Persona 5 Royal – 44 hours in, tons of fun! (mid-game spoilers)

Just learned how to transfer Switch screenshots without taking the SD card out, so I can go crazy now!

I’d forgotten how much fun it can be to play a JRPG with an actual start and finish. Persona 5 Royal‘s story is still immature, bordering on the ridiculous, but I keep reminding myself that they’re just kids and then it becomes slightly bearable.

For example even a toddler knows better than to get into a stranger’s car, but nooo, a supposedly smart honor student just runs up to gangsters and demands to be taken to their boss. Doesn’t tell anyone where she’s going or who she’s going to see, just runs into an alley with people who are known to be pimps, drug dealers and extortionists. Normally this would be a good way to end up trafficked or in a shallow grave somewhere, but this is a video game so everything works out just great in the end.

I guess she would make decent fertilizer…

But she’s just a kid. If anything, it’s sheltered people who have grown up without danger who tend to be most vulnerable to doing dumb stuff, because they lack the street smarts, and everything has always gone their way all their lives so they don’t have any real concept of danger. …Actually, I just remembered some of ill-advised stuff I did when I was even older than her, so I can’t talk too much.

Current stage: For anyone who’s played it before, I’m currently playing the summer holidays in August. Just finished the tomb dungeon, now waiting for Futaba to take her sweet, sweet time waking up. Right now I’m in Mementos finishing up some quests so I can continue the Death social link, plus doing some other requests as well.

I would enjoy Mementos even more if I were free to go to a much greater depth, like in that dungeon in Stella Deus, for example. Having progress tied to my story progression means the enemies in any area I’m allowed to access are way too weak to make the dungeon interesting, so I don’t usually bother with Mementos. It wasn’t so bad in Persona 3 and 4 because progressing in the dungeon was the story, but here you have the Palace and then you have Mementos as its own thing, and the latter doesn’t really work for me.

That would be the smart thing to do, but I already told you this game doesn’t run on common sense.

Apart from that, I’m having a lot of fun focusing more on the visual novel aspects than the dungeons. Also constantly feeling like “Dammit Morgana, you’re not my mom! Let me go out at night!” I wish he wasn’t so cute so I could hate him more. I finish all the Palaces in two sessions if possible – one for reaching the treasure and the other for the boss fight, unless the game requires me to leave and return for some reason. That leaves more time for hanging out with “confidants,” which is what I play Persona for anyway. It would totally be a Majin-like if the dungeons weren’t so long.

Favorite social link so far: Sojiro Sakura, the old guy I live with. I like how he went from curt and brusque to “You ain’t half-bad, kid.” Like, it was clear he had a heart of gold because he wouldn’t have taken Joker in otherwise, but it’s still nice to see him soften up like that.

I also like Kawakami’s link because of the mind-boggling stupidity of taking a job like that in the same town as your students and their families. The other teachers seem more or less normal, but between her poor decision-making and her horrible attitude to Joker at first, Ms. Kawakami deserves to lose her license. Who am I kidding though, bad teachers keep teaching forever. At best they just get transferred elsewhere.

There’s no “Queen Salome” in the Bible, ma’am. You’re confusing the one who supposedly did exist (but is not mentioned in the Bible) with the femme fatale who was not a queen. And if anything it’s her mother who was the femme fatale.

Least favorite links: Not exactly a link but any situation where all of the Phantom Thieves are together in the real world, because they just won’t stop talking about their activities in very public places, e.g. Ryuji talking about their activities in a very crowded convenience store. Since they had the common sense to use pseudonymns in the Palaces, why not give it a boring nickname like the “Research Club” so they can talk about it all they want? Or does that make too much sense?

For actual confidants, it kind of bugs me that no one noticed that Akechi could hear Morgana, so I feel a bit irritated every time I see him. He’s also a smug little rotter, isn’t he? I can’t wait for the inevitable boss fight so I can punch his face in. The reporter lady Ichiko Ohya is also annoying and pretty useless so far. I don’t care what happened with your partner, stop making a teenager meet you in a bar at night!

