Persona 5 Royal Chinese QA Build Playthrough - Part 1

Channel:

ThrowbackGamerReloadCoded

Subscribers:

59

Published on January 13, 2022 5:23:06 AM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RsQT5PPbv4

Game:

Persona 5 Royal (2019)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 48:11

103 views

2

Datamining is an important part of the modding scene, as it gives modders and reverse-engineers a better understanding of the filesystem. However, modding can sometimes become difficult when the system it runs on hasn't been modded yet. This was the case with Persona 5 Royal. The Persona modding community is huge, and has near-full filesystem and code access to practically every game in the Persona franchise, including the original Persona 5. Lots of talented people permeate the community, however no one could look into Persona 5 Royal's files because the game came out after the 6.72 firmware version was released, so nothing before that could launch the game, which is a part of the dumping process. Why couldn't it be launched? Because the jailbreaking scene hadn't found any exploits in versions newer than 5.05, meaning modders were at a dead end at the time. Their saving grace came in the form of a QA build of the game in Chinese. Modders were finally able to datamine the game and eventually turn modding into a reality. They also modified some system files to make the game run on firmware version 5.05 so they could load up mods and scripts to further document the game. Most of the unused cutscenes that were found had first been discovered in this build.

After the PS4 jailbreaking community advanced to a point where the 7.XX firmware versions were able to be jailbroken and the JP/USA versions were dumped, the Chinese QA build faded into obscurity. Despite being referenced by a few modding websites, the build itself was nowhere to be found. It was never put on ObscureGamers because it's too new of a game, and it wasn't put on the Internet Archive either. It was put on AssemblerGames but only a backup of the site exists now, so it's no wonder I couldn't find it. Clearly, no one saw the value in it and didn't put as much effort into preserving it as it deserved. Luckily, I was able to reach out to a friend who was involved with the group who were analyzing it and I got ahold of it. It works fine on the recent 9.00 jailbreak, so I'm going to be playing through this build, doing as much as I can and showing off any regional differences I can find. My goal in this playthrough is to reach third semester and beat the Maruki boss fight, all while not being able to read anything on the screen.

Also, yes, I've preserved the build, so it's no longer confined to one small community anymore. You can also come to me if you want this build, I'm not sharing it on YouTube though.

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