Our Persona 5 Royal tips are just the thing for new and returning players alike! The remake doses the flawed, but stylish JRPG with a better localization, new characters, extra combat and dungeons, as well as some fun surprises. It’s no doubt the definitive version of the game to date. And it’s well worth returning to — even if you already put more than a hundred hours into the original.
But what’s the best way to get through Persona 5 Royal? Has the flow of daily life and dungeon diving changed considerably? Are there new goodies to acquire? Well, yes. But it’s also worth refreshing folks on the basics! Let’s go over both in our Persona 5 Royal tips guide, and free society from the tyranny of… Well, we won’t spoil it.
Will Seeds Are Worth It
Introduced in Persona 5 Royal, Will Seeds are a new collectible found in secret parts of every Palace. The game introduces them to you fairly early on, in the first dungeon. However, it’s coy about the benefits of finding them until you grab one.
Getting all three Will Seeds in a single Palace will provide you with a nice, powerful accessory for your team to equip. That’s not bad! But the individual seeds are arguably more useful at first. That’s because grabbing them restores SP to your entire team for free while in the Metaverse. SP is hard to come by early in the game, and restoring it up to three times in a run can keep you diving through the level.
This means a couple of things. First, it’s easier than ever to reach the Treasure and boss of a Palace in a single day (saving you time for other stuff out in the real world). Second, you really ought to grind enemies for money, items, XP, and Personas after you find a Will Seed, but before you pick it up. That’s if you’ve got a lot of SP to spare, that is. Once located, the Will Seed is a perfect excuse to farm, allowing you to fall back on the restorative object only once you’re ready.
Later on you can take the seeds to Jose in Mementos for a sweet little upgrade!
Take Advantage of Bonus Days
The vast majority of Confidants in Persona 5 Royal are available throughout the game. Some exceptions are Maruki (who leaves near the end of the first year) and Yoshida (who only hangs out with you on Sundays). But the other Phantom Thieves, in particular, are easy to max out before you reach the end. That is if you get your stats up high enough!
Raising your attributes can be a bit more of a grind. But its made much easier thanks to special events and days in-game. Take your part-time job at the flower shop. This won’t just pay you extra on Wednesdays and Saturdays. If you answer its questions correctly, you also get three points of Kindness instead of the usual two. And the general rule of thumb is that you want those bonuses!
That’s still not all, either. Confidants can randomly appear at your part-time jobs anyway. This gives you the opportunity to make them like you more, bonus stats, and a bit of money on top.
Prioritize Certain Confidants
Not all Confidants in Persona 5 Royal are created equal. Some of them provide more useful passive bonuses than others, while a few offer useful services or items. You should pick a few to level up quicker than others, if you want to move through the game swiftly.
Tae Takemi is one of the first Confidants in Persona 5 Royal. She’s a punk rock doctor and the holder of the Death Arcana. Leveling her up is extremely useful, too, because it allows you to buy items that restore SP (i.e. mana or MP in the world of Persona). Eventually, this will even include accessories that passively regenerate your SP in combat. Since SP is much harder to come by in dungeons than HP, these are a godsend. Getting them quickly will let you make more progress through a Palace in a single day — increasing your day-to-day efficiency. And after you unlock them, ranking up Takemi one more time will give you a 50 percent discount on all her items. So don’t grab the expensive accessories right out of the gate!
Chihaya, the fortune teller, is a later addition, but also incredibly powerful. She gives buffs that can help you with all kinds of things (like grinding money in the Metaverse). Most importantly, though, she can grind relationship points for you without making time progress. This won’t level up a Confidant, but it will save you from spending in-game time with them for no immediate benefit.
Speaking of characters that help you save time, Kawakami is great at this. She too only becomes a Confidant later in the game. But her nighttime services are very useful. She can make coffee and curry for you, as well as do laundry. This provides useful items and armor for a nominal 5,000 yen fee. The kicker is that it doesn’t cause time to progress, as if you did it yourself, which boosts your efficiency once again.
