The most aggressive thingPersona 5 Royal does to you happens on an ordinary Tuesday in June. School finishes. The game returns control. You have one afternoon and one evening, and in front of you sit a part-time job that would raise your Charm, a friend who has been waiting three in-game weeks to advance a relationship, a book that would raise your Knowledge before an exam, and a dungeon with a deadline in eleven days. You can do one afternoon thing. Some of those options will eat the evening as well.

Nothing threatens you. No enemy is on screen. This is the most tense the game ever gets, and Atlus knew that when they built it.

The system, stated plainly

Persona 5 came out in Japan in September 2016 and in the West in April 2017, directed by Katsura Hashino, with Shigenori Soejima’s character design and Shoji Meguro’s soundtrack doing an enormous amount of the heavy lifting.Royal is the expanded edition — Japan in October 2019, the West in March 2020 on PS4, and eventually everywhere in October 2022 when Atlus finally put it on PC, Xbox, Switch and PS5.

The structure is a school year. Each day gives you a small number of discretionary slots. You spend them on Confidants — twenty-odd relationships, each ranked one to ten, each granting mechanical benefits as it climbs — or on the five social stats, Knowledge, Guts, Proficiency, Kindness and Charm, which gate the Confidants. Meanwhile the plot delivers Palaces: cognitive dungeons with a hard calendar deadline. Fail to finish one by its date and the game ends. Actually ends.

So every single day is an allocation problem with an audit at the end of it. That is the machine. The phantom-thief business, the jazz, the extraordinary menus — all of it is upholstery on a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet is where the feeling comes from.

Why the scarcity works

Scarcity is easy to design and hard to makehurt. Most games with a time limit produce anxiety, which is a cheap emotion.Persona 5 produces regret, which is expensive.

The mechanism is that the game makes the thing you gave up visible. You skipped Yusuke, who texted, and whose Confidant is at rank four, and whose rank five would give you a combat ability you can name and want. The cost of every choice is a person with a face and a text message. That is the whole trick, and it is why the strategy-game version of this system, where you allocate abstract workers to abstract buildings, does not feel like anything.

The second mechanism is that the game refuses to let you win the allocation. A completionist run of Royal is documented to sit well past a hundred hours, and even a perfect one is a scramble, because the Confidant ranks are gated behind social stats that are themselves gated behind days. You are always behind. The design’s honest position is that a year is too short to be good at everything, which is a considerably more mature statement than the phantom-thief plot manages in its entire runtime.

The real ancestor of this is not the RPG lineage at all. It isTokimeki Memorial, Konami’s 1994 dating simulator, which established the loop of stat-raising against a school calendar with affection as the scoring function.Persona 3 imported that structure into Atlus’s demon-fusion RPG in 2006 and discovered that the calendar made the dungeonmatter, because now the dungeon had an opportunity cost. EverythingPersona 5 does is the third refinement of that fusion. Fifteen years earlier, on the home computers I grew up with, the closest equivalent wasElite’s fuel economy — a resource that turned exploration into a decision — and the shared idea is old: the interesting number is the one you cannot have more of.

Where Royal fights itself

Here is the argument I want to make about the definitive edition, and it is not a comfortable one.

Royal’s improvements are almost allloosening. Palaces now contain Will Seeds, which reward exploration with SP-restoring accessories; SP was the original’s scarcest combat resource and the reason a Palace took multiple visits. The grappling hook opens shortcuts. Safe rooms let you leave and return without losing progress. Morgana’s early curfew — the notorious business of a cat sending you to bed — is relaxed. Ranked SP items are purchasable. Showtime attacks give you a free burst of damage on a random timer.

Each of these is a quality-of-life win. Collectively they mean that a Palace which used to consume three or four calendar days now goes down in one, and those recovered days go straight back into your Confidant budget. Atlus made the dungeons kinder and thereby made the calendar softer, and the calendar was the antagonist.

I do not think this ruinsRoyal. I think it is a real cost that reviews at the time under-reported because the additions were so obviously generous. The 2016 game’s cruelty was doing structural work: when SP ran out, the Palace ended, and you went home having spent a day and achieved nothing, andthat was the day you learned what the game was about.Royal rarely gives you that day. It replaces it with a third semester — new content from November onwards, a new Confidant in Takuto Maruki, a new party member in Kasumi Yoshizawa — that is, and I say this having sat with it for years, the best-written material Atlus has ever shipped and structurally the wrong place to put it.

Because the third semester arrives after the calendar has finished threatening you. It is a coda. It is superb, and it is playing in a mode the entire preceding hundred hours had been arguing against: a stretch of time where the pressure is narrative rather than arithmetical. The best thing inRoyal is the part ofRoyal that stops beingPersona 5.

The upholstery, briefly

I have been dismissive about the surface and should correct that, because the surface is why anyone tolerates the spreadsheet.

