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I knew there would be a lot to cover here, but wow was there a lot to cover! While I’m sure these scenes will be more important with more context, for now it’s fluff that we start with.

The first is an extended look at the outdoor market the boys attend in the summer. We’ve seen this briefly in a previous trailer, but now we know that they’re all suffering from the heat and that it’s Ryuji’s fault, though the latter is still excited to get some kebabs before leaving ASAP (in a screenshot from this scene, we see that Morgana gets wrapped up in the meat hype too).

The second is quite depressing – it’s from the Inokashira cleanup (i.e. May 30th) but the team leader of Ren’s group still refers to him as “that person”. Worse, he starts calling Ren a “he”, then stops himself! It’s sad that Ren still can’t catch a break even after getting Kamoshida off his back, but we know Haru is around and this is also where Kasumi thanks him for saving her and the two become friends, so this moment will likely just serve to make the highs of Ren’s community service feel even higher.

The third is definitely going to be significant – if not to the plot then certainly to the characters involved – since it features both Kasumi and Takuto. Specifically, the scene is Takuto expressing surprise at Kasumi’s lunchbox. Now, one of the first things we learned about Kasumi is that she’s a big eater (this is even played for laughs in her character trailer) and we also knows she explains why to Ren over lunch. Ren knows this reason at this point in time (that she needs the energy for her gymnastics) and shares it with Takuto, which means they’ve already had lunch together.

Now, you may remember me pointing out that sharing lunch with your Shujin-based Confidants was a cut feature from the original game and that Kasumi having lunch with Ren might mean it would be included this time around. However, this scene is voiced and – because more than one character is present – odds are high that it’s not the start of either of their Confidants. In other words, having lunch with Kasumi is most likely a fixed story event and not a mechanic.

On the other hand, we’ve seen Ren eating with Kasumi in both their default and summer uniforms, so this could go either way. Ren seems to be Kasumi’s go-to confidant (in the literal meaning of the word) so it makes sense that she’d invite him to lunch multiple times…but maybe sharing lunch is a mechanic, and while the initial lunch with Kasumi is mandatory, it merely serves as a tutorial that unlocks it for everyone else? There’s also the fact that Futaba features heavily in Sojiro’s Confidant (even in the voiced Rank 10 event)and Ann and Yusuke’s Confidants also have cameos from other Thieves, so there are already a few exceptions to the “only one character per Confidant” rule.

In any case, Takuto seems surprised that such a thing (i.e. gymnastics) can exist, which seems an odd thing to not know about. Is there a reason for this lack of knowledge, or is he merely surprised by Kasumi’s situation – and is there a personal reason for his concern (either good-natured or bad) or is it strictly professional?

Finally, it’s funny that Ren can treat Kasumi like a child here by saying she eats a lot because “she’s growing”. I’m sure Takuto will accept either answer (heck, he may even understand this one better), but I wonder how Kasumi would react xD

The next two conversations also double as reveals for two new locations: Nakano and Shinagawa.

In the first of these scenes we see Futaba get a confidence boost and demand to go to the ocean (this would be her second time as this is in October, well after the beach trip) – in the Famitsu article she also expresses excitement at a new product the two of them passed by. These two instances are only a day apart, so it’s likely these are both new hangout events (or two parts of the same event).

The second features Shinya at the aquarium. Oddly enough, he seems to be evaluating it as a dating spot. Considering he had no romantic interests originally, is this just a throwaway line, a mistranslation (perhaps he just sees it as a hangout spot)…or has his story been rewritten too? As cruel as it sounds, I liked his relationship with his mother for how uncomfortable it was and hope it stays put if so.

In any case, he doesn’t come away with a good opinion of it, though knowing Shinya it’s possible he’s just being a tsundere pretending he doesn’t care.

The next two indicate new mechanics. The first is a conversation with Kawakami. While she’s likely playing dumb at first because of her maid persona (pun entirely intended) , the rest of her dialogue suggests this is early on in her relationship with Ren – or maybe even before she visits him for the first time – as she asks if he really lives above a coffee shop. We cut away before hearing Ren’s response to her question (“What do you eat there?”) which is a shame because we can get extra affinity points through these phone calls through dialogue choices such as this one. Guess we’re not getting any freebies this time!

