Persona 5

This page is dedicated to Billy Kametz (March 22, 1987 - June 9, 2022).  Persona 5 is the fifth game in the Persona series. It was released in September 15, 2016 in Japan and April 4, 2017 in North America and Europe.

Plot
A High School student must team up with his friends to stop corruption and tyranny in Tokyo. They form a team of phantom thieves called The Phantom Thieves Of Hearts.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Beautiful cel-shaded graphics and art style.
 * 2) Like the previous Persona games, the English dub is still as good as the Japanese original.
 * 3) Great gameplay.
 * 4) Every playable character can now use ranged weapons just like in the first Persona game.
 * 5) Social Links (called Confidants in this game) can give you special abilities that can be very useful, like Hifumi's ability that lets you switch members during a battle.
 * 6) Likable and relatable characters, including Goro Akechi, despite his psychotic breakdown.
 * 7) A very amazing story. Ren Amamiya/Joker, the game's main protagonist, is arrested for a crime he didn't commit and forms a group called The Phantom Thieves with his friends to fight against tyranny.
 * 8) The soundtrack is very stylish as it uses elements of Jazz and Rock and features Lyn Inaizumi as the vocalist.
 * 9) Stylish combat.
 * 10) The game takes on the themes of society since the game is about outcasts fighting against people of power who are abusing their power. For example, Kamoshida (the game's first villain) is a teacher who is found to be abusing his students and sexually harassing his female students. It also deals with personal freedom with regards to society and how society can be both harmful and beneficial to it.
 * 11) Players can use improved stealth to ambush enemies to attack first.
 * 12) The game is much darker and has more mature themes than any other Persona game. The game tackles things like suicide, abuse, sexual harassment, abuse of power, neglect, loss, and more.
 * 13) Large amounts of content and even more in Persona 5 Royal.
 * 14) *They've added brand new characters, Kasumi/Sumire Yoshizawa/Violet, Takuto Maruki, and Jose.
 * 15) *All maxed female Confidants who the protagonist didn't date will give him a chocolate (which gives 100 SP for one ally) they bought on Valentine's Day. This includes Sae, who the protagonist cannot enter a relationship with.
 * 16) *White Day is added a day prior to the protagonist's departure from Tokyo. The protagonist can date a girl with a romance relationship here.
 * 17) *You can now take out selfies and send pictures to your fellow Phantom Thieves.
 * 18) *Futaba Sakura/Oracle, Akechi's Black Mask form, (Who is now only playable in the third semester) and Lavenza now have their own all-out attack portraits.
 * 19) *"Show Time" is the name of the combination attacks between members of the Phantom Thieves. You unlock these special moves called Showtime by deepening the bond between Phantom Thief members.
 * 20) *Seasons are added to the landscape and text messages. For example, cherry blossoms can be seen on the Shujin Academy floor and the messaging app on April.
 * 21) *Royal has a gallery mode called Thieves' Den where one can watch anime scenes (including the original version opening animation) view artwork, watch anime scenes (including the original version opening animation), listen to the soundtracks, take control of any of the Phantom Thieves, check achievement progress, play a card mini-game called the Tycoon and customize the palace.
 * 22) **Even if you accidentally skipped one of the cutscenes, you can still view them in Thieves' Den. The same way for the opening in the original game and cutscenes you weren't able to find in Royal.
 * 23) **Surprisingly, you can actually view the trailers in-game back when Persona 5 was still in development, and the intro of ''Persona 5: The Animation - Daybreak.
 * 24) *Each Personas have added “Traits.” There are all kinds of different Traits, and they can be inherited after fusing.
 * 25) *There are new accessories that add certain skills used in combat. By mixing and matching you can expand on your strategies in battle.
 * 26) *Baton Pass now have ranks. By increasing the rank you can get extra damage, HP recovery, SP recovery, and such. By connecting with each member, the last one gets zero skill cost.
