My wife is refusing to speak to me again. I keep telling her that I'm speaking to my waifu Futaba, and that we are only theorising our future together. She says I have 4 days to pack all my things.
Felt better playing this than when I did jerking off to Hanekawa
I hate that I don't like this game. I wish I did. For the first thirty or so hours, I did. But then I finished it, and I thought about it, and I realized that I don't like Persona 5. Some things here are excellent, and some things here are atrocious, and they all blend together into something that's only ever able to peak at the heights of "okay".
The writing is my biggest problem, with the way the game handles its characters being the strongest flaw. The trauma these people face is treated as a punchline at their expense far too often. It's not an uncommon opinion that Ann gets it the worst of the lot; she's a survivor of sexual assault at the hands of a powerful teacher, and the game constantly takes time out to make her own party members leer at her and make her uncomfortable. Yusuke's "nude model" scene is talked about a lot, but it really isn't that bad, especially compared to later instances — one scene forces her and every other woman in the party into swimsuits to seduce a keycard out of some old rich lecher, and it's played as a joke until the guy grabs Ann, threatens her, and then turns into a big shadow monster who you kill and take the keycard from regardless, making the whole seduction plan pointless. Ryuji and Joker will try to stare up her skirt when she lays down on a couch, gawk at her thighs when she gets caught in the rain, and peer down her top when she's fanning herself in the desert. Ryuji may just be a dumbass who Ann can easily rebuke, but Joker is the leader of the group, and unquestionably holds power over her and the other Phantom Thieves. He doesn't treat any of the other characters this way, and he keeps doing it in cutscenes that you have no control over. Regardless of how the player treats Ann, your character won't stop creeping on her as soon as you give up control. It's weird. It's really fucking weird. Speaking of Ryuji, it's just as tasteless to have a character who was physically abused by that same teacher to the point of broken bones and ostracization be the butt of so many jokes where the punchline is him getting the shit kicked out of him. He's rewarded for both getting the track team back together in his confidant route and for saving every single member of the Phantom Thieves from a sinking ship with the exact same thing: the people he's going out of his way to protect punching him senseless until he's left in a crumpled, bruised, moaning heap on the ground. Ha ha. It's also implied in a scene that comes completely out of nowhere that he gets molested by two gay men in Shinjuku. All of this is played for laughs. It should be obvious to anyone reading this or playing the game for themselves that none of this is funny. It's fucking horrific. It's made worse that someone (or several someones) on the ATLUS writing team think that any of this is funny. I've heard that the localization team begged to be allowed to make script changes to address these issues, and were refused; whether or not this is true, the script that's here is the one that we've got, and the few changes made don't fix these core problems with the writing.
I'm still kind of confused to see all of the "I hate JRPGs!" crowd (your Dunkeys, your Yahtzee Croshaws) circle the wagons around this game and talk about how Persona 5 broke the mold. Mechanically, it's Pokemon. There's nothing wrong with Pokemon. Pokemon can be fun. But the core combat loop is "fish for the enemy's weakness, use the element that they're weak to, win the encounter". It's every single-player Pokemon game. Sometimes, if the fight goes long enough, you can cast a debuff, or maybe even a party-wide buff if you're really feeling brave. Bosses and mini-bosses are completely immune to status effects like shock or sleep, so any foe that you can't kill on the first turn of combat boils down to a DPS race where you either have enough damage and healing to outlast them, or you don't. This is in stark contrast to other entries in the Shin Megami Tensei series where bosses can have mechanically interesting gimmicks or one-off skillsets with unholy good synergies, rather than just being walls of health and damage; the closest thing you get to a boss that challenges your conception of the mechanics in Persona 5 are Okumura and his waves of robots that need to be killed within one turn of each other, which are in a fight so ridiculously easy to brute force by just having enough AOE damage that it barely even qualifies as a challenge. Futaba's later support skills make the game completely trivial, with her Ultimate Support constantly being cast to full heal, buff, and revive every member of the party. I tried to kill myself on a boss by enabling rush mode and walking away, and it still took six and a half minutes before Joker actually went down and I got kicked to the death screen. The guns — while certainly a unique addition — are borderline useless in most encounters, serving only as a middling damage dump (or as a status applier, which only works on trash enemies that are more easily killed by hitting their weak element anyway) and are utterly outclassed by Persona elemental skills. Many Personas can even deal Gun-type damage, giving you almost no reason to ever use the actual guns.
I've seen it said that this game hates women. My gut instinct thinks that's an exaggeration, but it's unquestionable that the writing handles them like shit. Every female confidant in this game leads as smoothly as a car crash into a sexual relationship, with four (!!!) of them being adults pursuing our underage protagonist. There's not a single woman in this game that you can just be friends with without needing to turn down their advances or dodge making your own, first. The men, conversely, do not have this problem, as the only gay men in this game are the sexual predators who assault Ryuji. Lala Escargot, the owner of the Crossroads bar, is the only character who is both a) not a walking punchline and b) queer. The game never actually confirms if she's a drag queen or if she's transgender, but she's at the very least gender non-conforming. That's it. Nobody else. I realize that this may come off as me pounding my fists on the table and demanding token representation, but the way that the female confidants are treated is already token. Every single woman in Joker's life desires him sexually, because this is a shounen harem game masquerading as a serious adult thriller that explores serious adult themes. It's juvenile. The game likes to talk big about rebellion and putting down the system, man, but it's remarkably intolerant of anyone whose inclusion in any mainstream anime would attract death threats for being "too woke". The writing in Persona 5 doesn't put down the system, it is the system. It should not come as a surprise that a series that's based the past three games around the trappings of Jungian psychology is this achingly stupid when it comes to how it handles social issues.
It is endlessly frustrating that ATLUS has accrued as much money and prestige as they have — Joker got into fucking Smash Bros. — and this is still the best that they can do with all of it. Outright bad writing and middling RPG mechanics that feel like they've hardly evolved since 2006. What's left? The UI and the music? Both are great, but there's not a chance they can carry a game that insists on being this long. What missed potential. It's a shame I waited this long to get a chance to play it. I wish I hadn't bothered.
The writing is my biggest problem, with the way the game handles its characters being the strongest flaw. The trauma these people face is treated as a punchline at their expense far too often. It's not an uncommon opinion that Ann gets it the worst of the lot; she's a survivor of sexual assault at the hands of a powerful teacher, and the game constantly takes time out to make her own party members leer at her and make her uncomfortable. Yusuke's "nude model" scene is talked about a lot, but it really isn't that bad, especially compared to later instances — one scene forces her and every other woman in the party into swimsuits to seduce a keycard out of some old rich lecher, and it's played as a joke until the guy grabs Ann, threatens her, and then turns into a big shadow monster who you kill and take the keycard from regardless, making the whole seduction plan pointless. Ryuji and Joker will try to stare up her skirt when she lays down on a couch, gawk at her thighs when she gets caught in the rain, and peer down her top when she's fanning herself in the desert. Ryuji may just be a dumbass who Ann can easily rebuke, but Joker is the leader of the group, and unquestionably holds power over her and the other Phantom Thieves. He doesn't treat any of the other characters this way, and he keeps doing it in cutscenes that you have no control over. Regardless of how the player treats Ann, your character won't stop creeping on her as soon as you give up control. It's weird. It's really fucking weird. Speaking of Ryuji, it's just as tasteless to have a character who was physically abused by that same teacher to the point of broken bones and ostracization be the butt of so many jokes where the punchline is him getting the shit kicked out of him. He's rewarded for both getting the track team back together in his confidant route and for saving every single member of the Phantom Thieves from a sinking ship with the exact same thing: the people he's going out of his way to protect punching him senseless until he's left in a crumpled, bruised, moaning heap on the ground. Ha ha. It's also implied in a scene that comes completely out of nowhere that he gets molested by two gay men in Shinjuku. All of this is played for laughs. It should be obvious to anyone reading this or playing the game for themselves that none of this is funny. It's fucking horrific. It's made worse that someone (or several someones) on the ATLUS writing team think that any of this is funny. I've heard that the localization team begged to be allowed to make script changes to address these issues, and were refused; whether or not this is true, the script that's here is the one that we've got, and the few changes made don't fix these core problems with the writing.
I'm still kind of confused to see all of the "I hate JRPGs!" crowd (your Dunkeys, your Yahtzee Croshaws) circle the wagons around this game and talk about how Persona 5 broke the mold. Mechanically, it's Pokemon. There's nothing wrong with Pokemon. Pokemon can be fun. But the core combat loop is "fish for the enemy's weakness, use the element that they're weak to, win the encounter". It's every single-player Pokemon game. Sometimes, if the fight goes long enough, you can cast a debuff, or maybe even a party-wide buff if you're really feeling brave. Bosses and mini-bosses are completely immune to status effects like shock or sleep, so any foe that you can't kill on the first turn of combat boils down to a DPS race where you either have enough damage and healing to outlast them, or you don't. This is in stark contrast to other entries in the Shin Megami Tensei series where bosses can have mechanically interesting gimmicks or one-off skillsets with unholy good synergies, rather than just being walls of health and damage; the closest thing you get to a boss that challenges your conception of the mechanics in Persona 5 are Okumura and his waves of robots that need to be killed within one turn of each other, which are in a fight so ridiculously easy to brute force by just having enough AOE damage that it barely even qualifies as a challenge. Futaba's later support skills make the game completely trivial, with her Ultimate Support constantly being cast to full heal, buff, and revive every member of the party. I tried to kill myself on a boss by enabling rush mode and walking away, and it still took six and a half minutes before Joker actually went down and I got kicked to the death screen. The guns — while certainly a unique addition — are borderline useless in most encounters, serving only as a middling damage dump (or as a status applier, which only works on trash enemies that are more easily killed by hitting their weak element anyway) and are utterly outclassed by Persona elemental skills. Many Personas can even deal Gun-type damage, giving you almost no reason to ever use the actual guns.
