Persona 5 August 11 demo event spoilers/impressions

There was another premium event the 11th, this time in Sendai. It’s not like they changed the demo, but they changed the way they do it:
Source People played from the start of the game for 1h30 or so, then the staff would load a save and the player would play for around 10m in the art gallery dungeon. (from my deductions it’s the same save used for the 10 minutes demo)
Source Then the staff makes you fill a questionnaire, and give you a souvenir.
Source Lastly, they ask the player to please refrain from leaking spoilers so everyone can fully enjoy the game when it’s out.
(Well too late. It’s been like 3 years since I’m waiting for Persona 5. Usually I wouldn’t spoil myself a game this much, and it’s just the first 2 hours anyway. I just want to know as much as possible, as if I went to a premium event myself.)

This new batch of impressions has a lot of new things. So might as well post here what I read anyway, instead of keeping it for myself. I won’t repeat things that we already know. Also keep in mind that those are people’s impressions, so there may be people who remember details wrongly.

Also, Persona Central reposted the summary I wrote last time and fixed a few points I wasn’t sure about or got wrong so you should read their summary now instead.

Lastly, my Japanese is far from perfect, so if there’s a sentence I’m not 100% sure about, I’ll mention it under parenthesis.

Edit on august12th: Just noticed I accidentally wrote Shinjuku station instead of Shibuya station at some point. I corrected it. Also added a photo of Sojiro with the suit+hat and fanart of MC getting lost in Shibuya station.

Edit: source one more report got published on August 12  (I didn’t reinclude stuff I already wrote about later below)

It seems you’ll be able to change clothes in dungeons, to put on DLC clothes for example.
The day passes when you sleep, so as long as you don’t go to sleep you can take various actions at night.

We could actually see Sojiro with the suit+hat attire on one of the screens during the nico live of the take the treasure event.

Morgana calls itself human but at the same time say it doesn’t know what it is, and someone throws it and it says “don’t throw living beings!”.

From Twitter:

source The first battle after MC awakens his persona is a tutorial, Arsène is the one speaking during it and explaining how to play.

Source There’s no automatic reload once you run out of bullets. Going out of the Palace back to the real world is the only way to reload your guns. The person adds it’s weird that model guns apparently shoot real bullets. (Maybe once you level up Shinya’s coop you’ll be able to carry more bullets, or get the ability to reload once per dungeon run. I’m sure there’s a coop skill like that.)

Source Morgana does a lot of tsukkomi.

Source Controls. I think we know them all already anyway. Including this for completion sake.

Source At the end of their impressions, they say they like Ryuji now. Pointing this out because I saw a lot of people saying in their impressions they didn’t really like Ryuji at first, but started to like him after trying out the game. IIRC he got one of the lowest scores on the niconico live popularity vote at the end of the take the treasure event.

Source In the save the staff loads after 1h30, the one that takes place in the art gallery dungeon, An had a whip sword as her close range weapon.

From the 2ch thread:
765:

• The game advances to the next day when you go to sleep at nightime. So maybe as long as you don’t sleep you can keep doing things?

• Removing your mask yourself means you made a contract with your persona and awakened it.

• The teachers treat MC like a problem child and the fact that he has a criminal record somehow leaked to the students. It seems the rumors about MC get even worse later on, because he starts hanging out with Ryuji who’s a problem child, and with An who’s being doubted by people because of her connection with Kamoshida sensei.

• Morgana doesn’t know what it is and is trying to find out the answer by using MC and co.

• This time the MC has a lot of mean answer choices. Like acting as if you don’t know Ryuji and telling him “who are you?” at a point in time when you already met many times before.  Or say you can’t remember Morgana’s name and call it “Morumoru”.

778 & 779:
Morgana feels like Kuma with the “I don’t know what I am” thing, and it’s weird Morgana says stuff like that even though it also says it’s not a cat but human.

781:
Seems like An is a model, we don’t know what kind of model though.

New report published on August 11:
Unlike the one from last time, this is mostly spoiler free so it doesn’t have a lot of story details. However it has a lot of other info. I’m not including  generic stuff like “Justine and Caroline are so cute! It’s cute how they’re loyal to Igor!”, “Sae is beautiful”, “MC’s persona awakening is so cool!”, “Morgana is so cute!”, “Jack Lantern says hoihoi and is so cute!”. (If you really want these kind of comments, this list was made from all the instances of “xx is cute” in the report, so in a sense I actually included them already)

• There’s many events in the game when the controller’s vibration is used nicely, so the writer suggests it’s best to play with vibration on.