What’s next: More Persona 5 Royal! When I get the time, that is, because there’s an Overlord collab coming up in Epic Seven. I’m not a super big fan of Overlord, it’s just aight, but I’ve gotta have those collab units, and I need to grind lots and lots for the epic gear crafting events, plus refresh the shop tons to get more of Albedo and Shalltear’s artifacts. That’s another advantage (and also disadvantage) of regular JRPGs: there’s no FOMO so I can take my sweet time coming back to it. But I really am enjoying P5R, so I’m sure it won’t be too long before I’m back in the saddle. See you then!

15 hours into Persona 5 Royal – Really feeling my age (spoilers)

15 hours of gameplay should be enough for an initial post. Though it’s more like 5 hours of the dungeon and 10 hours of visual novel hijinks, but the dungeon was really boring so I’m cool not having too much of it. I’ve finished the first, overly-long Kamoshida arc, now I’m into the second, also sure to be over-long Madarame saga.

Along the way I’ve had to remind myself over and over again that the protagonists are just kids. They’re just kids. They’re just kids. If I don’t keep repeating that to myself, it will be just too frustrating because there’s a lot of things I just wouldn’t do if I were in their position – at my age right now. As a dumb 17 year-old, yeah, it sounds about right, but as a [ahem! ahem!] year-old, I’m more into “keeping my head down and getting on with my life” no matter where I go.

1) I wouldn’t get involved with any of this Kamoshida business to begin with. I already got into trouble once for meddling. I’d just serve my time quietly for a year and skedaddle. Especially the moment I was told the Principal, teachers and parents were all aware and kept their mouths shut for the sake of results, that would have been my cue to butt out and stay out. Those days of joining an organization and immediately trying to reform their culture are well over [ahem ahem!] years behind me.

2) I definitely wouldn’t hang out with that Ryuji kid. He’s an idiot. Always running about, mouthing off with to the wrong people, taking decisions for me, making uncontrolled outbursts left and right with all the discretion and common sense of a monkey at the zoo… I think he was supposed to be the “lovable idiot” type but they forgot the “lovable” part. In fact, as a general principle it’s best to avoid the kind of loser who latches on to newbies in organizations and is full of complaints about this and that. Eventually you’ll find out why they are shunned by their peers, hopefully before you burn too many bridges.

3) Once the whole Kamoshida saga was over, that would have been the end of my adventures as a “Phantom Thief.” If Mishima wants to create his little website, that’s his problem. If Ryuji wants people to know we’re real (why???), that’s his problem as well. I’ll deny everything to the end. I mean for story reasons we have to keep doing this whole thief and Palace thing, so I’m just talking in hypotheticals here. This whole thing is just too shady, better to read some books, watch some DVDs, and chill in the coffee shop until the school year ends than risk my life and reputation for stuff that doesn’t concern me.

4) No way in hell am I going to out of my way to save a creep that tried to blackmail a girl into posing nude for him. Being an abused orphan does not give you the right to become a lech. That’s criminal. Any sympathy I had for him went out of the window like whooosh. In fact, I wouldn’t talk to a stalker like that to begin with, or go to his art exhibition, or go to his house… And since I’m looking for dirt on Madarame, I would certainly have an audio recording going so I could capture both his confession of Madarame’s plagiarism and his threats. These Phantom Thieves are just too naive. They’re just kids… they’re just kids…

Actually the far more bizarre detail is how no one has realized over all these years that Madarame’s works are all drawn by different people. An artist can’t get that famous without his works being studied over and over again by art experts, who would spot the differences in style from all kinds of things like the depth of the brush strokes and what have you (I’m not an art critic but it sounds plausible, right?). He miiight have gotten away with it for one apprentice with a very similar style, but dozens of apprentices over the years? How stupid is the art world in this game anyway?

Honestly it’s only a matter of time before Madarame comes crashing down in a blaze of common sense, so I would just give Nakanohara the reporter’s number and stay well out of it.

But no, Persona 5 Royal doesn’t work by common sense, so I’ve been tossed into the second Palace in this game to take down Madarame because otherwise Ann will have to pose nude? Except she really won’t because she really never has to talk to that guy again? His threat to call the police is an empty one when it’s your word against his, and seriously, you can just talk to the shady counselor at school to get things sorted out. Shujin Academy is in a bad place right now and the last thing they need is more publicity. They’ll definitely help us make this thing go away… and there I go thinking like a rational adult again.

