note

This post contains spoilers for Persona 5 Royal! If you haven't played the game yet, I suggest you stop reading to avoid spoilers, else, proceed at your own caution.

Recently, I decided to pick up Persona 5 Royal, as I broke my controller and… Persona 4 Golden on a keyboard felt horrible (this probably needs its own blog post…) so I put it on pause for now. Fast-forward a few weeks later and I'm 60 hours into it. I've been enjoying the game a whole lot, but there are points where I feel like the game is out to annoy me. I've still got half the game left to go - but these will be my thoughts up to this point, for Kaneshiro's bank and Okumura's spaceport.

Kaneshiro's Palace

The third palace in the game. This is probably the first instance that I felt like the game was a bit annoying. The palace itself is fine thematically, and the OST was really nice too. But, despite all that, the mechanics in this palace felt so wrong.

The main puzzle within the palace involves the security system, where you have to decode a 4-letter word into numbers to progress. Each letter corresponds to a number, and you have to go around the palace collecting torn pages from Kaneshiro's journal to form the cipher.

The page-collection part itself is fine, running around the palace to find the pages is pretty simple. Each page is in a very visible piggy-bank-shaped container. I was stuck for like… 20 minutes finding myself missing a page, but that was mostly my fault for overlooking a container right next to a room entrance.

One of the annoying part about this is how the hints are basic arithmetics, but there are so many of them you are basically required to have a notepad of some sort to solve for all the letters involved. But, alas, it's fine, I'll let this one slide.

The worst part about this palace has to be how you have to do this a total of three times. And for every corridor you clear while finding each keypad, there are no safe rooms - there's only one at the start of the vault. If you end up failing a single encounter randomly (god bless this game's RNG!), that means you're restarting from the start of that corridor.

Of course, I can see how this is just the game being "difficult" and punishing failure, but it's just slightly annoying how you have to reclear each vault floor if you accidentally fail a fight. The fights aren't hard, but it's very easy to randomly die if you get a stupid effect proc.

Nonetheless, I feel like the mechanics of Kaneshiro's Palace are just slightly annoying, in the lines of being tedious, but it's not totally bad. It's a nice end to Makoto's story arc, and I didn't lose too much time pulling my hair to finish it.

Okumura's Palace

Kaneshiro's Palace is definitely, definitely, definitely no match for this. The fifth palace in the game has to be one of the worst designed palaces I've ever seen. It's so bad we even got subsections for it!

Timed mechanics

A ton of the mechanics are timed, which technically fits the theme of "capitalism draining everyone dry", but it's just so, so, so annoying. Pathing through the map involves a bunch of 30-second timed platforms, and you need to backtrack and re-activate the platforms to progress if you don't make it in time. This time passes during fights too, so if you accidentally get an encounter, have fun backtracking!

Yippee, you've made it to the end of the palace, and you sent the calling card. You enter the palace again, fast travel to the last section before the boss encounter, and you feel like you're so prepared to do this boss fight. You're wrong. You are not ready to do this boss fight.

After a little bit of a cutscene, a 10-minute timer starts, and you're supposed to chase after Okumura. You are supposed to run through a Shadow-infested corridor to catch up to him, and you have to do this in 10 minutes. If you don't make it in time, you have to restart from the start of the corridor. This is the most annoying part of the palace, and it's just so, so, so frustrating. Thankfully, the kind developers at Atlus has added the grappling hook to Royal, and you have a shortcut to skip yourself straight to the boss encounter, rendering the annoyance of this 10-minute timer to essentially null.

That should be it right? Oh dear sweet summer child, you're getting even more wrong. The boss fight has a thirty-minute time limit. "It's a whopping thirty minutes!", I hear you say. Well, let me tell you about the mechanics.

Boss fight mechanics

Okumura sends waves of four robots of increasing strength to face you, while he sits in the back and either buffs them or debuffs your party. The robots are weak to certain elements, and resists everything else. You have met all of these robots as part of the introductory sequence of the palace, and good luck preparing for all of them.

For you, you have three turns to attack and kill these robots to clear the "wave". If you don't kill them in time, if you dealt even just a single point of damage to any of them, they would flee and you would fail the wave. This is probably the part where the game expects you to abuse the hell out of Baton Passes to maximize damage dealt, but I'm telling you, even on Normal difficulty, maximum Baton Passes on Haru struggles to take down the last wave of robots.

This straight up makes it extremely annoying as these robots are super tanky and they deal a ton of damage to your party as well. With all of this, you can probably start to see how thirty minutes straight up isn't enough to clear the fight.

I've sat and pulled my hair for at least three hours doing Okumura's boss fight and I still haven't cleared it, and I've got close to clearing the fight only once… If this isn't one of the worst designed boss fights in the game, I don't know what is. It frustrates me genuinely because Haru's arc was getting really, really good and this horrible boss fight makes it so tedious to go through, and simply ruins the narration for me purely because how long it takes to finish it. I've also spent at least two hours looking at Reddit posts asking on how to fight it and a whole lot of them is pointing towards abusing Merciless' 3x weakness multiplier and a DLC Persona to clear the fight. I'm very close to just doing that, but I'm still holding out hope that I can clear it without resorting to that. The sheer difficulty of the fight just makes me reconsider doing NG+ runs as well, but I will see how that goes…

The damn airlock puzzles

A bit before the boss fight, you have to go through a series of airlock puzzles to progress. It's not very clear what you really need to do, other than toggling the various switches to progress. It's so annoying that you constantly need to constantly toggle the map to find out the path you need to take while attempting to grab the third Will Seed. The pathing took me forever since you're meant to go in one specific direction. This puts the icing on the cake for how bad Okumura's Palace is designed. Thank god you're not timed on this section, or else I would genuinely flip doing this palace.

Closing thoughts

While I've learnt to accept Kaneshiro's bank, Okumura's spaceport is still something I genuinely am frustrated about. This really ruined the experience for this part of the game for me, and it made me feel stuck similar to Yakuza Kiwami 2's Man in Black fight. But alas, after writing this, I'll probably spend the next few hours trying to clear this fight, but this will definitely go down as one of the worst designed fights I've ever witnessed in a JRPG.

I still want to make clear that this doesn't make Persona 5 (Royal) a bad game by any means! It's still a truly enjoyable experience overall, and I still don't regret the hours I've sunken into this game. I really recommend it if you are interested in turn-based RPGs, or you wanted a good entry point into the Persona series.