Persona 5 Royal tips: 9 things to know before starting

Persona 5 Royal This is an enormous JRPG that will make your time precious as there are only so many tasks you can do in one day. Between managing friends (aka Confidants) and exploring dungeons, there’s tons of different aspects of the game to juggle.

Now that the game is getting released outside of PlayStation consoles, we’ve listed some tips below that we wish we knew before getting into the critically acclaimed JRPG.

For free statistics, look around.

Many things you can do in your environment that passively boost stats will help you save time. Whether it’s completing a crossword left at the café or giving a plant some fertilizer, you’ll want to interact with the various things around you to make sure you’re making the most of your time.

For even more statistics, keep books and DVDs with you

There are many nights where you can’t leave Leblanc, but you can still read books and watch DVDs on these nights. You should head to the DVD and bookstore in Shibuya and grab some stuff so you can gain stat points even when you can’t leave the café.

Every Confidant is useful. Not just you.

While it might be tempting to ignore some of the non-Phantom Thief characters, you should rank up as many people as you can, as they’ll give you useful abilities.

HifumiTogo is a shogi-player that allows you swap between your parties members in battle. Sadayokawakami the teacher lets you read during class. Tae Takemi can give you access special medicines.

Image: Atlus/Sega via Polygon

These three characters are the real ending

You need to make sure to reach certain Confidant ranks with three specific characters by specific dates in order to get to the game’s “true ending,” which is the most complete version. Spend time with Takuto Martuki (Councillor), Goro Akechi (Justice) and Kasumi Yoshizawa (“Faith”) by mid-November.

Diversify your personas and don’t be afraid to fuse them

It is important to have enough Personas in order to be able cover many different elements. Because you have the ability to swap Personas once per turn you are able to exploit enemy weaknesses.

However, it is important to fuse your Personas with new skills as you progress rather than keeping the same Personas forever. Once a Persona has no more new skills to learn, that’s typically a sign that you should fuse it into a stronger one.

Don’t forget to register your personas after leveling them

You can add all the Personas that you have collected to your compendium, where they will be available for you to summon them again. However, the compendium won’t retroactively keep up with your leveling, so if you want to get rid of a Persona that you’ve been using and resummon it later, you should register it to the compendium in the Velvet Room first. It doesn’t cost anything to register, so you should make a habit of doing this before you ditch or fuse your Personas.

Image: Atlus/Sega via Polygon

Take advantage of the time you have in Mementos or palaces.

Once you leave a palace or Mementos, you can’t do anything else for the rest of the night (unless you max out Kawakami’s Confidant rank). To avoid wasting a day, make sure not to enter either of these places until you’re fully ready to explore. This means that you have your Mementos requests in order, healing items stocked up, and whatever else you may need before fighting a ton of bad guys, as you shouldn’t leave until you’re completely done.

Watch out for unusual weather conditions

The weather can have a huge impact on your game. It affects stat gains and what you buy in shops. Shadows in Mementos also influence the game. Rainy nights are a great time to enjoy the sauna or learn more from Leblanc.

Mementos love special weather conditions because shadows will be debuffed by certain types of weather. For example, if there’s a “pollen warning,” then shadows in Mementos will be more lethargic and tired.

Don’t stress about completing everything

There is technically time to do everything, but you’ll need to follow a pretty rigorous and perfected schedule in order to do so. It can take a lot of effort, and this may be your first time trying. Persona 5In any case, we encourage you to do whatever you wish and go at your own speed.