I've seen it said that this game hates women. My gut instinct thinks that's an exaggeration, but it's unquestionable that the writing handles them like shit. Every female confidant in this game leads as smoothly as a car crash into a sexual relationship, with four (!!!) of them being adults pursuing our underage protagonist. There's not a single woman in this game that you can just be friends with without needing to turn down their advances or dodge making your own, first. The men, conversely, do not have this problem, as the only gay men in this game are the sexual predators who assault Ryuji. Lala Escargot, the owner of the Crossroads bar, is the only character who is both a) not a walking punchline and b) queer. The game never actually confirms if she's a drag queen or if she's transgender, but she's at the very least gender non-conforming. That's it. Nobody else. I realize that this may come off as me pounding my fists on the table and demanding token representation, but the way that the female confidants are treated is already token. Every single woman in Joker's life desires him sexually, because this is a shounen harem game masquerading as a serious adult thriller that explores serious adult themes. It's juvenile. The game likes to talk big about rebellion and putting down the system, man, but it's remarkably intolerant of anyone whose inclusion in any mainstream anime would attract death threats for being "too woke". The writing in Persona 5 doesn't put down the system, it is the system. It should not come as a surprise that a series that's based the past three games around the trappings of Jungian psychology is this achingly stupid when it comes to how it handles social issues.
It is endlessly frustrating that ATLUS has accrued as much money and prestige as they have — Joker got into fucking Smash Bros. — and this is still the best that they can do with all of it. Outright bad writing and middling RPG mechanics that feel like they've hardly evolved since 2006. What's left? The UI and the music? Both are great, but there's not a chance they can carry a game that insists on being this long. What missed potential. It's a shame I waited this long to get a chance to play it. I wish I hadn't bothered.
I don't really like JRPGs, but Persona 5 is
every time i talked to futaba i had to take a break so i wouldnt turn into the joker
I opened this game again today after having beaten it a while ago, I cried at the opening. Im a mess. But then I realized I never wrote a review for this, so here it is. I can list a dozen if not two dozen problems i have with this game, but god damn it this is one of the best gaming experiences I have and probably will ever have. The style, the story, the characters, the music the literally everything just oozes sexy on a level I can't even describe. I still overall prefer the quiet town vibe of Golden, but these two games capture the near perfect video game experience for me despite all their numerous flaws and I dont think any game could ever top it. I just can't let anyone on the internet know I like it lol
This would probably be my favorite game if it weren't for the mind-numbingly stupid final cutscene in the new true ending. + akechi and maruki overrated tbh
This would probably be my favorite game if it weren't for the mind-numbingly stupid final cutscene in the new true ending. + akechi and maruki overrated tbh
this mf cat is PLAYING DARTS
HOW DOES HE DO IT
HOW DOES HE DO IT
This review contains spoilers
There’s this idea in human development and psychology called schema theory, assimilation, and accommodation. We all have different mental schema that hold different philosophies and information. More often than not, new information is simply assimilated into our existing understanding of the world. When the brain is shocked by new information, it has to make a new schema to understand the world. This is accommodation. This schema may conflict with one another and may require one schema to be destroyed and absorbed into the new schema. But this is the mental framework that our brains understand the world.
Some months ago, there was a post I saw about Disney’s Andor that I’ve been thinking about frequently. The post asserted that it's actually concerning that a corporation could make a show so fiercely anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist. It means they don’t consider those ideas a real threat. They consider it fantasy. When Glass Onion and The Menu came out, articles and other posts reverberating this point emerged. These movies are Bad Actually because they have become part of the status quo.
It has a bit more validity than I’d like to admit (and it's possible some weird mental defensiveness has made me view those posts more negatively than the poster intended). If every movie just has a general “rich bad” observation, without more nuance or call to action than that, I’m not sure what they add. There has to be something meatier on that bone.
But I guess that opens to a wider conversation on how powerful art can or cannot be.
There’s certain things a corporate product is just not going to do. It's not going to call for global revolution, it's not going to call to dismantle every institution we need to dismantle, it's not going to say we need to execute people in the square.
Do these corporate products, in varying degrees of tepid or otherwise, still have validity outside of that if people read more into it than intended? Where does meaning begin and end with these kinds of products? Where does it falter?
And where does Persona 5 succeed and fail in delivering Meaning?
Kamoshida’s Palace
Kamoshida’s Palace may be one of the most striking and investing opening segments of an rpg I’ve ever played. The beginning storyline is so immediately successful at dropping you into the horrible environment of a high school. Whispers everywhere you go, teachers glaring at you for showing up, classmates bluntly informing you that “it's a distraction” for you to try and study with everyone else in the library. Kamoshida as a villain is a high point that I don’t think the game reaches again for… basically the rest of the game. The stakes feel so intimately real and pointed, the abuse he weaponizes against others so constant and direct. It's a phenomenal way to introduce the basic gimmick of your story and invest in the successes of your protagonists.
When I have to pick how to spend my in-game afternoons, I’d often just teleport away from the school to wherever I needed to go. On one occasion, I chose to walk out of the school for once. Suddenly, I'm cornered by Kamoshida. I don’t know if that was added to Royal or if I just missed it in the original, but if you walk past him on the first floor, he’ll force you into a conversation so he can mock and torment you some more. He'll do this every single day. Most people probably missed this, but once you know it, a new tension emerges. Teleporting out of the school now feels more intentional than passive. This optional, incidental piece of dialogue suddenly made the very act of choosing to walk out of the school feel more like a choice. Teleporting or sneaking around him felt more like I was dodging his abuse. It's an incredible feeling. It adds another dose of tension to a section that was already rife with tension.
But then there’s Ann.
Ann's character starts amazing, just a powerful and passionate addition to the cast. Its where the game takes that character that falters.
The Watsonian perspective: Royal’s boss fight with Kamoshida adds a fake version of Shiho, the girl who attempted suicide, as one of his supporters. She’s dressed up in a bunny suit. The original game left it unclear if Kamoshida even remembered who Shiho was after her hospitalization, but this was to ensure his warped view couldn’t be mistaken.
The Doylist perspective: One of the options when you see a fake!Ann in a bunny suit is to go “damn that’s hot.” Ann’s phantom thief costume is made up like a big sexy outfit that we’re supposed to be excited by. There’s various bits of dialogue where Ann is ogled by the camera and the characters. And, as mentioned above, out of all the things they chose to add to the game, they added Shiho in the bunny suit. On one hand, as said above, it further cements just how depraved he is. But on the other hand, that topic seemed pretty well covered. Was it more powerful back when he never mentioned Shiho? When he seemingly forgot about her mere seconds after she dropped off a roof? I dunno. It's something I’m still mixed on. Does showing that exploitation become exploitation in itself?
Are Kamoshida’s actions forcing brains to recognize monsters and accommodate that information into new rebellious schema? Or does he let the audience find excuses? What if instead, Kamoshida’s actions are just assimilating into the kind of schema that labels some people “bad outsiders”?
Madarme, Kaneshiro, Futaba, and Okumuda
It's hard to claim that the following palaces reach the stakes of the first palace. Madarame’s story is a genuine tale of corruption and in many ways it feels like something the creative team did care a lot about. There’s personal history there, personal stories among devs about stolen work. But at the same time, they clearly had trouble explaining how plagiarism and theft hurt their careers. Explaining the daily grind of increasing failure and loss is a much harder image to depict. So they have to go bigger and involve some murder.
Kaneshiro almost reaches something. He’s funding various politicians and I’ll probably have more to say about the precise history of yakuza in politics in during Shido’s chapter. But his existence as a guy committing petty scams and an obvious criminal lifestyle kind of makes him feel more like a threat outside the social systems the thieves claim to hate. He’s easier to dismiss as an outlier to a corrupt system.
At the same time, the purpose of these palaces aren’t really built around these actual people. Futaba’s palace cement that these are much more about the development of our cast than about the villains. And that’s fine. I think Futaba’s Palace is actually the most valuable level in conveying an actual message: how a person’s mindset can get warped and distorted by their lives. But I can also understand how that can feel… insulting. Big ol’ magic heist to fix your noggin. Fix some gears, no more depression. It's the same way Psychonauts both does and doesn’t work, for the same complicated reasons.
Okumura’s Palace is bad, in ways that tie into other Palace Problems. The puzzle design in P5 isn’t very advanced. It's just short ways of delaying progress, extending out the game. The Palaces are already mostly fun, we don’t need to extend them even more. But Okumura’s Palace also feels like it gets back to the stakes of Kamoshida. This man has an active harm on society that the others can’t compare to. The corporate culture is horrifically violent, even if its dressed up in silly alien aesthetics to cover the faults.
But the way the story goes, the game clearly doesn't want me to hate Okumura that much. I'm supposed to feel bad when he dies. "Even if he's evil, he doesn't deserve that" is the drum they pound on.
Haru, you’re my favorite character, but I kind of think your dad had it coming.