 * 27) *The new Kichijoji area has places where you can enjoy Darts with the members of the Phantom Thieves. By improving your teamwork here you can increase Baton Pass rank.
 * 28) *The in-game calendar displays rain and snow.
 * 29) *A "Daily Assist Command" will be implemented during the daily-life sections of the game, with the intent of helping players navigate the options available to them on a daily basis. Goro Akechi's Confidant is now leveled up by hanging out with him, instead of being automatic and story-based.
 * 30) **The protagonist is required to battle him alone in Mementos to advance it to rank 8.
 * 31) **His confidant ability is Detective's Eyes in which the Phantom Thieves can scan the Shadows' weaknesses during the first attack.
 * 32) *By playing billiards with the Phantom Thieves, you'll deepen the bond between members while also improving on yourself and improve your technical attacks.
 * 33) *The range of customization for the guns carried by the Phantom Thieves has increased. You can increase the accuracy rate of your favorite gun, and even attach effects that inflict the enemy with status ailments. Also, bullets will replenish after battle.
 * 34) *During the night you can visit the Jazz Club to do some late-night bonding. Chances of your teammates getting new skills are also rare.
 * 35) **A collaboration with Darts Lives: Darts Live's latest darts machine, DARTSLIVE3, will be fully reproduced in-game. The protagonist can invite friends after school to play darts. Playing darts with fellow Phantom Thieves will increase their Baton Pass Rank, granting better in-battle benefits, such as an increase to damage and better HP/SP recovery.
 * 36) **The protagonist can play pool. As well as increasing Social Stats, playing pool grants an increased rate of critical hits/downing an enemy.
 * 37) *There are all kinds of other stores to check out, including a Thrift Store where you can trade-in equipment found in the Palace and Mementos for money. You can get various rewards by racking up points from item exchanges.
 * 38) *The grappling hook from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has been added to the palace. With the wire, you can jump from one distant ledge to another, or even use it to latch onto faraway enemies to zoom in and start the battle with the upper hand.
 * 39) **The trophies in Royal will be slightly different than the base game's ones.
 * 40) **The western release of the game will come with both English and Japanese audio options, as well as multiple language text, whereas in the original version the dual audio setting was only available as DLC.
 * 41) ***Merciless difficulty will be present in Royal from the start as well.
 * 42) **The protagonist can buy costumes in Harajuku, which can be worn in Palaces and Mementos, although legacy and crossover costumes still require DLC. The costumes are based on Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight.
 * 43) **There will be new character portraits.
 * 44) **All Phantom Thieves and several Confidants will receive both new midwinter casual clothes and school uniforms.
 * 45) **The improved graphics are now based on Persona 3: Dancing in Moonlight and Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight. The game runs in 60fps with 4K support for PlayStation 4 Pro.
 * 46) **Haru Okumura's existence is foreshadowed earlier in the game. Even on the first day of school.
 * 47) **The Velvet Room can sometimes enter red alert mode and allow the party to fuse stronger Personas with a different move set than usual.
 * 48) **A mode akin to training quests from Shin Megami Tensei IV will appear in-game, allowing the party to battle various Personas in the compendium. Copies of the Persona 3 and Persona 4 protagonists will also be available as DLC boss fights using this mode. Their appearance based from Persona Dancing spin-off games.
 * 49) **Lavenza will be present after the Day of Reckoning, into the events of the new semester. She, like Caroline and Justine, can be fought in Mementos in a New Game Plus playthrough.
 * 50) **Kaneshiro's voice has a higher pitch.
 * 51) **Tae Takemi has a new English voice provider due to the original moving away.
 * 52) **Kaneshiro and Chihaya Mifune's voice providers from Persona 5 The Animation will redo the voice lines due to the fact both of their previous Japanese voice providers passed away.
 * 53) **Lala Escargot is fully voiced.
