Why try Persona 5 Royal, even if you hate JRPGs

I had never touched Persona 5 Royal, or any other Persona game, let alone a Shin Megami Tensei title. That wasn’t an oversight. It was a deliberate avoidance. Everything I had seen from skimming videos and screenshots gave me the impression of a genre built on text, with hours of dialogue wedged between fights. Nothing about that made me want to jump in. Then I bought a Steam Deck OLED, and the game got in my way anyway.

The Steam Deck as an unexpected way in

Scrolling through rankings of the most played games on the device, Persona 5 Royal kept showing up. Persona Central compiled Valve’s own lists and notes that the game landed at number twenty among the top 100 most played Steam Deck titles between March 2023 and March 2024, after already reaching the silver tier (25th to 50th place) on Steam’s 2023 year end ranking. A game I assumed was niche was running in the pockets of players who had, on paper, nothing to do with fans of dense text adventures. That was enough to make me question my own assumptions and give it a try without much confidence.

What changed my mind

The suspicion didn’t last. What hits first is the presentation. The art style, somewhere between a comic book and an animated interface, doesn’t resemble anything else in the genre, and the story of the Phantom Thieves carries real tension. You want to know what happens to the group next, not just push forward out of habit. I got attached to the characters faster than expected, which is probably the most surprising part for someone who assumed he would stay outside this kind of story.

The Persona mechanic itself, this system of summonable companions you fuse together, adds a strategic layer that breaks the routine of standard turn based combat. The game is still a JRPG at its core, but the back and forth between school life, exploring the Palaces, and combat gives it a pace you don’t find elsewhere. The length matches that ambition: it took me 89 hours to reach the credits, a number that looks modest next to the 102 hours TheGamer estimates for the main story alone, climbing to 143 hours for anyone chasing full completion.

A game built for the handheld format

What really sealed it is how well Persona 5 Royal fits short sessions. Progress is split into in game days with frequent save points, so you can stop after twenty minutes without losing your place, exactly what you want from a Steam Deck game. The title carries Valve’s Verified badge and runs remarkably well on the hardware. SteamDeckHQ tested several settings: at 50 frames per second with a TDP capped at 7, you get 4 to 4.5 hours of battery on 10 to 13 watts, and a heavier 40 frames per second setup still holds a 95% stable framerate. Nothing like the games that drain a battery in an hour. Docked to a TV, the resolution still holds up, with none of that downgraded-port feeling.

What didn’t win me over

Not everything works, and it would be dishonest to skip past that. The gameplay leans into repetition on purpose, the same combat patterns and the same back and forth through the Palaces, a choice that fits the game’s logic but won’t land for everyone. The soundtrack, genuinely great at first, ends up looping for dozens of hours and loses some of its punch along the way.

The real low point is a specific boss fight (mid-game spoiler, open it if that doesn’t bother you): the fight against Okumura. The community largely agrees on this, as documented by outlets like ScreenRant: the boss runs a thirty minute timer with an instant game over if you miss it, throws wave after wave of robots that self destruct on command, and blocks All Out Attacks even once every enemy is down. The kind of fight that makes you put the controller down and swear, then start over anyway. The twist, pointed out by several players, is that the fight gets easier on Merciless difficulty rather than an easier one. Go figure.

A sequel that confirmed the attachment

Once the credits rolled, I had no interest in walking away from the series. I bought Persona 5 Strikers almost immediately after, the action spin off released in Japan in February 2020 and worldwide in February 2021 on PS4, Switch, and Windows. Trading turn based combat for real time action with the same cast could have thrown me off. Instead it confirmed this wasn’t just enthusiasm for one well executed game, but a real attachment to this world and these characters.

What’s next

The plan is already set. Persona 3 Reload, released in February 2024 and also comfortably placed in that same Steam Deck ranking (fiftieth spot), is next up. After that I’m waiting on Persona 4 Revival, the remake announced in June 2025 and set to release on February 18, 2027 on PS5, PC, and Xbox Series, carrying over the content from Persona 4 Golden, out on PC since 2020. And then there’s Persona 6, revealed in June 2026 at the Xbox Games Showcase with a bare bones teaser, a graveyard in a storm and a green tinted mood, no gameplay and no firm date. Hard not to look forward to it once you’ve just figured out why this series means so much to people who already went through it.

If an entire genre can make someone who avoided it for years change their mind, maybe it’s worth revisiting other assumptions too, like the ones around narrative single player games. Either way, this kind of hook leaves you with a library that grows fast, split between the base game, its sequel, and remakes still to come, scattered across Steam and other platforms depending on when the sales hit. Radion exists for exactly that, bringing Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo libraries together in one place, so you know what you’ve already finished before buying the same game twice.