JRPGs are bad. They are hundreds of hours long with pointless systems upon systems and combat mechanics from 20 years ago. They're always about fighting God and going on dates (I am a fan of only one of those things) and usually just end up with you having to read a guide to find out the optimal time to give one of your party members a piece of toast so they'll have an extra 10% extra damage in battle.

Persona 5 Royal has all of these things. It's amazing.

I don't know how it's managed to do it. Every receptor in my brain demands that I hate it. It goes against everything that I like in video games these days but somehow it's won me over. Allow me to explain:

The bit Where I Bring you all up to Speed

Persona 5 Royal has you living the life of unnamed hero/high-schooler - I called him Joe Kuh which is a very funny joke and what we'll be calling him from now on. It seems our friend has been dealt a bad hand in his life as he has been arrested for a crime that he didn't commit and sent to live in the worst place imaginable: Tokyo. His attempts to stay out of trouble lasts approximately half an hour when he accidently stumbles upon the Metaverse (hear me out) which is a place where the distorted desires of certain peoples' cognitions (bear with me here) can emerge in the form of 'Palaces'. Joe Kuh awakens the power of his Persona (it makes sense, please stick with it) which are definitely not Pokémon and allow him to fight against the shadows that roam the Palaces. Once you reach the end of the Palace, its treasure will manifest allowing you to 'steal' it (look I'm serious, this makes sense when you play it), causing that person to have a 'change of heart' and confess to any wrongdoings they've done in the real world.

With this new found power, Joe Kuh will team up with a colourful cast of like-minded individuals (and Haru) and take on the corrupt elite of Japan and expose them to the rest of the world. With this, the group known as The Phantom Thieves are born.

For those wondering: yes, it is very much like Code Geass

The bit Where I Explain What you Actually do

The game can best be described as 20% Pokémon and 80% busywork. Let's tackle the 20% first since it's unfortunately nothing too special.

So you know that scene in Captain America where he wakes up in the present day but they want to ease him back so they put an old baseball game on the radio? I'm confident that if such a situation happened for fans of 90s turn based JRPGs, you could easily give Captain America Persona 5 and he'd be fine. You wouldn't have to worry about him hospitalising several of S.H.I.E.L.D's finest operatives because he'd be right at home. Completely fooled. The problem that turn based JRPGs have is that you can only put so many hats on the 'lining up against the dragon' genre before you realise that the hat shop is actually on fire and there's no way out. Baton passes, showtimes and technicals are cool and all, but they're just additions to something that you've been doing for over twenty years now. It's still the same. You still take turns stabbing the man; you can cast spells if you like; those spells can be effective depending on what you're fighting; you can have stat buffs and debuffs as well. That's pretty much it.

And that's okay. This isn't to say the combat in Persona 5 Royal is not enjoyable. It's fun for what it is, and the hats that it does don are interesting enough that they only begin to wear out a hundred hours in. The different Personas (Pokémon) you collect keeps a variety of playstyles on the table, and is necessary at times when fighting certain enemies. It's fine, and if you're not a huge fan of it like me then you can just turn the difficulty down. The challenge of combat was not what I enjoyed here.

Funnily enough, the parts where you're not shooting and stabbing people are the best parts. 80% of the time, you are preparing to infiltrate the Palaces of corrupt or criminal individuals to change their hearts. Each palace is a momentous occasion - there are 7 in 100 hours of gameplay and it's where all the Pokémon stuff happens. The rest of it would probably be best described as a sort of dating simulator. Every day that passes, you go to school, shop for things and improve relations with your confidants and party members.

Confidants can provide essential benefits in battle, but spending time with these characters is usually a reward in itself. Trying to help an artist get through a slump or a shut-in gain her confidence make for genuinely interesting moments. In true anime fashion, the characters usually have one or two distinct personality traits that the game constantly plays up. The dialogue is genuinely hilarious. Almost every line had me laughing in some way, either because it was actually funny or it was edgy nonsense. The best way I could describe the game's dialogue is dorky. I can't help but love all of my dumb sons and daughters and their dumb high-school hijinks. It's safe to say that I was genuinely sad to see these characters off once I reached the end and if anything happens to my boy Sojiro I will snap.

Best Boy and Best Girl tier list. Haru is the worst. I will not be taking constructive criticism at this time.

