I know my reviews are long and I appreciate the time you taking the time in reading them.

I own Persona 5 on the PS3 and PS4, Persona 5 Royal on the PS5 and on PC. Look I’m fully aware that by buying every re-release of a game I’m part of a problem in today’s gaming industry. Gamers being squeezed for every last penny they’ve got, more so with fans of a particular game or series. “They love it, so they’ll buy it anyway”. And Atlus certainly has proven itself to be part of that side of the gaming industry that wants their fans to pay the absolute maximum, because they know that we’ll buy it anyway.
It's just that most of their games are some of the absolute best ever made, and Persona 5 Royal, for me, is probably on top of that list. It’s everything I hoped a game would be as a kid and here’s why.


When I was a kid I used to read tons of comics, hundreds of them a year. My parents bought me a little tape-player (yes, I’m that old) and every last cent of my pocket money was spent on either comics, music, or audiobooks on tape. It was much cheaper than buying a CD and the selection they had on certain events was just insane. Laying in bed listening to every story over and over again, my eyes closed and imagining I was part of every journey. No matter if I was Tintin, Spiderman, Wolverine or Asterix, I loved every story and I’ve been a part of many of them.

I wasn’t all too familiar with Atlus-games in 2016, but I saw a trailer for Persona 5 and immediately added it to my wishlist on the PS-store. The more I checked out some early-on impressions on YouTube and read about it, I became aware of the huge passion the fans of the series had. Apparently the Persona series (and ofcourse Megami Tensei as a whole) had quite the legacy, which only made me more excited to play the game.

In April 2017 I was sitting on my couch, watching the download of Persona 5 crawl along. I felt something that I felt when unwrapping a new comic or tape. A mix of anticipation, excitement and a hint of nervousness. It’s done. The Atlus logo is displayed, the music starts, goosebumps. And suddenly I’m not sitting on my couch anymore, I’m part of the Persona universe, each morning I’m waking up in an attic, I’m Ren/Joker.


Ren’s a high school student accused of assault and therefore put on probation, his parents decide that he’ll go to another school and stay with their family friend Sojiro Sakura. There he’ll become part of a story where adults are taking advantage of their (social) positions, most of the time to the detriment of children/young adults. Ren/Joker gets to know these victims, befriends them and starts to form his own social circle in this new city. Adults who become so distorted by their own (wicked) desires form a so-called palace. A place where they are the rulers and anything what they want to be in real life becomes reality, influencing their behavior in the real world. Ren and his friends infiltrate these places (palaces) and try to take away the thing that feeds these adults to behave the way they do (a treasure).

Persona 5 does an impeccable job sucking you in their world. The way the story unfolds is on a level I’ve experienced maybe a handful of times in gaming. Yes, it’s a slow burn the first couple of hours but with good reason. The game starts in the middle of the story and after you are introduced to the stories’ setting you are thrown back to the beginning. So many questions arise: Why was I there, what was I doing in a casino of all places, who betrayed me?

When you get to the free roam part of the game you’re several hours in. It’ll definitely be worth it, but if you’re more into the ‘dive straight into the action’-type games, be aware of this. But I hope you can find the patience because otherwise you’re missing out on one of the greatest stories ever told.

Persona, for me, feels like I’m reading a comic and all of a sudden I’m part of the story and certain choices have an impact on MY friends, on MY town, on MY family. I don’t want to disappoint any of them, which make some of the choices so hard and so genuine. Who to spent time with? Who to date? Who to deepen your bond with? To balance all these choices while also trying to improve your own (social and combat) skills feels just like real life. I don’t want to say no to any of them, but I’ve got to think of myself as well you know? I am Ren/Joker, these choices are mine and I must deal with the consequences.


P5(R) stays true to the turn based genre and to earlier Persona and to most of the Megami Tensei games. If you’re familiar with them than P5R brings very little new stuff to the table, but it’s probably also the reason you’ll love this one. The game is divided in 2 forms of gameplay.

First the dungeon crawling, action focused gameplay takes place in palaces/Mementos. Here you’ll face ‘shadows’, fight them, gain new (fighting) skill and collect new additions to your team. Second is social part of the game, here you can explore the city, train social/life skills and socialize with a wide variety of people struggling with society. These social connections are a large part of what makes P5R so great. Each of the social connections has their own backstory. Some struggle with past mistakes, some with financial issues, are being bullied or are even unaware of who they really are. With each step you get to know them more and just like a real friendship they try to help you along in life, just like you‘re helping them.

The balance between the 2 gameplay types is great. Whenever you reach the limitation of certain confidant/social storylines the main storyline advances. Giving you several hours of action-filled gameplay, which advances everyone’s story and gives you a new purpose to focus on when the social aspect again becomes the main focus. This ebb and flow of different kinds of gameplay keeps you invested, interested and makes it hard to stop. There’s always something new to see, learn and love just a couple of minutes away.

In the last 6 years I’ve played P5 (including Royal) 7 times. Depending on the difficulty setting and your interest to explore every part of each confidant, it should take you anywhere from 70 to 120 hours to complete. New game plus lets you keep items and social skills from the previous playthrough, which gives you more time to deepen the relations with the people around you and encourages you to choose an increased difficulty.

The amount of times I’ve had goosebumps from profound emotional moments is insanely high. Moments where you can’t help but yell at the screen be it from happiness, anger of sadness. And when the story reaches it’s inevitable peak and conclusion it felt like I was saying goodbye to my own friends and family. You know that feeling when you’re watching the last scene of ‘Friends’ (or another series that’s close to your heart), ‘Embryonic Journey’ by Jefferson Airplane starts playing and you feel the tears welling up in your eyes. You’re torn somewhere between a feeling of love, loss and happiness to have been part of something truly special.

