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.

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.

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.

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!