Persona 5 Royal

Persona 5 Royal is an expanded version of Atlus's stylish JRPG, combining a social simulation of school life with dungeon crawling set in surreal Palaces, mental representations of the corrupted desires of adults who abuse their positions. The player, a transfer student with a tarnished reputation, becomes the leader of the Phantom Thieves of Hearts, a group of teenagers able to enter targets' cognitive worlds and steal their corrupted hearts, forcing them to publicly confess their crimes — from a corrupt teacher through a mafia boss to politicians abusing their power.

Outside the dungeons, the player manages limited real-world time split between attending school, part-time jobs, studying, and building Confidant relationships with other characters, which unlock new combat abilities and useful skills. Each day offers only a handful of free slots, so the game constantly forces a choice between studying for an exam, friendship, and a Palace expedition, and it's precisely from this pressure that the addictive pacing of the game's full year springs. The battle system combines turn-based combat exploiting enemies' elemental weaknesses with collecting Personas, demonic alter egos that can be fused into stronger forms similarly to previous Shin Megami Tensei games; knocking down an entire group of enemies leads to an all-out attack or to negotiating for them to join the player's collection.

The Royal version adds a new character, Kasumi Yoshizawa, an entire new half-year story segment set in a snowy Palace, and reworked endings offering deeper closure to the main plot. Thanks to its stylized graphics — where even the menus are treated as graphic design — Shoji Meguro's jazz score, and its themes of the abuse of power, Persona 5 Royal earned the status of one of the highest-rated JRPGs of its generation, aimed squarely at older players. On Switch, the game arrived at a time when it had already built a reputation as a modern classic, so the port served mainly as an invitation to audiences who had missed the original on PlayStation.