 * 54) **SPOILER WARNING: A brand new semester has been added, along with 3 new endings. To gain access to the third semester, you will have to get both Maruki to Rank 9 and Akechi to Rank 8 before Nov. 19, and get Kasumi to Rank 5 before Dec. 22.
 * 55) ***Takuto Maruki is a well-made antagonist. Even if certain people don't agree with his motivations, his plan of creating a fake but ideal reality where everyone can live without pain or sadness is justified if you think about it. Especially if he had to sacrifice his happiness for others.
 * 56) ***The protagonist is given a mercy offer by Maruki to accept the dream world resulting from his excessive cognition manipulation powers as his reality; Should the protagonist accept, the time skips to February 3rd. However, not only is everyone at the cafe and the protagonist has no recollection on what's going on, everyone bar him will all now be subject to Maruki's magic, where Morgana is a human and is dating Ann, Ryuji becomes well-revered by the Track Team, Ann and Shiho have fun together, Wakaba and Okumura are revived, Sumire Yoshizawa identifies herself as Kasumi Yoshizawa and officially regains her sister's former glory, Yusuke reconciles with Madarame and the protagonist became friends with Akechi. Jumping forward to the 15th of March, Haru, and Makoto graduate while the party celebrates as Maruki (who's dressed as a bystander) gives them a photoshoot and the protagonist recognizes something is not right. The credits display everyone fulfilling their wishes and a remix of Maruki's counseling theme playing in the background. The post-credits display a snapshot of the party having fun at Leblanc with the protagonist and Akechi looking towards the camera, which burns outwards from Ren, Akechi, and "Kasumi's" direction.
 * 57) ****This ending can also be triggered on the day before Maruki is fought; when the protagonist is reminded by Maruki that Akechi is a fake made by him, he is offered by Akechi an option to express that he wants this Akechi to stay forever; Should he proceed, he will get the same ending as above.
 * 58) ****Once the protagonist makes any decision to allow Maruki to make his reality the only reality during both instances, Akechi will ask him to confirm his choice. Should he confirm, the bad ending will play.
 * 59) ***True Ending: After Maruki loses his powers, the events that happened courtesy of Azathoth's warping are reverted. Akechi is still missing, and the protagonist is at Juvenile Hall (as Akechi was not present to take his place) while all of his confidants, including those whom he maxed at the third semester, will attempt to get him out of it. From here, the events of the true ending are similar to the original game, with some key differences. During the day the protagonist leaves LeBlanc, when he is picked up by his friends for a road trip back home, they find that they are being tailed by some men in black. Maruki arrives on the scene and offers Ren a ride to the train station while the others distract the people tailing them. Once he is in the train station, he refuses payment and tells the protagonist that he will be following in his example and will choose to live his life bravely, facing the good with the bad. The phantom thieves meet up with the protagonist again and say their goodbyes before going off to distract the men in black some more. At the station, he along with Morgana run into Sumire who vaguely warns him that he's being tailed and he should enter the train quickly. In the post-credits scene, the protagonist will see his Phantom Thief outfit as his reflection on the glass before it reverts to normal. If wanted to fulfill your promise to Akechi back at Shido's palace, the protagonist will see what appears to be Akechi out the window as well.
 * 60) ***Failing to reach the deadline: If the party takes too much time to clear Maruki's Palace, he will end up in the counselor office of Shujin in prison garb during a dream, in which Maruki tells him to sleep for an eternity. The protagonist wakes up in LeBlanc with his room filled with cobwebs and his phone's battery long dead. Without motivation, he sleeps in his bed again with Lavenza in butterfly form failing to reach him.
 * 61) Just like in Persona 4 Golden if you are not a fan of games with large amounts of text, you can fast forward the text by pressing Options (Start in the PS3 version).
 * 62) *Persona 5 Royal resolves many unsolved plot-points such as Akechi's fate. It also improves on the writing from the base game such as making Ryuji much more likable as Japanese players were not fond of his impulsive and brash nature. Especially in Futaba's palace where he indirectly brings the phantom thieves into an avoidable fight.