Confidants
The other aspects that falter after the first dungeon present themselves in the social links. Persona director Hashino allegedly said in an interview (that I can’t track down, don’t quote me) that he never had female friends. If that’s true, you can really tell.
jesus christ can you tell.
Ann’s sharp, serious character gets progressively lost to a “kind of a ditz” angle once she’s isolated into her social link. Ryuji starts the game as the most refreshing Persona Best Friend yet, but he displays all the same annoying traits before long too. Horny lad is horny. Nearly every main cast member gets worse in the social links and you kind of have to hope the main story will revive them to something reasonable, which is not guaranteed.
And then you get the social links with a teenager dating an older woman or the other creepy shit towards the women and there’s really no excuse for it. All those themes of commodification and exploitation are thrown to the wayside because “listen dude, this exploitation is like, really hot tho.”
This isn’t to say all the social links are bad. I have my favorites like anyone else. The underdog politician, the gun shop man, the doctor. But the game’s weird wink-wink-nudge-nudge “harmless” fanservice and misogyny, the inability to recognize the double standards, the insistence on maintaining some horndoggery. Its constant.
Assimilation or accommodation.
It's this part of the game that I can’t really muster any kind of defense for. It makes me uncomfortable. With the benefits you get from social links, someone trying to create the most beneficial playthrough is gonna need to date those women. Hire the maid teacher. You need those ethers, Joker. Entering a bizarre, uncomfortable, mess of a power dynamic is the only way.
Shinzo Abe
Masayoshi Shido. Political monster, sexual assault wielding asshole, man who destroyed any hope of opposition in the upcoming election.
To complete Shido’s palace, there’s several different miniboss shadows you need to track down. Each one represents one of Shido’s loyal cronies, someone that helps him in the real world. They’re unnamed and generally act as a catch-all to ideas of political corruption. But there’s several worth pointing out. The former noble, who’s family lost power after WWII. The yakuza muscle, who takes care of political opponents on Shido’s behalf. The TV exec, manipulating facts into Shido’s favor. And the general mass of right wing politicians these people tend to attract.
When Nobusuke Kishi was released from prison after WWII, after running various oppressive puppet states, he was immediately summoned to the Prime Minister’s house. He looked around the table at his old friends and war criminals, newly backed by the US. It was here that he infamously said “well, I guess we’re all democrats now.”
In his return to power, Kishi enacted a variety of notable moves. Through his connection with various yakuza organizations (supported by the US), the famed war criminal sabotaged left-leaning movements at every opportunity. Kishi’s inescapable grip on power only ended through the Anpo protests, where thousands upon thousands of people finally forced Kishi to resign in disgrace.
Throughout this period, Shinzo Abe was happily bouncing on his grandfather’s knee, buying into every word ol’ Pappy Kishi told him.
Abe inherited and maintained Kishi’s various political connections. He spent his entire career defending his grandfather’s war crimes and using right-wing rhetoric to make the world a worse place to live. He became a notable member of “Nippon Kage,” a fascist group pledging to bring back the monarchy, funded by various politicians, cults, and former nobles. Abe’s insistence on denying how so-called “comfort women” were exploited by his grandfather prior to the war is an internationally known fact. Abe also became embroiled in controversy for manipulating town halls and media events with paid actors, to make the government look more positive. His biographer Noriyuki Yamaguchi was a high-ranking journalist allied with various media think tanks, before the Me Too movement publicly exposed his history of assault.
Many of Persona 5’s references to historical figures tend to be clumsy or poorly thought out. Yuuki Mishima speaks to that just by existing. And one of the biggest misteps in handling Shido is that there's little to no interest in where he came from. There’s no mention of Shido having any connection to any previous war criminal. In fact, his past beyond his current political goals and the deaths he's orchestrated in Futaba's history are left vague and unclear. But the comparisons to Abe are pointed and direct. His rhetoric is populist and inflammatory. Campaign posters in his palace mirror Shinzo Abe’s real posters. It just says the quiet part out loud. Whatever else can be said about this game, it seems pretty evident to me that a large chunk of it involves pointing to Shinzo Abe and going “man, fuck that guy.” And I gotta respect that.
(On a related note, if you want to see Shinzo Abe get beat up by plastic monsters, watch Kamen Rider Black Sun. I know I'm building up to a thesis about "maybe looking for activism in fiction is poisoning my mind and I should stop hitching my internal morality to fiction" but that's a fucking great show.)
Rebellion
More than any scene in the game, of all things, I think about the starting party eating at a fancy diner. They’re trying to celebrate after defeating Kamoshida, feel some sense of success and joy after they’ve outed a predator. But these little sad moments keep happening. They speak a little too loud here, they spill something there, they lose track of their table, etc. They don’t know the social cues. They don’t belong in that rich society restaurant and everyone wants them gone. Their enthusiasm wanes bit by bit and you just get these sad kids who’s dream of a good time got crushed by the grim reality that they’re still outsiders.
And that’s when they start talking about becoming the Phantom Thieves full time.
It's a triumphant moment and the narrative knows it. This is their call to action, their decision to stand up for the little guy.
But there’s this unintentional (intentional?) subtext that these dumb teens just desperately want to be validated by their peers. It's rampant in Mishima’s storyline but it's always present if you look for it. So much of the game revolves around them seeking the approval of strangers online, to the point that being forgotten nearly destroys them. It's sad. It's so desperately sad.
After Okumura’s Palace, the cast wonder amongst themselves if they were truly fighting for justice or for vanity. It's partly just a typical “the heroes doubt themselves” story beat. But it ties into groundwork the game has set down before now.
Here’s the hard truth I’ve had to face as someone who loves history: any revolution will have unintentional victims. It's an inescapable fact, seen time and time again. So the essential question of revolution rests on a simple fact: is the violence inflicted by the existing corrupt state worse than the violence that will ensue in a revolution?
Much of the game wrestles with this, even if it doesn’t realize it. Is the violence of stealing a heart equal to the violence of these oppressive figures? I say no and I assume much of the audience shares that sentiment. Which is part of why I think the game’s final act rings so hollow for so many people. The final bosses of both versions of the game are provided as examples that the violence inherent in stealing a heart is too dangerous to hold onto long-term. “We can’t ethically hold onto this power. The public has to make these choices, not us.” That’s a fair message but the thing the game seems to somehow miss is that the characters are part of the public. They aren't above or outside it. Stepping away from their revolution because its getting too violent is... kind of bizarre. And sure, approaching this gets muddy when dealing with magical powers. But the public is being manipulated so they can’t make these choices. They’ve been provided the wrong information, on purpose, by political machines far beyond our scope. The messaging here falls flat.
The theme of “are we in danger of being baddies” also ends up pushing the heroes dangerously close to that “now that we beat the villains, let’s conform to the status quo again” storyline. We’ve seen this in Persona 4 and it was already bad there. And this is particularly aggravating with the changed ending for Royal. The original game lets you ride off into the sunset on a road trip with your friends. Royal? Not so much. Ryuji goes back to track, Ann goes back to being a model, the gang “grows up” past this rebellion. Just a childhood indulgence. Now they can join society and become Normal Good Workers. Maybe that’s not the meaning the designers intended to impart but it’s there.
Perhaps that’s the biggest issue with the game’s messaging. Intentionally or not, the information it gives you can be assimilated into existing ideas. It certainly points to dangerous targets. Sexual predators, plagiarists, short-staffing CEOs, malicious politicians. But its pledge to reshape society is more debatable. If the characters return to society in the Royal version, can we really say they’re truly still radicals? Can this game be a radical story? Did corporate demands water down the messaging? Or is it a more sinister thrall of moderate sentiments assimilating rebellion into acceptability? If the thing Royal mainly adds is more Ann perving, if that's their grand intention, what do they really have to say about anything that's worthwhile?
Assimilation or accommodation?
It's tough.
Apathy
The text of the game is that God has emerged to control the population, brainwash them to follow the status quo, and leave them resting in happy cages while he burns down the world. As with many of these rpgs, you gotta attack and dethrone god.
It's in the subtext and metaphor that I find this finale much more interesting.
The Phantom Thieves spend all their time warning the world about Shido. If they can make him confess, if they can just expose his crimes, they’re sure everything will work out. That’s what keeps them going.
Except, that’s not reality. Because the truth is, things are always more complicated than exposing/killing a few specific people.
The political machine that benefits from Shido won’t even let him confess. They cover it up, they use the media machine, and they prey on public fears. Shido has so effectively presented himself as a savior that the public cult of personality can’t grapple with the alternative. The system is so thoroughly rigged that the Phantom Thieves have no chance.
The Thieves panic and journey to the center of the collective subconscious. And that is where God exists, the physical manifestation of these systems. It keeps the public chained down, supported by their apathy and eagerness to hand their freedom over to an oppressive force. And when the Thieves are forced back into Shibuya, they’re confronted with a true look at the world. Everything around them, every building, streetlight, every street corner, is built of violence. The totality of existence is covered by the blood of the systems that built it.
And every passerby around them just ignores it. Violence and blood? Don’t be dramatic. It's just a normal street, a normal boring life. Any rebel that has pointed out these things is delusional or never existed in the first place. And this denial is so maddening that the few people that do see the evidence of violence around them feel crazy themselves.
To keep supporting these systems of violence, the history of its rebels are erased. The Thieves cease to exist. Locked away without a trace.
The only path of success left is to find the very soul of these apathetic systems, with all its Christian roots, and shoot it in the face.
