With the original version of Persona 5 releasing in 2016 and the remastered and bonafide Royal version having launched in 2019, plenty of us have spent our fair share of time with The Phantom Thieves of Hearts. We’ve followed these kids a few times as they hung out, became friends, and kicked ass together - and that’s before you factor in the auxiliary games, like the striker games or the dancing ones.
Although it’s a slow burn until you get into the heart of the action, we’ve all been there before. Whether you’re a veteran of the series who’s played a Shin Megami Tensei title in your time, or you’re a newcomer to the wildly popular series as a whole, you can rest assured that you’re in good company with these things all of us have done once or twice before as we help these teens beat the hearts of corrupt adults using teamwork, monsters, and, somehow, the Tokyo Metro.
10 Pondering Why Sojiro Even Took You In
Our protagonist’s guardian in Tokyo, Sojiro Sakura, is kind of a tough nut to crack. He doesn’t like you when you first meet, and it takes him a while to warm up. He spends the first half of the game cynically criticizing us, our friends, and curtailing our efforts to feel somewhat normal.
So why take on the protagonist in the first place, then? He swears he’s doing “a favor to a friend,” but that’s all the explanation you get. Your resident father figure blossoms wonderfully later on, but we spend the first chunk of the game wondering why the hell we’re staying in Yongen-Jaya with him in the first place.
9 Questioning The Ethics Of Certain Relationships
Who struggles to resist the charms of a teenage boy, serving his criminal sentence? Several adults, that’s who – and all of them should know better.
You have the option to pursue a romance with Sadayo Kawakami, your teacher at school, or Tae Takemi, the goth nurse who runs a practice around the corner from Sojiro’s café. The protagonist is a high school student, which both these women know. Kawakami can come to your house after-hours for a “massage” that allows you to do another activity at night, while Takemi offers better items for Palaces the more she likes you. Regardless of the rewards, yikes...
8 Saying Yes To Every Invitation
At the end of the day when your protagonist goes to bed, he might get a text from a friend asking to hang out the following day. And given the vibrant personalities in this group, it’s kind of tough to say no – especially when you even have to walk past them in the café to blow them off.
But it pays to agree. Not only does it offer a good chance to increase the inviter’s confidant rank, but you’re in for a bevy of other benefits, too: other friends meet up with you and also level up their confidant rank, you can go to new locations, you can get items, or you might even boost a social stat or two.
7 Blowing Off Certain Confidants Entirely If You're Not Maxing Them All This Time Around
You’re rewarded handsomely for maxing confidants' social rankings. If it’s one of the Phantom Thieves, their Persona will level into a final form. If it’s someone from around town, you’ll receive all kinds of bonuses from new abilities, new items, or even just some support later on in the game.
But some characters you can hang out with don’t have the same luster as the others. When you’ve got the choice between hanging out with a friend or the old politician giving speeches at Shibuya Crossing, or you’re deciding between a potential romance and the drunk journalist in Shinjuku, it can be a little tough to choose the less-exciting options.
6 Naming Your Team Something Other Than “The Phantom Thieves”
Listen, if they wanted us to call these kids The Phantom Thieves, they wouldn’t have given us the option to rename them, wouldn’t they? No matter what title you give your roving band of teens when given the chance to do so partway through the game, in cutscenes and in the important game moments, they’re referred to as The Phantom Thieves of Hearts.
But don’t let that stop you from naming them something you like better. We’ve seen some people choose names that feel more glamorous, names that better describe what you’re doing, sitcom references, and so, SO many memes. It’s your game – call them what you’d like.
5 Spending A Ton Of Time Making Personas
There’s merit to catching a Persona in a dungeon and using it the rest of the way through, but with the residents of The Velvet Room able to do all manner of things to your monsters to power them up, it’s too easy to get lost in there.
Between straightforward combinations, rambling lists of high-powered Personas required to make truly superpowered ones, and just plain old experimenting, a good chunk of our playtime for these games is spent doctoring our team. Just try not to think about what happens to the monsters you sacrificed in the name of better powers...
4 Doing Your Best To Max Your Skills
With five social skills to raise during your year in Tokyo – Knowledge, Guts, Proficiency, Kindness, and Charm – it’s a given you’ll spend some time trying to boost them. After all, certain confidants are locked up to set skill levels, and certain things require certain mastery to achieve in-game.
There are some really fun, surprising ways to go about boosting them, too. It’s logical that studying will boost your Knowledge or that cleaning the café for Sojiro will boost Kindness, but you can also watch movies, take baths, or even eat comically-oversized cheeseburgers to improve them as well.
3 Patching Your Teams Type Disadvantage With Your Own Personas
Each new friend that joins The Phantom Thieves will bring a new Persona to the table, and, spoiler alert, your buddies specialize in one kind of elemental attack per character. With a decent spread in their abilities, you should be able to cover a lot of bases with them.
But when you’re assembling the protagonist’s team ahead of each dungeon, keep in mind what friends are going on the journey with you. You can see what attacks each Persona has, so if you know what elementals you’re missing, they’re easy enough to recoup with your own team.
2 Trying To Catch Every Persona In Each New Dungeon
With many dungeons across the game, you’re bound to see a wide variety of Personas, since the bulk of what you’ll find in each one changes every time you start a new mission. And with you able to get rid of them in The Velvet Room if you’re not interested, why not catch a bunch while you’re dungeon-crawling?
Not only will you be meeting new monsters in every mission, but the attacks they use against you could be used in your favor instead. Forget an elemental Persona in your own team and miss it dearly? Grab one inside. Know you’ll need a lower-level Persona to make a higher one? Why not just snag it while you can?
1 Attempting To Platinum The Game Your First Time
Some trophies you’ll earn for Persona 5 are givens: you get ones for each Palace, for dating, and even for unlocking your original Persona, Arsene. Some of them are more challenging than that: defeating The Reaper in Mementos, catching the biggest fish in Ichigaya, or reading every book.
What the game doesn’t tell you, though, is that you’ll need to start a New Game Plus to Platinum this game. To earn all the trophies, you’ll have to create the most powerful Persona available to you, but you’re only able to make it in NG+. Not only can you not make it right away, but you’ll also need six of the highest-level Personas from specific confidants as well. Wish we knew that before we spent all that time trying to complete the Compendium the first time around…