It also adds new romance options
Persona is a series with plenty of choice as you balance your alternate dimension demon-slaying responsibilities with your high-schooling social life. Playing as a student, you’re free to decide how to spend your free time, which characters to spend it with, and who to inevitably romance by the end of the game. Plenty of options, for sure, butPersona 3 Portablewas the last time we could choose our protagonist’s gender in the series. Until now. Thanks to the simply titled “P5R Female Protagonist” mod, you can now replace the default male protagonist Joker inPersona 5 Royalwith a she/her Joker. On paper, that would seem like a novel change in a lot of games, but in the mammoth-sizedPersona 5, a change like that requires some very impressive modding.
Modder Chlorophylls is up to the task, as their mod not only swaps out Joker’s in-game model, but tweaks almost everything you can imagine: animations in and out of combat, UI fixes, dialogue changes, a fully re-voiced character, and most importantly to many fans, new romance options.
New romance options includeeveryone’s bestie Ryuji, young detective Akechi, painter Yusuke, and the guy that runs your phan site Mishima, for some reason. Feels like a slot that could’ve gone to the hot counsellor, but that’s probably against his Code Of Ethics or something. The game apparently has a hardcoded limit on the number of confidant slots, so only four previous romance options make the jump to this mod: Ann, Takemi, Haru, and Hifumi - leaving the Makoto stans in trembles.
Our new female Joker is also fully voiced in both English and Japanese. Alexa Farron recorded Joker’s lines in English, meanwhile Maayo Sakamoto handled the Japanese voiceover. Sakamoto has actually done plenty of voice work in anime and video games (she was the badass Lightning inFinal Fantasy 13), and some clips from her role inPersona 3were repurposed for this mod. Very cool.
Again, the mod is extensive, tweaking things most players wouldn’t notice such as bathroom interactions or social stat labels (suave is now chic). But it’s not absolutely perfect. The anime cutscenes remain as they are, “unless you have an animation studio in your back pocket,” modder Chlorophylls writes on the mod’sdownload page. Chlorophylls also says the title screen models are “cursed beyond belief” so that uses the original Joker model, too.
I’ve been chipping away at the giga-RPG since ithopped onto Game Pass last year, andI thinkthat I’m close to the end (give-or-take 75 hours has to be nearing the end, right?Right?). Regardless, this mod has me excited for an eventual replay far, far, far into the future.
You can download the mod over onGameBanana.
