@sethmode: His introduction is rough, and ultimately wholly out of character for the entire rest of the game. Like he's eccentric and weird but absolutely never again skeevy about it like that.

I just think he's quietly very funny in the background of a lot of scenes.

@efesell: @sethmode: I take that scenario as Yusuke being too oblivious to actually realize the greater implications of what he's asking. He just thinks he's asking someone to help him with his art, and there's no greater pursuit in his mind than art. It doesn't make it okay, but it's not as scummy as it first seems.

I still don't like that scenario from a writing perspective, as it's kinda shitty to put Ann thought that after what she just went through, but I don't hold it against Yusuke as a character. He's still one of my favorites.

I'm glad I said something here, because honestly after just going through his opening moments I was like "Oh jesus this fucking guy again" and it feels like I've kind of pigeon-holed him a little bit.

I like Yusuke quite a bit more this time around than I did in the original release. He's one of the few characters in the game that feels like they have a distinctive voice. I wish they would've leaned more into him being an aloof goofball artist rather than the hyper serious but occasionally witty pupil, but he's interesting. I don't mind him that much.

The Showtime attacks are incredible. I've unlocked three of them so far and can't wait to see the rest.

There's a specific moment in one of the text threads they have where he says something, is interrupted by like 2 or 3 other people and finishes the sentence after and it kills me every time.

Or those damn lobsters during the beach event.

@nateandrews: I would argue he's very much the former in almost every scenario after you recruit him. They definitely utilize him as a comedic goofball far more than a serious artist.

Unless you just mean that scenario where you recruit him, but I'm not sure that would really jive with what was going on with him and Madarame at the time.

@zeik: @efesell: Yeah I think you both might be right. I had that group text moment specifically this afternoon and it's great. I think it's that sometimes I'm not sure if I'm laughing because the game is playing into his characterization or because he's just ridiculous. Like I said, definitely enjoying him a lot more this time around because of those moments. His Showtime attack with Ryuji is my favorite so far also.

So, I just started the Yusuke/Madarame part and I still have not seen a Showtime attack...is that normal for the progression of the game or is there something that I have to do that I'm missing?

@sethmode: They are all unlocked automatically with story progression. You can't miss them.

@zeik: Thanks, mate! I was getting a little worried reading about them but not having seen them yet!

Currently stuck at the boss fight of the Okumura Palace where now I have to fight through waves of four robots with only one weakness and one neutral affinity and if I don't kill them all in two turns they just respawn and it's annoying the shit out of me.

@dochaus: It's definitely the most annoying fight in the game. I died there more than anywhere else in the game.

The trick I found worked best was to buff Joker and then target three of them individually, followed by two aoes for maximum damage. Make sure you have a Persona with Psio/Mapsio or Eiga/Meiga for the big guys. If you can get a boost or amp passive or a trait like Relentless to increase weakness exploitation then even better.

You could also just summon Tsukiyomi using the free legacy DLC. His kit will wreck them. And if you really don't care about playing fair and just want to be done then just bump the difficulty up to Merciless. With the increased weakness exploitation damage the fight would be a breeze.

Yeah I've been all in on this since I got it, just finished the fifth palace (which on hard took some tries but I did it dammit!) Haven't touched P5. since the month of its release, so maybe it isn't surprising it's been easy to get swept up in the Persona life sim management again. Personally I really appreciate the amount of reediting done to the localization, feels so much smoother now, even if "Sakamoto" still has that asinine pronunciation. Between that and the fact Morgana isn't constantly sending you to bed after story events there's no reason to go back to vanilla regardless of new content, which all seems good so far. Though I'll echo it seem more slanted to be on the easier side compared to the original, even on hard.

Loved P5 base game but Royal needs to drop in price a *lot* before I pick it up. It sounds like its much easier, so I guess the fun would be playing on the hardest difficulty, and then at least you don't need to worry about purposely nerfing yourself because it seems too easy.

@north6: It's basically easier by virtue of adding a lot of quality of life changes but not necessarily re balancing around them.

I dunno, I played on Normal and it felt like a fairly standard JRPG difficulty in that mode.

@north6: Unfortunately having played the game on hard originally and feeling like it was just challenging enough, there's no real way to increase the difficulty for me. (Merciless is sadly easier than hard.) I have had to kinda nerf myself to avoid breaking the difficulty to the point of it not being fun.