The second is quite a big one: Chihaya the Fortune Confidant gets a new ability! This is called Contraindication Reading and increases the chances of the alarm ringing in the Velvet Room (more on that later). What’s also interesting is that the description begins with “the alarm rings immediately”.

So, there are things we can do to force a Fusion Alarm? Considering the Velvet Room is part of our subconscious, it makes sense that gaining a Confidant Rank would trigger it, but what would are the manual activation requirements exactly? We see with Ann that not every Confidant ability comes with a free alarm, so is this bonus exclusive to Chihaya? Perhaps exclusive to this specific Rank because the normal reward is already tied to the alarm? If so, is it possible that other rewards related to the Velvet Room also trigger the alarm? I’m thinking of the Twins’ Confidant for this one – since they carry out the Fusions, I wouldn’t be surprised if they automatically turn the alarm on as thanks for Ren showing them the right Personas or taking them out into the real world.

In any case, Chihaya says we may be feeling restless (again, since the Velvet Room is partly in our subconscious, this is a fitting description) but it’s a good opportunity to take risks. Another fitting description of what’s to come!

Before we move onto the Metaverse stuff, you may have noticed the dates that some of these events took place, specifically that some happened at the end of January. This is the furthest in time we’ve seen so far! Other screenshots and trailers have already shown the infiltration of the new Palace having started by this point (not to mention the bizarre dream world stuff happening at the start of the month), so it’s strange seeing such casual activities going on like this. Of course we were promised a full semester, so ending the game mid-way through January would have been…troubling at best. I like “cooldown periods,” but will we really have our final dungeon in January and hangouts for the rest of the semester (I have to assume Mementos survives if this is the case), will the final Palace be so long that it’ll take the entirety of the third Semester to complete? Or perhaps it’ll be unlocked in “phases” after reaching certain points in the Palace or real world story – PV 03 suggested the Thieves (or at least Ren, Goro and Kasumi) would have to revisit (parts of) previous Palaces, so perhaps certain parts of the Palace will only unlock after you’ve cleared certain numbers of these “flashback Palaces”…or perhaps we were wrong: the Palace we’ve seen in all the trailers isn’t the last one at all, just the one Atlus has been willing to show us, with another Palace waiting for us in February or March (perhaps somewhere in the purified Mementos)?

Now it’s time to discuss the changes to the Velvet Room….

Or at least it would be, but Morgana has other plans. We see a brief snippet of Mementos gameplay and, while this was shown off in a live gameplay demo a while back, this is our first “formal” confirmation of something many of you have been hoping for: Ryuji’s Instant Kill has been changed!

Not only does killing an enemy this way now grant EXP, money and items in addition to a Persona, it now only activates when you attack an enemy from the front. In other words, you can now fight enemies normally when you Ambush them. This makes it easier to traverse Mementos and other Palaces on your own terms, and if your level is high enough (or you’re just that lucky) you may even be able to escape a mad chase by triggering an Instant Kill on one of the Shadows coming after you!

We also see how Ann’s Overkill<3 ability is unlocked. You may remember this from her trailer and how it confirmed that everyone was getting a unique skill, but we didn’t know anything more than that. Now we know that she unlocks it at Rank 4 and that it’s a passive ability with the chance to cancel an enemy’s action.

What’s also interesting is that Rank. Rank 4 is the only Rank in which Ann didn’t unlock anything in the original game. While Ryuji and Makoto also have a Rank (5, in their case – Ryuji doesn’t get anything at Rank 1 either) conveniently left open for a new Skill, the others don’t, so if everyone’s getting a new Skill as a Confidant ability they’re either losing another or get two abilities at once elsewhere.