Its this intentional? Fuck no. But its where my mind went playing it. I could try and justify my points by claiming some cultural aspect needs to be considered. Japan’s LDP has basically been in power for seventy years with only brief interruptions. The failure of the New Left movement in the 60s to 70s only compounded the party’s authority. I feel like that level of political stagnation and people’s willingness to put up with that bad status quo has to be considered when tied with the themes of the apathetic public.
But a white american claiming she “knows more” about a foreign country’s culture is cringe as fuck so, I do have to admit the theme just… works for me. It doesn’t have to work for you, would not force that on anyone. But… Desperately screaming against an apathetic society that won’t put in the effort to change, feeling bogged down by the fact that it’s just so much easier to fall into that same apathy than to keep screaming, and finally ending with shooting God in the face?
I can’t not think about it. The theme just works for me. Even if I start second-guessing myself with the same tired question.
Accommodation or assimilation?
But what’s left after all that? What’s left after all that 100 hour story? What’s waiting for you in this game?
Gameplay and Style
Fuck. Like. Fuck. Y’know? One of the main reasons its easy to enjoy this game is just how fucking fun the gameplay is. The speed of the combat, the flow of battle, the way all these systems blend into each other to be maximized and measured from beginning to end…. Fuck!
And the whole game just drips with aesthetics. Every visual, every menu screen, every music track, all perfectly calculated to this moody, jazzy feeling. Fucking stellar. Put that shit on my homebrewed 3DS and I don’t regret it.
Royal goes further and adds some mechanical flourishes. The fusion system now has periodic “alarms” if you’ve been grinding through Mementos a lot. Those alarms mean you can get new results from fusing or itemizing persona. Now getting a character’s ultimate weapon requires planning and deliberation rather than just throwing cash into the fusion grinder.
Royal’s new location Kichijoji also holds some special mechanical additions. The darts minigame helps improve the effectiveness of “baton passing”, letting characters infinitely weaponize the weakness of enemies and keep smacking them down. The billiards minigame improves technical attacks, using status debuffs to launch critical attacks and make it easier to launch All Out Attacks on a foe. And the jazz club lets you give your party special new skills, allowing greater freedom and customization of your party line up. It adds so much to the existing system. I went from barely engaging with vanilla P5’s gameplay to going full completionist on the Persona Compendium. It's just rad as hell.
Royal’s New Content
Akechi fucking rules.
This poor kid, abandoned by his father, desperately missing his mother, has launched a complicated revenge scheme to take down Shido. Bring Shido to the top of the world, then expose Shido as a fraud and be there to watch him fall. He’s so embraced this dream, he kills and betrays anyone to see the journey through.
But what’s truly sad about Akechi is how doomed his plan was from the start. Shido always knew Akechi was his secret son and was always planning on killing Akechi once he lost his use. We see how the political machine defends Shido and that’s proof that this secret child revelation would get covered up and suppressed in minutes. Akechi’s plan was never going to work.
But Akechi can’t accept that until it's too late. Because despite his hatred, despite his fury, he just desperately wants his dad to love him.
Royal’s bonus section, the third semester, is… weird. It's a compelling morality play about happiness versus trauma. If you could erase the traumas of your past and integrate yourself back into “respectable” society, would you? As the Phantom Thieves realize, their gut instinct would be yes. Deep down, they’d love to live normal lives again. But that would be a disrespect to that pain they grew from. Denying it happened denies themselves. It's hard, but they’re stronger for accepting it.
Akechi’s storyline features Akechi dropping the mask and just relishing in being a nasty little crime boy. The voice actor delights in going over the top nefarious, howling PERSONA like he’s clinging onto the edges of sanity.
And by extension, by bringing Akechi back, the game gives the protagonist/Joker/Kirby Styles a specific personality and desire outside of player action.
Joker wants Akechi back and he wants him to be more unhinged. He wants the mask off, he wants the true Akechi, even if that man is an asshole.
Outside of player control, Joker Persona 5 loves Akechi.
The final villain of this semester, Dr. Maruki, is a deeply sad man. His denial of a broken past only hurts him in the long run. He has to convert other people into his ideology because it's the only thing he has left. If you accept Maruki’s deal, Maruki isolates himself into a role as a kindly messiah. When he shows up in the bad ending scenes, his character portrait vanishes. He’s not a person anymore. He’s lost any human connections keeping him stable. Even when Maruki wins, he loses. Failure is his only option and it's the only way his life can get better.
To save Maruki, you have to destroy his delusional dream. To give Akechi his freedom, you have to let him die. You have to let Akechi make his choice for himself, even if it sends him off to his demise.
Still, there’s weirdness to the section. The third semester might have been better as an AU story, DLC, or some kind of spin-off novel. It just doesn’t flow with the main game’s themes and ideas. It's hard to go from shooting God in the face to “a happy cult.” I enjoyed it, but it's hard to argue in favor of the game’s themes when this section provides even more tangible proof of its inconsistency.
Coupled with the changed ending mentioned in the Rebellion section, it's hard to say that the new story content benefits the game overall. The additional Ann perving, the cast returning to their status quos... any defense I can make of Royal crumbles with the knowledge of what the devs chose to add. This was their vision.
Anyway
I don’t think Persona 5 is a perfect or consistent text. I think it fails in a lot of its efforts, particularly in how it treats women and minorities. I often flip-flop on how generous I’m feeling towards its themes and meanings, as is probably obvious in this twelve page rambling. I’ve seen the Disco Elysium image about capital and critique. A capital product cannot, truly, be a meaningful message under the material conditions we’re stuck in.
But I still get excited by the sense of freedom and rebellion this game offers. Maybe that’s me falling for it. Maybe that’s me getting subsumed by capital, falling under the sway of apathy and false promises, instead of making the kind of direct action I need to. I’m not as ideologically steadfast in my beliefs as I want to be.
And what does that mean for me?
I think it means I need to log the fuck off.
This review reached twelve pages at one point and I got this truly strange anxiety writing it. This endless dithering and agonizing about being a bad leftist, about failing, about exposing myself as a moron who was still untangling some ingrained societal shit. And it just suddenly hit me at some point how… hollow this feeling was. What does this anxiety do for me? Do for anyone? Does worrying about what media I consume actually impact the wider activism efforts, or is it just getting in the way of me doing that activism? It's the constant pattern of online activism, something I find it too easy to fall into, worrying so much about performance that I don’t actually do the real work.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be that deep. Maybe it doesn’t have to be all those things I wish it was. Maybe I don’t need to obsess and worry over defending how I feel about something.
Maybe sometimes I just need to be okay with enjoying a dumb video game, flaws and all.
Some months ago, there was a post I saw about Disney’s Andor that I’ve been thinking about frequently. The post asserted that it's actually concerning that a corporation could make a show so fiercely anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist. It means they don’t consider those ideas a real threat. They consider it fantasy. When Glass Onion and The Menu came out, articles and other posts reverberating this point emerged. These movies are Bad Actually because they have become part of the status quo.
It has a bit more validity than I’d like to admit (and it's possible some weird mental defensiveness has made me view those posts more negatively than the poster intended). If every movie just has a general “rich bad” observation, without more nuance or call to action than that, I’m not sure what they add. There has to be something meatier on that bone.
But I guess that opens to a wider conversation on how powerful art can or cannot be.
There’s certain things a corporate product is just not going to do. It's not going to call for global revolution, it's not going to call to dismantle every institution we need to dismantle, it's not going to say we need to execute people in the square.
Do these corporate products, in varying degrees of tepid or otherwise, still have validity outside of that if people read more into it than intended? Where does meaning begin and end with these kinds of products? Where does it falter?
And where does Persona 5 succeed and fail in delivering Meaning?
Kamoshida’s Palace
Kamoshida’s Palace may be one of the most striking and investing opening segments of an rpg I’ve ever played. The beginning storyline is so immediately successful at dropping you into the horrible environment of a high school. Whispers everywhere you go, teachers glaring at you for showing up, classmates bluntly informing you that “it's a distraction” for you to try and study with everyone else in the library. Kamoshida as a villain is a high point that I don’t think the game reaches again for… basically the rest of the game. The stakes feel so intimately real and pointed, the abuse he weaponizes against others so constant and direct. It's a phenomenal way to introduce the basic gimmick of your story and invest in the successes of your protagonists.
When I have to pick how to spend my in-game afternoons, I’d often just teleport away from the school to wherever I needed to go. On one occasion, I chose to walk out of the school for once. Suddenly, I'm cornered by Kamoshida. I don’t know if that was added to Royal or if I just missed it in the original, but if you walk past him on the first floor, he’ll force you into a conversation so he can mock and torment you some more. He'll do this every single day. Most people probably missed this, but once you know it, a new tension emerges. Teleporting out of the school now feels more intentional than passive. This optional, incidental piece of dialogue suddenly made the very act of choosing to walk out of the school feel more like a choice. Teleporting or sneaking around him felt more like I was dodging his abuse. It's an incredible feeling. It adds another dose of tension to a section that was already rife with tension.
But then there’s Ann.
Ann's character starts amazing, just a powerful and passionate addition to the cast. Its where the game takes that character that falters.
The Watsonian perspective: Royal’s boss fight with Kamoshida adds a fake version of Shiho, the girl who attempted suicide, as one of his supporters. She’s dressed up in a bunny suit. The original game left it unclear if Kamoshida even remembered who Shiho was after her hospitalization, but this was to ensure his warped view couldn’t be mistaken.
