Persona 5 The Royal gets announced – whatever it is

Atlus, developer of the Persona games, released a trailer for an upcoming project named Persona 5 The Royal over the weekend. I use the word ‘project’ because, well, nobody knows what it is yet.

The trailer features a a female character, a student of the same high school the protagonist of Persona 5 attends, looking up at a logo of The Phantom Thieves; the collective name of the player party in the original game. I’m one of those weeaboos who can’t speak Japanese, but according to this handy fan translation, the mysterious girl seems to be a loner who isn’t the Thieves’ biggest fan. The end of the trailer assures us that more information will be revealed on the 24th of April.

But that’s all the information we get for now. Persona 5 was a captivating dungeon crawling JRPG/high school drama simulator hybrid that we loved to bits in our review, so anything new with the same name is likely to be a fun time, but we do wonder what exactly The Royal is. Both the previous games in the series received updated re-releases with fancy colon-free subtitles (Persona 3 FES, Persona 3 Portable, Persona 4 Golden), so The Royal might be a similar version, but doesn’t buying an old game with new content seem old fashioned in the age of DLC?

Is this angry redhead a new player character? A new villain? A new NPC with an engrossing storyline that you’ll have to spend hours working at the flower shop in the mall to unlock more of? It’s hard to say anything for sure at this stage.

This seems to be the big March 2019 announcement that Atlus teased at the start of year, but it appears to be yet another teaser. Are we only going to get a third teaser next month? If so, would we call that a teaser-ception? Like literally everything about Persona 5 The Royal, we are confused and excited to find out.