Take the Big Bang Challenge (When You’re Ready)
The Big Bang Challenge — where you try to eat a massive burger in one sitting — is one of the only reliable ways to gain Guts early in the game. That’s not all, though! Every time you raise your Guts, Knowledge, and Proficiency you should head back to the burger joint for a showdown. The reason is simple: you get a ton of rewards for it. Each successful eat (up to a certain tier) gives you one point in every stat besides Kindness. That’s an incredibly efficient use of your time. Plus it’s a funny little cutscene…
Brewing Coffee Makes Sojiro Like You
A lot of tasks in Persona 5 Royal actually kill two birds with one stone. Case in point: brewing coffee and cooking curry at Cafe Leblanc yourself. Rather than paying Kawakami to do it, this won’t just net you a free item. It’ll also raise your relationship with Sojiro by a few points.
Like with Chihaya’s predictions, this won’t trigger a rank up with the Confidant. It will, however, bring you closer when he’s not quite ready for that all-important jump. It’s a useful alternative to just hanging out with him to grind relationship points.
Personas Make Confidants Like You More
You might stumble onto this by accident, but it’s better to know about it early on. If you equip a Persona that matches the Arcana of the NPC you spend time (e.g. a Chariot Persona with Ryuji) you get a bigger boost to the relationship. Dialogue options and time spent will be more efficient. It’s not always a huge boost, but it can be the difference between taking two days to level someone up and just one.
Buy Everything & Find Sakai
Persona 5 Royal, much like its predecessor, is full of limited-time items you can purchase from stores under certain conditions. The most obvious the special bread only available once every Friday in the school store. But there are plenty of others! During the summer, you can get Melon Pan at the bread shop at the Ginza Line Station, for instance. It’s one of the best revival items in the game. Make sure to pick it up!
Besides using them for yourself, though, there’s another reason to hoard special goods: Sakai. This is a shady item dealer you won’t find marked on your map. He appears as an NPC in the Kichijoji alley — just south of the incense shop. He’s also a trader. He’ll take special limited items you might not need and turn them into potentially better gear! This is especially useful if you pass parts of the game where certain healing items are no longer useful to you.
Money Matters – Like a Lot
Cash makes the world of Persona 5 Royal go ’round. That’s true in the story, where the rich and powerful prey on the weak, but it’s also true for the Phantom Thieves. You need money. You need lots of money. It’ll come in handy for upgrading your gear and buying restorative items, which are downright vital on anything higher than normal difficulty.
Perhaps more importantly, you need it for pulling Personas out of your register. Remember how having the right Persona on your person make people like you more? Well, to maximize that benefit, you’ll likely need to fuse and recreate Personas over and over again outside of the Metaverse. That gets expensive. Luckily, we broke down how to make money in Persona 5 Royal into its own guide. Check that out for the best results!
Fix the Laptop
At some point in September of Persona 5 Royal, just as in the original game, the thrift shop in Yongen-Jaya (the same one where you purchase a DVD player and game console) will offer to sell you a broken laptop. Make sure you pick it up. Being a broken laptop, it’s totally useless at first. When you unlock Akihabara, however, you can purchase PC repair parts from one of that area’s shops.
Once you have both pieces of the puzzle, it’s time to sit down at your bedroom’s work desk and fix the dang thing. We won’t spoil what happens next. Longtime Persona players will likely get a kick out of it, though. For everyone else, it provides a very useful service as well.
Books Are a Bad investment… Most of the Time
Most activities in Persona 5 provide two points to a given stat. A few provide just one, while also giving other benefits. And special days will boost you to three points (and possibly even more rewards besides). Most books, by contrast, offer just three skill points for two sessions.
Basically, don’t read books, kids. Well, don’t read them instead of doing something else, anyway. Books become useful when you do them during downtime — such as on the train. This doesn’t cause time to progress. It’s also a good reason to stock up on the books, even if you don’t intend to make time to read them. You never know when you’ll get the chance!
Even then, though, it’s better to focus on the special one-session reads. These are the ones with descriptions that don’t mention things like Knowledge, Proficiency, or Guts. Instead, they’ll unlock special locations (and special events later on) or passive bonuses. Burn through those first. There are better ways to raise your stats early. Speaking of which…
Don’t Waste Your DVDs (or Your Money)
Home movies are an odd mechanic in Persona 5 Royal. They’re usually not the best use of your time or money. What makes them interesting, though, is that you can use them even when Morgana restricts you from leaving the cafe at night (usually). That makes them a good activity when you go to Mementos or a Palace earlier in the day. Or does it…?
