thoughts on persona 5

20221118

this post was brought over from my cohost!

since i made this post i have played the intro of the japanese version of persona 5 and learned that the “please take care of me” in the intro is not 「よろしくお願いします」, it’s (iirc, not looking it up again) 「私を預かりますお願いします」, which is literally and unambiguously “please take care of me.” that’s also a weird greeting in japanese as far as i know!

i’ve been playing persona 5 for the past several weeks and it’s genuinely one of the most frustrating games i’ve ever played. and that’s not because it’s all bad, it’s something much worse than a terrible game – it’s an almost great game. it’s worth noting that i’m only 30 hours in, so i might be misrepresenting some aspects of the game, but i really feel like i’ve seen enough.

the design improves on the previous persona games in just about every way imaginable. the battle system is substantially more interesting: the baton pass mechanic allows you to choreograph cool anime fight scenes during battles, bringing the demon negotiation mechanic from earlier SMT games is substantially funnier and more interesting than the card shuffling persona mechanics of previous games, the switch to hand-designed levels instead of procedural generation substantially improves the pacing of dungeons, the optional request dungeon is a massive improvement on the sidequest systems in previous persona games (though it’s still not great).

and there’s improvements outside of battles too! since persona 3 the games have been a sort of kindergarten tokimeki memorial stapled to a kindergarten shin megami tensei, but now they’ve smartly borrowed even more from tokimemo by letting you choose from a wide variety of different hangout spots when you hang out with someone. there’s so much more to do and see, all sorts of fun yakuza-style minigames that haven’t been in a persona game before, and the game is so much better about surfacing all your available options to you. you can open a menu and see all the confidants that you can hang out with whenever you have free time, and if you’re online you can see data about what other players did with their time to help inform your choices! plus there’s all this surface-level magic; the user interface style is obviously stunning and the music and sound effects are incredible.

and literally none of it matters because the narrative is so awful.

i’ll put aside the english localization, which is fairly clunky. to give you a taste, in the intro, the game translates 「よろしくお願いします」 as “please take care of me,” and you can expect about that level of too-faithful awkwardness all the way through¹. it didn’t bother me at first, but after playing several hours it started to grate.

they added a texting mechanic that should be great, and sometimes it is. but the vast majority of the time you get text messages after story events or in class that add nothing, they simply contain exactly the same information you just saw in a cutscene, rephrased.

the characters are constantly talking in circles, and they’re all so fucking stupid. none of them can figure out even the simplest deductions or remember the most basic of facts. all of their ideas are terrible. the result is that this is an M-rated game that feels like an episode of dora the explorer.

almost all the characters are awful and one-dimensional. persona games have never featured the most… complex characterization, but they have in the past featured generally likable characters you enjoy hanging out with. i’ve played for 23 hours and i’ve met two people i even remotely enjoy seeing on screen. ann is nice and realistic and multidimensional despite being something of a gyaru stereotype. kawakami, your homeroom teacher, is a tired OL who moonlights as a sexy maid, and i love her.

the character you become acquainted with first, however, is ryuji, who is this game’s version of yosuke from persona 4 and junpei from persona 3. ryuji is a moron, he’s constantly moaning about how he doesn’t understand simple concepts, he’s constantly interrupting people to say dumbass shit, and like his predecessors he’s weird about women.

of course, all the men in this game are weird about women. your second teammate is morgana, a boy trapped in the body of an anthropomorphic anime cat. as soon as ann joins your team, he immediately develops a bizarre complex about her and keeps talking about how he needs to turn back into a human so he can “have” ann before anyone else does.

he’s not the weirdest about women, though. during the second dungeon, you gain a new teammate, yusuke, who is on paper sympathetic: he is an orphan who was taken in at a young age by a famous artist. he’s now experiencing abuse at the hands of this artist who steals yusuke’s work and passes it off as his own. yusuke obliterates this goodwill immediately, however, because the first interaction you have with him is that he jumps out of a moving car to try to get ann to model for him. when you’re investigating his master, you take him up on the offer, and you and ryuji go with ann to the modeling appointment to see if anything weird is going on. yusuke whines and complains the whole time about you being there, and then reveals that you were completely right to be suspicious by demanding ann pose nude for him or he’ll call the police. again, this guy becomes your teammate.

and he never apologizes! he never learns anything. after the dungeon is over and his master has been defeated, he reiterates that his “offer” of posing nude is still open, floats the idea of him moving in with ann, and then moves out of his dorm without telling anyone and, luggage in hand, says he’s moving in with ann. again, this is your teammate. immediately after that scene you throw a party celebrating him joining the team.

and this isn’t even getting to the plot. the worst part is, there is the smallest kernel of a good idea in here. this game was in development before the existence of #metoo, and it came out the same year that allegations were first made about harvey weinstein, so in a certain way it feels almost prescient. it’s clearly concerned with what we would come to call “cancel culture,” and it actually has its head on almost straight about it.

persona 5 casts you as the phantom thieves of hearts, who are given the magical ability to go into the literal mind palaces of people with twisted abusive desires and “steal” their hearts. this causes them to experience a personality change that results in them recognizing the tremendous evil that they have perpetrated, and turn themselves in.

