Persona 5 difficulty level?

Japanese
#1

I wanted to start Persona 5 Royal soon in the Japanese dub and I was just wondering to what extent the difficulty was? I’m probably around N3 right now and it’s probably my favorite game of all time but it also gives off a vibe of “You are going to horribly struggle”. I played the first hour in Japanese and I don’t know if I got it because I’ve played the game so often in english (like 4 full playthroughs if we include original and p5) or if I got it since I actually knew the words.

TLDR: Will I get the shit slapped out of me and feel horribly sad about my Japanese skills or would I be able to actually play the game?

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#2

I finished my Japanese PS5 royal playthrough last month. It took me about 250 hours. I think I did most of the dialogue heavy content? I got all the confidants to max etc. For the sake of practice, I tried to not skip through anytime mindlessly. It was my first time playing the game, though, so I assume it will be easier for you since you’re already familiar with the story.

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#3

Just wanted to share this amazing OCR tool for mining games, LNs, etc. I’ve been mining FFXIV with it for a while now, and it’s super easy to set up. Let me know if you have any questions about the settings

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#4

I would put the difficulty level at high. That first conversation with the lawyer killed me, but then again I had never played it in English so I had less context. The countless explanations and systems also don’t help.

I have played through several games in Japanese including Skyrim, FF7 Remake, DragonQuest XI, Pokemon, Fire Emblem. But none were as hard as Persona. Since you played the game before and have more context, it might be easier for you, but it can also lead to a false sense of knowing. Still, I did play Skyrim in English first and it did make the game easier overall in Japanese, but it also made me prone to skip over a lot of the details I had already gone over in the English version.

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#5

You’ll be fine regardless of difficulty level if you’ve played through the game four times through in English. And that applies to any video game or text, not just Persona 5.

The most difficult part of high-level reading like playing a long, text-heavy RPG involves tracking non-sentence level things like plot details, characters, strategy and what you should do next, etc. All of which are solved by you knowing what happens and what you should do already. That makes it a great choice for practicing your reading skills as an intermediate student, as you can focus squarely on sentence-by-sentence understanding of the text.

If there is one difficulty I’ve experienced in Persona 5 it’s the kanji. The game is packed with unusual, non-Joyo kanji (perhaps because of its small text-box size?) and if you’re not playing on the PC edition they can be very annoying to look up. It would make the game much easier to read if you use OCR software like the one @SnowTale934 suggested above.

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#6

Word of warning: this tool is flagged a virus by windows defender

#7

That’s just the nature of how hook’s work, they latch to another process to read the data. The program’s been around for 2+ years and there’s been no complaints about it being a virus, I did my due research before installing it. But If you don’t wanna take the risk it’s completely understandable.

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#8

When you say unusual do you mean unusual as in like they show up in other places but just aren’t on alot of reading lists or unusual as in “I saw it one time in the game and then literally never again what even is that?”

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#9

I mean unusual in the sense of 1) a kanji not on the Joyo kanji list, 2) a reading of a kanji not on the Joyo kanji list, or 3) ateji or other kanji constructions typically written in kana in most written text. I actually kept a list of the ones I came across in the game, which numbered maybe 500+ by the time I hit the fourth palace. Here’s some examples:

  • Verbs are almost always written in their kanji forms, even when uncommon otherwise: 強請る、 彷徨う、躊躇う、竦める、挫く
  • Lots of Buddhist terminology: 虚仮、懺悔、贖罪、醍醐味
  • Lots of plant and animal names: 苔、豹、獅子、閑古鳥
  • And Igor and the demons spit out so many archaisms (汝 is just the tip of it) that I stopped writing them down lol

While these characters are not necessarily uncommon in literary Japanese, even in novels they tend to be marked with furigana, which are not present in Persona 5. While they are individually low frequency words, Persona 5 as a whole has a high frequency of low frequency words, if that makes sense. This is why having an OCR reader is very handy, as all these novel constructions are going to be hard to keep up with at a JLPT N3 level.

Thankfully, there is some advantages to playing Persona 5 as a learner. Sentences are short, since the game’s text boxes are a maximum of two lines of text long. There is no narration, so the game is almost entirely in dialogue, which is easier to read (in my subjective option). And the game has a tendency to repeat major themes and plot points over and over and over again, which means it’s hard to get lost if you do have to skip through a conversation. It’s not a bad choice for a starting game, especially if you have a passion for it already.

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#10

I can’t say much about Persona 5, but I’ve been playing Persona 3 Reload for a bit. I have only learned N3 grammar, but grammar-wise it was definitly doable. Just prepare to look up some N2 / N1 points here and there if they show up.

