Persona 5 Royal negotiation guide: tips and tricks (2024)

Persona 5 Royal has several changes compared the original Persona 5, but many systems stay the same. One of those systems is negotiations.

While you’ll spend most of your time in Royal cutting down various demons and evil personas, not every fight has to end in bloodshed. In fact, you can finish some encounters with enemies through conversation. Do that job well enough, and you may even sway some demons to join your team.

Getting a negotiation started in Persona 5 Royal is simple, but the process itself is a bit obtuse. In this guide, we’ll explain how negotiation works in Persona 5 Royal and offer some tips and tricks to help you get better.

How to initiation a negotiation

Early on in the game, you learn about elemental weaknesses that demons have. Hitting a demon with an attack they are weak against knocks them down. If you knock all demons down at once, you’ll initiate a Hold Up. From there you can choose an All-Out Attack or, after a certain point, you can choose to Talk. Then you can ask for money, items, or request to have the demon lend you their power. That’s when the real game begins!

Image: Atlus/Sega

The secret to negotiating: demon types and likes/dislikes

Each demon is a bit different, but developer Atlas actually tucked a simple guide into the game’s manual. We’ve adapted it below.

The moment you hold up an enemy, you can see one of its four personality traits: Upbeat, Timid, Irritable, or Gloomy (you can also see this when you analyze them). Based on the personality, you must choose the right answers that correspond to an answer type: Funny, Serious, Vague, or Kind.

When you answer correctly, you’ll see a reaction from the demon and visuals to match. The same happens when you answer incorrectly. You get two chances once you start talking. Of course the answers aren’t labeled, so you have to guess which answer is what type. If you aren’t sure, try to determine which answers correspond to what the demon doesn’t like and then pick the remaining option.

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