 * 63) *You can fight the previous Persona protagonists as DLC in Persona 5 Royal.
 * 64) The velvet room in Persona 5 Royal can sometimes go in alert mode which gives you the chance to create even more powerful Personas.
 * 65) The new incense feature in Persona 5 Royal allows you to further train your Persona while the Challenge Battle mode allows you to take on challenging trials where you'll get to aim for high scores and rare rewards. You'll also get to go out with the Velvet Room twins.
 * 66) *You can now be able to give certain gifts to your male confidants.
 * 67) *Nakano and Shinagawa are some of the new spots in Persona 5 Royal. Confidants can also call you on the phone in the evenings after having spent some time together, so that means you'll also get to strengthen your bond at night.
 * 68) Jose a new character in Persona 5 Royal you'll encounter in Mementos. He appears to be collecting flowers in order to study humans. He can turn the Ishi you've collected in the palaces to get stronger accessories. You can also get items by trading him flowers found in Mementos.
 * 69) *The third semester in Persona 5 Royal is finally explored and the only way to break out of it is by upgrading the Persona's of the party members to an even more powerful third form.
 * 70) There are two new palaces.
 * 71) "Stamp Pads” are spread across Mementos in Persona 5 Royal. You can collect these stamps and take them to Jose to add modifiers to Mementos. For example, you can choose to increase the amount of experience points, money gained, or up the drop rate in Mementos.
 * 72) Both PS3 and PS4 versions of the game work perfectly without any issues.
 * 73) First main Persona game to have dual audio (free DLC).
 * 74) Improved puzzles in dungeons.
 * 75) Dungeons are well made and much better than the early Persona games, as they are more unique at the cost of not being randomly generated.
 * 76) Despite the large amount of content, the game's installation size is 20GB for PS4 and 4.6 GB on PS3.
 * 77) There is a Cloud Save feature that doesn't require PlayStation Plus, which is useful for people who lost hundreds of hours of gameplay due to the game's super long length and new game plus.
 * 78) Really well done animated cutscenes by Production I.G and more have been included in Persona 5 Royal.
 * 79) If you have save data from the original Persona 5 you can carry it over to Persona 5 Royal to receive a variety of bonuses.
 * 80) Legendary Japanese anime voice actress Aki Toyosaki (Who voices Caroline & Justine) appears here as well.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) In earlier Persona games, you'd be restricted to sleep because the protagonist feels tired. However, in this game, Morgana tells you to go to sleep and restricts you to do anything else even in important events, which can be annoying and harms Morgana's character. This issue is mostly rectified in Persona 5 Royal. Morgana himself is a massive egotistical hypocrite and his constant insults to Ryuji are more irritating than funny (although Ryuji calling Morgana useless as a joke when it served no purpose was uncalled for). Also, during Haru's arc, Morgana frequently takes the screen-time away from her due to an unnecessary fallout with the Phantom Thieves that left no impact on anything, resulting in Haru getting very little screen-time compared to the Phantom Thieves. This was only in the original but thanks to Royal, her existence was foreshadowed earlier in the game. Even on the first day. But now the new Phantom Thief that gets little screen-time in Royal is now Kasumi/Sumire Yoshizawa/Violet.
 * 2) *Morgana also has a huge crush on Ann and those crushes can get pretty annoying and offensive as you progress through the game.
 * 3) Sometimes, the Japanese voices for the villains don't sound threatening.
 * 4) Environment designs can look repetitive.
 * 5) A few of the twists in the story are very unsurprising given how easy they were to predict. Particularly Goro Akechi being the traitor, and Shido being the main antagonist.
 * 6) The story overall, while still good, feels like somewhat of a step down compared to Persona 4.
 * 7) Plays it too safe to the formula of Persona by having characters who are obvious expy's to previous characters in the series.
