Persona 5 Royal snatches the crown for best-rated JRPG
Honestly, this record turned over when Persona 5 Royal (Atlus) first came out in 2020, but I didn’t work here then, plus today is the 30th Anniversary of the Persona series as a whole, so making a fuss of it seemed appropriate. And more importantly, who’s going to stop me? You? Didn’t think so.
Persona 5 Royal has an impressive aggregate score of 95 on the review aggregator Metacritic.com, making it the most critically acclaimed JRPG in the world. And in fact, there are two other games in the Persona series in the top 10: Persona 4 Golden (Atlus, 2012) and Persona 5 (Atlus, 2016) in fifth and sixth place, respectively. Confused? Don’t be. Royal is an enhanced version of 5, with additional content.
The series started as a spin-off from the Megami Tensei multimedia franchise, and is now exceedingly popular in its own right. Starting in 1996 with Revelations: Persona, each game follows a group of seemingly normal high school students who, at night, unlock the magical power of their masked “Personas” to fight demonic or otherwise supernatural forces.
“JRPG” stands for “Japanese Role-Playing Game”, which means an RPG developed in Japan. This definition was tested by the existence of games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Sandfall Interactive, 2025), which was made by French developers and thus is sometimes called a “J’aiRPG”. You will note that this is incredibly funny.
So, more broadly, a JRPG is a game that uses features that were popularised by Japanese RPGs, including a “party” character system, linear story, and turn-based combat.
It’s an incredibly crowded and popular field (the JRPG heyday is perhaps the era of the PlayStation 2, for which 118 JRPGs were released) that includes Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series, for one. Persona 5 Royal winning the top spot is no small thing. One thing that makes it stand out is its graphic design. Believe it or not, but Persona 5 in particular gets a lot of love for its menu screens.
It’s an undeniably slick, stylish and downright cool series. Are these adjectives all kind of synonyms of each other? Who cares! Ride it out, that’s the Persona way, darn it. And there’s a Persona 6 in development, so you’re not too late to check out these chart-topping crowd-pleasers for yourself.