Persona 5 Royal Best Characters TIER LIST
This Persona 5 Royal Best Characters Tier List will teach players which characters are the best in Persona 5 Royal.
If you’re playing Persona 5 Royal, you’re going to want to know who the best characters are and where they rank on a tier list. You have 9 playable party members and a support character who you can make use of in your party.
The rub, though, is you can only use 4 characters at once. So who’s worth a spot on your Persona 5 Royal squad? That’s the question. I’ve got over 400 hours of Persona 5 clocked under my belt so I’m pretty sure I can give you some guidance on this. This is the Persona 5 Royal best characters tier list.
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Table of Contents
S Tier
Joker
There is no one else deserving of this spot. When it comes to the Persona 5 Royal best characters, Joker is the best of the best.
What your main character is capable of compared to any other party member is insane. Your other party members are lucky to put out a decent amount of damage, and get some decent moves that help them evade their weaknesses
Meanwhile, your main character can easily become immune to all damage, acquire skills that kill any enemy group instantly, and take out the game’s most difficult bosses in just a few turns.
By gearing up the hero with stat boosting equipment and top tier personas like Kaguya, Yoshitsune and Satanael, any encounter in the game can be easily beaten solo.
No other character can even come close. He’s the best at everything. Physical damage, magic damage, support, healing. There is no role in the game that the hero doesn’t excel far beyond every other character.
A Tier
Ryuji
Ryuji may not have a very high magic stat, but he’s the best physical attacker your team has access to for most of the game and he gets the most useful buffs. He gets a party-wide attack buff, which is the only stat buff you really need, and he eventually gets a party-wide Charge skill.
His lightning element has surprisingly high utility, not only because it gives elemental variety for hitting weaknesses, but it regularly inflicts shock, which stuns enemies for a turn or two and opens them up to technicals.
The main thing that makes Ryuji good is his support capabilities. If you pair his two amazing buffs with the President’s Insight spell you get from the Ring of Greed, he’s the ultimate support character. Not only that, when necessary, he’s capable of dishing out decent damage with his God’s Hand skill after being charged up.
He’s the only party member who is useful throughout every stage of the game. Early game he’s a great attacker, mid-game he’s strong all around, and late game he’s a fantastic supporter. When it comes to Persona 5 Royal best characters, it’s hard to do much better than Ryuji.
Click here for the Ryuji Persona Skills & Best Build Guide
Akechi
Akechi has a wide variety of tools at his disposal where most other characters just have a few basic niches, which ranks him highly among the Persona 5 Royal best characters. Every other character gets an elemental spell, a physical attack, and some kind of support utility.
Akechi, however, gets all the best attack skills in the game and debilitate, an extremely useful support skill for debuffing bosses. He gets a physical attack that’s tied with Ryuji and Yusuke’s ultimate physical attacks in terms of damage. He gets Riot Gun, the most powerful gun attack.
He gets Megidolaon, the top tier Almighty damage spell. Finally, he gets a unique skill called Riot Blade, which is a powerful Almighty damage attack that deals extra damage to downed enemies.
This skill is the only thing that can come close to the damage output the hero is capable of putting out. It’s a shame you only get him for one semester, but during that semester, he’s one of the Persona 5 Royal best characters and he makes a great addition to any party.
Click here for the Akechi Persona Skills & Best Build Guide
Futaba
Futaba’s part of the party no matter who you select as active party members, so there’s really no choice involved here, but it’s important to point out how useful Futaba ends up being.
By the end of the game, it’s all about buffs, and any time Futaba’s abilities trigger, it basically frees up a turn for your other characters.
From time to time she’ll give your whole party Charge+Concentrate and she regularly buffs the party’s attack power. Every time she does that she frees up Ryuji to spend a turn attacking instead of throwing up buffs on the party.
Even though she’s not an active party member, Futaba is definitely one of the Persona 5 Royal best characters.
B Tier
Morgana
Morgana is the best healer your party has access to until the very end when you can acquire an accessory that gives any party member access to Salvation, at which point most of Morgana’s utility can be replaced by anyone.
His magic power is fairly high, making his wind spells competitive with Ann’s fire spells for most of the game.
Morgana also has a fairly unique physical skill in Miracle Punch, which allows you to easily down the various treasure personas to acquire them without much hassle.
He’s easily among the most useful parties until the last few parts of the game where you no longer need his utility for the treasure demons and Salvation can be given to any party member.
For most of the game, Morgana is one of the top tier Persona 5 Royal best characters, but he starts to drop off late in the game.
Click here for the Morgana Persona Skills & Best Build Guide
Ann
Throughout most of the game, Ann is the strongest mage and has access to an element that enemies are commonly weak to (fire).
Not only that, but she’s the only party member who gets access to a “Severe” strength magic spell, giving her higher overall damage potential than anyone else you can get in your party.
