achieves this is that it gets rid of a lot of repetition and streamlines a lot of story elements to keep it moving quick (HLTB reports 97 hours for P5, and 103 hours for P5R, to give you hard numbers);
  • The new content that is introduced has a second, extremely significant effect on the story: it actually helps space out a lot of the scenes and dialog in the original game that could feel endlessly repetitive. For instance, in the original game, you could have a 5 minute long conversation with your friends going through something in excruciating detail. When that was finished, you'd get home, and you'd have that exact same conversation, but now it's a group text When that was done, you'd have to go to bed, but before doing that, you and Morgana would recap that same conversation for a third time. And this sort of thing happened in it a lot. Royal spaces out a lot of this repetition. Adding in new scenes with other stuff happening, new characters, new story developments, and just other stuff in between helps space those conversations out, and helps those repeated conversations a) feel more organic and b) less repetitive and less of a waste of time unlike in the original game.
  • A very small thing, but for me this is fairly important, is that the new content that is added actually helps broaden the game's story and character focus a bit. The original game has an almost single minded and dour focus on the exploits of the Phantom Thieves. You get zero downtime from that. You don't get to get away from it at all. No matter where you go or what you do or who you do it with, inevitably it circles back to the main plot line (and as discussed, in turn can lead to a lot of the repetition I discussed in the previous point). This can just add to the overbearing sense of the story, and exacerbate pacing issues. In Royal, there's actually a lot of narrative downtime from the main story's events. You have actual new story content that doesn't tie into the main quest, it's just friends hanging out or doing their thing or whatever, and this sort of thing greatly helps the story feel better paced (this ties into the whole bell curve intro/build-up/crescendo/payoff/epilogue format I mentioned for pacing earlier. Persona 5 vanilla does not allow the story to breathe, it just adds more on top of the already existing stuff until it becomes untenable and starts to buckle under its own weight. P5R gives its story and characters actual breathing room, and that greatly helps the pacing).
  • The last thing I will say with regards to the pacing is that the gameplay changes help with it too. Again, returning to the repetition in the original game, it can often be have conversation -> be forced home-> have group conversation repeating the same points -> be forced into bed -> have that same conversation again. Royal just removes the whole "forcing you" part. You can still do stuff after you get home, you can still go hang out somewhere else after you met your friends, there are new locations, new places, things to do, and just by engaging with all of this content, you sort of... end up pacing the story better yourself, as a player. Simply by actually letting you play the game, the pacing of the story improves. Because right now those repetitive conversations aren't happening one after another (only to be followed by another repetitive series right after), they're being spaced apart by a lot of stuff you chose to and wanted to do, and that helps the pacing feel more engaging (and also personally authored by you as the player).
Okay, so that's the stuff about the pacing, I also want to address your concerns about Mementos, because I feel like that too did see a lot of changes for the better that help it be a better experience in Royal than in the original game. Of course, remember, Mementos is procedurally generated, so if that is at the core of your problems with it, then nothing can really fix that. However, if you don't mind procedurally generated dungeon crawling in principle, and had more issues with the execution with Mementos, then Royal has a spate of fixes that can help:

  • Firstly, most obviously, but also significantly, it gets rid of the audiovisual repetition. Mementos was, what, ~100 floors in the original game, all looked the exact same, all sounded the exact same, the same dreary music playing constantly? Every block of Mementos has its own aesthetic and its own music now.
  • As the player, you are given significantly more to do in Mementos now, which actually lets you engage with it on your terms. You're not just looking to get through the floor now, you are given secondary and tertiary objectives to engage with, doing so can give you rare and useful items, and more importantly, actually lets you alter Mementos itself, in the form of EXP, Item, and Money multipliers (again, letting you tailor it to your preferences at least a little).
  • It's a lot more dynamic now! There are random events that can happen when you enter a new floor - like the whole floor might have a blackout, forcing you to navigate in low visibility, or there may be a lot of rare shadows (to farm EXP and money) or tough shadows, or no shadows, or a lot of rare items. Again, this helps break the dreary monotony of "get into Mementos, get through the floor, get through the next floor, get through the next floor, get to the roadblock, exit" that the original floor had, because Mementos in and of itself just offers a lot more to do now.
In the end, I was someone who was famously mixed on Persona 5 vanilla, I liked it a lot, but I didn't really think it was what it set out to be (or on par with its predecessor). Royal is just such an improvement in every way, it makes the original game feel like a sort of mistakenly-released beta (which I realize can sound absurd and hyperbolic when referring to a game as polished and content packed and well made as the original P5 was, but Royal really is that much better). I wrote a fairly long review when Royal came out detailing all the changes and how they work and how they make it better, if you wish to read it, it's here.
Click to expand...
Top answer. Really, really good.