Also for unknown words etc.
There is the “Agent” text hooker (available on github) which also works with Persona 5 on PC as far as I know.
With that tool, the game text content can be copied to a browser window and you can use tools like yomichan to look up unknown words.
While playing Persona 3, I usually play it in windowed mode and keep a narrow browser window next to it for quick lookups and mining.

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#11

Agreed! It’s a great way to increase your vocabulary/kanji knowledge, and the game itself provides the SRS.

Besides, if you like this sort of media you’ll be coming across these items again and again, so they’ll stick eventually.

#12

This is 1000% how you’re going to feel, but I genuinely think no matter what you play you’ll feel this way for quite a while. If you really want to play then just go for. It may be a lower barrier to entry to start off with a not 100 hour rpg though. :sweat_smile:

#13

Quick update for anyone who cares. I played about another hour today and my understanding fluctuates by… alot on sentence to sentence basis. I’ll go from hearing Sojiro speak and getting all of it and think “I might just be the greatest Japanese speaker alive” and then he says like three sentences that go completely over my head. Definitely gonna need an OCR reader

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#14

I’d say it’s a lot of N1 level stuff with some stuff above N1. Some stuff is easier to understand like N3-N2, but then they go on philosophical rants and I’m lost. It’s harder than Gyakuten Saiban and that game doesn’t have audio dialogue to help. I think if you really love persona it will help you advance really quickly, but if you want a more gradual acclimation to learning with gaming maybe Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy or like Buddy Mission Bond or something like that would be slightly easier but still challenging.

#15

lmao I managed quite well with most dialogue and could mostly just guess which word meant what when I didn’t understand everything. However, I have near 0% understanding of what soujiro says. He is my lowest level confidant, because I just can’t bring myself to understand a damn thing he says. Oddly enough I don’t have that issue with Ryuji despite both of them being fairly rough in their speech. I think it could just be that I barely speak to older people or just the gruffy sound of his voice that makes it tough for me to understand. I’m pretty sure I’ll make a better attempt of studying in a new game plus, but now I’m mostly invested in the story aspect and don’t want to spend hours of my first playthrough writing down new words.

if you are intent on studying everything you don’t understand then making use of the log feature (L or R3 on the PS) you can brute force listening to a sentence until it makes sense. On an unrelated note. What is your favorite persona so far?

#16

I want to study most of what I don’t understand so I will definitely be using the log feature. I am making exceptions though for stuff that’s pretty much useless (Like when you fuse a persona and they say some old archaic words that you’ll never hear again).

As for my favorite persona, It’s definitely P5R for overall experience. Pacing, music, gameplay just pretty much everything was top notch. However Persona 3’s story blows P5 out the water. My only issue with it is it’s so unbelievably slow to start getting good (I started being interested around when Shinji joined). Persona 4 was spoiled for me so I can’t really unbiasedly review it since a murder mystery where you know who the murderer is kinda ruins it.

As a final question, how many words did you know when you started playing the game? Right now I believe my word count is relatively high but I really don’t want to have to be searching up every single dialogue line since I didn’t know enough words.

#17

I played P4 “the golden” in Japanese, not P5 yet, but if the difficulty level is roughly similar I’d give it something like L28~30 on Natively. As far as JRPGs go, it’s definitely not on the easier side, in my experience mainly because it actually takes place in Japan and not a made up fantasy world. So you have to deal with all the intricacies of “real” Japanese: slang, dialect, cultural references etc… The ratio of text-to-gameplay is also very lopsided, there’s a ton of dialogue to go through.

But honestly if you know the game well and are motivated I wouldn’t worry about that. The very first piece of native Japanese content I really engaged with was Final Fantasy VIII back when I was absolutely not up to the level required to play such a game and I still managed to make it work with a ton of patience, lookups, checking with the English version when I was completely lost etc…

Yeah that’s absolutely normal. I play a lot of games in Japanese and I can do that fairly casually these days but from time to time a character will pop up that speaks in a very peculiar dialect and suddenly I have to spend 30 seconds on every sentence…

Be careful not to overdo it, if you just log every word you have to look up you’re going to log a lot of stuff. I tend to wait until I encounter a word a few times before I decide to create an Anki card.

I also have an arbitrary rule where I decided that I would only add max one word per scene/conversation. Otherwise I find that it breaks the flow too much. Learning to deal with ambiguity and partial understanding is actually a useful skill to develop too, sometimes you have to go with the flow.

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