Thanks to the tireless work of Persona 5 fans, you can now play the PlayStation exclusive JRPG on your PC. Although technically you have been able to do so for the past couple of months, the frame rates have steadily improved over time and we’ve now reached a point where you can have a comparable experience on the PC. Since it’s unreleased officially on that platform though, playing it is technically illegal.
Persona 5 has been a smash hit ever since it was released in September last year, even pleasing many gamers who don’t traditionally like Japanese RPGs, or turn-based combat mechanics. But of course, as a console exclusive, its audience was somewhat limited, so emulation experts have been working hard to bring it to the PC, where a much larger group of gamers can don their masks and take the fight to supernatural creatures of the Metaverse.
The emulator that makes this all possible is RCPS3. It’s been in development for some time and has slowly been improving support for various games. At the time of writing, some 216 titles are considered playable from start to finish. Persona 5 is now one of them.
One of the most notable improvements in this latest version of the RCPS3 emulator and its Persona 5 compatibility, is the frame rate, but that’s just one aspect of it. Bloom and depth of field are now handled correctly, making the emulation far more like the actual game in terms of how it looks and runs.
The developers also cleaned up a few issues which could cause crashes or issues with completing the game. To make sure that is possible, too, they’ve had several people complete all 100-plus hours of Persona 5 content, to make sure just about everything works as intended.
However, the emulator developers do point out that the game is still not perfect. Frame rates are unlocked and jump around between 15 and 30 depending on how much is going on in any one scene. That means it does sometimes look a little choppy, especially to an eye not used to rougher emulations of games. However, one way to fix that is to throw faster hardware at it. These frame rates were achieved on an Intel Core i5-4690k, so overclocking or running a faster CPU will help.
Regardless of any persistent issues though, the developers have taken Persona 5 and emulated it in six months. It’s an amazing feat and has the likes of Kotaku hoping that this encourages Sega to do official ports of the beloved game franchise.