In the original game the only thing I really felt like I had to avoid abusing was the max level Strength confidant that let you fuse Persona's of any level, but now you get that even earlier and there's even more mechanics that can make you absurdly OP if you exploit it.

The main saving grace from my perspective is that a lot of those mechanics at least feel like interesting and worthwhile additions to the game, even if they do make it too easy sometimes. The new traits system and alarm fusions are good mechanics, even if the game doesn't feel balanced around them.

The lack of a new difficulty is still my only significant complaint with Royal, but I'm still having fun playing it.

@zeik: I actually thought up this idea before I saw this post, and it worked but still required a little luck on Hard mode. Then when the Cognition of Haru exploded I thought I'd have to do the boss fight all over again, but miraculously Joker survived the blast and I was able to kill Shadow Okumura with literally 00:01 left on the clock (kept getting distracted mid-fight but hey it worked out).

Also I got to the addition of Kasumi's Palace and it feels like they couldn't be bothered to put up a more compelling backstory than "fuck it she's got the weight of high expectations on her let's just have her do the Persona thing and go." Maybe she'll be a replacement for Crow later in the game when he betrays the Phantom Thieves but I dunno if I would prefer that or for Crow to have a redemption arc. Feels like either way it's a dumb addition.

@dochaus: There's a lot more to the Kasumi stuff than that brief scene and I'll just leave it at that.

I think they realized that throwing in a whole new palace at that point would really mess up the pacing, so they had to find a way to just give you a small sample and move on. I think it was the right call.

I started this yesterday and I was a bit iffy how into it I can be the second time, but that brief introduction of Kasumi in the prologue got me all pumped up and ready to go all the way.

@zeik: Interesting, what makes Merciless easier than Hard?

@nateandrews: The big difference is that all weakness exploitation damage does like 3.5x damage, which includes both you and the enemy. However it's way easier for you to cover your weakness than the enemy (especially in Royal thanks to some new items) and with that kind of damage you'll likely be one-shotting everything that has a weakness before they even get a chance to act.

There's only a couple fights in the whole game where you're at more of a disadvantage than the enemy.

@zeik: That's pretty wild! What makes Hard more difficult than normal, if you don't mind my asking? Just, enemies do more damage?

@sethmode: Enemies do more damage and have more health and general stats. It's pretty basic stuff, but it's more rewarding than normal or merciless imo.

I started with on hard and it's really punishing but also more rewarding. Many enemies one shot your party members so healing spells and items are useless in battle and it's better to let people stay down than waste items on them.

I still have party wiped only a few times and both times I could just restrart the battle. Is this just training wheels in the first dungeon or is it a thing through out the game? Is it new to Royal? I totally remember wiping in the original game an having to play like an hour of a dungeon again.

@zaccheus: So far I’ve only been able to restart a battle if it’s a boss encounter. Everything else has sent me back to the previous safe room.

Yeah bosses restart, otherwise you go back to a safe room. Either way you keep progress.

@efesell: Well, I think more specifically you keep yen and exp... You lose level progress. Literally just had this happen to me haha

Holy shit the Ryuji and Makoto Showtime is something else.

It had taken me far too long to realize how useful the Jazz Club is. Probably because the game really doesn't explain it at all.

Most days it will just raise the stats of a party member of your choice, which is nice, but not game changing or anything. But if you go on Sunday you can teach them new skills they wouldn't otherwise learn. Not only does this give Futaba some secret skills, but depending on when you go you can teach your other party members some really powerful skills.

I just got Debilitate on Yusuke and now he's a core party member for any future boss fight.

@humanity: I am 100% in your position, I would love to see the new content as part of a New Game+ upgrade to the base version (I would pay for this expansion) but I am just not going to put in 120+ hours based run replay of the game to do this. (My original play through was 120 hours)

@zeik: Yeah I eventually used it to give Ann/Ryuji Spell Master and Arms Master, it rules.

@arcitee: Even if you could play Royal in NG+ from the start I don't think it would actually shave off that much of that total playtime, just given the way the game is structured. You still have to progress through the game day by day and clear dungeons. Most of the stuff that would speed up that process can be done regardless.

