So, I'm on the fifth Palace in Persona 5 Royal now, and... yeah, I can see why I had the recollection of Futaba's Palace being sort of the end of the game's high points.

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The whole period of Morgana leaving the group in frustration due to starting to feel useless after Futaba joined was just kind of annoying. For no good reason you lose the ability to do anything at night without him, and your days for around a week straight are taken up with story events that mostly amount to the group trying to find him and convince him to come back. While there's certainly some value to Morgana's development there, it really didn't need to be married to such a lengthy and complete disruption of your ability to do anything. And sure, in the process you meet Haru and get her father's Palace started, and there's some quality there, but even that feels a little off. Unlike every Palace up until now, for instance, it never shows the group figuring out what Okumura's distortion is - it's skipped over both for Morgana when he enters on his own, and the rest of the group when they do. And despite the amount of in-game time it takes, marrying it to that incident with Morgana somehow manages to make Haru's introduction and the setup for her father's Palace feel rushed compared to prior Palaces. And the way that Haru is sort of half-awakened when you meet her kind of denies her a proper Awakening scene, for the sake of... what, the added mystery when you first run into her? Eh...

Moreover though, there's just a fairly big problem with how Okumura himself is handled as a villain. Unlike everyone else so far, you don't get to see much of his abuses in the real world. You do get to see him treating Haru herself like a tool with that arranged marriage she's being forced into, and that's certainly some powerful stuff, but his Palace focuses on his abuses of his workers and how that fuels his political ambitions, and you never see any of that in the real world directly. Sure, by that point you know that what the Palace shows pretty accurately resembles what the ruler is up to in the real world, but still, moments like finding that conveyor belt dumping the bodies of burned-out robots representing his workers into an incinerator to fuel the Palace would be so much more powerful if you'd, say, had to investigate Big Bang Burger in advance, or had a school trip to one of his factories, and found out about the workers being forced to work unpaid overtime or having crazy short lunch breaks, like other parts of the Palace imply are also happening. Or, alternatively, the Palace could've had at least one portion that did emphasize his treatment of Haru specifically, rather than everything being so focused on his businesses - as-is there's that mini-boss fight with the cognitive version of her fiance, and that's it.

All of it just kind of leaves this part of the game vaguely unsatisfying compared to the first four Palaces, and if memory serves that continues on through the end from here. I was hoping that a re-run years after having played the game the first time might lead me to be happier with this part of the game, but so far, not so, sadly. Maybe things will improve as I hit parts that are more changed - I know there's a whole additional section that's been added to the game after the original ending, so I have some hopes for that, but we'll see.