There’s a book in Persona 5 Royal that only becomes available after you reach Shinjuku. The book store there will sell you an item called “The Craft of Cinema.” This is pretty valuable since it lets you get three points in any given attribute from watching a DVD instead of two. Normally, that kind of bonus is reserved for activities on special days, like when it rains. That means its better to hold off on watching DVDs until you reach that point — especially ones that provide Proficiency or Knowledge. You can upgrade both of those things in Leblanc without burning a movie.
To further help in this quest, make sure you go to the movie rental shop in spring (as soon as you unlock Shibuya in the game). This will let you buy a cheap lifetime membership to the store. From then on you can rent DVDs one at a time for free! This lets you get the most bang for your buck and your time.
Check Confidant Progress from the Overworld Map
Here’s something to make your digital social life so, so much easier than it would be otherwise. You can check which neighborhoods have available Confidants on any given day from the overworld map. More than that, you can see which Confidant is where and whether or not they’re ready to level up your relationship.
Just hit R1 to bring up the local map. Then hit it again to see the map of every city and neighborhood you’ve found so far. The ones with blue tarot card symbols on them have a Confidant who’s ready to speak with you.
Finally, if you select that area’s icon and press the square button, you’ll see the name of the Confidant and one of a few different symbols. A blank blue tarot card means they’re ready to speak with and grow closer, but won’t level up just yet. A blue card with exclamation points means they’re ready to step up the relationship. A gray card with exclamation points means they’re technically ready to level up. However, you need to meet some secondary requirement to speak with them (like progressing the story). Lastly, a blank gray card either means they’re not ready to level up yet and want to ask if you meet some extra requirement.
This is a pretty handy and quick way to determine who you should hang out with for any given stretch. You can also couple it with Chihaya’s relationship boosting service to focus on only raising the opinions of Confidants who aren’t ready to level up yet.
Plant Food: High, Medium, and Low
One of the very first places you see in Persona 5 Royal is the main character’s own bedroom. On the far right side is a houseplant. This is a secretly very useful item, as it allows you to raise your Kindness stat, repeatedly, without passing time. All you need is some plant food!
You can find some in Yongen-Jaya — the game’s starting neighborhood — but it’s better to buy it the more expensive variety from the underground mall in Shibuya. A flower shop at the back of the mall sells the stuff which, when applied to your houseplant, gives you two points in Kindness. This can even be used on days when your character is “too tired” to do anything but sleep.
However, you’ll want to abandon this variety of fertilizer, too, once Shinjuku opens up. The flower store in that part of town sells a “Mega Fertilizer” that raises your kindness by three points instead. Just make sure to check the plant every few days to see if it needs more food. The sooner you begin the cycle of feeding it, the more often you’ll be able to raise your Kindness for “free” over the course of the game.
Your Friendly, Neighborhood Vending Machine
Until you rank up Haru, Takemi, or Sojiro, SP restoratives are at a premium. You can negotiate with shadows and hope they’ll give you these items, which are great for keeping you in dungeons for longer stretches, but obviously that’s not very reliable.
What is reliable is the vending machine sandwiched between Yongen-Jaya’s laundromat and bathhouse. It’ll dispense four SP drinks per week for a measly couple hundred yen. They don’t restore much of the spell fuel per use, but it’s better than nothing. Plus once you unlock Akihabara, Shinjuku, Kichijoji, and the school courtyard the vending machines in those areas will also sell you a few of the same drinks every week.
Check the Refrigerator
It’s not immediately obvious, but you can enter the kitchenette in Cafe Leblanc: the one behind the bar where Sojiro is hangs out. This is where you can make SP restoring curry (or have Kawakami do it for you) on certain days. That’s assuming there are enough ingredients left over to do so.
Even when you don’t want to make curry, though, you should check the fridge. On some days it’s completely empty. On others you can make the life-affirming spicy stuff. Yet every once in a blue moon you’ll instead find a present in there from Sojiro himself. It’s always free, so you might as well take it.
