I've already reviewed Persona 5 for PS3, and I admittedly found it somewhat frustrating. I really want to like it, being a big fan of P3 and P4, but whenever I look at my P5 box, I just feel mild exasperation.
Cue GamePass and P5 Royal. By most accounts it's a better game than vanilla P5. And, I have to admit, one of the things that annoyed me about the original (at least on PS3) wereI've already reviewed Persona 5 for PS3, and I admittedly found it somewhat frustrating. I really want to like it, being a big fan of P3 and P4, but whenever I look at my P5 box, I just feel mild exasperation.
Cue GamePass and P5 Royal. By most accounts it's a better game than vanilla P5. And, I have to admit, one of the things that annoyed me about the original (at least on PS3) were the load times. They weren't that bad, but they were everywhere.
Between rooms.
Walking up a set of stairs.
Exiting the classroom.
And the ones after battles annoyed me most.
Thankfully the PC version - even the Xbox One S version - blows through these loading screens almost instantly. How much faster? Well, my good readers, I've painstakingly compared between versions how fast I could get to the part of the game where choosing daily activities becomes available, and here are the results
P5 PS3: 100 minutes
P5R PC/Xbox One S: 75 minutes
Yes, that's right, 25 minutes of loading times removed for the intro. It's probably less noticeable on a regular playthrough, which would take about 4 hours to get this far, but over the course of a 100 hour game it will make a huge difference.
But ultimately, Persona 5 Royal is just, I dunno, more Persona 5, and it still annoys me.
The first 4-5 hours encapsulate pretty well all the stuff I dislike about the game. Morgana is incredibly annoying and condescending. On top of re-explaining some of the stuff we already saw in the intro scene, he's mostly set up as an exposition dispenser, and everytime he opens his mouth it's a bad case of "explaining it makes it worse". There must be 20 fights early on where Morgana explains all sorts of mundane mechanics. "Use special skills to hit your enemy's weak points", "Enemies are weaker when they're downed", "Your fake gun works here because reasons". I know how a knife works, the pointy bit goes stab-stab. In case you couldn't understand these very basic video game mechanics, after Morgana explains them to you a popup window will reiterate everything post fight. Come on, Atlus.
I still find the raw amount of dialog frustrating. Conversations take much too long to get to the point. If a character is present during a cutscene, that person will talk, even if they don't have anything useful to add. I don't need 12 paragraphs of discussion to decide we're going into a palace, I just want someone to say "are we going into a palace?", so I can answer and move on with my life. And the chatter just never stops, even outside of conversations or cutscenes. Post-fight quips, tips while exploring, warnings while sneaking around enemies, excitement when there's a chest in the room, in the middle of a fight. Please, just be quiet for a few minutes. Aren't thieves supposed to be discrete?
How about that new stuff? The grappling hook sounds cool, but it seems like a solution to a problem that didn't exist. The mild inconvenience of going up a set of stairs wasn't magically solved by using a grappling hook, Elon. I always find myself irritated when my imagination goes "hey, a grappling hook would be really useful right now" in a place where it can't be used. The palaces were good without it in the original anyway. **** appearances were clearly added in post, and these scenes feel kinda weird compared to all the other interactions. Maruki's inclusion feels a bit better, but how rapidly his Confidant rank goes up early on is a bit off. I think the guns are better, but still poorly balanced. I don't know why we need Jose or the Thieves' Den. Mementos still sucks.
Still, it's hard to not look at Royal as the definitive version of the game. I have had some mild performance issues with it, which is pretty strange for a PS3 era game. I mean, I'm running Death Stranding on max steadily over 50 FPS, but this goes down to 30 in crowded areas? It's not a game breaking thing, and I don't mind the game running at 30 FPS anyway - I'm going to get hate for this, but some animations in this game look bad at 60 FPS - but these performance issues seem to be a fairly common issue on the Steam Forums. If I could make vanilla load on my PS3 as fast as it does on PC, or get RPCS3 to work decently, I wouldn't bother even considering Royal's existence.
If you love Persona 5 and want the best version possible, PC is probably it, though I don't think it's worth more money than any other version of it. If you weren't sold on vanilla, Royal is not going to change your mind.… Expand
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