i finished persona 5 royal today.
[1:43 AM]
"kinu, why did you, a noted grognard and hipster extreme, play persona 5, which is like the ubisoft free roamer of jrpgs, again" i have gone from illness to illness for one whole month and required a video game of exactly this sort.
[1:45 AM]
here are my thoughts. it is kind of insane how much better the majority of the royal-exclusive content is. it's consistently a highlight of the game. the Atlus Mystery Girl du jour is a good character. the problems with Royal's new content are basically entirely those of implementation because of the fact that it's a rerelease of Persona 5 and thus has somewhat limited budget and scope to actually make changes, so you can't change those expensive anime cutscenes they paid for last time.
[1:46 AM]
so for instance, as Atlus Mystery Girls go, Persona 5 Royal's Atlus Mystery Girl is present for most of the game in a largely unintrusive manner, you can spend time with her just fine, and then for about two months in the game they make like, really funny excuses repeatedly for why she can't be in your party despite her awakening to a Persona two months before the original game's ending.
[1:47 AM]
i would call this C-tier implementation. in terms of character? good character. interesting story, fills a role the group didn't have in both gameplay and in character. very cromulent character! i like her just fine! which is an astonishingly high mark for Atlus Mystery Girls, a genre of character that has granted the gaming public some real rancid fucking characters.
[1:48 AM]
the new content also includes just straight up making the game better by both adding more options and by rebalancing old options to make the video game better in ways that make perfect sense. and also giving you a bunch of gay dates with the gay boy which doesn't let you kiss him but it lets him throw his glove at you and hiss in your ear about how much he hates you and that's like, more romantic, honestly.
Kinu — Today at 1:48 AM
more importantly, however, is that the new content, which is about a month of actual content, is an actual ending to persona 5.
[1:51 AM]
all of the old writing, including the entire old ending, is still there. it's still not good in the same ways that it wasn't good. but then basically immediately after you beat the original final boss, the new arc occurs and it, like, takes what persona 5 was and is, originally, and then pivots in a direction to actually give a thematically satisfying and resonant ending that, importantly, the world and characters of persona 5 are capable of delivering on. the new final boss is a human being with a consistent, interesting, and compelling ideology, and the events make sense as an ending to persona 5 and can go into specifics and edge towards saying something. that thing is not what persona 5's original ending kind of pretended it was saying but wasn't really saying, it is a different thing, but it's a cromulent thing that i enjoyed experiencing.
[1:54 AM]
people have been saying for a while that now that katsura hashino, director of personas 3 through 5, is off the series, things might get better, but royal's new content is actually not done by his team, and will be handling the persona series from now on, and what i'm saying here is that having actually played an offering—a trial run of the team that may go on to continue the series—i'm actually cautiously optimistic. persona isn't anything approaching punk and never will be and is never going to be, but i'm cautiously optimistic based on what i've played here that future offerings in the series might be capable of just being consistently compelling, as opposed to the comically uneven offerings they've had for a while.
[1:55 AM]
and hey, maybe in the next one you won't be able to date your fucking teacher, that'd be nice. having played royal, i am willing to levy this incredibly low bar of cautious trust towards the royal team, because the content they wrote was high-quality and basically compelling.