the first person whose heart you steal is kamoshida, the gym teacher at your high school, a former olympic volleyball player who is abusing the students on the volleyball team, and has been sexually abusing ann using a friend of hers as leverage. the frustrating thing is there’s genuinely so much that is good about this! it recognizes that people with the power to stop the abuse are complicit, and it astutely rejects pleas to deal with these kinds of issues by appealing to the very system that upholds them.

unfortunately its understanding is also deeply flawed. you and ryuji decide you want to gather proof that the abuses happening in the mind palace are actually happening in real life. to do this, you yell at abuse victims until they break down. there is no option to be kind or understanding. even if you choose options that are the least abrasive, ryuji will always butt in and start stomping and yelling at people who have no reason to trust him. it betrays the truth of the fantasy that this game is fulfilling, which is not that of fighting for justice but rather the much more basic savior fantasy that has no empathetic connection to those it wants to save.

and that’s to say nothing of the metaphysics of this situation. when you steal someone’s heart, they essentially become a completely different person who is no longer guilty of the crimes “they” committed. these people confess and go to jail for their crimes, but this is a fundamentally flawed understanding of what even constitutes justice. what committed the crimes is not the person’s body, which is now inhabited by a completely different consciousness, but the person, who has now been obliterated.

the trouble really starts after you complete this first dungeon. this is when the game reveals its trick. it is not really about any of these interesting things, not on purpose.

on every loading screen after you start doing work as the phantom thieves, you see a sort of “approval rating” meter, showing people’s responses to the question “do you believe in the phantom thieves?” this poll is on a fan site run by mishima, the abuse victim you berated to get information about kamoshida. a substantial amount of dialogue is dedicated to the characters fretting over this approval rating, for reasons that are never explained. the characters are under the impression that raising this approval rating is the primary stakes of the story, but it simply is not. i have never seen a story with such a vast disconnect between what the characters in the story and even the writers of the story think it is about and what the story is actually about.

first: what do people who don’t believe in the phantom thieves think is happening? what is their explanation? what happens is that people receive public calling cards from an organization claiming to be the phantom thieves, then they spontaneously confess to crimes that nobody knew about. by what mechanism could this otherwise occur. everyone talks about the impossibility of “stealing someone’s heart,” but there’s never been any explanation of what that actually means. nobody is required to adjust their metaphysics in order to believe that there is an organization or individual calling themselves the phantom thieves that uses some means to force criminals to admit to their crimes. nobody ever puts forward any kind of alternative explanation for what is going on! there are lots of characters who profess to not believe in the phantom thieves but absolutely no explanation for what they think happened.

second: why do any of the phantom thieves care if people believe in them? at all times, your objective in the top right corner of the screen is listed as “prove your existence to the world” but why do we want to do that? surely it is to the benefit of phantom thieves for their existence to be ambiguous? ryuji, in his infinite wisdom, gets extremely upset when people bad mouth the phantom thieves, but there is no clear mechanism for any possible negative consequences coming from people thinking the phantom thieves aren’t real or thinking that they’re bad. the phantom thieves commit their crimes via magical means! barring one of them (ryuji) doing something stupid there is no possible means to connect the phantom thieves to their real world identities, or for anyone to ever get proof of their “crimes.” i’m pretty sure there’s no statute on the books in japan that makes stealing imaginary objects from people’s immaterial mind palaces illegal. shortly after completing the second dungeon, you visit a TV station on a field trip and sit in the studio audience for a live broadcast in which a high school detective says the phantom thieves are criminals who should be in jail. the cops trying to find the phantom thieves is certainly stakes, especially if they’re starting to connect the dots, but the issue isn’t whether they’ll get caught, it’s that this statement is an affront to their honor and they feel bad that people don’t like them. who fucking cares!

the worst part is that this story is not rotten to the core. teenage vigilantes using magic powers to bring abusers to justice is a great idea for a story! and i respect it on some level for not shying away from the really hard parts: its first narrative arc features explicit depictions of and conversations about suicide and sexual abuse². persona 5 simply does not understand why it’s a good idea for a story. instead of being a compelling heist thriller, it refuses to have stakes that make any sense. instead of having likable or interesting characters, it populates its world with cardboard cutouts of creeps and assholes. instead of having witty or enjoyable dialogue, it has poorly translated clunky repetitive nonsense.

it is just infuriating. persona is, at this point, almost the last vestiges of its genre. the heyday of dating and social simulation games is long in the past. japanese studios that would have made them 15 years ago are now all making gacha games, and western developers all think a dating simulator is a kind of visual novel. it’s also the only torchbearer of this genre available in english. countless english-speaking game likers have had their only exposure to games like tokimeki memorial, amagami, refrain love 2, and love plus by proxy through these games. atlus saw fit to take nearly ten years and no doubt millions of dollars and hundreds of talented programmers and artists to produce something lazy and trashy. it fucking pisses me off that people who would squander the opportunity to make something truly great like this get millions in funding and glowing reviews and game of the year awards while everybody i know who could turn that kind of money and attention into something worthwhile gets peanuts. caring about video games, caring about making something good, it’s all worthless. this industry is trash, it can only produce trash, everyone in it gets ground up and processed into trash, everything made out of it can only become trash.