I didn't realize that the game wasn't actually 30 hours longer. If they've fit 30 hours of new content into only 6 hours more playtime then the streamlining is obvious.

Glad you mentioned the dialogue repetition as that was one of the biggest problems. Also shows you can be clear-eyed about a game you obviously love.

Despite the enormous amount of group dialogue, the game was TOTALLY missing more downtime / group bonding moments, so that's also a big positive. It felt like everyone had a relationship with Joker, but the group itself didn't have a "vibe" at all.

Sounds like Mementos is hugely improved, but in a game as long as P5 I still don't see how it can be justified as anything other than optional content. As optional content I think it would have been really well received. "Look at all this extra post-game or side quest content". But stuffing it in there doesn't help.

I still wouldn't replay the game, but my curiosity is sated.

Anyway, hope everyone enjoys the game.
 
I just started this and so far, so good. The vibes, music and UI have so much personality, and while I don't feel like I've got into the gameplay loop proper, I'm enjoying it for what it is.

I think my main stumbling block is honestly going to be a length. This isn't a criticism of the game, it's just that I know I bounce off games so easily, and it's realistically not that likely that I will be able to put in 100 hours into a game without my enthusiasm waning. Add to that the fact that God of War and Pokémon both come out very soon, and I just don't have a lot of faith in myself lol

But hey, maybe I'll surprise myself! Maybe when I'm done with Pokémon, I'll want to return to this. This didn't happen with SMT V last year, but that was released much closer to Pokémon, and I think this game is likely to end up being more up my alley anyway. Hell, maybe I'll even finish this and want to go back to SMT V (that's a pipe dream, I still have Nier: Automata and Xenoblade 3 and Triangle Strategy and...)
 
0
I expected it to jump into the top 5 on the eShop charts easily, even over here in Germany. A bit disappointed it's only #26 right now, even if many folks will probably still grab a retail copy instead.
Let's see where it's going to land in the upcoming week. Hoping for the best!
 
Wow, I was expecting the resolution downgrade and I can understand it, but how did they fuck up so much the gamma color? Really, it's all over the place and in general the game is way darker than it should, even if you put the brightness at the max setting in the menu settings the gamma is all over the place and the image is way too contrasted, which implies a lose of detail in many areasa. Really disappointed by that since it's a matter of callibration.
 
Last edited:
zumaddy said:
People who played on other platforms, how much of a downgrade is the Switch version?
Click to expand...
I only played the vanilla version on PS3 and the framerate seems to be a massive improvement. But then again I don't remember playing any PS3 game with a stable framerate.
 
0
Lol I forgot they just dump all the DLC on you in Royal, they should have integrated it a bit more.

At the very least they should have made it so you don't have to click through 20 prompts when picking it up.
 
0
zumaddy said:
People who played on other platforms, how much of a downgrade is the Switch version?
Click to expand...
Barely noticeable imo. I played it in 4K before and the only real difference is some icon changes and a lower resolution. The game’s visual strength was never in its resolution though. It’s still a great looking game.
 
0
While I'd agree with those saying the resolution ain't a big issue handheld, I still notice the softer image and slight shimmering here and there, having played both vanilla and Royal on a PS4 already.
It would be a dream to have this running at 720p on the OLED, because the colours are popping already, stuff looks absolutely great in that regard. The 3D render resolution of 540p is just servicable, tho, in my opinion. Doesn't make the game actively worse or less enjoyable, but would still go a long way to make it look even better!

Really need to stress again just how great the contrast is on the OLED Switch, tho!! Those menues are sooo punchy and crisp. Wow.

Performance has been flawless so far, too. And loading is pretty quick as well! I was surprised. Probably even quicker than on PS4, but I didn't measure. Overall I'm happy from what I've played up to this point. Native res undocked would make this perfect in my book, but otherwise there really isn't anything to complain about in terms of technical aspects from my point of view.
 
0
Imitatio said:
I expected it to jump into the top 5 on the eShop charts easily, even over here in Germany. A bit disappointed it's only #26 right now, even if many folks will probably still grab a retail copy instead.
Let's see where it's going to land in the upcoming week. Hoping for the best!
Click to expand...
It’s #4 in US and #7 in Canada if it helps lol
 
I get the feeling the resolution concession was made to benefit the battery life.
 
0
Great OP @Phantom Thief !

I'm not getting this at launch since I'm busy with Splatoon / Bayonetta right now and Novemeber is looking like more of that with maybe Harvestella. But I'm definitely planning on getting this before end of the year and playing through it next year. I played P5 all the way to the end but never started Royal so this will be my first go at the new content. And then probably get on with Strikers after that.
 
So, I caved really damn fast and bought it yesterday, lmao. Playing this handheld is so great, and I think it's finally been long enough that I can replay it without getting bored.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


Back
Top Bottom