The Doylist perspective: One of the options when you see a fake!Ann in a bunny suit is to go “damn that’s hot.” Ann’s phantom thief costume is made up like a big sexy outfit that we’re supposed to be excited by. There’s various bits of dialogue where Ann is ogled by the camera and the characters. And, as mentioned above, out of all the things they chose to add to the game, they added Shiho in the bunny suit. On one hand, as said above, it further cements just how depraved he is. But on the other hand, that topic seemed pretty well covered. Was it more powerful back when he never mentioned Shiho? When he seemingly forgot about her mere seconds after she dropped off a roof? I dunno. It's something I’m still mixed on. Does showing that exploitation become exploitation in itself?
Are Kamoshida’s actions forcing brains to recognize monsters and accommodate that information into new rebellious schema? Or does he let the audience find excuses? What if instead, Kamoshida’s actions are just assimilating into the kind of schema that labels some people “bad outsiders”?
Madarme, Kaneshiro, Futaba, and Okumuda
It's hard to claim that the following palaces reach the stakes of the first palace. Madarame’s story is a genuine tale of corruption and in many ways it feels like something the creative team did care a lot about. There’s personal history there, personal stories among devs about stolen work. But at the same time, they clearly had trouble explaining how plagiarism and theft hurt their careers. Explaining the daily grind of increasing failure and loss is a much harder image to depict. So they have to go bigger and involve some murder.
Kaneshiro almost reaches something. He’s funding various politicians and I’ll probably have more to say about the precise history of yakuza in politics in during Shido’s chapter. But his existence as a guy committing petty scams and an obvious criminal lifestyle kind of makes him feel more like a threat outside the social systems the thieves claim to hate. He’s easier to dismiss as an outlier to a corrupt system.
At the same time, the purpose of these palaces aren’t really built around these actual people. Futaba’s palace cement that these are much more about the development of our cast than about the villains. And that’s fine. I think Futaba’s Palace is actually the most valuable level in conveying an actual message: how a person’s mindset can get warped and distorted by their lives. But I can also understand how that can feel… insulting. Big ol’ magic heist to fix your noggin. Fix some gears, no more depression. It's the same way Psychonauts both does and doesn’t work, for the same complicated reasons.
Okumura’s Palace is bad, in ways that tie into other Palace Problems. The puzzle design in P5 isn’t very advanced. It's just short ways of delaying progress, extending out the game. The Palaces are already mostly fun, we don’t need to extend them even more. But Okumura’s Palace also feels like it gets back to the stakes of Kamoshida. This man has an active harm on society that the others can’t compare to. The corporate culture is horrifically violent, even if its dressed up in silly alien aesthetics to cover the faults.
But the way the story goes, the game clearly doesn't want me to hate Okumura that much. I'm supposed to feel bad when he dies. "Even if he's evil, he doesn't deserve that" is the drum they pound on.
Haru, you’re my favorite character, but I kind of think your dad had it coming.
Confidants
The other aspects that falter after the first dungeon present themselves in the social links. Persona director Hashino allegedly said in an interview (that I can’t track down, don’t quote me) that he never had female friends. If that’s true, you can really tell.
jesus christ can you tell.
Ann’s sharp, serious character gets progressively lost to a “kind of a ditz” angle once she’s isolated into her social link. Ryuji starts the game as the most refreshing Persona Best Friend yet, but he displays all the same annoying traits before long too. Horny lad is horny. Nearly every main cast member gets worse in the social links and you kind of have to hope the main story will revive them to something reasonable, which is not guaranteed.
And then you get the social links with a teenager dating an older woman or the other creepy shit towards the women and there’s really no excuse for it. All those themes of commodification and exploitation are thrown to the wayside because “listen dude, this exploitation is like, really hot tho.”
This isn’t to say all the social links are bad. I have my favorites like anyone else. The underdog politician, the gun shop man, the doctor. But the game’s weird wink-wink-nudge-nudge “harmless” fanservice and misogyny, the inability to recognize the double standards, the insistence on maintaining some horndoggery. Its constant.
Assimilation or accommodation.
It's this part of the game that I can’t really muster any kind of defense for. It makes me uncomfortable. With the benefits you get from social links, someone trying to create the most beneficial playthrough is gonna need to date those women. Hire the maid teacher. You need those ethers, Joker. Entering a bizarre, uncomfortable, mess of a power dynamic is the only way.
Shinzo Abe
Masayoshi Shido. Political monster, sexual assault wielding asshole, man who destroyed any hope of opposition in the upcoming election.
To complete Shido’s palace, there’s several different miniboss shadows you need to track down. Each one represents one of Shido’s loyal cronies, someone that helps him in the real world. They’re unnamed and generally act as a catch-all to ideas of political corruption. But there’s several worth pointing out. The former noble, who’s family lost power after WWII. The yakuza muscle, who takes care of political opponents on Shido’s behalf. The TV exec, manipulating facts into Shido’s favor. And the general mass of right wing politicians these people tend to attract.
When Nobusuke Kishi was released from prison after WWII, after running various oppressive puppet states, he was immediately summoned to the Prime Minister’s house. He looked around the table at his old friends and war criminals, newly backed by the US. It was here that he infamously said “well, I guess we’re all democrats now.”
In his return to power, Kishi enacted a variety of notable moves. Through his connection with various yakuza organizations (supported by the US), the famed war criminal sabotaged left-leaning movements at every opportunity. Kishi’s inescapable grip on power only ended through the Anpo protests, where thousands upon thousands of people finally forced Kishi to resign in disgrace.
Throughout this period, Shinzo Abe was happily bouncing on his grandfather’s knee, buying into every word ol’ Pappy Kishi told him.
Abe inherited and maintained Kishi’s various political connections. He spent his entire career defending his grandfather’s war crimes and using right-wing rhetoric to make the world a worse place to live. He became a notable member of “Nippon Kage,” a fascist group pledging to bring back the monarchy, funded by various politicians, cults, and former nobles. Abe’s insistence on denying how so-called “comfort women” were exploited by his grandfather prior to the war is an internationally known fact. Abe also became embroiled in controversy for manipulating town halls and media events with paid actors, to make the government look more positive. His biographer Noriyuki Yamaguchi was a high-ranking journalist allied with various media think tanks, before the Me Too movement publicly exposed his history of assault.
Many of Persona 5’s references to historical figures tend to be clumsy or poorly thought out. Yuuki Mishima speaks to that just by existing. And one of the biggest misteps in handling Shido is that there's little to no interest in where he came from. There’s no mention of Shido having any connection to any previous war criminal. In fact, his past beyond his current political goals and the deaths he's orchestrated in Futaba's history are left vague and unclear. But the comparisons to Abe are pointed and direct. His rhetoric is populist and inflammatory. Campaign posters in his palace mirror Shinzo Abe’s real posters. It just says the quiet part out loud. Whatever else can be said about this game, it seems pretty evident to me that a large chunk of it involves pointing to Shinzo Abe and going “man, fuck that guy.” And I gotta respect that.
(On a related note, if you want to see Shinzo Abe get beat up by plastic monsters, watch Kamen Rider Black Sun. I know I'm building up to a thesis about "maybe looking for activism in fiction is poisoning my mind and I should stop hitching my internal morality to fiction" but that's a fucking great show.)
Rebellion
More than any scene in the game, of all things, I think about the starting party eating at a fancy diner. They’re trying to celebrate after defeating Kamoshida, feel some sense of success and joy after they’ve outed a predator. But these little sad moments keep happening. They speak a little too loud here, they spill something there, they lose track of their table, etc. They don’t know the social cues. They don’t belong in that rich society restaurant and everyone wants them gone. Their enthusiasm wanes bit by bit and you just get these sad kids who’s dream of a good time got crushed by the grim reality that they’re still outsiders.
And that’s when they start talking about becoming the Phantom Thieves full time.
It's a triumphant moment and the narrative knows it. This is their call to action, their decision to stand up for the little guy.
But there’s this unintentional (intentional?) subtext that these dumb teens just desperately want to be validated by their peers. It's rampant in Mishima’s storyline but it's always present if you look for it. So much of the game revolves around them seeking the approval of strangers online, to the point that being forgotten nearly destroys them. It's sad. It's so desperately sad.
After Okumura’s Palace, the cast wonder amongst themselves if they were truly fighting for justice or for vanity. It's partly just a typical “the heroes doubt themselves” story beat. But it ties into groundwork the game has set down before now.
Here’s the hard truth I’ve had to face as someone who loves history: any revolution will have unintentional victims. It's an inescapable fact, seen time and time again. So the essential question of revolution rests on a simple fact: is the violence inflicted by the existing corrupt state worse than the violence that will ensue in a revolution?
Much of the game wrestles with this, even if it doesn’t realize it. Is the violence of stealing a heart equal to the violence of these oppressive figures? I say no and I assume much of the audience shares that sentiment. Which is part of why I think the game’s final act rings so hollow for so many people. The final bosses of both versions of the game are provided as examples that the violence inherent in stealing a heart is too dangerous to hold onto long-term. “We can’t ethically hold onto this power. The public has to make these choices, not us.” That’s a fair message but the thing the game seems to somehow miss is that the characters are part of the public. They aren't above or outside it. Stepping away from their revolution because its getting too violent is... kind of bizarre. And sure, approaching this gets muddy when dealing with magical powers. But the public is being manipulated so they can’t make these choices. They’ve been provided the wrong information, on purpose, by political machines far beyond our scope. The messaging here falls flat.