If you want to skip through cutscenes you've already seen you can do that. If you want to make the game easier you can drop down the difficulty or take advantage of some of the free DLC Persona that are super OP. Money isn't much of an issue in Royal either, past the early game. The biggest thing you would be able to skip over is raising your social stats, but I don't feel like that adds that much extra time.

It also wouldn't make sense to just let you start the new end game right away, since there's a lot of added content in the main game that is necessary to build up to it. It's not like The Answer in P3: FES, where it was an entirely self-contained epilogue.

If you're not interested in replaying the game as a whole I don't think there's a scenario where Royal would be a worthwhile experience to you.

Wow that Okumara boss fight is rough. Once I found out what it was really asking me to do I came to respect it a bit more, but the fleeing mechanic is so wildly frustrating and it’s such a slog until you figure out the right moves. I ended up using one of the DLC personas with a Severe Curse dmg skill, since the green robots are weak to curse damage. Worked out way better than trying to Psi my way through it.

Remembering now why this palace totally killed my interest in continuing with the original release. But I’m way more positive on the game now and I’m just happy to be on the other side of it.

Well, I just finished Okumura's palace after feeling like people either were exaggerating how bad it was or I was forgetting it and...definitely the latter. Boy that fight is just shitty.

I didn't hate the palace itself though. Just more kind of tedious than anything. Really enjoyed the look of it and what they were going for (even conceptually with the boss fight), just feel like they really biffed the landing.

@sethmode: I didn't mind it as much the this second time (same for most the other palaces too) but it's definitely starts to lose pacing in generally during this point of the story in general. The palaces theme is actually maybe my favorite, but it goes way too long like every other dungeon in the second half. Doesn't help that it has the one music track that gets grating.

@sethmode said:

I kinda liked the idea of having to use items to hit weaknesses and bounce Baton Passes around for the boss fight. That's how I ended up beating it anyway. The mechanic where enemies flee and return really ruins the whole thing.

@thewildcard: It definitely reminded me that this was the point that things started to grind for me in my playthrough of P5. I kind of always though it was me based on a lot of the overall positivity around the game. Not to say I don't love it, I do. And what I remember of the ending I feel like they mostly do a good job...I just kind of realized that while I remember so much of the front half and ending portion, there was a section that I didn't really recall and I'm starting to realize why...

@nateandrews: Yeah, honestly, the whole fight would be fine if it weren't for the fleeing aspect. I had one where I was on the last wave and three fled and then one blew up (where one more attack would have killed them all) and I literally yelled so loud out of frustration that I scared my wife who was wearing NOISE CANCELING headphones.

@sethmode: That fight felt like it was supposed to have one of those special boss mechanics that would prevent them from being able to run away, but they like just forgot to implement it.

Honestly the part that really made the fight frustrating for me was that there was a time limit on top of all that. I could deal with the run away mechanic by itself, but not only do you have to deal with each wave almost perfectly just to pass them, but you also have little time to even do each phase you'll just run out of time anyway. It happened to me and I was very upset.

It's a real bummer, because it was already the least interesting boss fight in the original and this was a good opportunity to fix it, but they somehow made it worse.

I don't think it's the worst boss fight ever like I've seen some people claim, but it sucks to see them stumble so hard there when basically every other change or addition to Royal has been a noticeable improvement.

@zeik: I agree on everything. Especially the time limit thing. I got so frustrated on my third try with how much unskippable dialogue that there is that I started mashing buttons to through it and then fucking up a turn or, worse, one time I was hitting start thinking that would skip things and it just ended up doing that thing where it rushes regular attacks for everyone.

I'm just glad I'm past it now.

I finished the game a couple days ago. The more tedious parts of the game, which I was now playing for the third time, like Okumura's palace and Shido's palace, were a slog, but the gameplay improvements and extra content sprinkled throughout were enjoyable enough.

Then I got to the new stuff and I was seriously blown away. Yoshizawa and Dr. Maruki are both incredible characters, and their stories were presented fantastically. In general I feel like the writing in all the new content is better than anything in the original game. The third semester fits right into the story, is conceptually great, and feels like such a natural continuation/ending of P5 that it almost feels like the game is finally complete. Yoshizawa might be my favorite Persona character, which kinda automatically puts her up there in my favorite game characters.