P5R does that to you. It makes you want to instantly play the game again but also to keep a distance for a while because it takes time to recover from something that you so deeply love but eventually has to end.

Schedule 1 (S1) is an amazing crime/drug simulator, while easy to get into the game has a lot of potential to min-max strategies, production and getting rich. I’ve spent more than 50 hours in the game the past week. This review contains some spoilers, but the story itself isn’t really important for the game, it’s more of a guideline what your next focus on progressing should be.

Let’s get into it.


S1 is a game about drug producing and dealing, where you travel the streets supplying those who want it with weed, cocaine and meth. You’ll start by doing all of the deals yourself before progressing into having multiple dealers employed. Growing, cultivating and mixing of drugs is done by you in the first place as well. S1 let’s you get to the basics about how everything is made first and after some time there is an option to let others (dealers, botanists, handlers, etc) do the work for you. As the scope of your drug empire grows, the things you need to concern yourself with expand further while leaving the more mondain tasks behind you.

If you’re starting up S1 for the first time, I’d advice you to do the tutorial. Although not very comprehensive about what’s coming it gives you some basic first steps without any (time) pressure. After that you are introduced to the town you will be dealing with (sorry, had to do it). The town is divided into 6 sectors, which you can explore right from the beginning. Making and dealing drugs is closed off to 1 sector only when you’re just starting, which makes the game feel a lot less overwhelming.

S1 has a clock/day-and-night-cycle. Different stuff happens at different times; some shops are open during the day while others can only be accessed at night. You can choose to sleep and progress to the next day or stay up until late and do some management or dealing, whatever you want. What is an amazing feature is that after 04:00 at night the time doesn’t progress any further. This means that plants don’t grow and employees don’t work anymore sure, but you have all the time in the world to fill up your ingredients needed for the next day, make sure everything is working okay. I loved having the time to set up new processes to automate stuff I didn’t want to deal with anymore. Also, this give me some time to relax a bit, I tend to feel a little bit overwhelmed when there’s (too) much to do in certain games. Having a moment to create an overview about where everything stands is a really great feature.

The game takes you by the hand for each step of the growing, packaging and dealing process. After doing some street deals you meet a dealer, which you can employ. Assign this dealer most of your customers and you now have more time on your hands to get into mixing and expanding your empire. Each of the steps in this (expanding) process is met with deeper options for automation and customization, it gives S1 an amazing depth in a genre that has been filled with very superficial games in the past 5 years (the simulator genre).


I’m by no means an expert in how the world of drug manufacturing and dealing works but I would think it’s filled with a constant feel of suspense and anxiety about possible police, gang or even cartel related incidents. S1 is no different with bypassing stop-and-search actions by the police, cartel member aggression and a nightly curfew in which you aren’t even allowed on the street (let alone deal drugs). Although not much of a hassle at first, the cartel can really set you back with robbing your dealers or ambushing you. As you gain power you can start to push and fight back, arming dealers and yourself, waiting on known cartel stashhouses to ambush them. The cops can be ‘dealt with’, they do respawn each new day though, which I like a lot.

S1 gives this amazing feeling of slowly pulling you more and more into the entire criminal enterprise feeling. Laundering money, buying properties, getting people to work for you, getting rich. When I was dealing in the higher upper-class region of the map and saw some cartel members walking on the street dealing dope this ‘I am the one who knocks’/Heisenberg feeling came over me lol. From a small streetcorner dealing punk to a druglord fighting off the people who had the city as their playground before I came along, amazing stuff.

The overall progression is great, even when the game is ‘only’ in version 0.4, so a lot more stuff will be added before getting its full release. Starting from a motel ending up with more room than you know what to do with, starting with a couple of bucks to having more money you know what to do with, awesome.


However great a game is, there’s always room for improvement. My focus for improvement lies in the employee and automation mechanic. I’d like to manage my staff at the place where I can recruit them, having to fire someone on location and having to drive back to the guy setting you up with new staff can be tedious. The automation options are great, but I’d like to hoover over an employee and seeing all the routes I have planned for them. If you want them to grab something from stash x, bring it to stash y, putting the outcome of item x to machine y can be a lot to remember. It works great with machinery already, please add to the storage units as well.

Another thing that would give a bit more depth imo is adding skill/progression to the dealers, staff that works at manufacturing and the suppliers. When buying seeds, it really is cool that you go from ordering only a handful to a stash full to meeting the supplier and having no restrictions in quantity. But I’d love it if the next tier is them coming to places I own, just like when you’re ordering ingredients for manufacturing. Same thing for staff working in manufacturing, give them some form of progression/specialization. Have a weed-producing botanist options to get better/faster in his job, same goes for the other professions. Now you’re dealing with names, but they mean nothing to me, how cool would it be to have something like; ‘Oh Jessica, yeah she’s the specialist in creating weed-string x’ or ‘Rick, yeah he’s handling the mixing process of meth and is crazy good at it’. Same goes for the dealers, give them something that makes them have a personality. Get them in fights with customers sometimes if they have a more aggressive personality but that gives them an edge when fighting with the cartel. And the other way around as well, a more chill dealer, who gets along with customers great and improves his earnings but gets their ass kicked by the cartel from time to time.


Look, it can come as no surprise that Schedule 1 gets a ‘hell yeah I recommend it’ from me. The game really took me by surprise. Expecting a basic simulation game but getting so much more in return. The hours felt like minutes which felt like seconds while playing this game, isn’t that exactly what you’d want most? I can see myself putting in many hundreds of hours with each future update this game gets.

There’s probably so much good stuff I’ve failed to mention. But give this game a try, it is well worth its money. If you have feedback regarding this review, stuff that was great, stuff that could be better, love to hear it.

Much love like always,

PJ

P.S. This game gets updates all the time, I'll be updating this review with the next big patch coming out..