SegmentNextQuests
Most games decide their ending in the last hour. Persona 5 decides most of it months earlier, in evenings you spent on people who seemed optional at the time. The three pages in this bucket cover the two things the game asks of you outside a Palace: the requests that fill Mementos, and the ranks that decide how the story finishes.
The true ending is three Confidant ranks
Our true ending guide gives the requirements plainly, and they are not choices made at the end. They are relationships in place before the third semester begins.
| Requirement | Where the Confidant lives |
|---|---|
| Takuto Maruki at Rank 9 | The Councillor, and the highest bar of the three |
| Goro Akechi at Rank 8 | A party member, Justice Arcana |
| Kasumi Yoshizawa at Rank 5 | A party member, Faith Arcana |
| The right dialogue in the third semester | Refusing every offer you are made |
Two of those three are covered in our companions guide, which is worth knowing because it means the true ending is not a hidden path. It is the ordinary business of ranking up teammates, done to a deadline nobody announces.
Rank 9 on Maruki is the demanding one, and it is the reason to start early rather than to plan a final push. Confidant ranks cost evenings and evenings are the one thing the calendar will not give you more of.
The other endings, and how you fall into them
Our endings guide covers the full set: the true canonical ending, the normal ending, and three separate bad endings. The bad ones are the interesting part, because they are not failures of skill.
They are accepting an offer. Persona 5 repeatedly gives you the option to take a deal that ends the story early and comfortably, and saying yes is how most people who get a bad ending get one. Knowing that in advance is most of the protection you need.
The work that never runs out
Requests and Mementos is the other half of this bucket and it operates on entirely different rules. Palaces have deadlines; Mementos does not. Requests arrive from Mishima and from your Confidants, and our page lists them with dates and locations.
The Confidant requests are the ones to prioritise, and the reason is the ending above. A request from a Confidant is a rank you did not have to spend an evening on, which makes Mementos the only place in the game where dungeon time and social time are the same time. If you are behind on ranks in October, this is the lever.
Mishima's requests do something different: they are the reliable way to farm experience and money without waiting for a Palace to open. Our dungeons guide covers how Mementos differs structurally from the seven Palaces, and the bosses guide covers the Reaper, which is what happens if you spend too long on a single floor down there.
The short version of all three pages: clear Confidant requests as they appear rather than banking them, do not accept any offer that sounds like an easy way out, and have Maruki, Akechi and Kasumi where they need to be well before the year ends.