It’s been awhile since I posted a formal update about this mod. See the first three from last year here: #1, #2, #3
This past Christmas, I premiered a teaser trailer for the Persona 5 Royal Vinesauce mod on my YouTube channel. The video is set to the song Eminence by Red Vox, and focuses on dungeon exploration and battles featuring both Vinny and Scoot as playable characters.
Reception has surpassed all my expectations. I very much appreciate all the shockingly positive responses, which have helped fuel my ambition to finish and release the mod. I tentatively set the release date as a vague “2024,” to allow for extra time.
While the trailer showed essentially nothing new that hasn’t already been featured in clips on my Twitter profile, it still served as most people’s first impressions of the project. It seems many of you enjoyed the multitude of Vinesauce references, the wide range of model replacements, and most of all, the moment where Scoot looked like a real-life mallard.
Moving into this new year, I want to announce some recent developments, and clear up any misconceptions about the mod that may exist.
The Inclusion of Vargskelethor Joel
In the past, vinesauce.com was a hub for a variety of other streamers in addition to Vinny. Although they occasionally collaborated, their streams still had their own unique identities. To this day, you can find many of their Twitch channels via the website.
However, in recent years, the connotation of “Vinesauce” has shifted to refer to the individual rather than a collective of streamers. You can read Vinny’s own statement here regarding the issue from his perspective.
Understandably, many viewers of the trailer left comments speculating on other appropriate candidates for party member replacements. I do have a desire to honor the wider history of the community– which will always include those individuals– but out of respect for Vinny’s wish to differentiate his brand from them, I’ve decided to limit the scope of the project.
That brings me to the big announcement:
Vargskelethor Joel will be the only other real-life internet personality represented in the mod. He will be taking on the role of Ryuji Sakamoto, another playable Persona-user with lightning powers.
As another recognizable figure close to Vinny, it stands to reason that many viewers want to see him fighting shadows in the metaverse as well. Initially, I held off on this due to the current workload of replacing two full party members already becoming overwhelming.
To make this happen, I’ve had to collect and assign hundreds more voice clips, and work with yet another talented artist to replace the 2D and 3D visual assets, just as I’ve done with Vinny and Scoot. Shoutouts to Protokyuu for designing Joel’s artwork and giving me lots of good ideas!
If other party members or characters end up being replaced, they will be in the form of fictional Vinesauce references only. Two Face, Sponge, Birdo, Dante from DmC, etc…
The Intentions Behind This Mod
I began developing this when inspired by a meme about Vinny not wanting to play this game. Its existence runs counter to that, contributing to the meme in an ironic way. Aside from that, it also aims to celebrate memorable moments from the past 10 years of the stream’s history. But to be perfectly clear– the target audience is fellow chat members– not the streamer per se.
With that in mind, when it comes time to release the mod, I urge everyone: please, do not pressure Vinny to play it, since that is not primarily why it exists. He’s already been made aware of it and will make that decision of his own accord. I would welcome it if it happens naturally, but I don’t have any expectations.
I already have more than enough satisfaction from being able to provide something to other long-time viewers that we can all enjoy as a community. Everyone will be free to play the mod or stream it on their own, if they’d like. But it would mean a lot to me if you only do so respectfully, since I do not want the mod weaponized as a way to “make” anyone do anything they don’t want to do.
The Future of the Mod
Despite the lack of recent public updates, I’ve been hard at work behind the scenes. Ever since the release of the Joel trailer, we’ve been deciding how to handle the rest of the party member replacements. Even fictitious characters will still take a lot of work, and might cause delays to the release timeline.
As a compromise, our ultimate decision was to completely cut the game’s story. By not worrying about character replacements “making sense” and coming up with a slew of original dialogue for them, I’d rather have their in-battle voice clips and appearances speak for themselves. I believe that’s where the content of the mod shines the most, so doing away with the distractions complements the experience nicely.
We believe this also prevents us from accidentally flanderizing real people (like Joel and Vinny) by attempting to write too much original dialogue for them. Not to mention, it’s much less material to have to proofread and play test.
Originally, this was always the plan for the optional 20 Minute Mode, but extending it to the full game allows us to place our full focus on the new content we want to make. With this in place, 20 Minute Mode is now nothing short of a “demo” mode that challenges you to see how far you can get in the dungeons in just 20 minutes.
To anyone disappointed by this measure, I want to offer yet another compromise. All files involved in the axing of story content have been relegated to a single folder, which can be easily deleted (or toggled off in the mod’s configuration settings). That way, you can still experience the full story of P5R with Vinesauce themed models, voices, and music replacements, but the character writing will still be unchanged.
About the Event Skip Development
Achieving a total annihilation of the game’s story was not as simple as deleting a few files. In my previous post, I mentioned the P5R Flag Comparer program I made that lets me capture, analyze, and compare dumps of story progression data.
I did my best to play through the entire game and take snapshots of the data whenever anything significant happened. This took about 60 hours, even when skipping all the dialogue and one-shotting every enemy in battle. Thankfully, this endeavor made it painless to implement something I wanted from the beginning– a way to tackle dungeons in any order.
Those familiar with Persona 5 are aware the game isn’t designed for you to revisit dungeons, much less sequence breaking them. Many of the progression flags are re-used for each dungeon, so even by warping to a previous dungeon’s map, this presents many problems that make it likely be impossible to beat.
After writing custom scripts that load “game states” from my flag dumps, I ensured players can visit fully-unlocked dungeons, ready to fight the bosses whenever they want. This skips the need for cutscenes and tutorials that over-explain dungeon mechanics, as well as leaving the dungeon to send a calling card, and many of the puzzles and locked doors.
In 20 Minute Mode, the player will always have access to a menu that lets them go back home, or change to a different dungeon whenever they’d like. You will still have to be careful which enemies you fight as you level up, but if you take bigger risks, you can face down the bosses even sooner.
It’s my hope that these changes make the mod easier to approach and replay for seasoned P5R players and newbies alike. Maybe it’s the 10 years of working on Persona mods wearing me down, but I personally don’t enjoy re-experiencing the entire story every time I want to pick up the game. I know many others share that sentiment, but for those that don’t, I made the mod as flexible as I could to support both playstyles.
Our Focus in the Future
With that out of the way, I can get back to focusing on models and voices, which are the most fun to show off. So you can probably expect more posts like the ones I made in the past beyond this point.
I still need to look into connecting Mementos to this new gameplay style. Ideally I’d like the various blocks of Mementos to bridge together the dungeons, at least outside of 20 Minute Mode (since you won’t have the menu to traverse dungeons out of order).
I also still need to start replacing Personas and enemies with Vinesauce-themed characters, which will probably take up a large chunk of the remaining development, but I think it will pay off– especially now that the mod is so battle centric.
See ya next time I have something to report, and thanks for sticking with me this far!