Okay, back to the game. The stealth mechanic isn’t as annoying as I’d thought it would be, and I’m happy to finally get to collect Personas again. Time to steal some treasure!

What I’m playing lately (March 2024)

I’m pretty busy, but if I can squeeze some gacha games into the day, then I can squeeze proper games in as well. Here’s a few things I’ve been trying lately.

Epic Seven & Love Nikki: Go without saying, but I just put them up here to proclaim my continued love. Love Nikki is the same as usual, though I’m happy with more frequent housing pavilions. Epic Seven is going great too. I was able to finish the Hell difficulty in the last Advent event, even though I could barely finish the first stage the last time it ran.

Now if only I had the charms to level up gear. I have some promising-looking gear, and plenty of Wyvern and Banshee materials to craft with, plenty of cores and those blue conversion gear boxes. But the charms and powder… where are the charms and powder to level the gear up?! Moreover, I keep getting very good characters: in March alone I’ve pulled Navy Captain Landy, Beehoo, Death Dealer Ray, Urban Shadow Choux, and just now, Solitaria of the Snow, but the gear… Just Epic Seven doing Epic Seven things.

Ring Fit Adventure: “Middle-age spread” is real, let’s just leave it at that.😅 I mentioned in this year’s resolutions that I wanted to work on my health this year, and I recently started Ring Fit Adventure to help shore up my flagging stamina (and flabby… everywhere else). It’s only been two weeks, so there hasn’t been much change, but I do feel like the exercises are slowly getting easier. The ring con works really well, and the mini-games are fun. It’s a game I intend to stick with for the long term, so I’ll write a proper review one of these days.

Atelier Lulua: Mentioned that I accidentally started this recently. I haven’t played any more beyond the initial session, and I think I’ll bench it for a bit in favor of the game below:

Persona 5 Royal: Two hours and twenty minutes in, and I’m somewhat enjoying it, somewhat frustrated. I named my main character “Useless Showoff,” which says a lot about my very early feelings, but I’m really looking forward to getting more personae, and doing social links/confidant thingies. I wish they had lead off with a different story instead of Kamoshida though. He’s so gross and it’s taking so long -___-. Another game I plan to stick with, so I’ll write more later.

Unicorn Overlord demo: I heard it was like “real-time Fire Emblem” and also reminiscent of FFXIII Revenant Wings, which I dutifully played but didn’t really like. I don’t play many SRPGs lately, but the screenshots and descriptions piqued my interest and I tried a little. More than anything else, the fact that there’s a “Story” mode with very easy battles is super appealing to me. Everything else, I’m on the fence about. The text is really small and there’s just so much of it. I couldn’t follow all the instructions and battle mechanics without squinting, and eventually I just gave up.

Also… Prince Alain and his troops are kind of dumb. There’s like four of them against an enemy that controls the whole continent, but they just waltz into town without a care or a disguise. It’s going to be one of “those” games again, isn’t it? You know, where the heroes keep doing stupid things but it works out because they’re the good guys (*ahem* Xenoblade Chronicles 2 *ahem* any Tales game *ahem*)? Anyway, I liked the little I played of the demo, but the eye strain was too much, so I’ll have to continue it later when I’m better rested and also have the leisure to play on the TV. More complete comments when I’m done trying the full demo. Not any time soon, though, ‘cos P5R comes first.

Voxelgram: Just about 5 puzzles left to finish this game. I wish they would release a DLC or something. After that comes Murder by Numbers when I need a puzzle game. It’s about time Picross S10 came out already.

What else am I playing… can’t remember anything else for now. Anyway, I’m pretty busy these days but I’m working on some stuff here and there, so I have more to write in the near future. See you then!

Finished Shin Megami Tensei V after 72 hours. It was kind of fun, actually

shin megami tensei v nahobino in battle

Fun, but not memorable. I would have passed it by without a final word if I hadn’t heard recently that Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance was coming out. I thought it would be a spin-off like SMTIV: Apocalypse, but no, they just added more content and re-released it. Which is like RRGGGH, I just bought this thing and now there’s a better one out already, grr. This usually doesn’t happen to me, because my laziness and large backlog means I take ages to buy a game in the first place, but publishers are re-releasting and remaking anything and everything these days, so it was inevitable that something like this would occur.