The theme of “are we in danger of being baddies” also ends up pushing the heroes dangerously close to that “now that we beat the villains, let’s conform to the status quo again” storyline. We’ve seen this in Persona 4 and it was already bad there. And this is particularly aggravating with the changed ending for Royal. The original game lets you ride off into the sunset on a road trip with your friends. Royal? Not so much. Ryuji goes back to track, Ann goes back to being a model, the gang “grows up” past this rebellion. Just a childhood indulgence. Now they can join society and become Normal Good Workers. Maybe that’s not the meaning the designers intended to impart but it’s there.
Perhaps that’s the biggest issue with the game’s messaging. Intentionally or not, the information it gives you can be assimilated into existing ideas. It certainly points to dangerous targets. Sexual predators, plagiarists, short-staffing CEOs, malicious politicians. But its pledge to reshape society is more debatable. If the characters return to society in the Royal version, can we really say they’re truly still radicals? Can this game be a radical story? Did corporate demands water down the messaging? Or is it a more sinister thrall of moderate sentiments assimilating rebellion into acceptability? If the thing Royal mainly adds is more Ann perving, if that's their grand intention, what do they really have to say about anything that's worthwhile?
Assimilation or accommodation?
It's tough.
Apathy
The text of the game is that God has emerged to control the population, brainwash them to follow the status quo, and leave them resting in happy cages while he burns down the world. As with many of these rpgs, you gotta attack and dethrone god.
It's in the subtext and metaphor that I find this finale much more interesting.
The Phantom Thieves spend all their time warning the world about Shido. If they can make him confess, if they can just expose his crimes, they’re sure everything will work out. That’s what keeps them going.
Except, that’s not reality. Because the truth is, things are always more complicated than exposing/killing a few specific people.
The political machine that benefits from Shido won’t even let him confess. They cover it up, they use the media machine, and they prey on public fears. Shido has so effectively presented himself as a savior that the public cult of personality can’t grapple with the alternative. The system is so thoroughly rigged that the Phantom Thieves have no chance.
The Thieves panic and journey to the center of the collective subconscious. And that is where God exists, the physical manifestation of these systems. It keeps the public chained down, supported by their apathy and eagerness to hand their freedom over to an oppressive force. And when the Thieves are forced back into Shibuya, they’re confronted with a true look at the world. Everything around them, every building, streetlight, every street corner, is built of violence. The totality of existence is covered by the blood of the systems that built it.
And every passerby around them just ignores it. Violence and blood? Don’t be dramatic. It's just a normal street, a normal boring life. Any rebel that has pointed out these things is delusional or never existed in the first place. And this denial is so maddening that the few people that do see the evidence of violence around them feel crazy themselves.
To keep supporting these systems of violence, the history of its rebels are erased. The Thieves cease to exist. Locked away without a trace.
The only path of success left is to find the very soul of these apathetic systems, with all its Christian roots, and shoot it in the face.
Its this intentional? Fuck no. But its where my mind went playing it. I could try and justify my points by claiming some cultural aspect needs to be considered. Japan’s LDP has basically been in power for seventy years with only brief interruptions. The failure of the New Left movement in the 60s to 70s only compounded the party’s authority. I feel like that level of political stagnation and people’s willingness to put up with that bad status quo has to be considered when tied with the themes of the apathetic public.
But a white american claiming she “knows more” about a foreign country’s culture is cringe as fuck so, I do have to admit the theme just… works for me. It doesn’t have to work for you, would not force that on anyone. But… Desperately screaming against an apathetic society that won’t put in the effort to change, feeling bogged down by the fact that it’s just so much easier to fall into that same apathy than to keep screaming, and finally ending with shooting God in the face?
I can’t not think about it. The theme just works for me. Even if I start second-guessing myself with the same tired question.
Accommodation or assimilation?
But what’s left after all that? What’s left after all that 100 hour story? What’s waiting for you in this game?
Gameplay and Style
Fuck. Like. Fuck. Y’know? One of the main reasons its easy to enjoy this game is just how fucking fun the gameplay is. The speed of the combat, the flow of battle, the way all these systems blend into each other to be maximized and measured from beginning to end…. Fuck!
And the whole game just drips with aesthetics. Every visual, every menu screen, every music track, all perfectly calculated to this moody, jazzy feeling. Fucking stellar. Put that shit on my homebrewed 3DS and I don’t regret it.
Royal goes further and adds some mechanical flourishes. The fusion system now has periodic “alarms” if you’ve been grinding through Mementos a lot. Those alarms mean you can get new results from fusing or itemizing persona. Now getting a character’s ultimate weapon requires planning and deliberation rather than just throwing cash into the fusion grinder.
Royal’s new location Kichijoji also holds some special mechanical additions. The darts minigame helps improve the effectiveness of “baton passing”, letting characters infinitely weaponize the weakness of enemies and keep smacking them down. The billiards minigame improves technical attacks, using status debuffs to launch critical attacks and make it easier to launch All Out Attacks on a foe. And the jazz club lets you give your party special new skills, allowing greater freedom and customization of your party line up. It adds so much to the existing system. I went from barely engaging with vanilla P5’s gameplay to going full completionist on the Persona Compendium. It's just rad as hell.
Royal’s New Content
Akechi fucking rules.
This poor kid, abandoned by his father, desperately missing his mother, has launched a complicated revenge scheme to take down Shido. Bring Shido to the top of the world, then expose Shido as a fraud and be there to watch him fall. He’s so embraced this dream, he kills and betrays anyone to see the journey through.
But what’s truly sad about Akechi is how doomed his plan was from the start. Shido always knew Akechi was his secret son and was always planning on killing Akechi once he lost his use. We see how the political machine defends Shido and that’s proof that this secret child revelation would get covered up and suppressed in minutes. Akechi’s plan was never going to work.
But Akechi can’t accept that until it's too late. Because despite his hatred, despite his fury, he just desperately wants his dad to love him.
Royal’s bonus section, the third semester, is… weird. It's a compelling morality play about happiness versus trauma. If you could erase the traumas of your past and integrate yourself back into “respectable” society, would you? As the Phantom Thieves realize, their gut instinct would be yes. Deep down, they’d love to live normal lives again. But that would be a disrespect to that pain they grew from. Denying it happened denies themselves. It's hard, but they’re stronger for accepting it.
Akechi’s storyline features Akechi dropping the mask and just relishing in being a nasty little crime boy. The voice actor delights in going over the top nefarious, howling PERSONA like he’s clinging onto the edges of sanity.
And by extension, by bringing Akechi back, the game gives the protagonist/Joker/Kirby Styles a specific personality and desire outside of player action.
Joker wants Akechi back and he wants him to be more unhinged. He wants the mask off, he wants the true Akechi, even if that man is an asshole.
Outside of player control, Joker Persona 5 loves Akechi.
The final villain of this semester, Dr. Maruki, is a deeply sad man. His denial of a broken past only hurts him in the long run. He has to convert other people into his ideology because it's the only thing he has left. If you accept Maruki’s deal, Maruki isolates himself into a role as a kindly messiah. When he shows up in the bad ending scenes, his character portrait vanishes. He’s not a person anymore. He’s lost any human connections keeping him stable. Even when Maruki wins, he loses. Failure is his only option and it's the only way his life can get better.
To save Maruki, you have to destroy his delusional dream. To give Akechi his freedom, you have to let him die. You have to let Akechi make his choice for himself, even if it sends him off to his demise.
Still, there’s weirdness to the section. The third semester might have been better as an AU story, DLC, or some kind of spin-off novel. It just doesn’t flow with the main game’s themes and ideas. It's hard to go from shooting God in the face to “a happy cult.” I enjoyed it, but it's hard to argue in favor of the game’s themes when this section provides even more tangible proof of its inconsistency.
Coupled with the changed ending mentioned in the Rebellion section, it's hard to say that the new story content benefits the game overall. The additional Ann perving, the cast returning to their status quos... any defense I can make of Royal crumbles with the knowledge of what the devs chose to add. This was their vision.
Anyway
I don’t think Persona 5 is a perfect or consistent text. I think it fails in a lot of its efforts, particularly in how it treats women and minorities. I often flip-flop on how generous I’m feeling towards its themes and meanings, as is probably obvious in this twelve page rambling. I’ve seen the Disco Elysium image about capital and critique. A capital product cannot, truly, be a meaningful message under the material conditions we’re stuck in.
But I still get excited by the sense of freedom and rebellion this game offers. Maybe that’s me falling for it. Maybe that’s me getting subsumed by capital, falling under the sway of apathy and false promises, instead of making the kind of direct action I need to. I’m not as ideologically steadfast in my beliefs as I want to be.
And what does that mean for me?
I think it means I need to log the fuck off.
This review reached twelve pages at one point and I got this truly strange anxiety writing it. This endless dithering and agonizing about being a bad leftist, about failing, about exposing myself as a moron who was still untangling some ingrained societal shit. And it just suddenly hit me at some point how… hollow this feeling was. What does this anxiety do for me? Do for anyone? Does worrying about what media I consume actually impact the wider activism efforts, or is it just getting in the way of me doing that activism? It's the constant pattern of online activism, something I find it too easy to fall into, worrying so much about performance that I don’t actually do the real work.
Maybe it doesn’t have to be that deep. Maybe it doesn’t have to be all those things I wish it was. Maybe I don’t need to obsess and worry over defending how I feel about something.
Maybe sometimes I just need to be okay with enjoying a dumb video game, flaws and all.