• There’s a public bath in the neighborhood of Café Leblanc, so this may be the same public bath they’re in at the end of the E3 video.

• Café Leblanc and Sojiro’s actual house aren’t the same building. Sojiro stays at the house and MC stays in Café Leblanc’s attic. Sojiro warns MC many times to not forget to lock the doors. (I got this wrong last post. MC’s room doesn’t have an attic. The café’s attic IS MC’s room.  And Sojiro barely cleaned the attic before MC started living in it. This makes much more sense now.)

• The attic is very dirty. Apparently it was cleaned but there’s still ton of dust that could have been cleaned.

• MC’s luggage when moving in was only a single cardboard box.

• The inner part of the attic doesn’t have a bed, just a mattress with something like a bed cover on it, so what the MC sleeps on is very crude.

• MC has different clothes: his school uniform, his plain clothes, and pajamas. The pajamas don’t cover his neck and you can see his collarbones.

• Igor’s in-game model is scary.

• During that 2D animated scene with Sae and Goro talking about eating sushi I wrote about last time, Goro is holding an attaché-case. We don’t know why though.

• At one point the next objective displayed is “behave and go to bed”, which made the writer laugh.

• Sojiro san says things like “I don’t have seats available if it’s for men” and ” Saving a man’s phone number goes against my principles” and is a dandy. As expected of Jouji(Nakata).

• The writer got lost in Shibuya station when needing to change trains to go to school. They say they already went there many times IRL, and the station in the game is very close to the one IRL. The writer even already did IRL the exact same train line change you need to do in the game, so they didn’t get lost for long. However people who never went to Shibuya station IRL will definitely get lost for a long time. The reason you get lost is because at some point, the way the indications point to is blocked, so you’re forced to take another path. The best way to find your way is to ask station staff. The writer say that he actually got lost more at the beginning of the game when you need to find Sojiro’s house(which is different from Café Leblanc) and that if you have a bad sense of direction, you can get lost anywhere, just like IRL.
  (I read “I got lost in Shibuya station” in like 5 different reports by now. It’s gonna be really funny when the game gets out and tons of people get lost in the station)

12th August Edit: Someone even already made fanart of the situation. The usual path to Ginza line is blocked so MC is forced to find another way. Source

• Arsène has a lot of recorded lines. The battle right after MC’s persona awakening is a tutorial battle, and Arsène is the one who speaks to explain things. The writer thinks Arsène is someone else entirely instead of the MC’s other self like Orpheus in P3 and Izanagi in P4. It feels like Arsène awakened from the “soul of a rebel” dwelling inside MC. (This would mean he is indeed MC’s other self though. Not sure what the writer means.)

• Before Arsène awakens, the scene with Ryuji in pain is very well done and the writer thanks Atlus and the Cero C rating.

• When you meet Morgana, you have a choice where you can say “you’re a cat?”. Morgana will answer vividly “I’m not a cat!”. There’s a lot of comedy with MC being the boke and Morgana doing the tsukkomi.

Then the writer put in various things about the story in no particular order:

• The writer thinks Sae san’s boss is very suspicious (the person she talks to on the phone at the start of the game in the 18m vid)

• Kawakami sensei (teacher&maid) warns Ryuji telling him to dye his hair back to black, meaning his blonde hair isn’t natural

• Mishima kun comes to class all beaten up. He has a band-aid on his right cheek, a scratch on his left cheek, his left arm is bandaged from the wrist to the elbow. And even though he’s injured, he’s still planning to go to club activities after school. During class, his desk is far away from MC’s, but for some reason he keeps staring at MC.

• The game must have a new game +, because even at the beginning, there’s choices you could only pick if you have a high level enough of courage.

• Ryuji wants to get along with MC because he thinks they’re similar, and because they’re both treated as problem childs(Ryuji was also a transfer student like MC)

• It seems like An has a part time job as a model. It also seems she regularly goes to an hospital but we don’t know why. Kamoshida is worried thinking she might have appendicitis. An is busy to the point that it’s been a long while since she met her best friend, who is in a club and very busy as well. (Sadly, I guess this will spark more “An is a slut and does STD check ups in hospitals” or something like that trolls.)

• Ryuji calls Morgana “Monamona”.