That said, it’s just a minor annoyance but hardly the end of the world. Of course I’d want to get the best bang for my buck when I buy a game, but once I play something, that’s the definitive version of the game as far as I’m concerned. For example, I hear there’s Persona 3 Reloaded coming out soon, but in my opinion, there were no other Persona 3s after Persona 3 FES. FF7 Remake part 2 came out, but I have FF7 at home in my Playstation X, so we’re cool.

Back to the topic of Shin Megami Tensei V. I think I explained my thoughts about it quite thoroughly in earlier posts, so today I will just do a quick summary of the pros and cons, say something about the story and the ending I got and call it a day.

PROS

Collecting and fusing demons, like I said already. You won’t find me playing a lot of (or, indeed, any) Pokémon on this blog because I have Pokémon at home in the form of the Shin Megami Tensei and Persona series. That’s not to say I dislike Pokémon, but after playing one or two of them, I’ve had enough. And I honestly feel like I’ve had enough of SMT as well after this mediocre offering, but we’ll see how I feel if/when SMT VI comes out.

Demon menu SMT V

I dared to risk a screenshot

Not having any party members. Technically the demons you summon are your party members, but you know what I mean. So many JRPGs with whiny party members with long tedious backstories and trauma to overcome, so you have to sit through a lot of talking and arguments etc etc blah blah, I’m getting too old for that stuff. When it works, it works great. When it doesn’t work, I want to rip my hair out.

You can simply choose the route you want to be on. No need to play three times for separate routes, though you will be penalized if your past behavior doesn’t align with your final route. That’s pretty handy.

Decent number of sidequests. I like sidequests, especially when they’re not too tedious. I could have used another 100 of, especially of the “kill this monster” type, but I was satisfied with what I got.

CONS

Horrible map so I kept getting lost. Again I complained about this already so I won’t start.

Soundtrack was crap. I had a lot of work recently, so I was listening to game soundtracks to pass the time, and I couldn’t make it through more than a few tracks of SMT V‘s. It was just noise.

Slow start with wasted hours in the beginning. I started a New Game+ out of inertia but was so annoyed by the memory that I quit.

The other characters were either annoying or hardly present. You barely know them anyway, so you don’t feel anything about all the pathos they’re going through. Like whatever, can you send me to a new area so I can catch new demons now? Dishonorable mention goes to the whole school arc which was just an excuse to kill some girl whose name I’ve forgotten. What was the point of that arc anyway? In the end everybody died. If they had asked me nicely, I would have offed them all in five minutes so we could get back to the real action.

Story and Neutral ending

Um, I already forgot most of it. Something about the “God” of the Bible actually usurped a world throne somewhere and declared himself God? Where did the throne even come from… anyway, Satan wasn’t really bad but they were all demons or whatever and “God” kicked them all out or whatever. But later Lucifer killed him??? But didn’t take over the throne himself??? So it’s open to whoever, and at some point Tokyo was destroyed by demons and replaced by God… I AM SO LOST.

IIRC the Law route has the angels pretending Lucifer didn’t kill God and… umm, IDK. I didn’t do that route. The Chaos route was all about saving Tokyo. IIRC one of my classmates and the president of Japan want to take over the world’s throne so they can restore Japan. In fact, not even Japan, but Tokyo. That one flew clear over my head because it was so “Tokyo, Tokyo, Tokyo,” like “Screw anyone who’s not from Tokyo,” right? It would be too reasonable if they wanted to save the whole world while they were at it, so Atlus made sure to exclude 99.9% of the world from their grand plan.

So, the Neutral route… and the Neutral ending I got… Nope, barely remember a thing either. IIRC I had to fight both the Law and Chaos representatives, who had turned into demons because why not. Then instead of assuming the throne and shaping the world, I chose to destroy it. Which, apparently, changed very little. Demons still kept attacking Tokyo, and angels and demons kept fighting for lack of anything better to do, and I’m just up in some ethereal plane watching them. Yeah, aight, whatevs.