However, Morgana can be selected as a Baton Pass target in Kamoshida’s Castle, when he only unlocked the ability right before the boss fight. I speculated before that this may mean everyone gets Baton Pass by default as Ann does. If so, this gives everyone a free space to get a new Skill in, though I have to assume at least some of their other rewards will get shuffled around in the process (otherwise almost everyone would get a unique ability at Rank 2). If this is the case I have to assume it’ll be the out-of-battle abilities that get rearranged and not abilities like Follow Up or Harisen Recovery (especially since everyone already unlocks those at the same Rank as each other so messing this up would mess up the symmetry and team-building options).

Q&A! We have two questions as with every Report. The first asks if Joker will be getting Show Times. And for those of you worried about this since Yu missed out on Unisons in P4G…don’t be, as Morgana confirms that Joker will! However, he says that they’re only unlocked later in the story.

Now, this either means Joker’s Show Times are unlocked as part of the story (which is why Morgana can’t talk about them now)…or that his Show Times are with the last party members to join and all the evidence suggests that these are Akechi and Kasumi. I already pointed out that those three seem to have their own “quest” in the Metaverse in the PV 03 analysis, so it’d make sense mechanically to give Joker team attacks with the two Thieves he has to work alone with (not to mention that this would also corroborate both my earlier interpretations of Morgana’s answer). Perhaps he unlocks his Show Time with Kasumi when they work together in the Casino and Akechi’s in the third semester?

The second question asks if there will be a new title screen for the new Thief roster and the answer is again yes, followed by a showcase of each of the different options. Two things come to mind when seeing this.

First: the original title screen was set on a subway station as a reference to Mementos…which turned out to be the final Palace of the game. We’ve seen in previous trailers that the final Palace this time seems to be somewhere in the city – indeed, even after escaping the main building of the Palace, something still seems to happen in the city itself. This new title screen is also based on a city centre – is this a coincidence? (The new opening still ends with a subway car passing by though, so Mementos may still play a significant part in the finale – as we’ll see later, maybe even moreso than simply being linked to the new Palace!)

The second was spotted by LettuceSauce. You may have noticed a new option in the title menu simply called “????”. In an early livestream, viewers spotted a new option in the menu screen titled “My Palace”. People wondered what it could mean and if it meant we could make our own Palaces and…it seems so! As you can see in the linked tweet, there’s a stall in the background of the “New Game” shot called “Palace Maker”. That’s amazing!

The livestream also showed a separate currency beside the “My Palace” option. Perhaps we can unlock decorations or aesthetics based on the Palaces we complete, then purchase them to make our own? Will this feature be as vast as the likes of Little Big Planet or Mario Maker? That Persona’s combat is turn based lightens the load of crafting a 3D level, but the implications of this are still huge! I’m keeping my expectations in check, but even if our Palaces are only allowed to be a few rooms large I’m going to have plenty of fun here. I’m thinking it’ll be nice to make a basic platformer, but you just know some galaxy-brained individuals are going to make complete masterpieces (and some psychopaths are going to create unholy mashups of airlocks, dark rooms and rat puzzles). Persona 5’s network features don’t require PS+ right now, so I just hope making and sharing Palaces will be free too.

Finally, you may have noticed in the original game that the clock in the title screen showed the time on your system, but this title screen doesn’t have anything like that. Instead, there’s some text running along the bottom of one of the TV screens (seen best from the Load Game view). It’s hard to make out from here, but could this be the aspect of the title that changes this time around? And since it’s text, could it change based on where in the story you happen to be? (And if it’s based on your console again, perhaps it would display a unique message on holidays and the like?)

Okay, NOW it’s time to talk about the Velvet Room. We start with the twins explaining what’s going on – specifically that the alarm isn’t a sign of danger but something the twins themselves instigated to scare Ren straight. This is also when we get the official name of this state: the “Fusion Alarm”.

The Famitsu article clarifies some details, so I’ll mix its explanation with what the Report tells us. We’re told the Fusion Alarm rings “irregularly”. However, we’ve already seen two ways to force the twins’ hand on this (getting to Rank 8 with Chihaya and using her new Reading) – will there be other ways to do this or is Contraindication Reading the only method we’ll get?

