[Major spoilers for the true ending of Persona 5 Royal]
I’d like to preface this by saying that I love the characters🍸 of , even the new ones added in Royal. They are my🍎 children, my joy, the light of my life—
Which is exactly why I hated the ending of P5R.
Here’s the thing— as clumsily paced as the endgame of Persona 5 was, the original game had a good ending. A bit cliche, sure, but it was still satisfying. It completed the journey from arriving in Tokyo, alone and dismissed by everyone, to ♒leaving the city surrounded by the bonds that were made and tested during the year.
Persona 5 Royal takes all of that satisfaction away and replaces it with… well, nothing. ꧟It starts with Joker being surprised by his friends waiting for him with a rented van all the same, but diverges from the original ending whenꦫ they notice the cops tailing them.
In the original, Makoto said that it didn’t matter what the cops thought— a statement symbolic of their resolve to not care what society thinks of them and live their truest lives— before Morgana sabotaged the cop car and they drove off, laughing at their one last act of thievery. There was a sense of closure, of catharsis, as you watched these kids you just spent a hundred hours with smiling, goofing aroun📖d, loving each other, and looking towards their brighter future.
In Royal, the kids look fairly concerned until a taxi pulls up, revealing Maruki as the driver offering to help e♍vade the cops😼.
Dude, Just Go To Therapy
Record scratch is an understatement— why the hell ꦦIs Maruki Takuto, t𓂃he ruler of the final palace, a man who supposedly went off to reform himself a♏nd find a be🌄tter way of helping people, working as a taxi driver?
This isn’t a knock on taxi drivers, of course— it’s not an unworthy profession by any means. It’s simply so… r𒁏andom, and out of character for Maruki. Why a taxi driver? Why not a volunteer therapist in a rural t🦂own, or going back to grad school to re-think his philosophy on helping people, or, hell, just focusing on therapy for himself?
The game tells you that this man, who was willing to sacrifice every part of himself to ease the suffering of every person in the world, who clearly cared very deeply about every one of the Phantom Thieves, would casually pull up to them in a taxi, drop Joker off at the tra♋in station, then leave without a si൲ngle word of explanation.
Based on all his characterization throughout the games, and what happened to him after the fඣinal battle, I simply cannot imagine him doing what he does in the ending. Whatever it was that Atlus was tryi💟ng to accomplish by having him show up this way, it didn't work.
It only gets worse from there— the van full of his friends pulls into the same parking lot as he's dropping Joker off. Then, instead of getting off aౠnd staying with him, or having him get on and driving him home ✃(as they did in the original ending) they say, oh, this is good enough, right? Bye! Have a safe trip! And then drive off, pursued by cops.
Welp. There goes all the fuzzy warm feelings of found family and not caring about the boxes soc♔iety forces you into.
Roses Are Red, Violet Has Been Character-Assassinated
If you’ve been wondering where 🍎the heck Sumire has been this entire time, here she is! In the train station, bumping into Joker, before giving him a weird one-liner that’s not really an acknowledgement at all before walking off…
I could see her doing that if she’d already🥀 said her goodbye to him earlier and really was simply bumping into him there. But, as you know, she’s nowhere to be found bet💞ween the final few scenes and the ending up until literally that point.
This? This is not the girl who ran up to Joker, half in tears from relief when she found out that he’d only faked his death. This is not the girl who asked for time off from practicing her great🍷est passion so that she could help exonerate him. The Sumire we know— the caring, enthusiastic girl we were presented with throughout the entirety of the game up until this point— would have, at the very least, given Joker a real goodbye, if not tried to be in the van with the rest of the crew.
Thanks For The Memories, I Guess
This is the biggest problem I have with the ending, why I hate it so ꦇmuch: it takes the incredible bonds the characters have with one another and renders them trivial. The game makes you fall in love wi𝕴th the plight of Sumire and Maruki, two amazingly compelling characters, and then spends about two sec💝onds on them in the ending, while at the same time taking away all the emotional weight from the bonds you have with the rest of your team.
All of that, for what? A few badly done “suspenseful” scenes while Joker’s sitting in the train. That whole “is Akechi alive or dead?” scene was alright, but didn’t need to be there— especially nℱot at the expense of adequately wrapping up the story for the rest of the characters.
Listen, I get it. There's just not enough time to wrap up every thread from the story in one ending scene. But that's just the thing: Royal's storyline, more thanꦑ anything, should have been structured as a post-game campaign instead of being haphazardly shoved into the main story. Then, the developers would have had the chance to do all of their characte𒐪rs justice.
In the en෴d, it’s just another symptom of Atlus’s inability to undersജtand why people love the Persona series so much. The core aspꦉect that draws fans to the games isn’t flashy animations, cool battle mechanics, or even plot intrigue; it’s the palpable love that each character has for one another and the incredible bonds forged from overcoming the horrors of the world together. Ironically enough, it’s the third semester’s “bad ending” that delivers on this integral aspect more than the “true” ending of Persona 5 Royal. The o🎶nly “true”﷽ thing about it is how truly it fails the characters themselves - and all the fans who love them.