What is Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal?
Persona 5 launched in Japan in September 2016 for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4, reaching the West in April 2017. Its hero, a student on probation after intervening in an assault, forms the Phantom Thieves of Hearts with his friends: they enter Palaces, physical worlds built from adults' distorted desires, and steal the Treasure at the core to force a change of heart in the real world. Between heists, the calendar runs through a Tokyo school year of part time jobs, exams and Confidants.
The presentation is the breakthrough: menus styled like a pop art poster, battle music with vocals, and dungeons designed as authored places rather than random floors. Persona 5 won wide critical acclaim, sold in the millions, and with Royal and its spin-offs pushed the Persona 5 family past ten million copies, making it the commercial center of the whole Persona series.
Royal, released in Japan in October 2019 and worldwide in March 2020, expands the base game the way Golden expanded Persona 4: Kasumi Yoshizawa joins as a new playable character, counselor Takuto Maruki becomes a Confidant, a new district, Kichijoji, opens, and the story continues into a third term with a new Palace that reframes the ending. Mechanics are rebalanced throughout, with new Personas, a grappling hook in dungeons and the customizable Thieves Den gallery.
Royal later left PlayStation exclusivity: ports to Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox and PC arrived in October 2022, the first time a mainline Persona game launched on Nintendo and Xbox hardware in the West's modern era. That wave matters physically, because each platform has its own case, and the Switch and Xbox editions are often a collector's first physical Persona 5.
The editions stack is deep: Japanese and Western standard covers differ, the Take Your Heart and SteelBook launch editions have their own page in this shelf, and Japan received its own limited packages. Official strategy guides were published in both languages for the original and again for Royal, and as with Persona 3 and 4, the guides are edition specific: Royal's new term, Confidants and fusion data are not in the 2017 guides.