BTW, I acquired the soundtrack and the song that plays during the dance scene with Yoshizawa (great song) is called "wish come true", which suddenly gave that scene a lot more meaning to me and made it pretty sad. In retrospect it feels like the one moment that Sumire achieved her dream of letting Kasumi live on through her, by having her dance in front of all those people including her (boy)friend with everyone cheering her on.

Overall, Royal doesn't really fix my biggest problems with Persona 5 (pacing, everything drags around the middle, homophobia) but all the gameplay changes made it more fun and all the new story content was fantastic. Persona 5 was already one of my favorite games despite its flaws, and everything they did to it in Royal feels essential.

I own the original version of P5 but never beat it. Can I buy this as a DLC or do I need to just shell out for a new copy of the game?

@justin258: You'll have to buy it separately.

I think I may be hitting the same wall I hit with both Persona 3 and 4 where the serious fatigue sets in after 100 hours. P5R fake-ends twice and then hits you with that third semester, and I'm really just wishing I could do the boss fight and see credits. I've enjoyed this iteration of Persona 5 way more than the original release but the Persona fatigue is really hitting me hard, even though I really like a lot of what they're doing in this new content. Anyone else experience the same?

I didn't even get to the 3rd Semester until 135 hours in (!!!) and yes, I experienced the same thing. I LOVE Maruki as a character, but I was just kind of tired after about 3 hours into the third semester. It's all really well done and interesting, but I found it very easy to move on to Trails in the Sky just because I felt like I needed a break.

My biggest mistake was playing the original fairly close to this one's release, making me space out with some of the repeated dialog/interactions, but that's hardly the game's fault.

I really liked Persona 5, then I absolutely loved it when returning to it, and this has definitely added a lot of great gameplay to an already rich game. The changes to Mementos that makes grinding FAR less time-consuming is, perhaps, the best addition. I'll never get pissed off that a JRPG streamlines, and I REALLY have a hard time understanding people who do.

I'm happy they changed some of the cringier stuff, and the only thing I'm REALLY unhappy with is that still, in 2020, in the FIFTH Persona game, your romance options, and the S-links in general, still feel like bolted-on side stuff. We're a LONG way from Jeff and Vinny rightly getting pissed and pointing out that Dojima really SHOULD trust you with his S. Link maxed out, and I get it, with all the myriad compositions of possible people, but the fact that there's no interlude in the add-on content feels, frankly, cheap. Persona 4: Gold set the standard for that, so the fact that this is a step back for character interactions is disappointing.

That out of the way: good LORD, the new stuff is so excellent overall. Persona 5 was bold in its time, and has only become moreso in the years since it came out, and I really admire how much of a stand the writers were willing to make in an industry that prizes its "let's keep our heads down and not make waves"-style bullshit.

I do have some issues with just how much the Goku/Vegeta dynamic infects the stuff with Akechi, that guy gets a LOT of slack with the whole "you're a multiple-times murderer we're still supposed to find not just sympathetic, but actively rooting for????" for a game set in a fairly non-fantasy setting, it's never a leap I'm willing to make... that having been said: KUDOS to them for sticking to their guns and not giving you an easy way out. I REALLY admire how the added content ends, it sticks the landing in a way few things do.

@undeadpool: So, as I said, I haven't finished the third semester yet, but as far as the part you have in spoilers it was partially what made it kind of hard to stay motivated. That character is a complete monster and on top of that becomes an outright prick when the "truth" is out about him, and I just can't wrap my head around why characters are okay with that. But, anime, I guess.

I ended up enjoying what they did with that character a lot and I was always on the side of thinking that fans of his in the original were a bunch of weirdos.

@efesell: @sethmode: I definitely like that they do a lot of legwork to show you just how under the thumb of his father he was, which was his driving force to do what he does, and ALSO they lean much more into "he's how you could have turned out" than they did with, say, Adachi when they gave him a REALLLLLLLLLLLLLLY unearned-feeling S.Link in Golden. It really was everyone ELSE being okay with him that had me scratching my head, but yeah: anime. And that they keep his death rather than doing the fan-servicey "you redeemed him and that washes away all those murders he DEFINITELY committed!" or "It turns out it was his EVEN DARKER SIDE, which you purged through the 3rd semester!" and actually stuck to the original ending. Maybe THAT made it an easier pill for me to swallow.