In this state, we’re told that the number of skills available to inherit to your Personas will increase and that they’ll also be stronger (we can see this with Shiisaa, who seems to have gained more stats than would be normal for a Fusion, though I may be wrong on this). Most interesting of all is that the inherited skills also have the chance to change.

Thankfully we have the option of preventing this, as the footage shows Igor warning us that “something is going to happen to [these] skills” and we get the option to leave them as they are or see the changes through. I’ll come back to what happens to Shiisaa’s Skills in a bit.

Famitsu also tells us the likelihood of Fusion Accidents increases (incidentally, this was hinted at when Fusion Alarms were first teased, as we were told that Fusions would become “riskier)…and it shows! We’re treated to a new Fusion Accident animation where Caroline utterly relishes shredding our psyche with her chainsaw, with the result being Ame-no-Uzume (who gains an even greater stat boost than Shiisaa did).

Here’s where things get strange. Instead of just the inherited Skills being glitched, Ame-no-Uzume’s entire kits freaks out and – without Igor even warning us (unless there was a cut in the footage somewhere) – completely transforms.

Now, both examples of Fusion Alarm Skill changes seem random at first, but something tells me they’re not. Shiisaa lost two Skills: Media and Energy Drop, which became Flash Bomb and Energy Shower respectively. However, Shiisaa learns mostly Physical moves (of which Flash Bomb is one, though Shiisaa doesn’t learn it specifically) while Energy Shower is a direct upgrade to Drop.

While there aren’t any direct parallels like this with Uzume’s change, her entire Skill set still seems to have a surprising amount of synergy for something that was entirely randomised. Specifically, she now has a Physical build that also doubles as a way to inflict and exploit the Enraged status, with a few defensive Skills to protect her in case the enraged enemies attack her instead of their own allies.

This leads me to believe that there are a number of Skill Sets saved somewhere in the game’s files and that one is chosen at random (or perhaps each Persona has a designated subset of sets depending on its default stats) in the case of an accident. For regular Fusions, there may instead be two lists of Skills: one list whose Skills can be swapped out for level- and Persona-specific abilities and the second list detailing Skills that may be directly upgraded instead.

Caroline comments on the accident, but then asks us to get out. Is she simply asking us to finish that specific Fusion session (i.e. she and Justine will get everything cleared up for our next Fusion) or are we being locked out of Fusing – or maybe even the Velvet Room itself – entirely? If so, why? If the Fusion Alarm is indeed as valuable as it seems (despite the risk of RNG doing more harm than good), will we be immediately booted out upon getting an accident (i.e. something that may or may not come with a ready-made, synergistic Skill Set) to preserve game balance? That seems a bit extreme to me so I doubt it, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

But the Fusion Alarm isn’t the only new thing in the Velvet Room!

We start with an introduction to incenses, which are used when putting Personas in Solitary Confinement. We see five different types of incense in this example and each is associated with one of the five stats (Strength, Magic, Endurance, Agility, Luck). Applying an incense will boost the associated stat of the Persona by 1 alongside the bonus Skill it would get from Confinement normally. Here, Ren chooses to use the Magic incense, which makes sense as Sarasvati is primarily a magic based attacker.

The Persona materialises inside the cell as normal, but an incense bottle now also appears before it, suggesting we can only apply one per Confinement session. I can’t make out the options in this Confinement menu, but there seems to be an extra option to the three that existed before (paraphrased, they would be “Place Persona in Confinement,” “Retrieve Persona,” “Check Confined Persona”) that I think lets you apply an incense to a Persona after you already placed it in Confinement – so while you likely will need to wait a few more days for the incense to kick in, you won’t need to decide as soon as you confine a Persona which one to apply (if at all). Also, the bottle disappearing will likely also serve as a visual indicator when you check your Persona that its effects have been applied, in which case I wonder if there’ll be a new indicator to say your Persona has learned a Skill from their Confinement which you could previously only check by checking their status in the aforementioned window (though this would now make that option obsolete – maybe you can check what Skill your Persona learned before retrieving it now, so you can leave it in if it didn’t learn the one you wanted? And if so, will you no longer risk losing your Persona if you leave it in there for too long?)