Late game she gets a party-wide Concentrate skill, which is of questionable utility (the only party members who really make good use of it are the hero and Ann herself, and you can slap the Ring of Greed on anyone to give Concentrate to your hero every turn).
Her final weapon is great for random battles, since it has a high chance to inflict Freeze on enemies.
Because of Ann’s high magic power, she performs pretty well among the Persona 5 Royal best characters, but is not essential.
Click here for the Ann Persona Skills & Best Build Guide
Yusuke
When it comes to the Persona 5 Royal best characters, Yusuke is sort of a poor man’s Ryuji. What he brings to the party is similar to Ryuji, but he’s generally worse than Ryuji in every way. His physical attacks are weaker, his magic is about the same, and his buffs are not as good.
In late game, Yusuke gets a full party Heat Riser and you can slap the Salvation accessory on him, and he becomes a better party member than Morgana in every way.
So in the late game, he’s worth a spot. For the rest of the game, he’s just sort of a budget Ryuji. He’s decent, but he’s not top tier in terms of Persona 5 Royal best characters.
Click here for the Yusuke Persona Skills & Best Build Guide
C Tier
Makoto
There’s nothing that Makoto really excels at so it’s hard to count her among the Persona 5 Royal best characters. Her Nuclear magic is incredibly weak and it’s fairly rare for enemies to be weak to it.
By the time you get her, you’ve probably already trained yourself to have a backup persona on your main character for Nuclear and Psychic damage, so she really doesn’t add any worthwhile elemental coverage.
Her physical attack skills never go past the moderate damage stage, so she can’t keep up in that arena, and her healing pales in comparison to what Morgana is capable of.
Basically, in any niche, she’s one stage weaker than every other character capable of fulfilling that same role. Her final gun does give her a huge stat boost, which definitely helps her out, but it doesn’t make up for the fact that she has a mediocre skillset overall.
In endgame she gets a version of Debilitate that affects all enemies, but that’s actually worse than just the normal Debilitate, since it costs like 4x as much SP and you only ever need to cast Debilitate on a single target.
Definitely not unusable, but not one of the Persona 5 Royal best characters.
Click here for the Makoto Persona Skills & Best Build Guide
Kasumi
Kasumi’s saving grace is that she gets a very strong unique physical attack skill called Masquerade. This is the strongest physical attack skill any party member has access to. However, that’s all she’s got going for her.
Her element, Bless, is surely already covered by your main character by the time you get her, and she’s not even good with it. Unlike every other character in the game, she doesn’t get both Boost and Amp skills for her element. She only gets the Amp skill. So her magic is very mediocre.
She has high dodge and high crit, making her similar in terms of gameplay to Yusuke, but Yusuke gets a party-wide Heat Riser and Kasumi gets no utility whatsoever. So if Yusuke is a budget Ryuji, Kasumi is a budget Yusuke, which I guess sort of makes her a bargain bin/dollar store version of Ryuji.
She’s honestly a little bit stronger than both of those characters in terms of damage output, but by the time you get her, you’ve entered that phase of the game where your main character is so ridiculous that the only thing that really matters is keeping attack up and Charge/Concentrate on him every turn.
Unfortunately, Kasumi isn’t naturally capable of contributing much to that meta, ranking her pretty low among the Persona 5 Royal best characters.
Click here for the Kasumi Persona Skills & Best Build Guide
F Tier
Haru
When it comes to Persona 5 Royal best characters, Haru definitely ranks among the bottom.
She feels like an afterthought somewhat generally, since she only exists in only like 4 scenes in the game, but gameplay-wise she’s… objectively not great.
She gets some weak psychic skills, generally the least useful element in the game, and a handful of gun skills. Because you need Boost and Amp skills for both Psychic and Gun to make them at all worthwhile, her moveset has 6 skills locked in (7 if you include Evade Nuke as a necessity), and none of those skills are good anyway.
She’s not even the best at her own supposed specialty, Gun Damage, as she has the worst gun (a single target-all bullet), and Akechi’s the one who gets the best gun move, Riot Gun, not Haru.
She does get Heat Riser, but Yusuke gets Heat Riser for all, and Ryuji’s party-wide attack buff is much better than a single-target buff-all skill. Plus she uses an Axe? Why? Definitely not among the Persona 5 Royal best characters.
Click here for the Haru Persona Skills & Best Build Guide
The Best Party
If I was going to recommend a single best party in the game, utilizing all of the Persona 5 Royal best characters, I’d say for the majority of the game it’s Hero, Ryuji, Ann, Morgana.
In the bonus semester it’s Hero, Ryuji (with President’s Insight), Akechi, Yusuke/Ann (with Salvation).
Conclusion – Persona 5 Royal Best Characters
Most of the Persona 5 Royal best characters have a time to shine, usually when you first get them. Still, one thing is for sure: Joker is far and away better than every other character.
Anyway, that about does it for the Persona 5 Royal Best Characters Tier List. Be sure to check out the Games Section for more content like this, and click here for more game guides for Persona 5 Royal.
