Thoughts on the P5 Battle System UI

Or: it doesn’t just look nice, it’s way more efficient.

People have already said a billion words about how snazzy the Persona 5 UI is, but I haven’t seen a lot of people talk about how it works, and how it works seems to have changed considerably for the better from Persona 4. In Persona 4, you picked an action to take by scrolling through a menu - say, you pick Skill to use Persona skills, or Persona to change Personas, or Attack to use a weapon, Guard to guard, so on and so forth. When you choose a Persona skill, you then get to watch an animation where your character summons their Persona, and then the camera zooms out, and the skill happens, and it just takes ages. Persona 5 throws all that out the window. Here’s the battle UI in Persona 5:



Right away, something should pop out at you: no scrollable menu! Instead, each action is mapped to a button, which immediately makes accessing them faster, since you no longer have to scroll. Once you’ve gotten the layout down in muscle memory, it’s practically instantaneous to pick any of these commands. Here’s something else: see the commands at the bottom?

L1 is Analyze (just like P3 and P4 had), left and right on the D-Pad switches targets, down shows you who has the next turn, Options is Rush, and R1 is Assist (which we haven’t seen in action yet to know just what it does - I’ve seen it suggested that it’s used to have your Navigator provide support). So what does that mean? It means Analysis has been integrated right into the top-level menu. No selecting Analyze and then picking a target, you can just select a target from here and hit Analyze to get info.

( By the way, one option you might notice is not present is Tactics, probably because nobody used it in Persona 4 since you could have full manual party control, unlike P3 . Scratch that, I believe it’s simply been renamed to the Order command.)

Something else you might noticed is there’s no longer a “Skills” option, but there is still a “Persona” option. Check this shit out. Here’s the Persona command screen.

First off, you might notice that blue glow behind the menu. Your Persona gets summoned instantly when you select the Persona command, so there’s no long animation to wait through when you pick an attack. Second, the Persona command now houses the skill list, but do you see the L1/R1 option up there? You can just switch Personas on the fly right from the skill list with L1 and R1. No going to the Persona command, picking a Persona to switch to, and then going back to the skill list. It’s all been streamlined into one easy-access screen. If you need more info about the selected Persona, like weaknesses and resistances, you can hit Square here.

(The L1 and R1 Persona swap option only appears for the MC by the way, in case it wasn’t obvious. Everyone else is still stuck with their one Persona.)

And, as mentioned, animations have been greatly streamlined. With the Persona summoned instantly when selecting the Persona command, attacks happen much faster. What all this adds up to is, well, here’s an entire turn from start to finish in Persona 5:

Boom, done. Less scrolling through menus, less going back and forth between options, less animation to sit through, which makes for a much faster battle system even though it’s still turn-based with just as much depth as ever. Of course, they didn’t get rid of all the flashy animations completely. You still get a slightly longer animation for hitting a weakness or critting:



Even that is still faster than the P4 equivalent of the same scenario. (I also suspect that, like P3/P4, you won’t see this every time you hit a weakness, there’s just a chance.) Anyway, moral of the story is, Persona 5 is polished to a fucking mirror sheen. They put some serious work and thought into how they could make it a way better game to play than its predecessors. It sucks for us as fans that the game has taken so long to come out, but they’ve clearly been using that time to make the best game they can and it shows.