DeathChaos’s landmark Persona 5 (PS3) overhaul mod has, at long last, escaped its “work-in-progress” status. Marked as 100% complete on Gamebanana, you can expect all the same improvements as before, but with some major additions.
Whether you’re updating from a previous version of the mod, or looking to try it for the first time, see the brand new Get Started section here on ShrineFox.com! It’ll guide you through the entire setup process, including setting up patches for RPCS3 or a modded PS3 console.
Note: DeathChaos recommends that you start the game over with fresh save data for the best results.
As a quick side note, PS2 and PS4 games are also part of the Get Started page now. In the near future, this section will also support PSP, Vita, Switch, 3DS and PC titles. These developments are hastily progressing in anticipation for the new, recently announced ports of Persona 3, 4, and 5.
Any future updates to Persona 5 EX’s patches should automatically go live on ShrineFox.com too, making the Get Started page the most convenient place to get set up with Persona 5 modding! (I can only hope…)
What’s New In Version 2.0?
There are too many things to list, so refer to the readme for all the details. But I’ll be covering the most major additions, such as…
Kasumi Yoshizawa as a Party Member!
That’s right, the new party member introduced in Persona 5 Royal (PS4) joins your party automatically when you first arrive at the cruise ship palace in the later half of the game!
All her weapons, Personas, and her all-out-attack are included. Even the new Royal prologue has been ported over, allowing PS3 players to experience another small taste of the exclusive content.
Official PS3 Hardware Compatibility
Previously, SPRX mods weren’t compatible with the PS3 console out of the box, but the bugs and issues have been mitigated. They mostly related to the path of the conf.yml/mod.sprx files needing to be changed. For PS3, they must be located at the root of dev_hdd0 on the PS3’s hard drive (rather than the game’s USRDIR folder, like on RPCS3).
New Challenge Battles
Not only are the fights against the Persona 3 and 4 protagonists from Royal available, but now a new fight against Tohru Adachi can be accessed via the Velvet Room (as well as your previously completed challenge battles). In addition, another brand new challenge battle can be accessed once all of them (including Adachi) have been completed.
But before you even think about cheating your way through these fights with the Mod Menu, any custom skills that aren’t normally obtainable will result in the fight becoming unbeatable. So you’ll have to get more creative than that if you can’t clear them with your skill alone.
New Voicelines
Many unused voice clips for various scenarios have been re-included, such as…
- Joker dying and being revived
- Party members commenting on eachothers critical hits or being knocked down (like in P3/P4)
- Joker announcing the current day during the calendar transition
New Configuration Options
You can edit the config.yml file to toggle certain features. While this is only recommended for advanced users, it can’t hurt to try some of these, since you can always re-download the original config file if you later suspect that an invalid setting may have caused an issue.
- Prevent game overs when Joker dies, and instead require all party members to die (like most other JRPGs). This has an unintended side effect where sometimes dead Joker will still take his turn, but as long as you press X to perform a regular attack, the turn will then be skipped without softlocking.
- Toggle and customize the red highlight color in battle! You can even set it to rotate colors each turn for a cool RGB effect.
- Shop banners can have randomized colors as well, if you decide to toggle that setting.
More Improvements for Modders
P5 EX was mainly intended to serve as a dependency for other mods that take advantage of these features. Developers who base their mods on P5 EX are sure to mention this requirement, in case you’re unsure if you need P5 EX to enjoy future mods. Here are some new features that might appeal to us devs.
- A new flowscript command can prevent game overs in certain battles by default.
- Last Surprise and the default victory BGM are now loaded separately from the game’s regular bgm acb/awb files, similar to DLC music. This should drastically reduce the size of mods that specifically change the battle BGM and improve compatibility with other BGM packs.
- Field0E now specifies what model to load for each outfit in the costume TBL, rather than these IDs being hardcoded, meaning you don’t necessarily have to replace existing models anymore. You can also specify which BGM the outfit uses with Field10.
- The amount of bitflags you can use has increased thanks to unused save data space.
- P5R flags will now be auto-converted to the corresponding P5 flags automatically, improving compatibility with P5R flowscripts.
- Other new flowscript functions have been added which are viewable at this GitHub repo!
Kabukicho Prison Mod Released
While Persona 5 EX is an outstanding standalone mod, if you’re curious about its potential as a dependency for other mods, look no further than Cherry Cream Soda’s Kabukicho Prison mod, which ports an area from Nocturne to Persona 5, complete with some inventive changes to the game’s appearance to make it more in-line with the true Nocturne experience™.
In order to enjoy this new short-but-sweet dungeon and its exclusive boss fight, you will need to update Aemulus to the latest version (6.1.3 or higher) and have the latest version of P5 EX installed.
In Closing…
Hats off to DeathChaos for the new update, as well as friends who helped along the way: rirurin, DniweTamp, HaythamQuake, secreC, chlorophylls, and Sierra. If you’d like to support DeathChaos for his hard work making this mod, check out his PayPal via his GameBanana profile.
Keep a lookout for more Persona modding scene news. I’d like to get everything as caught up to date as possible here on my site, just in time for the new ports to shake things up again. As always, when more information becomes available on modding Persona games, this is where you’ll find it. Thank you for reading!