Persona 5 Royal launched on PS5 this week, adorning the PS4 Sega and Atlus RPG masterpiece with newly included DLC and a chance to find a new audience. That said, should you play Royal over the original Persona 5?
Debating whether Persona 5 Royal’s PS5 remaster is or isn’t a cash grab is very much a problem for PS4 players who may have already swept up the game’s trophies. However, for first-time PS5 players wondering what all the fuss around Persona is about, there’s also another question — should I play Persona 5 Royal or the original Persona 5? In this article, we’ll make the case for why you should forgo the latest release and check out the original Persona 5 instead.
Six reasons why you should play Persona 5 instead of Persona 5 Royal on PS5
It's showtime!
Persona 5 Royal’s grappling hook breaks the game
One of Persona 5 Royal’s best features on paper is the introduction of a new gameplay mechanic — the grappling hook. As many of the Persona 5 Royal PS5 reviews are sure to note, the grappling hook makes leaping into battles in the evening dungeon crawls a lot smoother, adding a light layer of patience and strategy to how players engage monster fights in each of the game’s palaces.
The problem is the grappling hook makes the game’s dungeons much too easy. With very little effort, players will find themselves capable of ambushing almost every enemy in the game, meaning they get to fire off a few free shots in battle without taking any damage. This removes one of the original Persona 5’s greatest strengths — its risk-reward game design.
Players will always want to min-max palaces, climbing as high as they can in a single run. On playing Royal, players will find they might never need to leave the palace any earlier than the mandatory stopping point the story places on each visit — meaning they blitz right over the game’s very purposeful design, robbing themselves of that much-needed friction that helps us create memories with the games we play.
There will always be a Kasumi run some other day.
The trophies for Persona 5 are harder, in a good way
Persona 5 Royal’s trophies can be fairly demanding for absolute newcomers — Persona games throw a lot at the player and often it can take a single long playthrough of the game just to realise exactly how much of your limited daytime choices you wasted investing in the wrong things. If you’re a complete newcomer to the series, or even if you’ve dabbled in the series before, you might even need two runs to get all those Persona 5 Royal trophies.
Unfortunately, it’s a shame that when that second playthrough of Persona 5 Royal comes around, or if you’ve been saving your second playthrough of Persona 5 for Royal on PS5, trophy hunters best prepare to be wildly disappointed by the lack of depth or challenge offered by those Royal trophies. The hardest thing you’ll have to do to win the platinum is beat the optional Reaper boss fair and square to claim Unsurpassed Rebel, which you can sink time into in a separate save near the end of the game and save yourself a playthrough.
You don't even have to catch the big fish!
Meanwhile, the original Persona 5 really demands you get everything out of the game... and it feels better for it. Whereas Royal will give you the platinum even if you don’t achieve the perfect final ending, the original release requires you to max out all of your confidants to earn the Great Phantom Thieves Convene. A Perfect Job requires you to clear all the optional requests, while the hidden One Who Rebels Against a God tasks you with really paying attention to the Persona collecting habits.
Once you get a single playthrough deep in Persona 5, chances are you’ll realise you want to come back to this world a bunch more times in the future — which is why you’ll really want those maximalist base Persona 5 trophies to dive into when that day comes. Otherwise, you might put a ton of effort into Persona 5 Royal just to realise the game’s biggest trophy challenges are long behind you before you reach the game’s finale, and that’s rough.
Neat, but not neat enough.
The new area, Kichijōji, doesn’t add a lot of substance
Persona 5 Royal offers players a new area to visit — Kichijōji, one of the most popular metropolitan areas in real-life Tokyo. It’s a cool place to visit in Royal, offering a few new side activities and date spots — though not much else. If it’s your first time playing through Persona 5 and you’re afraid of what constitutes a wasted day in the game, that sums up just about everything in Kichijōji. There are more than enough things to do in the original Persona 5 for two playthroughs as it is.
The new opening animation isn’t iconic
Don’t get us wrong — Persona 5 Royal’s intro animation, set to the new song ‘Colors Flying High’, is absolutely a great way to open the game. It feels closer in vibe to Persona 4 Golden’s breezier Shadow World opening with its focus on all your favourite characters chilling out in some colourful abstract void. It’s definitely a good mood setter, especially if you’ve already played the game and have invested in the Royal remaster as another excuse to hang out with the cast.
When it comes time to boot up another round of Persona 5, only a fake Phantom Thief would rather Colors Flying High play over the iconic ‘Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There’ from the base Persona 5. Where Royal’s intro eventually loses its lustre, the original intro animation is nigh-impossible to skip, an understated masterpiece in establishing the tone and intrigue of a game that quite literally never gets old. You need to form your first memories of Persona 5 via this introduction, and that is not an option.
You will almost never hear Persona 5’s iconic battle theme in Royal
Another consequence of Royal’s grappling hook ambush is that it starts every battle with the new ambush theme, ‘Take Over.’ Now, Take Over’s a fine song — it’s boisterous, it’s got a good guitar riff, and more collaborations between singer Lyn and the game’s composer Shoji Meguro are always welcome. However, with the grappling hook being so easy to use, you’ll almost never fail to start a fight with an ambush — which means you’ll rarely hear the game’s iconic battle theme, ‘Last Surprise.’
Last Surprise is more than just a song — it’s the beating heart of Persona 5. The song’s groovy, strings-oriented main riff and its howling refrain of “you’ll never see it coming” both evoke Persona 5’s best qualities while also utterly transcending them. The song continues to live on in internet circles as a shorthand punchline to any video clip featuring either stealth or a surprise, and to play Royal and somehow live in ignorance of that wider cultural phenomenon is to be robbed of something intrinsically unique to the experience of playing Persona 5.
You always see it coming.
The new story dampens the impact of Persona 5’s ending
Don’t worry, new fans — no spoilers for Persona 5 or Persona 5 Royal here, just something to keep in mind. Persona 5 Royal adds a whole new chunk of story to Persona 5, including new characters that are intermingled throughout your entire playthrough. These new characters are generally great, and the story raises some very interesting themes and ideas not seen in the original Persona 5 that are well worth checking out if you’ve already beaten the game.
The only downside is the damage these changes deal to the original game’s story and how awkwardly the new twenty-hour-long excursion slots into the game’s finale. For returning players, the extended ending promises an alternative play of events that ultimately never makes good on what it sets up. For new players, it arbitrarily dampens the initial story impact left by one of the key characters by writing what essentially amounts to fan fiction all over it. Let’s leave it at that and say, if you want to know why people really loved Persona 5 in the first place, consider playing its original story instead of indulging in Royal’s version of events.
Sure, you'll never see a few cutscenes — it's really worth saving it for another day.
That’s our list! If you’re still interested in playing Persona 5 Royal over the original, you are more than entitled to do so, and we may even have a future list arguing six reasons to do that instead. For more opinions on Persona, check out our
Persona series ranking, argue why it's not on our
best PlayStation JRPGs list or kick-off the conversation down in the comments below.