Manually raising stats is great – especially if you want to minmax a Persona and don’t care to rely on the RNG/ cost associated with feeding it other Personas – but I’d personally like it if there was an incense for influencing which Skill a Persona learns. As someone who mostly uses Confinement to help a Persona learnt the Null Skill needed to cover its weakness(es), such a feature would be incredibly helpful! But with the five we’ve seen clearly geared towards manipulating your Personas’ raw stats, I find it highly unlikely that such a feature would be added. But of course, boosting stats with incenses is just another incentive to leave your Personas in confinement anyway, so everything works out 😛

The final Velvet Room feature being added (that we know of at least) is Challenge Battles, and these are exactly what they claim to be. The example shown is a Trial challenge intended to serve as a tutorial, but you can adjust the level – it’s set Level 10 by default, but there are ten difficulty levels in all (and the second tier is Level 20) so it follows that you can raise the level of the enemies you face here all the way up to Level 100. And this is just the Trial battle; who knows how high the default levels of future battles will be and how higher you’ll be able to raise them still? That the first is a tutorial is fitting though, as it’s unlocked on April 21st, which is right at the start of the Kamoshida infiltration. Is this being unlocked so soon simply because it’s a tutoria; (and subsequent fights will be time-gated) or will all of the Velvet Room’s features be unlocked sooner this time around?

In addition to being challenging, these battles are also scored and you get rewards for reaching certain point thresholds. Here the rewards are an accessory for the top prize, a Skill Card and finally a material; is this the template for all battles (if so, I can imagine higher difficulties offering Liquid Mercury for the Eternal Lockpick) or will each battle offer different types of rewards – for example, a high level one may offer three different rare Skill Cards instead.

Anyway, in addition to having three rewards, each Challenge also has a set of bonus “feats” that boost your score each time you accomplish them. There are three in this example, but it’s possible others will have more or less (but considering this is the Trial, I imagine the number of rewards will either stay the same or go up, never down). Here, the first bonus is a flat score boost for completing the challenge within a specific number of actions – not turns, actions, so a full team of four will only have seven turns to win (less if you count Baton Passes) while a solo Ren will get 28; an interesting way for players to give themselves their own challenges!

The next two are multipliers applied to certain actions. The first multiplies the score gained by all Nuclear attacks by 4 while the latter multiplies all killing blows dealt by Yusuke by 7. While the first of these nudges you towards using Makoto, the latter explicitly requests Yusuke and grants a massive bonus for not only using him but changing how you fight so that he always deals the finishing blow. If you’re also trying to get the time bonus, chances are you’ll have to completely warp how you play to maximise him! Will all Challenges be themed around a specific character then? This particular Challenge is called a Trial, but will the others also secretly be geared to teaching you how to best use each of your teammates?

Speaking of teammates, the twins explain that the Thieves fighting alongside you are merely cognitions. This explains why the Thieves don’t know what the Velvet Room is until Qliphoth World (assuming this still stays the same), but why not just use amnesia as with the Twins’ bonus boss fight?

At first I thought this was just an artistic choice, but it may also have gameplay implications. Remember that you can enter the Velvet Room from both worlds – if Challenge Battles don’t take up a time slot, this means you could potential farm them for EXP and other rewards without losing any of your activity slots. Saying your friends are cognitions could be the game’s way of telling you that they won’t gain any EXP from fighting in these battles (and from there it’s easy to extrapolate that neither will you): these fights are purely for the rewards earned by beating the score thresholds and nothing more.

To finish off this section: right before the fight begins, you’re given a preview of your opponents in each Round – again, there are three shown here, but since this is just the first fight I expect this number to only grow with future battles (unless you have to fight mini-bosses or even full bosses, in which case there’ll probably only be two rounds or one respectively). What’s interesting about the preview is that you aren’t given a specific Persona name, instead you’re given the description you get for Shadows before you recruit them! Is this because the player hasn’t recruited these particular Personas (and going back to how these battles are likely grind-free, I doubt you’d be able to recruit them here) or will they always be described like this to add an extra layer of suspense unless you recognise or look up those descriptions?

