You now live with surly ladies-man and coffee shop owner Sojiro, who misses no opportunity to berate and threaten you with eviction and only lets you live above the coffee shop in a garbage filled attic (for most of the first five hours, all I anxiously wanted to do was tidy that room!). In Persona 5 you play as Joker, a high school delinquent who has been relocated to Tokyo after getting in trouble trying to save a woman’s life. The narratives are where the games have always shone, and though this one is familiar, it’s still wholly its own beast. School life simulators must have been on trend. The closest western equivalent I can think of is Bully, back on PS2, which incidentally came out within months of Persona 3. The conjunction of these two genres makes Persona somewhat unique and has proved to be a winning formula.
The other half of the game is spent in a kind of fantasy netherworld unreality called The Metaverse a dungeon crawler with hundreds of hours of turn-based combat and exploration, leading to bosses and ultimately advancing the story. You also need to clean your room, enhance stat points by reading books or watching your character watch DVDs, navigate the Tokyo underground, and manage your time very efficiently.
Half the game is set in the real world you are a high school student in Japan, and you need to go to school, get a part-time job, study for tests and learn social skills in order to make friends or start romantic relationships. So, for people like me who missed it the first time around, or the uninitiated, the Persona games (ever since 3) are a strange mashup of two of Japan’s favourite genres the fantasy RPG and the social simulator. This is a pimped-out all-guns-blazing stylish re-imagining of a game that was already top of its class. Royal is so much more than a repackaged Game of the Year Edition with bundled DLC, but it’s also a bit less than a rebuilt game from the ground up, like the FF7 Remake, the recent Resident Evils or Shadow of the Colossus. For the last 4 years Atlus have been spending their time honing, refining, slicing away chaff and adding heaps of new content into what has become Persona 5 Royal, a tremendous return to form for a genre that’s spent a decade on life-support. I was so disillusioned by this point I missed it the first time around. And after a hiatus of 8 years Persona 5 crashed onto the scene in 2016 reminding everyone of just how good JPGs can really be. Zelda: Breath of the Wild redefined the open world trope so relied upon by western developers. Thankfully there are one or two games that buck the trend and keep a fan’s hope alive. Masterful immersive titles used to come thick and fast, but in the last decade the genre has floundered against the rocks. At the same time, people like me who had grown up on high quality FFs 7, 8 and 9, Xenogears, Star Ocean Second Story, Suikoden and Chrono Trigger, were expected to stomach fifty awful Kingdom Hearts decimal points that did nothing but leave a bad taste in the mouth (Don’t even get me started on what we eventually got with III).
PERSONA 5 ROYAL DARTS SERIES
The average quality of the JPRG took a nosedive in the mid-2000s – Final Fantasy churned out 12 and 13 and all its terrible sequels (and the less said about 15 the better), Xenosaga started well but lost sales with every instalment until it was cancelled, the Tales series died after Symphonia and still trades on the strength of Vesperia, only viewed as great in the dearth of other quality titles. Since then that side of the genre has taken over with franchises like Fallout, Dragon Age, Mass Effect and Elder Scrolls commanding the console market for whole generations. I had little exposure to any western ones during the nineties, and only really started to take notice of them in the early 2000s. Persona 5 Royal, the Finger Guns Review.Īs a teenager I was obsessed by JPRGs, or as we referred to them at the time, RPGs. It's not perfect, but if you like RPGs, anime, engrossing narratives, or just a second life to live you owe it to yourself not to miss this.
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