The interface is the most confident work in the medium. Every menu is animated, angled, red-and-black, scored, and no two transitions in the game are the same shape. That is functional work: a game asking you to spend a hundred hours in menus has to make the menus a place you enjoy standing, and Atlus solved that by treating the pause screen as a piece of graphic design rather than a list. Meguro’s soundtrack does the same job in the other channel: the battle theme is the reason a random encounter you have fought two hundred times still snaps you awake.

And the writing, when it is good, is very good indeed. Futaba’s Palace, in particular, does something the genre almost never manages: it takes a character’s psychology, renders it as architecture, and then makes navigating the architecture the act of understanding her.

When it is bad it is very bad. The plot’s politics are adolescent, the Phantom Thieves’ celebrity arc goes nowhere it has not been dragged, and there are stretches of the middle third where the game will hold you in a cutscene for forty minutes to say something it said at the start.

The verdict

Persona 5 Royal is a hundred-hour game about the arithmetic of a finite year, wearing the best clothes in the industry. Its greatness is entirely structural — the fact that a Tuesday in June is harder than any boss — and its expanded edition is a slightly compromised version of that greatness in exchange for content nobody could reasonably decline.

PlayRoyal, since it is the only version anyone can now buy, and play it on whatever is nearest; the 2022 ports run fine and the PC one is the obvious pick. Take the third semester. Do not look up an optimal Confidant route, because a schedule someone else calculated removes the entire game.

For a much smaller, much sharper treatment of the same idea — time as a currency you are always short of, with none of the upholstery — readCitizen Sleeper, which does in eight hours what this does in a hundred and is honest about which of those is a virtue. And for the other end of the JRPG’s structural ambition,Nier: Automata makes the shape of the playthrough itself the argument.

Spoilers below

Maruki is the reasonRoyal exists, and he is a better antagonist than Shido by a distance that is almost embarrassing.

The third semester’s premise is that the counsellor who has been helping you all year has acquired the power to remove suffering, and has used it, and the world you wake up in is one where everybody’s worst thing simply did not happen. The dead parent is alive. The ruined career is intact. The friend’s trauma is gone, and so is the person the trauma made.

What makes this land is that it is acalendar argument. Maruki’s reality is a place with no opportunity cost — every choice is available, nothing is foreclosed, no Tuesday in June ever charges you anything. He is offering the player exactly what the player has spent a hundred hours resenting the absence of. The game has trained you to want this. The whole system has been a machine for generating the specific hunger Maruki proposes to satisfy.

And the refusal — the choice to reject a painless world and go back to the one where things cost — is the only moment in the entirePersona series where the theme and the mechanics say the same sentence at the same time. Everything else inPersona 5, the rebellion, the masks, the chains, is a metaphor stapled to a combat system. This is not a metaphor. This is the game asking whether you understood what the schedule was for.

The answer arrives in February, in a fistfight in the sky, which is the most Atlus thing imaginable and does not diminish it in the slightest.

Final Fantasy VII arrived in Europe in November 1997, and I remember the specific texture of that moment better than I remember most of the game: the Amiga had gone quiet under me, the PlayStation had turned up carrying the future on three discs, and a Japanese role-playing game about a mercenary with a comically large sword was suddenly the thing everyone had an opinion about. Midgar — the opening city, the bombing run, the plate, the slums — took maybe six hours. It was the best six hours on the console and then the game left it behind and went off to be a world map.

Final Fantasy VII Remake, released for PS4 in April 2020, takes those six hours and makes them the whole game. Forty of them, give or take. This is the fact that decided most people’s reaction before they had played a minute of it, and it is the least interesting fact about the thing.

The combat is the achievement

Start here, because the combat system is the part that deserves study, and it is a genuinely clever piece of hybrid engineering rather than a compromise.

You control one party member directly in real time. Attacking builds ATB — the gauge from 1997, now a resource rather than a clock — and spending ATB is how you cast, use an item, or fire an ability. Opening the command menu drops the game into Tactical Mode, where time slows to a crawl while you choose. You can switch to any party member instantly, and the ones you are not controlling fight competently and build ATB slowly on their own.

The read: this is an action game whose action generates the currency of a turn-based game, and whose turn-based game happens inside a bubble of slowed time carved out of the action. It sounds like a fudge. In play it produces something quite precise — you are always simultaneously executing and planning, and the slow-motion menu functions as a held breath.

Then Stagger. Every enemy has a stagger gauge, filled by pressure — pressure being generated by doing the specific thing that enemy dislikes, which the scan spell will tell you. Staggered, they take a burst of extra damage for a window. This mechanic did not come fromFinal Fantasy VII. It came fromFinal Fantasy XIII, and the people who built it are the people who made this: Motomu Toriyama on scenario, Naoki Hamaguchi on game design, both veterans of the XIII trilogy, under Tetsuya Nomura’s direction.XIII was pilloried for a combat system that most players never got far enough in to understand.Remake takes that system’s actual idea — combat as the management of a vulnerability window rather than an exchange of numbers — and wraps it in something you can touch.