Finally, the Report gives us another formal introduction, this time to the hangout requests from the Twins. Like Elizabeth before them, they too want to explore the human world to enrich themselves and are quite eager for you to show them around. They justify this by saying trying new things “stimulates the heart” and these hangouts are even called “Special Prisons” to further their rationale that all of this is simply to aid in your rehabilitation and nothing else baka!

This specific example has Ren take the twins to Big Bang Burger, where the duo take an interest in the Big Bang Challenge and not so subtly ask him to try it. We see in the Famitsu scans that he does (and the twins are surprised by it), but this raises a question: will Ren get the social stats for participating in the Challenge if he does it like this? If so, will other “Special Prisons” also grant social stats? Will they all? And will these requests be “free” actions as the dates with Elizabeth were? The article shows that you can also take them to the cinema, which begs the question of if you gain the stats you normally would from going to those too (and again if it would take up an activity slot).

That these are requests and even have an “official” term suggest that they aren’t a revamped Confidant for the Twins as was the case with Akechi, but I think it’s still worth remembering that many Confidants do also boost your social stats (e.g. Sojiro raises Kindness while Takemi raises Guts), so there’s a chance that these do too. Of course, this still begs the question of what happens once Lavenza appears. It’s safe to assume that any remaining requests from the Twins will be lost at that point, but will Lavenza have her own requests? Will she have her own version of the requests that you may have missed out on with the Twins? P5D established that she can split into the Twins (and reform) at will; will that be used as justification for you being able to complete the Twins’ requests before tackling hers? And since she retains the memories and feelings of the Twins, will her requests function as “sequels” to theirs (e.g. her wanting to revisit all the places she went to as Caroline and Justine to experience them as her true self)?

As an aside, where’s Morgana in all this? He’s with Ren outside the Velvet Room door but not in Big Bang Burger (i.e. he leaves as he does with other hangouts), but in-universe no one can tell when a Wild Card enters the Velvet Room – they just see the Wild Card zone out for a few seconds (even when one of the Twins is standing outside the door).

Now, it’s possible that Morgana can see them because they’re “physically” stepping into the real world – indeed, Elizabeth is also visible when she does this – but in the original story no one knew about the Velvet Room until the very end of the game. I’d argue that this was most important for Morgana because he was born there, but at the same time as long as he doesn’t learn that particular detail, him meeting the Twins wouldn’t be too big a deal (especially since they don’t remember him either) – as long as he keeps them a secret.

Because the biggest difference between Ren and Makoto/ Minako is that: Ren has a constant companion while those two didn’t, so it’s trickier for him to “just” hang out with his Attendants (of course, it doesn’t matter if the public sees them together, just their own teammates). Ultimately this boils down to one of two possibilities:

Morgana (and possibly the rest of the Thieves) learn about the Twins early on. This wouldn’t necessarily impact the end of the game either – instead of being surprised at the existence of the Velvet Room, they’d simply be surprised at finally being allowed inside it. Caroline knocks Morgana unconscious every time she and Justine hangout with Ren and Ren has to revive him every time after they leave.

I was initially going to include some speculation based on the new opening released on September 10th, as well as the livestream and GameInformer interview from the end of August, but this post has already gotten so large that I think they’d prefer having one all to themselves for the extra room to breathe in. I hope to have that up either tomorrow or on Friday, so please look forward to it!

Until then, please let me know what I can add or fix in this write-up. I’m more confident than I usually am with my translations, but I’d still appreciate someone checking those too. If you’ve made it this far, feel free to also check out this masterpost of everything we know about P5R thus far (and click here for the Reddit version). If you found this via reddit, please leave your comments there as I’m sure it’s easier for you – and for me! – to talk about this there. To everyone, if you liked this post I’d be thrilled if you would be willing to donate any change you may have via the link at the top of the site and/ or share it between your friends…

…but I’d be happiest knowing you had fun and got even a little something out of this post 🙂 Thank you so much for reading and, until next time, have a great day, afternoon, evening or night, wherever you are!

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to be a good little Phantom Thief and listen to my cat.