Persona 5 (PS3)

This is a perfectly good game that Royal took to the next level. Practically everything Royal added or changed is an improvement to what's here, but I want to start by mentioning the things the original does better:

• For some reason it was separated out as DLC, but ignoring that, Merciless difficulty makes more sense here. Merciless' whole gimmick is that while you deal 3x weakness and technical damage, so do the enemies, on top of the hard mode difficulty adjustments. P5R made the error of changing all the exp and money earned to 1.2x on top of this. In P5, you instead got a debuff where your earned money and exp was 0.4x. This made it so assuming you don't grind, despite being hugely under-levelled against your foes, you could take advantage of the 3x weak/technical damage to keep getting through the game. Royal changing it to 1.2x misses the point and is why everyone just uses Hard mode there. A good balance between avoiding the need to grind and not being too powerful would've probably been 0.6x? P5's is definitely tuned too low, as the start of the game is absolutely brutal without grinding.

• The difficulty balancing in general was much better here than P5R. P5R adds a lot of new mechanics and expands existing ones, but most battles in the game weren't really adjusted enough to accommodate the increased power you get. (That palace 5 boss everyone cries about in P5R is nothing that crazy in P5, and that's because that boss was one of the few that got a massive rework and therefore was adjusted to match the players power!) That being said, I can't deny just how much more interesting P5Rs combat is even if the game is easier. There was just so many ways to express yourself in the battles that is just satisfying, so even if P5 is a better balanced game, I'd rather play around with all the P5R bells and whistles.

• Gun ammo does not replenish after every battle here. This is something quite neat for the start of the game because things actually have a gun weakness, and so you need to conserve ammo between all your teammates to manage to take down all enemies (This is especially important if you are playing merciless without grinding!). They only get a point for this mechanic for the starting palaces though, because soon enemies get gun weaknesses way less and you have gun skills, leading you to just avoid using the gun at all due to not wanting to waste ammo.

• Confidant timing is waaaay tighter in P5. Since Royal frees up some time that P5 makes you skip or sleep through, and Royal has an additional whole month of gameplay if you unlock it, it's no wonder really. For game balancing this is good and I appreciated it, however I have to say Royals was still more fun since there were just way more things to do and I miss the extra confidants it had.

• The final boss to the end of the game is more cohesive here compared to unlocking the 3rd semester in P5R. Unfortunately for P5, the P5R 3rd semester is incredible and they did their best to link them pretty good, but it's still a positive none-the-less. The original P5 ending is also very wholesome and it's hard to decide if I liked the P5R one more or not.

So um you may have noticed that even in these points of "praise" I would often still bring up how I prefer how P5R did it. I think that says it all about what I think of P5 compared to P5R. Even in the parts it does better, P5R does something else to counteract it, and generally it's just slightly worse or the same in every other area. If I were to do a quick run through on just a few ways this game is not up to par to P5R:

• Cannot toggle auto advance in cutscenes
• The English translation can be iffy at times
• Less voice acting
• Worse graphics pretty much everywhere (And I don't just mean how the PS3 runs the game at 720p30fps which isn't really a big deal)
• Can't run at all unless you are in phantom thief attire
• Baton passing is a confidant ability
• Ryuji rank 7 ability literally makes the game worse once you get it
• You can flick your control stick out of hiding (sounds cool but you pretty much always do it on accident)
• Camera is very unresponsive when hiding
• Palace design is less puzzle-y and more hallway-ey
• Mementos has basically nothing to do
• Playing this on PS3 with the disc and a hard drive makes saving and (some) load times miserable (I would get freezes when ambushing enemies just so it had time to load the encounter...) And realistically I could go on but I won't...

P5R is still P5 at it's core though and so Persona 5 here is still a fun game. The issues I listed here are issues for sure but you can mostly get over them and get on the same playing field as it. It's just a lot harder to give this game praise when you have another product that overshadows it massively - and is what I've played first... I easily recommend Royal for first-timers, but this is certainly an interesting way to spice up a possible replay of Persona 5 (which is what I've done here).

Review taken from my Backloggd page.