The time has finally come for PC players to join the Phantom Thieves. Persona 5 Royal brings over 100 hours worth of story, combat, and social simulation to anyone who has yet to sink time into the game after all these years. After impressing me with Soul Hackers 2 the other month, Atlus has given us another mostly good port that has left me quite satisfied. The game is fairly hefty too, with a nearly 40 GB install size unpacked from a 33 GB download. It’s not exactly massive, but it’s certainly not tiny either. Granted, it’ll be sticking around on your drive for quite some time. This is not a short game by any means.
I played Persona 5 Royal at 1440p with the rendering scale set to 200%, which required more of a tradeoff than I’d imagined. The framerate was uncapped by default and I assumed I’d get a steady 120 fps, rendering scale be damned. This was not the case, however.
Persona 5 Royal PC port report — What you’ll find in the menus
While I was often able to hit 100 fps, there were times when that noticeably dipped. For instance, going out into busy streets with a bunch of character models roaming about could drop the proceedings down to 50 fps, depending on where the camera was pointed. Similarly, gameplay in Palaces could have some noticeable drops. For whatever reason, Persona 5 Strikers ran notably better for me with the resolution scale set at 200%, although that game was locked at 60 fps. Let’s take a look at the menus.
Fully rebindable keyboard controls are available and you can use your mouse to pick things from most onscreen elements. One thing I’m less than fond of is the fact that you can’t click an opponent and then immediately attack them. Attempting to bind left click to attack may not work that well in your favor. However, Persona 5 Royal is very playable with a mouse and keyboard. The mouse works exceptionally well when controlling the camera too, feeling a lot smoother than a right analog stick on controller.
It’s interesting to me that instead of having something that says “language” with an ensuing choice between English and Japanese, it simply has you set “Japanese voice” to on and off. I swore I’d play the game in English this time but I just couldn’t do it. The Japanese voice cast is just too perfect. Nana Mizuki, Ikue Otani, Mamoru Miyano, how could anyone say no to such a roster?
You can turn the BGM down or off. This doesn’t seem like an abnormal function, but it’s one of the only ways the re-release of Persona 5 Royal differs from the original PlayStation 4 release, which had no such option.
Obviously, there’s not much you can change if you’re having framerate issues. Mine, as I said, are most likely because I’m playing the game at 200% render scale but I’d personally rather reduce jaggies as Persona 5 Royal doesn’t necessarily benefit from high framerates from a gameplay perspective. The only major option here is shadow quality. No wonder the Switch and PS4 versions are locked to 30 fps.
And there you have it. Persona 5 Royal has a mostly satisfactory port that shouldn’t step on anyone’s toes as they dump dozens of hours into this world.