Oh boy... por onde eu começo. Tá sendo um pouco difícil organizar meus pensamentos e botar em palavras tudo que achei do jogo, não digo isso de uma forma crítica, mas algo mais pessoal, não mentir pra mim mesmo. Não é nenhum exagero dizer que Persona 5 Royal é um dos jogos que mais hypei na minha vida, e que sempre ficou no topo de jogos que tinha vontade de jogar. Não deu outra, eu já fui com a minha mente presa com a seguinte afirmação, ''vai ser o melhor jogo que já joguei na vida''. Mas será que foi?
Gostaria de cara já tirar o elefante da sala, que nem é tão elefante assim e irei explicar meus pensamentos. O ponto que mais fiquei conflitado foi sua história. Ela é rendondinha e coesa, mas ao fim de tudo, isso se aplicando antes dos acontecimentos do semestre Royal, a primeira coisa que me veio em mente foi: Simples. Isso não é algo ruim por si só, mas pro patamar que eu estava esperando acabou sendo bem comum. Suas reviravoltas não me impactaram tanto, apesar de ter bons momentos em sua reta final. Porém ao mesmo tempo, existe algo que quase inválida o fato da história ser simples e anulando tudo que pensei anteriormente, seus personagens. Não é novidade pra ninguém o QUANTO o jogo é longo. 40 horas de jogo e ainda tinham personagens sendo introduzidos, e por consequência de toda essa longa duração eles são absolutamente incríveis, profundos e relacionáveis, eles movem a história, ponto. Então no fim das contas isso não foi um problema grave, já que um lado nivelou o outro. Persona 5 brilha muito quando explora seus personagens, com todos eles tendo muito tempo de tela e isso não contando seus eventos de Confidant, porque se contar, nossa... Quando eu achava que os personagens já eram completos o jogo achava algum jeito de aprofundar eles ainda mais. Com tantos personagens incríveis desse jeito, não há plot que estrague, é uma história comum elevada por seus temas e personagens incríveis, ponto.
A arte do jogo é uma das mais incríveis que já vi, com a cor vermelho sendo minha cor favorita, acabei sempre me admirando com tudo. Sua trilha sonora é absolutamente incrível, em especial seus temas cantados que estão no hall da fama de soundtracks dos jogos eletrônicos. Pena que as músicas que se repetem TODA hora durante o Slice-of-Life
...chega, não quero ouvir nunca mais (bom dia BENEATH THE MASK). O gameplay é tudo que peço em um JRPG, combate coeso, fluído e divertido, a mecânica de combar fraquezas com o Baton Pass é sensacional e muito divertida, tendo um bom desafio na dificuldade normal, apesar de alguns bosses terem sido bem facinhos, com exceção de dois.
Agora queria expor meus pensamentos sobre os palácios, eles são incríveis. Tanto por suas estetícas quanto por seus temas, eles são sensacionais. Tirando o do espaço que é realmente chato, com o pior boss do jogo, todos eles tem um design sensacional e estão entre as melhores dungeons que já vi. Meu favorito foi de longe o da pirâmide, tanto em como abordou o fundo da psique da personagem, quanto por seu design incrível tanto estético quando no uso de puzzles espertinhos. Foi realmente incrível e é daqueles que quando você acaba diz ''ufa'', sensacional. Pena que esses elogios não se aplicam aos Mementos, achei um saco.
Persona 5 não se tornou *O* meu jogo favorito, mas foi uma experiência bacana e entregou bastante, apesar de não chegar atropelando nos meus jogos favoritos como eu esperava. Um plot bacaninha com personagens fora de série pra mover a trama, tive uma expêrincia incrível nessas 120 horas que gastei nele e já me sinto nostálgico.
Gostaria de cara já tirar o elefante da sala, que nem é tão elefante assim e irei explicar meus pensamentos. O ponto que mais fiquei conflitado foi sua história. Ela é rendondinha e coesa, mas ao fim de tudo, isso se aplicando antes dos acontecimentos do semestre Royal, a primeira coisa que me veio em mente foi: Simples. Isso não é algo ruim por si só, mas pro patamar que eu estava esperando acabou sendo bem comum. Suas reviravoltas não me impactaram tanto, apesar de ter bons momentos em sua reta final. Porém ao mesmo tempo, existe algo que quase inválida o fato da história ser simples e anulando tudo que pensei anteriormente, seus personagens. Não é novidade pra ninguém o QUANTO o jogo é longo. 40 horas de jogo e ainda tinham personagens sendo introduzidos, e por consequência de toda essa longa duração eles são absolutamente incríveis, profundos e relacionáveis, eles movem a história, ponto. Então no fim das contas isso não foi um problema grave, já que um lado nivelou o outro. Persona 5 brilha muito quando explora seus personagens, com todos eles tendo muito tempo de tela e isso não contando seus eventos de Confidant, porque se contar, nossa... Quando eu achava que os personagens já eram completos o jogo achava algum jeito de aprofundar eles ainda mais. Com tantos personagens incríveis desse jeito, não há plot que estrague, é uma história comum elevada por seus temas e personagens incríveis, ponto.
A arte do jogo é uma das mais incríveis que já vi, com a cor vermelho sendo minha cor favorita, acabei sempre me admirando com tudo. Sua trilha sonora é absolutamente incrível, em especial seus temas cantados que estão no hall da fama de soundtracks dos jogos eletrônicos. Pena que as músicas que se repetem TODA hora durante o Slice-of-Life
...chega, não quero ouvir nunca mais (bom dia BENEATH THE MASK). O gameplay é tudo que peço em um JRPG, combate coeso, fluído e divertido, a mecânica de combar fraquezas com o Baton Pass é sensacional e muito divertida, tendo um bom desafio na dificuldade normal, apesar de alguns bosses terem sido bem facinhos, com exceção de dois.
Agora queria expor meus pensamentos sobre os palácios, eles são incríveis. Tanto por suas estetícas quanto por seus temas, eles são sensacionais. Tirando o do espaço que é realmente chato, com o pior boss do jogo, todos eles tem um design sensacional e estão entre as melhores dungeons que já vi. Meu favorito foi de longe o da pirâmide, tanto em como abordou o fundo da psique da personagem, quanto por seu design incrível tanto estético quando no uso de puzzles espertinhos. Foi realmente incrível e é daqueles que quando você acaba diz ''ufa'', sensacional. Pena que esses elogios não se aplicam aos Mementos, achei um saco.
Persona 5 não se tornou *O* meu jogo favorito, mas foi uma experiência bacana e entregou bastante, apesar de não chegar atropelando nos meus jogos favoritos como eu esperava. Um plot bacaninha com personagens fora de série pra mover a trama, tive uma expêrincia incrível nessas 120 horas que gastei nele e já me sinto nostálgico.
To be honest, I don’t even know where to begin. This game is one of the best pieces of fiction ever created. It’s journey was magical. Almost everything about it is perfect. P5 is the textbook definition of a masterpiece.
Something I wasn’t expecting going into this game was the combat being a strength. As someone who normally gets turned off by the sight of long JRPGS with turn based combat, I was anticipating the same normal, boring, and generic turn based combat you’d find in games like DQ, Pokemon, or even past persona games like P4G. The combat proved me so wrong. Its fast, flashy, and most importantly so much fun. The baton pass system is fantastic. All out attacks are a blast. I also loved the teamwork attacks. Other than bosses, you’d never spend too much time on one enemy. The combat is always engaging and always keeps you moving. Easily one of the best combat system’s I’ve ever experienced.
The story/journey itself was straight up magical. Despite the game’s horrendous length, the story manages to be mostly engaging during its duration. This game’s story was so carefully crafted and it shows. It felt like everything you did mattered. The foreshadowing was brilliant. The story’s peak, for me, was definitely post palace 6. Being completely clueless to what was going on while slowly learning the devise plan the Phantom Thieves came up with was fire.
My biggest issue with this game is definitely the length. There are plenty of ways this game could’ve been a whole lot shorter. It should’ve been a lot shorter. I hope P6 is about 30 hours shorter. By the time I got to the third semester I was so done with this game. Luckily the third semester was an incredible experience.
The last thing I want to touch on is the cast. I wouldn’t consider any of the Phantom Thieves bad characters. My personal favorite characters, looks aside, were Akechi, Futaba, and Ryuiji. They will definitely be one of my, if not my favorite cast ever for the foreseeable future.
Something I wasn’t expecting going into this game was the combat being a strength. As someone who normally gets turned off by the sight of long JRPGS with turn based combat, I was anticipating the same normal, boring, and generic turn based combat you’d find in games like DQ, Pokemon, or even past persona games like P4G. The combat proved me so wrong. Its fast, flashy, and most importantly so much fun. The baton pass system is fantastic. All out attacks are a blast. I also loved the teamwork attacks. Other than bosses, you’d never spend too much time on one enemy. The combat is always engaging and always keeps you moving. Easily one of the best combat system’s I’ve ever experienced.
The story/journey itself was straight up magical. Despite the game’s horrendous length, the story manages to be mostly engaging during its duration. This game’s story was so carefully crafted and it shows. It felt like everything you did mattered. The foreshadowing was brilliant. The story’s peak, for me, was definitely post palace 6. Being completely clueless to what was going on while slowly learning the devise plan the Phantom Thieves came up with was fire.
My biggest issue with this game is definitely the length. There are plenty of ways this game could’ve been a whole lot shorter. It should’ve been a lot shorter. I hope P6 is about 30 hours shorter. By the time I got to the third semester I was so done with this game. Luckily the third semester was an incredible experience.
