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Persona 5 looks like two games sharing a disc. One is a high school year in Tokyo, full of exams, part-time jobs and people to have coffee with. The other is a dungeon crawler about stealing the corrupted desires of adults. Most guides treat them separately, and that is the mistake.
They are wired together by a deck of cards. Every friend you make belongs to an Arcana, every Persona you fuse belongs to an Arcana, and when the two match, the fusion comes out stronger in proportion to how well you know the person. That is Arcana Boost, and it means an afternoon in Shibuya is a combat upgrade. This hub is arranged around that connection.
Fifteen people, fifteen cards
We have pages for fifteen Confidants, and between them they cover fifteen different cards with no repeats. Eight fight beside you and are covered in our companions guide, where the ranks buy combat abilities. Seven stay in town and are covered in our NPCs guide, where the ranks buy services instead: medicine from Tae, guns from Iwai, SP-restoring coffee from Sojiro, and from Kawakami the only thing the game never gives you more of, which is free evenings.
The full rank-by-rank breakdown lives in the mechanics guide, along with the five social stats that gate who will even talk to you. If you want to move faster, confidant gifts and romance options cover the two ways those relationships develop.
The single most efficient thing you can do
Reading a book is worth three points to whichever social stat it covers, and it is the only activity that tops the list for all five of them. Everything else, from the batting cage to the maid café, feeds one bar. Our items guide covers the books alongside armour, the Electric Chair and the lockpicks that never run out.
For the months where the calendar is at its busiest, May and June have their own pages, because that is when the first Palace deadline collides with exams.
The other half
Seven Palaces, each running one trick the others do not: paintings and passwords in Madarame's museum, keycodes and cameras in Kaneshiro's bank, rigged dice in Niijima's casino. Our dungeons guide lays out what each one asks of you, and Mementos underneath them all, which has no deadline at all.
Our bosses guide splits the eleven boss pages into the six the story puts in your way and five optional encounters, including one you capture rather than kill and one with no weakness whatsoever. And the personas guide covers why you would build each of the ones we write up in full, with the complete compendium in the Personas list, sorted by Arcana.
Gear for the people carrying all this is split across best weapons and best accessories.
How it ends
The ending is decided months before you reach it. Our quests guide covers the Mementos request list and the three Confidant ranks the true ending requires, which must already be earned when the third semester opens rather than chosen at the end of it.
If you are starting today, the order that works is this: read the mechanics guide for the five social stats, buy books early, pick two Confidants whose Arcana you intend to fuse, and treat every Palace deadline as the real clock. Everything else follows from those four.