This impressive mod now lets you play Persona 5 Royal as a woman

Persona is a series with plenty of choice as you balance your alternate dimension demon-slaying responsibilities with your high-schooling social life. Playing as a student, you're free to decide how to spend your free time, which characters to spend it with, and who to inevitably romance by the end of the game. Plenty of options, for sure, but Persona 3 Portable was the last time we could choose our protagonist’s gender in the series. Until now. Thanks to the simply titled “P5R Female Protagonist” mod, you can now replace the default male protagonist Joker in Persona 5 Royal with a she/her Joker. On paper, that would seem like a novel change in a lot of games, but in the mammoth-sized Persona 5, a change like that requires some very impressive modding.

Modder Chlorophylls is up to the task, as their mod not only swaps out Joker’s in-game model, but tweaks almost everything you can imagine: animations in and out of combat, UI fixes, dialogue changes, a fully re-voiced character, and most importantly to many fans, new romance options.

New romance options include everyone’s bestie Ryuji, young detective Akechi, painter Yusuke, and the guy that runs your phan site Mishima, for some reason. Feels like a slot that could've gone to the hot counsellor, but that's probably against his Code Of Ethics or something. The game apparently has a hardcoded limit on the number of confidant slots, so only four previous romance options make the jump to this mod: Ann, Takemi, Haru, and Hifumi - leaving the Makoto stans in trembles.

Our new female Joker is also fully voiced in both English and Japanese. Alexa Farron recorded Joker’s lines in English, meanwhile Maayo Sakamoto handled the Japanese voiceover. Sakamoto has actually done plenty of voice work in anime and video games (she was the badass Lightning in Final Fantasy 13), and some clips from her role in Persona 3 were repurposed for this mod. Very cool.

Again, the mod is extensive, tweaking things most players wouldn’t notice such as bathroom interactions or social stat labels (suave is now chic). But it’s not absolutely perfect. The anime cutscenes remain as they are, “unless you have an animation studio in your back pocket,” modder Chlorophylls writes on the mod's download page. Chlorophylls also says the title screen models are "cursed beyond belief" so that uses the original Joker model, too.

I’ve been chipping away at the giga-RPG since it hopped onto Game Pass last year, and I think that I’m close to the end (give-or-take 75 hours has to be nearing the end, right? Right?). Regardless, this mod has me excited for an eventual replay far, far, far into the future.

You can download the mod over on GameBanana.