Persona 5 Gets New Dungeon Exploration Mechanics

Persona games have revolved around two things — our social interactions with your party and community members, and the dungeons you stomp your way through.

User Domi-Persona on tumblr recently translated an article about Persona 5 from Dengeki Playstation Vo. 617, which focuses on the adjustments made to dungeon crawling to change up the experience.

What’s new?

For starters, there will now be “safe rooms” that players can access mid-dungeon. In previous games like Persona 4, you reached checkpoints that you could teleport back to after you’ve bailed from your run. These safe rooms are unique in that you’re able to hop back and forth from the dungeons to the real world and back. They also provide opportunities to chat with party members, which has been a limited feature in previous Persona games. Though it’s unclear whether or not you can have full-blown conversations, at the very least your party members can provide you with hints on how to clear the dungeon.

Also you can now change party members at any time within dungeons. Previously, whoever you picked was in your group with you until you hopped out of the dungeon. This is interesting, as previous Persona games were balanced around wearing out your party. You didn’t bail from a dungeon because you got bored, you got out because it was getting too dangerous and you were running out of resources. If you can change party members, that sounds to me like that will be less of an issue. So will the dungeons be longer and more grueling now?

Finally, you will have abilities you can activate while outside of combat. Different from say, casting heal on injured party members, these skills will be there to help make your dungeon crawling easier — like running at high speeds, and even fully healing party members. Speaking of party members, if you’re getting into a dangerous area, they’ll even give you a warning about it.

Persona 5 will be releasing in Japan for the PS3 and PS4 on September 15, 2016. North America will have to wait for the February 14, 2017 release.