Summer Flame Day 2019- Why I’m Royally Pissed about Persona 5 Royal
2019 is another year of outrage and there’s no shortage of material for our annual Summer Flame Day. Today I set my flames of anger upon Atlus, a developer I normally love. Lately, their expanded ports have grinded my gears cumulating with the announcement of Persona 5 Royal.
Persona 5 Royal is an expanded port of Persona 5 which is coming stateside in 2020, roughly three years after the original game’s release. Like Atlus’s previous ports of Persona 4 Golden and Persona 3 FES, Persona 5 Royal will sport an expanded story, new features, new music, new cutscenes, new dungeons, new all-out-attacks, new locations, and two new characters. Despite all of these major changes it is interesting that Altus won’t be expanding on Hifumi Togo’s role in the game. Originally she was meant to be a Phantom Thief, but her role was cut due to time. A missed character opportunity aside, having an expansion of this beloved RPG is extremely exciting on the surface. Who wouldn’t want more content from a favorite game? Dig a little deeper and P5R feels lazy and unnecessary.
First, the game has been out for two to three years on modern consoles. Unlike moving Persona 3 and Persona 4 from the PS2 to the PSP and Vita with new graphics, updated ways to play, or an entirely new protagonist, this port brings little to the table. Worse, it’s not even an epilogue like P3FES was to P3 with an option to skip directly to the new content. As more details were released it became clear that Atlus would require fans to purchase an entirely new game because none of it would be compatible with existing copies of Persona 5. In other words, P5R would in no way be an expansion of the original base game. Again, Atlus did this with previous extended ports on older consoles, but Persona 5 was developed on consoles capable of supporting expansions that use the base game to access new content. I.e., there’s no reason to require players to buy a new game and force them to part with existing save data.
Could you imagine if the upcoming Monster Hunter World: Iceborne or Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers releases required players to start from the beginning with no way to import their data, despite already being a PS4 release? Or if every game with an expanded story required this, despite developers being able to alter game content without requiring players to start over? Why should Atlus be any different? Tradition? Incompetence? Greed, perhaps?
A lot of P5R’s new content takes place during a third semester which isn’t present in the original game– this includes the new character Kasumi Yoshizawa (sporting a reused design of the female protagonist from Persona 3 Portable), Morgana possibly in human form, and the new dungeon. Changes that have been made to the entirety of the game include the addition of a school counselor (Takuto Maruki), changes to the battle system, new locations, and updates of existing confidants. I still don’t see how these elements couldn’t have been patched into the base game through an expansion. DLC already exists that changes some elements of the P5, which means Atlus is more than capable of making changes to the existing game. The only conclusion is that Atlus is milking its fanbase by releasing an extended port of a game on the same console, make it incompatible with existing save data, and is requiring said fans to start over again with a “new” game. (To make myself crystal clear, these arguments are for the PS4 version of the game, not the PS3 version.)
This is also unfair to players because they are losing hard-earned time and the ability to carry a new game+ save over. Asking players to start from scratch on a 100+ hour RPG on the same system the original was developed on is a big demand. Worse yet, Altus also confirmed that any DLC purchased for P5 will have to be repurchased for Royal—albeit at a cheaper price. Still, there’s no reason beyond greed as to why fans that dropped over $100 on DLC should have to buy it again at any price. Those game assets haven’t changed in any significant way, especially for cosmetic DLC. (To be fair, this DLC issue might not apply in versions outside of Japan.) I’m also not buying the argument that an entirely new game is needed because of the new PS4 Pro compatibility. Quite a few games have PS4 Pro compatibility patched in, so this isn’t an impossible task.
As for Persona 5 Royal and its new character female character, I also have negative feelings. I’ve recently disliked the role that new characters have played in Atlus’s previous extended ports. My biggest concern is that the existence of Kasumi Yoshizawa as a Phantom Thief will create a retcon. This happened in Persona 4 Golden with the introduction of Marie. She was a character who didn’t exist in the PS2 version and she was essentially shoehorned in to make Golden work. I experienced her inclusion via the anime, but a lot of people who’ve played Golden and P4 on the PS2 felt her inclusion was forced. The original story was fine without her. I had the same issue with playing Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey Redux. Alex’s story was baffling and the existence of the final boss makes little sense within the story. Sure, Marie and Alex’s stories can be ignored to a degree, but if their inclusion is made canon that’s still a major retcon.
Joseph put it wonderfully during a discussion in our Discord channel: adding new characters to an existing story is attempting to fill a hole that never existed. To be fair, it seems like Kasumi won’t really appear until later in the game, which might help. After all, Persona 3 Portable did a good job of introducing new characters without altering the original story in an unbelievable way. And going further P3FES was an epilogue, not an entire rewrite. Nevertheless, P5 is being rewritten to create a role for Kasumi and to a lesser degree for Takuto as well. Surely that time could have been spent creating a side story in that missing third semester or a direct sequel, instead of serving up a repackaged story. Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse immediately comes to mind because it is a side story that takes place during the events from Shin Megami Tensei IV through the eyes of new characters.
I know I’m in the minority on this because Altus has plenty of defenders of Persona 5 Royal. Many fans aren’t upset because of this developer’s recent history of extended ports despite technological advances and consumer-unfriendly practices. Even if people don’t like this cash grab, plenty of them still plan to make Persona 5 Royal a day one purchase. For me, P5R is a missed opportunity from Atlus to take Persona into the modern age of gaming with expansions instead of ports, and direct sequels instead of retcons. As a fan of P5, I’m not even sure if I’ll even be picking up Royal any time soon, if at all. I do know that I’m just one small, unhappy voice in my corner of the internet raging on the longest day of the year.
About The Author
Angela
Executive Editor | Angela has had an addiction to video games and cartoons since she was young and impressionable. She enjoys writing long articles about these subjects and whatever else catches her eye. Mastodon
