Finally finished Persona 5 Royale. 157 hours. Wow, what an enormous game. What's even more impressive is that I didn't really get sick of it. Spoilers to follow. The final chapter ended up being better than my first impressions, I'm still not in love with it and think the game would have ended better if it just cut after killing the evil god, but whatever. Overall it was just really good.
The combat was passable, it's a traditional turn based JRPG barely any different from Persona 4 and 3 before it. I've cooled a lot on this style of combat over the years, it just has a lot of problems. You can work really hard and strategize over move sets and stats and craft the perfect personas... and trivialize combat. Or you can muddle along with sub-optimal builds until you run into a boss that hard counters you and you need to reorganize. You can turn the difficulty up to add some additional challenge, but then you increase the risk of dying to bad luck especially since the game is still over once the protagonist dies (at least enemies casting hama are less frequent). No options available are amazingly fun and I tended to just feel like the combat was a chore I needed to get over with to get back to the story. On the plus side, dungeons were even better and had more story than Persona 4 did. The proc-gen mazes weren't missed in the slightest.
The characters were enjoyable, and the story was well crafted. The big twist was handled extremely well, and made perfect sense in retrospect. The framing device was also used fairly well. It's fun to watch your group of scrappy rebels climb in notoriety and popularity until their sudden decline. It kind of sucks how you never really get back your pre-Shido fame and it ends with most people not really remembering the Phantom Thieves for... reasons. I still like advancing the social links and having the big moments at the end where everybody you maxed out always works well. I still didn't manage to finish 3 of them: Ryuji, the kid at the arcade, and Haru (who I barely even started because I could tell I wasn't going to have enough time when she joined.) The big problem was that at the start of the game I was giving all my confidants equal attention, not focusing on anyone in particular, then over half way through I finally finished Kawakami and realized that she would have saved a ton of time if I had focused on her first. Or maybe it wouldn't have, as I finished all my night S-links with a month to spare, I don't know. Would have at least given me more options for nights. Also, didn't help that whenever I ran into a stat block on a S-link I'd sometimes devote time to raising that stat over socializing. This was obviously a mistake as I maxed my stats well before the Shido fight. Utilizing Chihaya's fortune telling much earlier also would have helped a lot. Oh well, what's done is done. I could have finished up Ryuji on my last day, but it felt more fitting to talk to Sumire one last time about Maruki so she could evolve her persona.
And now to gripe a little more about the Royale Ending. Maruki was right. Straight up. I don't think the Phantom Thieves had any basis for fighting him, moral or otherwise, and the ending where we chose his reality was the best one. Seriously, it's just plainly hypocritical for them to object to what he's doing. This is a group that has been using divinely bestowed superpowers to intrude into people's subconscious and forcefully rewrite their personality in order to make them confess their crimes. Basically, manipulating people's minds in order to improve society as they see fit. Which is completely different from Maruki manipulating people's minds to improve society as he sees fit because... it's Maruki doing it and not the Phantom Thieves? I don't know. Maruki was granting everybody's wishes and improved everybody's lives 100x more than the PT ever did. What the heck was wrong with that? After this I think their next target was going to be Santa Claus because those kids did nothing to deserve getting those toys. Anyway, on the whole it was just a weak way to end the story. The stakes were lower (oh no, we lost, now everybody gets to have their wish granted and live in eternal happiness :o), and the final boss sequence just wasn't as good. Maruki and Joker having a dumb pointless rooftop puchout is nowhere near as anime as using the world's faith in the Phantom Thieves to evolve a giant persona to fire a massive gun at god. I also don't understand why Joker leaves town at the end and the team breaks up to scatter to the four corners of the globe or whatever. I mean, he's pretty much an adult, old enough to say that he's going to finish school at Shujin with the people he's gone to the ends of the earth with rather than go back to the parents that didn't even care enough to send one text for an entire year. It seems so forced. And who the heck were the guys in black car?! The police? It's so out of nowhere, when there wasn't a hint that they were being investigated for the last 3 months.
A couple other random thought. What was wrong with Ryuji's leg? He mentions a couple time that he needs surgery and can't run on the track team, except we see him running all the time and do nothing but train when we hang out with him. I don't get it. Pancakes aren't cakes, this was so distracting I didn't even pick up on the foreshadowing because I was just trying to figure out what the heck he was talking about. Morgana >>>> Teddy, though the Japanese VA probably helps. I'm glad I held out for Sumire as GF as she is the only one that straight up confesses her love, but the goodbye at the train was terrible. She waves goodbye like we were a classmate that she says hello to every now and then. I could have done without the DLC junk unlocking as soon as you look at the box on your shelf. I was just curious and then I had 100,000 yen suddenly and the early game economy (the only part of the game that has an economy) was broken. I actually restarted to avoid that and lost an hour of progress. Even when I did open it halfway through the game it felt like cheating to use any of the stuff that came out of the box and I made sure not to.
All in all, good game, extremely long. What am I going to fill my time with in a post P5R world?