What difficulty should I choose?

[Biggs]

I played the original p5 a few years ago on normal and thought it was really easy, and from what I understand royal is even easier.

My first thought was to just pick merciless or whatever the max difficulty is called, but when I tried basically googling my question I found some stuff talking about how "broken" the max difficulty is. As in like there's some hidden mechanics or weird scaling that somehow makes it easier/less balanced than just playing on hard?

But I've also heard that playing on hard really cripples how much money/xp you get, which isn't necessarily what I want either. Like I want the game to be hard but not in the sense that I have to really grind just because the xp/money sliders are turned down.

From what I understand there aren't any custom difficulty settings like in p4g, so I'm wondering which of the two "hard" difficulties are better to play on.

[Without Flaw]

merciless lol

[Furry Wrecking Crew]

Hardest difficulty for JRPGs, Usually Hard is more like Normal. I will say though, P4s hardest difficulty WAS a bit hard with the amount of days. You had to really plan ahead.

[_Se2_]

Merciless isnt hard just annoying, I recommend not start with this difficulty.

[Chilly]

Originally posted by Biggs:

I played the original p5 a few years ago on normal and thought it was really easy, and from what I understand royal is even easier.

My first thought was to just pick merciless or whatever the max difficulty is called, but when I tried basically googling my question I found some stuff talking about how "broken" the max difficulty is. As in like there's some hidden mechanics or weird scaling that somehow makes it easier/less balanced than just playing on hard?

But I've also heard that playing on hard really cripples how much money/xp you get, which isn't necessarily what I want either. Like I want the game to be hard but not in the sense that I have to really grind just because the xp/money sliders are turned down.

From what I understand there aren't any custom difficulty settings like in p4g, so I'm wondering which of the two "hard" difficulties are better to play on.

If there's no custom difficulty settings, then we gotta wait for a mod to fix it. I'm not sure why some game devs confuse grinding with difficulty.

[CoLd]

well you answered your question yourself either stick to normal or go hard despite the things you dont like about it, i would not recommend the highest difficulty tho

besides that, im almost 100% sure there will be mods for this game coming at some point after release, especially since p5 is so popular, the only thing that could speak against mods could be a possibility that this game will be hard to crack open for modders to create mods...but we will know once the game released

[Dorin]

Hard was the most enjoyable for me when I played the original game in the PS4 years ago. Makes you grind a bit, and is challenging enough without it being BS. Normal is waaaaay too easy.

[Seba]

i think merciless is more intended for new game plus, is quite broken on first play you could lose hours of dungeon farming from a random lucky shot form an enemy

[Stoibs]

Royal adds *a lot* of extra moves/abilities/buffs/QoL improvements bordering on brokenness to the player over the vanilla offering, I would say Hard for that reason alone as the baseline starting point. It can be changed at any point though so it's not a big deal what you pick at the start.

[nephalim]

I definitely want hard or merciless for this game. P5 was way too easy, and if P5R is even easier thats no good. Sounds likr hard is the way to go.

[vault2049]

Hard is good if you know what you are doing.

[Devil_Arcana]

I played the original on PS3. I could go for a challenge and based on what everyone is saying here, I will try merciless. If it gets too rough, I will scale back.

[Zyloc]

"Merciless" isn't more difficult then "hard". Early game it's harder. Late game it can get easier.
The differences are, that you genereally deal less dmg in merciless, but gain more XP and money.
But you also deal (and take) 3x weak/technical dmg in merciless. So you can deal more dmg overall.

[arta]

early game is hard because you canot use all might skills or nuclear

[2D神]

Hard is fair. I will only go lower if I hate the game and want to finish it as quick as possible.

[8/8 While I Masturbate]

Dont pick Merciless. Merciless makes it ridiculously easy to one-tap enemies with the tripled weakness/crit/technical damage.