Massive Spoilers, naturally.

I cannot BELIEVE that there’s never an exchange with Maruki where you actually discuss anything with him, or address the hypocrisy of the Phantom Thieves, or any number of things. “Futaba, Makoto, and Haru’s parents (and also Kasumi) could all just be alive? Ha, actually, it’s better that they died because it made them stronger. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back to my home planet with my talking cat who gets to live because I don’t suffer consequences.”

It’s just such a massive missed opportunity for interesting writing, instead resulting in the blandest and stupidest defenders of the status quo I may ever have seen.

  • The main person pushing you to side against Maruki is Akechi, who is a serial killer. I think Haru mentions this like once and everyone else tells her to just forget about him murdering her dad.
  • The MC is going to go to jail, where by all means Shido’s co-conspirators should just have him killed. Or at least that’s what should happen, but you avoid that by using your powers to mind control people into getting you out. Convenient that you’re allowed to use your powers to solve the problems of yourself and your friends but nobody else can solve broader societal problems. Curious.
  • Maruki is messed up due to his own trauma, but instead of overcoming it and healing people’s pain in a healthier way I guess he has to become a taxi driver lol.
  • The MC really has no idea how personas or the metaverse actually work. If Maruki can create his own palace consciously, someone ELSE (like, say, Shido’s co-conspirators?) are eventually going to figure out cognitive psience (they have Wakaba’s notes, after all), and then what?

I’ve never played vanilla P5 but man, P5R is fucked gameplay wise. Camera Strap accessory gives everyone infinite SP, and you can just summon some of the past game bonus personas and win the game.

As a final aside, it is ridiculous to me that the MC can’t just stay at Shujin for their last year of high school.

  • Dort_Owl [they/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    71·
    2 months ago

    Yup, you have the same complaints I did. You spend the whole game fighting the status quo and then Royal adds a whole dungeon that says “actually jk bootstrap your mental illness away.”

    • Emilytacular [comrade/them, she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      5·
      2 months ago

      I actually stopped playing pretty quickly once I began the extra semester. I wanted my team to be happy, and even though she’s a cop, fucking up Makoto’s better life made me feel terrible.

      Even if I had some issues with the base game, I had a lot of fun with it. The hard tone shift for the Royal content didn’t hit the same.

  • GeckoChamber [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    5·
    2 months ago

    Some of the design decisions in Royal are genuinely bizarre, like the rewards you get from the dungeon bonus objectives. The one from the second dungeon gives you an accessory that removes all of your weaknesses, which is so strong it removes like half the depth from the fusion and battle systems. Almost all the other rewards are so weak they are useless by the time you get them.

    • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      2·
      2 months ago

      There’s one other one that’s good, though I forget which it’s from. Boosts the first magic attack of the wielder to 2x. Smack that on the MC and spam Myriad Truths from Izanagi-no-Okami to one-shot every fight except bosses.

  • loathsome dongeater@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    My thing with every persona game is that I play them like an absolute fiend but mostly for the social link stuff. The combat is alright but I always set the difficulty to easy to make the experience less stressful. I love unraveling the storylines of the NPCs. Meanwhile I have no idea what is going on in the bigger picture. So much so that I don’t remember at all how Persona 3, 4 and 5 end. It doesn’t grab me at all because the politics in these games are not well thought out.

    With Royal I remember just being tired when I got to the DLC part. I dropped it when I was struggling in the Maruko fight.

    • barrbaric [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      My thing with every persona game is that I play them like an absolute fiend but mostly for the social link stuff.

      Yeah, social links are definitely the highlight of the game. Made me really resent when I had to go into Mementos to do a target for a bunch of them.

      With Royal I remember just being tired when I got to the DLC part.

      Yeah, I was already burned out during Shido’s palace. Main reason I kept going was because I was high enough level to just skip and auto-win every non-scripted fight due to Ryuji’s social link.

  • grandepequeno [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    2 months ago

    I’m with you 100%, I loved the 3rd semester but I think Maruki was done dirty. The guy is trying to bring the christian notion of heaven/paradise into the world and the problem is that he’s not powerfull enough to do it yet, hence the flaws in the system, and the only thing standing between him and getting enough magic power in order to make everyone’s lives better is you and your buddies, a few of which really should have more qualms about abandoning the “not real” reality. At least that’s how I interpreted it

    If it were a western rpg you’d probably get a long talk with maruki where you can let him win you over or something but it’s not that type of game so you only get a weird “yes I side with you” option, you don’t get to delve into what the world will REALLY become like afterwards.

    Throw your mask away is a completely goated song though I had that on repeat for weeks.

    And yeah there are a lot of things that make the game way easier, not that it’s a hard game in the first place on Normal difficulty, the only real challenge was the Okumura boss battle where they made it a gimmick fight in royal.