Instead of turning yourself in on Christmas morning as was the case in P5, Goro Akechi, who was presumed dead, conveniently arrives and says that he will turn himself in, leaving Joker to celebrate Christmas with the Phantom Thieves. However, the most extreme changes from P5 to P5R’s story comes once you defeat the final boss of P5, Yaldabaoth, and are lingering in Shibuya on Christmas Eve evening - which is about 100 hours in in P5R. My thoughts I wrote about the story from P5 still absolutely stand. That’s a good thing because the story of the original P5 was absolutely brilliant. I’d say 90% of the core story is largely the same - Akechi, Shido, Yaldabaoth, and obviously everything before that, all pretty much the same. Let’s talk about the story, which is the main thing I kept coming back to once I had finished my 121 hour playthrough. Sure, she pops up every now during the story and then but she’s not as much of a feature in this game as, say, the size of her character on the cover-art would suggest. I guess, in retrospect, the early Kasumi appearance was not really an outlier of what was to come. In fact, her role in this game is not what you would have expected heading into P5R. Her ‘anti’-Phantom Thieves stance isn’t so much of a thing in the actual game itself but the point remains in that Yoshizawa is not a member of the Phantom Thieves. It was confirmed very quickly in the escape from the casino that Kasumi was not a member of the Phantom Thieves, as she aides in your escape in an added scene (which was a good introduction to her). It’s implied from the E3 Trailer that while she’s a Persona user, she doesn’t seem to agree with the Phantom Thieves, certainly, she didn’t belong to them (which makes her different to most Persona users in Persona 5) - that was the impression I got at the time. So, I guess the major thing that was being pushed for P5R, the major addition, was the introduction of a new Persona user, whose name is Kasumi Yoshizawa. If you do not want to be spoiled…STOP, now. I’ll probably add some of my favourite screen shots from the game’s cinematics along the way, these also contain spoilers. Obviously this should go without saying, but there are spoilers for not only the original P5 but P5R too, so fair warning. This is mostly a story and character introspective, so those thoughts will come first and the gameplay stuff will come later. Many pages, and many hours later, I have beaten P5R and now that it is conquered, I wanted to write about. As I played through P5R, I took notes on basically my thoughts on the new things, maybe things I hadn’t realised or something I wanted to remember - whatever. I have a notebook for almost everything, including a miscellaneous notebook for, well, exactly that. I wanted to be able to tell the little things that might be different between P5 and P5R. Prior to this, I’ve played through P5 three times, the most recent of those around Christmas time, so I’d be somewhat fresh of the game but not too fresh for the April release. I scrambled (way too late, admittedly) to find a special copy of P5R to order, eventually pre-ordered the Phantom Thieves Edition with all the fancy shwag and all I had to do was wait… Eventually, the end of March arrived and it was a sweet, sweet moment when she arrived. The only unfortunate side of that announcement was that it wouldn’t release in Europe until late March - effectively, April - a lifetime compared to the October release Japan was getting… However, not long after that experience, Persona 5 Royal (which I’ll refer to as P5R from here onwards, and the original Persona 5 as ‘P5’) was announced and I was obviously very excited - the idea of more content for the game that had already (excuse the pun) stolen my heart was obviously a very exciting one. I wrote that over a year ago now and I still stand by it, so I guess it wasn’t just a spur of the moment emotion. The original Persona 5 was such an incredible experience to me, so much so that I labelled it my favourite game of all time - a pretty large claim for someone who has been playing games for almost 20 years now.
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