Watch TV & Read the Crossword
Leblanc has two more hidden benefits to address. The first is somewhat obvious. You want to read the crossword that sometimes appears on the back table of the store. Doing so, and answering its primary puzzle correctly, will give you a single point in Knowledge — without causing time to pass.
The same goes for TV trivia. The television set downstairs will offer you insight on the world, little jokes, and other interesting tidbits. But its most tangible benefit is more Knowledge. The TV will sometimes play a game show. The protagonist will then be asked to answer the same question as the contestants. If you get it right, you get some free knowledge. And even if you don’t, you can just reload your save and try again. That’s one of the reasons it’s important to save as soon as you reach Leblanc every night!
Allies Revive After Battle
It’s not terrible tough to revive allies in Persona 5 Royal. You can get resurrection items pretty early on, and not for a ton of money. But you might as well save them (and the SP needed to use revive abilities) when you can. Dungeon crawling is all about rationing, after all. That’s why it’s good to know that allies resurrect after every successful fight! If you’re about to win, you don’t have to worry about burning a valuable resource on raising your friends. They’ll just come back in a jiffy — allowing you to use more common healing items to boost their health.
Cover Equals Invisibility
Navigating a Palace can be scary. They’re often very long, dangerous, and filled with enemies that can bleed your stamina dry. Most of their puzzles aren’t too complicated, but they can slow you down. That’s when the real threats arrive: enemies. Even normal foes can eat into your supply of SP and items. So it’s important to avoid unnecessary (or unwinnable) fights. That’s where stealth comes in!
Persona 5 Royal is clear about one thing; staying in cover keeps you hidden. That doesn’t just mean enemies won’t see you from specific angles, either. You’re straight-up invisible to wandering shadows. The same is true even if you move between cover points. The animation can fling you right through a shadow, or directly into its line of sight, but it doesn’t matter. You’re safe. Use this to your advantage constantly.
Mementos Keeps Refilling
Morgana does you a solid by saying that Mementos changes every time you enter it. That’s only partially true, though. Mementos actually changes constantly — including any time you exit and reenter a given floor. That includes the items you can hoover up between battles and the flowers you can grab for Jose. If you want to easily harvest cash, it’s not a bad method! Plus it’s a good excuse to get enough flowers to buy out Jose’s stock every single trip. You might as well, since you can’t keep the excess flowers anyway.
Keep in mind that this is not a method to battle through Mementos indefinitely. Jose runs out of stock of his special items eventually. But it will let you last a good deal longer. Otherwise, just save the items you buy up for your next trip! You’ll return to Mementos plenty of times throughout the game.
Look for Walls Without Gunk
Persona 5 Royal tells you about secret areas in Mementos fairly early on (although not immediately). However, it doesn’t give you a perfect indicator of what to look for when hunting hidden spots. That’s fine. It’s actually really simple! Just look for dead ends in the randomized dungeon that don’t have inky black goo or bars on them. Even if it’s not marked as a door, or special room, this means you can break through. Gunked up walls will always be real, though.
Hit the Aojiru Stand Every Sunday
Another easy way to rack up stats that only costs money instead of time is the aojiru stand in the Shibuya underground walkway. The kiosk will sell you a fairly expensive drink once every Sunday. It’ll only increase one social stat by one point. However, it doesn’t advance time like most activities. That means its worth the price. Unfortunately, you’re at the mercy of a rotating stock every week, meaning you can’t choose which stat the stand increases.
As a side tip, don’t send your calling cards on Saturdays. This will lock you out of attending the aojiru stand, since the action eats up your entire following day with a boss fight. This is technically true of anything you might want to do, so check your calendar!
Unlock Every Confidant – Even if You Don’t Rank Them
Remember how Confidants can randomly appear when you work a part-time job? That’s not the only time. There are also several special events when unexpected allies can appear. A certain fishing trip with Ryuji is one example. This is a pretty efficient use of your time, since it usually leads to bonus stats and bonus relationship points. Then there are things like playing darts and billiards — which add even more new passive bonuses and skills. What all these events have in common, however, is that they pull in more Confidants for efficiency’s sake.
But none of that matters if you don’t have the Confidants unlocked in the first place! Even if you don’t intend to level up these NPCs right away, odds are that you’ll want to down the line. And keeping them un-recruited is basically leaving money on the table during those random events.
