Persona 5 Royal Staff On Akechi’s Confidant And Total Playtime

The latest issue of Dengeki PlayStation comes with an interview with Atlus staff for Persona 5 Royal, where they talked about the changes to Goro Akechi’s Confidant, how total game time stacks up to the original Persona 5, and more. [Thanks, Ryokutya2089!]

Here are the highlights:

• “The reason why the Ranking Up of Akechi’s Confidant relationship has been left up to the player this time is that you can’t really explore his character deeper if it Ranks Up automatically during story events. We want players to know about his various sides.”

• The developers acknowledge that Akechi is popular, but not everyone has a good impression of him. Your impression of Goro Akechi might change a bit in Persona 5 Royal.

• The devs estimate that Persona 5 Royal, while taking longer than Persona 5 due to the extra content, will still only have total playtime in the same ballpark as the original game, or maybe slightly higher. This is because things like load times and the amount of time each battle takes have been shortened, and the amount of time taken to beat existing Palaces have been optimized, so the extra features basically make up for that time.

• How Ryuji’s Instant Kill ability works has been changed in Persona 5 Royal, and the developers point to this as one of the examples of where staff have exchanged opinions and discussed the game with players.

Persona 5 Royal releases for PlayStation 4 in Japan on October 31, 2019. The game releases in the West in 2020. Atlus recently released info on Day 1 DLC, which you can read more about here.