 * 8) Dialogue is sometimes poor. For instance, the characters will always point out all the symbolism present in the palaces and in some cases, it feels janky (though in few instances and far-between). No matter what choice in dialogue you choose almost in all cases the story plays out almost the same.
 * 9) The schedules for when confidants being available are now gone.
 * 10) *Some parts of the confidants don't do anything to the story/dialogue and they feel very pointless to do.
 * 11) *Ohya's confidant ability is very useless and Ohya herself is a very uninteresting character.
 * 12) Spaceport of Greed (the fifth palace in the game) is, for many people, the worst dungeon in the game due to tedious puzzles and enemies with annoying skill sets (there are enemies that inflict a status ailment called Hunger, which greatly lowers your attacks' damage), and also contains the least favorite part of the story to many where Morgana temporarily leaves the Phantom Thieves.
 * 13) *The Okumura boss fight isn't any better, since it's just large waves of robots with a timer until Okumura runs out of employees and gives you a chance to finish him with a single blow. What's even worse the fight wasn't even improved upon in Royal, meaning taking down robots has become more time-consuming, and if you don't defeat them all at once, Okumura will keep sending more until the timer runs out to make his escape.
 * 14) Like previously in Persona 4, The dungeon crawling still occurs during the day. This means the player still has to choose between leveling up their Confidants (since most of them are available during the day) and investigating the palaces. Why is Persona 3 the only game out of younger games where you are allowed to to two activities in one day?
 * 15) *Also, like the PC version of Persona 4 Golden, it was also confirmed that the PC version will also use Denuvo, which again, is still notorious for not allowing games to be fully played offline and lowering the performance of games that make use of it.
 * 16) It was comfirmed that the PS4 version cannot transfer save data to the PS5 version, forcing players to start from the very beginning on that aforementioned version.
 * 17) SP management can be a bit of a hassle, especially on early palaces before getting tons of SP items and SP regen equipment.
 * 18) DLC Personas can be kinda game breaking for the first few chapters (same for your Personas from New Game Plus if you decide to carry them over).
 * 19) *Speaking of DLC Personas, some aren't very worth it. Most of them existing purely for nostalgia and fanservice.
 * 20) You can't redo Palaces once finished. Meaning whatever items you didn't get are gone for good.
 * 21) A lot of missed opportunities and unanswered questions from Sugimaru (Haru's fiancee) not having their own mementos missions. It's also never explained what was really in Sae's treasure, why Morgana kept having nightmares of a shadow version of himself or what happened to Jose after the disappearance of Mementos (Both post Day of Reckoning and the third semester).
 * 22) *The game also didn't really show the fallout of Shido's actions either or what has really happened after the Phantom Thieves cleared the mementos missions and palaces in the end.
 * 23) Royal is overpriced considering how little time passed since the original version in 2016 in Japan and 2017 Worldwide and the fact both are on the same console.
 * 24) *Kasumi/Sumire Yoshizawa could be comparable to Classic Sonic in mh:crappygames:Sonic Forces. As it feels like throughout the Royal's Story, she was just a character thrown in Royal as a marketing tool. She also felt like a character that was thrown into Royal at the last minute because you can't continue her last five ranks of her confidant until the third semester and she doesn't even have a Christmas event with the protagonist either.

Reception
The game is critically acclaimed. It was given higher scores than earlier Persona games. A 93% score on Metacritic as of 2017.

Trivia

 * This game spawned many internet memes such as the battle menu, which can be edited on any image from a movie, a tv show, a YouTube video, or even another game.
 * Other examples of memes include Ryuji's "FOR REAL", Ann's multi-layered outfit, Goro's "Delicious Pancakes", Makoto's "Let's do it in the student council room, I'll leave the back entrance open for you", and the Last Suprise song ("You'll never see it coming").
 * Due to failure to differentiate between "niche" and "obscure", many fans have erroneously stated that the Persona series is an obscure series of RPGS.

Videos
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