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N8han11 Since: Apr, 2014
05/27/2021 21:25:30 •••

Royal: not worth paying full price for, honestly.

Let me get this out of the way: Royal is technically an improvement over the original P5. It makes a variety of QOL fixes, has far more content than the original game, and also features all of the original game's DLC for free. However, I don't consider it worth paying full price for if you already have the original game.

My biggest misgivings are with the new content: so much of it is either completely superfluous (new dialogue portraits and voiced dialogue is nice, but is it really worth paying full price for?) while the actually interesting new stuff is restricted to the end of the game so you barely get any time to enjoy it (especially the third semester as a whole, the third-tier Personas, and poor Kasumi, who was pushed as being the newest member of the PTs but is actually an Advertised Extra until the literal last month). There are a few genuinely good changes like guns refilling after every battle and getting more free time across the board, but I feel like the bulk of said changes should have just been DLC for the original game as they are not worth directly buying the game a second time for.

This leads to the game feeling very repetitive if you're coming into it directly from the original game, as 90% of the basic story beats are near-identical and the new third semester feels woefully rushed and underexplored as a whole due to being compressed into a single month right at the end of the game. Kasumi in particular is especially poorly-integrated, as she gets a ridiculous amount of screentime (and occasional Ship Tease with Joker) but is completely irrelevant until the third semester and you barely get to play as her.

Valiona Since: Mar, 2011
05/27/2021 00:00:00

The premise that this isn't worth paying full price if you already have P5 is a reasonable point, but the review is needlessly harsh toward the additional content.

Some things you missed with regards to the new content include:

  • Redesigned dungeons that actually feel somewhat fresh and are better designed compared to the original game.
  • Stamp and flower features that make Mementos more interesting(I actually liked the original game's Mementos, but I think it's an improvement).
  • A better localization that fixes some of the more awkward or poorly translated lines in the original game.
  • Additional content in the Thieves' Den.

I'll disagree about the Third Semester; apart from narrative reasons that justify including it after the final battle, it's a good addition to the plot with a foe who's different than the Phantom Thieves' prior enemies. I also liked the additional Character Development the Phantom Thieves undergo, especially the look toward their futures in the extended ending.

I also think Kasumi was used fairly well for the most part, although I'll concede that I didn't use her as often for a few reasons(she doesn't get her third-tier Persona until just before the end, she doesn't get Bless Boost, and I already had a team of Joker, Morgana, Makoto and Haru), and she could have benefited from more interactions with the other Phantom Thieves.

Basically, this review's only useful for people who already bought the vanilla game, and even then, it doesn't fulfill that purpose all that well.


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