That is the real ancestral trace, and it is more honest than the one the marketing wanted.Remake’s fighting isKingdom Hearts hands welded toFinal Fantasy XIII’s brain, made by the people who had both. The 1997 game contributes the Materia system, which returns almost unchanged and remains one of the best build systems anyone has designed: spells are objects, objects go in slots, slots are in gear, and therefore your entire capability is portable between characters at any moment.

Where the design fights itself

Forty hours of Midgar is not, in itself, a crime. Midgar can hold forty hours; the concept is strong enough and the art direction is comprehensively magnificent. The problem is thetexture of the added thirty-four, and specifically that Square Enix appears to have solved a large fraction of them with corridors.

There is a category of moment in this game that everyone who played it can describe: the gap you squeeze sideways through while the level streams, the ladder you climb at a fixed speed, the arm you hold out to a robot claw, the pair of levers that must be pulled in sequence in a room built exclusively to contain two levers. The Train Graveyard chapter and the long descent through the Shinra building are the usual examples cited, and they are cited because they are correct. These are pure duration, purchased at the cost of your goodwill.

I take this seriously because forty hours is a real thing to ask. A game asking for a working week of somebody’s life owes them a reason for every one of those hours, andRemake has stretches where the reason is plainly that the chapter needed to be longer than the content in it. The side quests are the same instinct wearing a friendlier face — go and find some cats, go and kill some rats — and they exist to buy you affection scenes and a slightly better relationship with characters the game could have simply written more scenes for.

What rescues it, and it does mostly rescue it, is that the expansion isspecific where it counts. Jessie, Biggs and Wedge are three names and a death in the original. Here they are people with a flat, a family, opinions about Cloud, and a plan; when the plate falls the arithmetic has changed, because you have had dinner with them. Wall Market is no longer a joke and a dress — it is an economy, with Don Corneo sitting on top of it and a genuinely superb set piece built around a piece of 1997 comedy that could have gone very badly and instead goes big, sincere, and slightly magnificent.

The thing it is actually doing

Here is the read that matters. Every remake has to decide what it is faithfulto, and the available options are the text or the memory of the text.Dead Space’s 2023 rebuild chose the text and treated the job as restoration — clean the varnish, fix the joints, do not repaint.Capcom’s Resident Evil 4 chose to argue with its original about tone, and won some of that argument.

Final Fantasy VII Remake chose something stranger and considerably riskier. It is faithful to thememory — to the way Midgar is bigger in your head than it ever was on the disc, to the way Aerith is more important in retrospect than she is in her introduction — and it treats that gap between the game and the recollection as the actual subject. The forty hours are the game rendering your inflated memory at the size your memory has it. That is why the added material is nearly alltexture rather than plot: the plot was never what got exaggerated.

And then it goes further, in a way I will keep below the line.

The verdict

This is a magnificent, sincere, overlong thing, and the overlength follows directly from the ambition. Play it. Play it on PC or PS5 where Intergrade’s performance mode makes the combat legible at the speed it wants to run — the PS5 version arrived in June 2021 with the Yuffie episode attached, and the PC release followed later that year, reaching Steam in 2022. Turn the difficulty to Normal and use Assess on everything; the combat only opens up once you accept that scanning is a verb.

And then decide, honestly, whether you have another eighty hours forRebirth, because the 2024 sequel doubles everything here including the problems.

If you want the argument about endings and structure taken somewhere weirder,Nier: Automata is Square’s other great swing at making the shape of a playthrough into a statement.

Spoilers below

The Whispers. Let us have this out.

From very early on,Remake has ghosts in it — spectral figures who appear whenever the story deviates from the events of 1997 and physically shove it back on course. They stop Aerith from saying a thing. They block a road. They intervene at the moment Barret dies in a way he did not die before, and undo it.

The obvious reading is that they are the game’s own canon, personified and armed. The obvious complaint is that this is Nomura being Nomura: a metafictional device bolted onto a story that did not need one, resolved in a final act where the party fights the concept of fate in a sky arena while a dead character from a spin-off walks past.

I have gone back and forth and I have landed here: the Whispers are the honest expression of what this project is. Square Enix could not remakeFinal Fantasy VII straight — the original exists, is playable on everything, and is better than a straight remake would be at the only thing a straight remake could offer. What they could do is make a game about the pressure of the original’s existence, in which the characters are pushed around by a force that wants events to go the way you remember. The Whispers are the audience. They are the wiki. They are the decades of accumulated players who know Aerith dies and will riot if she does not.

And the ending — the party choosing to fight that force, and the game closing on a Midgar that has explicitly diverged from the one on the discs — is a studio saying out loud that it refuses to be a museum. I think the execution is muddled. The sky arena is bad. The Sephiroth escalation arrives about six hours before it has been earned. But theidea is the boldest thing a major publisher has done with its own back catalogue, and the alternative — a respectful, tasteful, identicalFinal Fantasy VII with better shaders — would have been a much safer game and a much emptier one.

The thing you remember is not the thing that happened.Remake knows that, and builds the knowledge into the plot. Whether it can land the consequences across three games is a question for the third one.