Presumably, the true ending to everything will be revealed by beating the True Neutral route on New Game Plus (or your first playthrough if you can be bothered to grind to level 94 and beat the secret boss). I don’t even care enough to YouTube it.

TL;DR

I wish I had written this a little earlier when Shin Megami Tensei V was still fresh in my mind. SMT V isn’t particularly memorable, and I kind of want my money back but I’m glad I played it. Despite the lukewarm comments above, I did enjoy roaming around doing my own thing for the most part. If I weren’t so lazy, I would look into more Last Ranker-style games where you don’t have to deal with party members at all, not even demons or created ones.

Currently playing: Epic Seven and Love Nikki, my surviving gacha games. On the Switch I’m playing a puzzle game called Voxelgram. I’m almost done with all the puzzles, then I’ll either play Oninaki or start Persona 5 Royal. On the PC I accidentally re-started Atelier Lulua the other day. No time for any console games this week though, too much work to do. Long live gacha games!

Done with Romancing Saga Re;Universe for now

Just completed a 130-day login streak, where I got down and dirty with Romancing Saga Re;Universe and explored all its nooks and crannies, doing all the story chapters and events that later went away in the 3.0 overhaul, doing plenty of Spiral Corridor (180) and Remembrance Battles as well as catching up to the latest story.

My initial thoughts about Romancing Saga Re;Universe are captured in this post I wrote years ago, trying to talk myself out of playing it. It worked for a while, but eventually the other stingy gacha games wore me down and I fled for comfort to the arms of RSRU. It’s not as ridiculously generous all the time once you run out of welcoming bonuses and the like, but it is still far better than most other games I’ve played, both in terms of gem income and in terms of regular giveaways. There’s always something being given away for free, sometimes useless stamina but often gems, tickets, characters, even excellent SSS weapons. For the freebies alone, I’d rate this game 1000/10.

The reason I dropped it is because of the gameplay loop. Or lack thereof. You get the latest characters, grind them up, use them for some content, newer and better characters come out, newer and harder content comes out, repeat the process endlessly. It’s fun to get shiny new characters, and the high gem income in the game makes it possible for even F2P players to get the majority of powerful characters. Equipment is not gated by gacha or even by hard content, so you can get the best weapons, armors, accessories etc. without breaking a sweat.

It’s just… it gets tiring after a while. Get characters, use characters, get more, use more. And the constant powercreep gets me down. The Orlette I pulled when I first returned was recently powercrept by an even better Orlette, same for the Esper Girl I got, and I know it will happen to all my other characters sooner or later. So on one hand I like getting new characters with flashy and powerful new moves, but on the other hand there’s a very “Why do I even bother” feel about the whole affair.

In a very recent update (February 2024), Romancing Saga Re;Universe finally did the sensible thing and gave us offline farming, a.k.a. “Memory Rematch.” The game records the skills you use in a match and the time it took to clear it, then reruns it for up to 24 hours in the background. No more leaving your phone on charge overnight or getting a second phone just to grind stats forever. It was a much-needed and very welcome addition to the game, but ironically it also made it much easier for me to drop the game.

The first reason is that RSRU became a pure idle game where you just log in once or twice a day, check your stat growths, queue up more matches and dip. That isn’t my idea of a “game,” or at least not one I want to stick with for any length of time. It’s very easy to forget to even load the game once a day, and I haven’t missed it since I uninstalled it yesterday.

The second, bigger reason is that it will make it very easy for me to jump back into the game whenever I’m ready to. I was reluctant to drop it at first because I was thinking of all the hours I would have spend grinding up the latest styles when I returned, but this Memory Rematch system takes all the pain out of it. I even saved enough gems for a pity so I can get whoever the latest and hottest style is if/when I jump back into the game.

When will that be? Honestly, not any time soon. It really isn’t much of a “game,” much as I enjoy the bright, happy colours, the killer soundtracks and the bountiful freebies. However, thanks to it my interest in the SaGa games has been revived, so I’m going to work on those for a while, especially Romancing Saga 2 and 3, Scarlet Grace and SaGa Frontier 1 since I already have those. If I miss Romancing Saga Re;Universe after I’m done with all that, then maybe I’ll dive back in again. Until then, it’s goodbye to this game.