Prior to the official release ofPersona 5 Royal, the marketing rollout for the game went to great pains to assure previousPersona 5players thatRoyalwas much more than a rerelease. The game’s main hook centered around a certain redheaded gymnast whose presence would be felt all throughout the original campaign, alongside a massive game expansion with a new dungeon, story, and area of Tokyo to explore.Kasumi Yoshizawa’s appearance on the new coverfor game’s box art, placed right alongside the other Phantom Thieves as if she had been there all along, gave the impression that her role was equal to that of any other member of the team.
What players actually got whenPersona 5 Royalreleased was different story. While the game itself remained excellent as before, with tweaks to dungeons and general quality of life actually making the experience superior, Yoshizawa’s presence in the game’s original narrative was far more limited than marketing had suggested. While the player was given the opportunity to interact with Yoshizawa during cutscenes and her limited Confidant throughout the school year, when she initially asks to join the Phantom Thieves, the protagonist rejects her.
RELATED:Persona 5 Royal Needs A Spin-Off That Highlights Yoshizawa
Yoshizawa Was Snubbed Despite Her Obvious Strength
When theplayer is preparing to infiltrate Shido’s Palaceand enter the final phase of the story, Yoshizawa approaches the team and asks if she can join the fight. By this point, she has unlocked her Persona and has fought alongside the player on multiple occasions, even saving the player from danger in Sae Niijima’s Palace. Regardless, the protagonist flatly refuses to allow her to join, claiming the danger is too great, and that she is unaware how dangerous Shido truly is. Yoshizawa relents, but the entire scene feels deeply condescending towards a character who has more than proven her competency.
The protagonist’s rejection of Yoshizawa raises multiple issues, first being that it feels completely unjustified from a story perspective. Yoshizawa’s abilities are well-recognized by the player at this point.Yoshizawa has saved the player’s life, awakened a powerful Persona, and is a nationally-renowned athlete. Telling her that she is unfit for the fight when players already know she will become a member of the Phantom Thieves at some point reads more as a poorly-conceived excuse to ensure joining the Phantom Thieves can be a part of her character arc during the new Palace.
Yoshizawa Joining Would Have Fit With The Game’s Character Introduction Structure
One of the clearest reasons why Yoshizawa’s entry to the Phantom Thieves should have happened during Shido’s Palace is that it would adhere to the structure of party member introductions throughout the game.Persona 5followed a very strict formatfor party member introductions. Each dungeon would introduce one new party member who joins the player along the way and whose abilities are best suited to navigating the dungeon.
Even Sae Niijima’s Palace, despite not adding a long-term team member, gave the players the opportunity to work alongside Akechi, whose abilities were optimized for the dungeon. Shido’s Palace represents a break from that structure and all subsequent true ending content is the same. The addition of Yoshizawa and her request to join the fight against Shido represents a clear adherence to the formula the game already has for character introductions.
The decision to subvert that structure is certainly bold, but it is a decision that actively withholds something from the player. Especially given how she is built up inPersona 5 Royal’s marketing materialsand is very obviously able to save the player’s skin during dangerous situations, the rejection of Yoshizawa rings hollow on a mechanical and narrative level.
RELATED:Persona 6 Could Learn From Persona 4 Golden’s Sense Of Danger
Reasons Why Yoshizawa Was Not Allowed To Join The Phantom Thieves
There is something to be said about the fact that balancing the difficulty of Shido’s Palace with Yoshizawa’s inclusion would have been more challenging for Atlus. Having an additional party member would give the player another fighter to swap out while navigating the dungeon, and it is entirely possible that rebalancing for that possibility was beyond the scope of what the developers had time for. Adding additional cutscenes may have hurt the pacing of the game somewhat, but it is nowhere near as complex as all the systems that would need to be accounted for during Shido’s Palace.
Her presence as a member of the Phantom Thieves during Shido’s Palace would also mean that while completing the true ending, she would also likely need to play a role. As a result, adding Yoshizawa to the fight against Shido would essentially make it mandatory to incorporate her in all the subsequent true ending fights, which is a much larger amount of work. It wouldn’t be out of the question for Yoshizawa to simply not be included in these sections via an additional story beat, but itseems that aside from Akechi, once the player has a party member, the developers are not keen to remove them suddenly. From a player’s perspective, it would also be frustrating to buy items and coordinate strategies around party members who disappear unexpectedly.
However,her Confidant trackhas been limited to a max level of five during the main campaign, so she lacks many of the combat perks of other party members. This would have made using Yoshizawa in Shido’s Palace far from optimal, which could have helped counteract the balancing issues. It is difficult to gauge just how much development work it would have taken to add Yoshizawa to the team during Shido’s Palace, but it is clear that because she chooses that moment to ask, Yoshizawa joining the team during Shido’s Palace feels appropriate from a story perspective.
Despite this issue,Persona 5 Royal’s revamp of the original’s campaign offered a lot of great new content. However, even withYoshizawa and Takuto Maruki’s Confidant arcs, it felt as though something more fundamental was missing to justify itself. Integrating Yoshizawa more thoroughly into the game mechanically by allowing her to join combat prior to the post-game would have gone a long way towards resolving this. Instead, her presence feels more like an attempt at coy foreshadowing for what returning players really wanted – the standalone epilogue campaign – rather than a seamless addition to the original game.
Persona 5 Royalis available now on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
MORE:Persona 5: What The Tarot Cards Reveal About The Phantom Thieves