The bit Where I Discuss The Systems

When you first play a game, you're unaware of all of the systems behind it. This makes it Cool and Mysterious. You try to do a thing and it works, or maybe it doesn't. This is where the magic is. It's not really a video game, but a living, breathing organism (maybe) that is full of unpredictability. What will attacking this ice monster with fire spells do? Oh what's that, he blew up? That's cool, video games are cool. Eventually, you figure out what all of your inputs into the hellscape black-box do. You become more acquainted with the systems and can figure out the best way of doing things. You don't need to test whether the fire spell works on the ice monster anymore, because you know for sure that fire spells work, but even better that you can just straight up attack the ice monster and take a little bit of damage since the SP cost of said fire spell is not worth it compared to the HP loss. Figuring these things out is an exciting part of any video game, but the fun has to stop eventually.

As you become more acquainted with the systems of the game, the magic starts to wear off. You're no longer a super hero with a cool fire monster that shoots molten rocks at Ice Babies, but a quarantined human being pushing buttons on a controller that seriously needs a hair cut. Instead of deciding to hang out with Ryuji because he's Best Boy, you decide to hang out with the stupid Shogi player instead because she gives you the ability to swap out party members during battle which can be super useful. You're no longer making decisions based on what Joe Kuh would want to do. You're making decisions based on what you as a play want to do in order to optimally beat the game.

Persona 5 Royal's plan to battle this entropy is to add systems upon systems upon systems to the point where you won't even have time to figure all of them out. It was only in the last 10 hours that I figured out how improving relations with your friends actually worked. I tried fishing once and it took me about twenty minutes to catch one fish. It took me about 50 hours to figure out that I could rush really weak enemies before entering combat to just instantly win the fight. Much like our actual universe, if you put enough stuff in your video game it will last a few trillion years and we won't even have to worry about the heat death of it all.

But that kind of sucks though, right? Because a lot of these systems just aren't good. I don't care about playing baseball to improve my proficiency stat or fusing two of my weak Personas (Pokémon) to create a slightly stronger Persona (Pokémon) that somehow feels worse. This extends to the combat as well. What's the point in using the stat buffs when spamming offensive spells works just fine?

The issue is that everything you do in this game serves your performance in infiltrating Palaces, or more specifically, the combat. Eventually the game's difficulty spikes get too much to the point where you all of a sudden have to pay attention to getting the most optimal gear or Personas (Pokémon) that, by point, it's too late. There's one boss battle where it's essentially impossible to do without the correct setup, but it happened for me as I was reaching the time limit of that Palace so there was nothing I could do but turn the difficulty down.

A game that makes no effort to make you use all of these systems suddenly pull the rug from underneath you half way through is a little frustrating to see. There's just too much to meaningfully engage with on your first playthrough and by the time the game ramps up, you're far behind on washing as much dirty armour as possible to protect yourself.

Someone actually made a spreadsheet for the most optimal way to play the game. I have done a full playthrough and still don't recognise half the words on it.

The bit Where I Discuss The Feel

Persona 5 Royal is at odds with itself. It is a game stooped in different kinds of systems from the combat, to studying for exams to catching fish. It is possible to optimally play the game to get the most out of each day that passes to the point where you can produce a spreadsheet of choices and dialogue trees. But at the same time, there's something about it that feels calming. It's almost a spiritual experience to just eat Ramen in a quaint place on the streets of Tokyo in a video game. And then it turns out that drinking the Kindness Milk™ with it has increased your Kindness stat and it's just like 'Huh, Video Games I guess'. Despite a literal time limit to change a person's heart hanging over you, the game does an excellent job at not making you feel pressured at all.

You live in the attic of a coffee shop ran by a grumpy middle-aged man with a heart of gold. It's raining today and it turns out you can study a little bit more than normal as if you're on the thumbnail of a lo-fi beats to chill/study/sleep to livestream. You have a talking cat who has bad dreams and when he does, he snuggles up to you. Every morning, the subway is jam-packed and you hear snippets of conversations about how it's pollen season soon and their allergies are going to be playing up. All of the teachers at your school are terrible at their jobs and none of them really want to be there. You have a plant in your room that you can water and take care of. I never did.

Persona 5 Royal has a lot of downtime, but it makes the most of it to the point where it's probably its greatest strength. It was at its best when I could just sit down, relax and watch conversations unfold.

The bit Where I run out of Intelligent Points to Make and Wrap up

As a full package, Persona 5 Royal is incredible. If you love games with dorky dialogue or, for some reason, the battle system of Pokémon, then you'll love this. The shortcomings of JRPGs are still there - it's a bit too long for my liking; the battle mechanics begin to wear thin towards the end and it can be a bit creepy (the bad kind) in some places. But it's easy to overlook for a game that not only manages to bring the mess of it all together, but sticks the landing. I still think JRPGs are bad, but perhaps Persona 5 Royal is good?