• The second time you infiltrate the Palace with Ryuji, he brings a model gun. MC borrows it from him and it now allows MC to use guns in battle. The writer purposely omits the plot reason as to why it’s possible for a model gun to actually do damage. Also the writer jokes that the fact the first gun MC gets in the game is a present from Ryuji will give ideas to yaoi doujinshi authors.
  (So this confirms all the characters don’t use real guns. Though I guess we already knew that, as the model gun shop where you buy the model guns obviously don’t sell real ones. Maybe Goro will have a real one though. As for the reason why model guns can do damage like real guns, it’s probably the power of imagination and manifesting what you think etc, like the Palace themselves. I can’t wait for when the game is released outside Japan, and 15 years old kids will say Persona 5 ripped off SAO)

• When MC starts up Isekai Navi, he automatically transforms into his thief form? Morgana tells MC that he’s not used to it yet, so he should return to his student clothes for now. (not 100% sure about this last sentence)

• The idle movement action of MC in a dungeon: He minds his own appearance and checks his clothes and touch his coat.

The writer played for around two hours in total, but didn’t get to the point where Ryuji awakens his persona. Instead, the staff person loaded another save. From the description of it, it was the save used for the 10m demo. The description fits everything I read about the 10m demo, the party being MC Morgana Ryuji An, all at level 14, Madarame Palace/art gallery dungeon, etc. There’s a few new things in the writer’s impressions though:

• When you trigger an alarm, it’s not like enemies immediately jump on you, so if you’re careful it’s still possible to do get a preemptive attack and start the fight with the advantage. However, if the enemy gets the advantage, the battle will start in a state where you’re surrounded, and you won’t be able to escape the battle. And it starts with MC holding his butt in pain(I already wrote that in a previous post)

• Often, when you’re about to kill demons in battle, they beg for their lives. If you hold them up at that point and ask them to lend you their power, it seems you have a near 100% chance of the negotiation succeeding and getting them as persona. If you ask them something they give you money. Demons talk in battle too(every single line isn’t voiced though, you can notice that in many official videos they published)

• The Auto recover button you see in official screenshots: with one push, every character with recovery skills will use them to restore the party members’ health. Needless to say it consumes the necessary amount of SP. This is so you don’t have to open the menu and do it yourself. The writer say they don’t know if it recovers everyone to full health or not. (It does, it was officially confirmed before. Auto Recover function was described along with the dash function some weeks ago in a Dengeki  Playstation magazine issue. It said that dash makes you move faster, and that the Auto Recover button restores everyone to full health with one push, to make your experience as a phantom thief smoother. Just as I and others guessed, they meant that in a way so you don’t have to bother opening the menu etc. It’s not free recovery.)

(In summary, Auto Recover button makes party members use their Persona’s skills to restore everyone to full health, using the corresponding amount of SP)

• Writer talk about how the results screen’s BGM is cool. Which reminds them that the BGM during the tutorial battle was different than the usual battle BGM, and was very cool. They hope it’ll be in the OST release so they’ll be able to enjoy it.

Impressions about Madarame Palace’s scenery:

• There’s an announcement like thing being played by speakers in the background. And there’s posters on the walls advertising Madarame’s exhibition, so maybe the palace is Madarame’s art exhibition.

• It seems some portraits displayed are Madarame’s ex disciples, at least that’s what the writer deduced from a remark An says. There’s also a large portrait in a hall with someone that looks like Yusuke.  His hair looks similar, however he’s wearing his summer school uniform and at that point they’re still wearing winter uniforms, so maybe that’s not Yusuke.(I don’t really think that’s a good argument, as it could have just have been painted more than a year ago)

• There’s a portrait that when you examine, Ryuji says “If he knew he’s being thought of that way～…”, probably talking about Yusuke, meaning they probably already met him once.

(These seem to contradict that Madarame steals his students art, since this says the portraits were made by himself and portrays his students. Or maybe there’s pieces he made himself which portray his students, and also pieces he stole from his students.
Either I understood something wrong, or either the report where I read the “Madarame steals his students art” thing was wrong. It’s probably the former. Anyway no use thinking about it we’ll probably know once the game is out anyway)

• It seems like the real place form of Madarame’s palace is an atelier. Sometimes the space inside the palace gets distorted and you can see a bit of the real version of it. You can see an art room with canvases and easels. (Like how Kamoshida Palace is where Shuujin school is supposed to be)

Writer say they played around 15 minutes this time, so around the same time as the 10 m demo. They regret they didn’t think about checking things like the coop menu.