The last thing I want to touch on is the cast. I wouldn’t consider any of the Phantom Thieves bad characters. My personal favorite characters, looks aside, were Akechi, Futaba, and Ryuiji. They will definitely be one of my, if not my favorite cast ever for the foreseeable future.
I'm normally not a fan of turn-based combat but I had an absolute blast with the stylized combat in P5. There wasn't a time I didn't enjoy an enemy encounter. Even years later the combat is the best this game has to offer. As for the plot and the whole social sim thing? Well, on my first playthrough (vanilla) I was hooked from start to finish and I actually enjoyed some of the plot twists. P5 was the most fun I had with a jrpg years ago. But now on my second playthrough (royal) everything was just dragging on way too much. It felt like a chore to play through. Knowing what came next and how long it would take to get to particular scenes took the fun out of the second playthrough for me and I had to struggle through it for most of the time.
But what really bothered me this time around was the Protagonist and the illusion of choice the game offered us. Why bother giving us several choices if most of them are the same? I guess I didn't care all that much years ago but now it's just annoying. Same with the random fanservice scenes. They're just coming out of nowhere. Seriously, they're unnecessary and ruined scenes for me.
Annoying aspects aside, I have to admit that I really enjoyed the third semester. Maruki was an interesting addition to P5. I also enjoyed Akechi's role in this and liked his ruthless personality that could shine through.
P5 is still a good game and the expanded story content + quality of life improvements were great. But were they enough to warrant a second playthrough from me? Sadly not. But thanks to Royal, I now know that I have to patiently wait until the next Persona game will get its second release with expanded content until I'll play it. Because playing the same Persona game more than once is just not for me.
But what really bothered me this time around was the Protagonist and the illusion of choice the game offered us. Why bother giving us several choices if most of them are the same? I guess I didn't care all that much years ago but now it's just annoying. Same with the random fanservice scenes. They're just coming out of nowhere. Seriously, they're unnecessary and ruined scenes for me.
Annoying aspects aside, I have to admit that I really enjoyed the third semester. Maruki was an interesting addition to P5. I also enjoyed Akechi's role in this and liked his ruthless personality that could shine through.
P5 is still a good game and the expanded story content + quality of life improvements were great. But were they enough to warrant a second playthrough from me? Sadly not. But thanks to Royal, I now know that I have to patiently wait until the next Persona game will get its second release with expanded content until I'll play it. Because playing the same Persona game more than once is just not for me.
This review contains spoilers
Imagine you live somewhere where you have to lie to survive, someplace where you’ll never really be you. All the connections you’ll have are hollow, you can’t ever truly express yourself because life is unfair to you. That was my reality when I played the Maruki arc of Persona 5 Royal for the first time, it’s an arc that asks the question of “does suffering need to exist” and at the time when I was first presented that question I didn’t know how to answer it. The morally correct option that society taught me to say was yes, but I was torn, I had seen some of the lowest things in life. Death of loved ones, abuse, suicide, drug abuse, and selfishly the one I feel is the worst is loss of self. I didn’t know who I was, I couldn’t be who I wanted to be, I simply existed to simply pass the time until some golden opportunity or miracle happened. So to answer the question, no I don’t think suffering needs to exist, Takuto Maruki is absolutely right. But just because he’s right doesn’t mean I have to give up on life and wait for a miracle to happen, seeing the journey of Sumire overcoming her flaws, flaws very similar to mine made me tear up. I wasn’t alone in dealing with life’s worst, I could stand back up and reclaim my life by myself, maybe I can’t be who I want to be now, but I’ll strive to become that person every day of my life until I do goddammit. Would I take Maruki’s offer? Absolutely, no sane person wouldn’t, but I’m not in a position to where I could accept his offer. Seeing the characters push past him, and reclaiming their life by their own merit touches my heart. Yes not everyone can endure hardship, some people can’t do anything but run away from life’s worst, but I am not one of those people, I am a strong person who can reclaim their life on their own. It might be a selfish and self centered view on the world and the arc, but it’s the exact same view as Akechi in the game, I am selfish, I care about myself and those close to me more than the world. Yes, I will achieve my dreams even if the world has treated me unfairly, I will not fold to the fake personas I’ve created and live my life as my own.
This review is more what this game means to me, and not a critical look/analysis of the Maruki arc. I’ll save that for a later date, I just wanted to pour my heart out on why I love this arc. I’ve lived most of my life in fear of being myself and the repercussions it would have on my life. I was scared, confused, disconnected from reality, couldn’t even make any friends without it feeling fake. I was stuck and I felt hopeless, but this arc made me realize that I don’t need to always feel trapped, I can look at all the hardship I’ve faced in a positive light, and reclaim myself by myself.
I love this arc, it changed my perspective of life from a nihilistic one to a hopeful one, one where your hardships don’t necessarily need to pull you down, but rather help you move forward.
This review is more what this game means to me, and not a critical look/analysis of the Maruki arc. I’ll save that for a later date, I just wanted to pour my heart out on why I love this arc. I’ve lived most of my life in fear of being myself and the repercussions it would have on my life. I was scared, confused, disconnected from reality, couldn’t even make any friends without it feeling fake. I was stuck and I felt hopeless, but this arc made me realize that I don’t need to always feel trapped, I can look at all the hardship I’ve faced in a positive light, and reclaim myself by myself.
I love this arc, it changed my perspective of life from a nihilistic one to a hopeful one, one where your hardships don’t necessarily need to pull you down, but rather help you move forward.
I have never really cared for or played many jrpgs, not really that type of guy. But then I decided to get a playstation and my friend kept bugging me to play it, they even bought it for me as an out of nowhere gift. I didnt know anything about the game, I havent even seen an anime that wasn't Dragon Ball Z before so I was about 90% sure I wouldnt like it. And it starts off pretty slow but for some reason, perhaps determination to give the game a fair chance for my friend I got sucked in. And before I knew it I had played like ten hours of this over the course of a day. While ELDEN RING was out! This game made me stop playing Elden Ring, thats gotta be the most bizzare thing thats ever happened to me. The game is a long one, but I never really wanted it to end, even when it was moving slow I was just enjoying the vibe. I love the cast, I love the music, I love how stylish everything is, I love the story and basically everything else about the game. Theres a lot of problems though. Some story moments, like the whole thing with Morgana and Haru or Ryuji getting beaten up for saving everyone... are really awful. Like bad bad. It's baffling that theyre even a part of the same game as the rest of the amazing shit. I also really liked the third semester, even if the true ending felt a little silly (watching the original ending on youtube I think I like that one more). Theres a bunch of little things like that that bog the game down to a point where I cant really call it perfect, but also like.. It's still perfect. Everything else makes up for it a dozen times over. Never in a million years would I have thought I liked this game so much. Between this, Elden Ring and Yakuza 0 these past two weeks have been some of the best gaming memories i've had in years and it makes me reminisce about being a kid again.
Sae, Takemi and Kawakami may of awakened something.
Sae, Takemi and Kawakami may of awakened something.
everytime someone posts #breakfreepersona i mail someone a dirge of cerberus copy
I guess it's fitting that after my first (serious) review that I review a game I find on the opposite spectrum. In my MOTHER review I briefly touch that my interest with the game transcends its mediocre review score, and while granted, my rating for this game isn't much higher than that of how I rated MOTHER, it is a game I hold considerably more contempt for. Persona 5 is a game that while at its best is fun to think about certain aspects (namely the gameplay and aesthetic which I will talk about shortly), the writing of this game has disgusted me and left me uncomfortable at numerous points that it considerably sours the experience for me. There is some seriously messed up and problematic material in this game, but I figure I should start with the positives first.
It goes without saying that Persona 5 is a visual marvel. It oozes flair and confidence in its music and especially visual presentation that has left me awestruck on multiple occassions. The UI feels like a streamlined and futuristic graffiti, aptly representing how the Phantom Thieves rebel against their society. It's one of my favorite art styles for a game and I have tried to emulate it on my own time it's that good. But that is just the style, how is the substance?
Gameplay has this weirdly satisfying pacing to it. Whenever I get bored with dungeon crawling is just often when I near the finale of a palace (I usually do palaces in one day if possible), and when I'm wanting to get back to it the game usually starts heading towards its next arc. Persona fusion makes Joker feel like an invincible badass, which is funny because if he dies your game instantly ends. A bit of a side tangent but I never liked that in games, why have the party leader be the load bearer in jrpgs when revival items work on other party members. Sometimes Joker just keels over because of a few enemies targeting him and that just feels frustrating and unfair, especially with this game having quite a few instant death spells. Besides that however, gameplay is pretty simple but pretty enjoyable which is usually how I like my JRPGs. Blasting enemies with your favorite colors of magic and shooting them in the head with assorted firearms is satisfying due to all the vibrant and poping effects. That is only half of the gameplay, and sadly is what I think is the better side of the coin.
Now, that doesn't mean I think the social sim is without merit. Theres a lot of various activites, especially in royal, to take care of, with just enough days to get what you want done. Routing what you want to get done feels satisfying, and it feels nice to see your bonds grow closer with others. Ryuji, Yusuke, Sojiro and Yoshida are very charming characters that have great moments, and raising not only their confidants but of everyone else is satisfying due to their affects on gameplay. I just wish that the game didn't spend an eternity to unlock certain things to do in the city, from locations to other confidants. Considering each arc can take 10+ hours, it feels like I'm just waiting to unlock certain mechanics as I wade through the first few chapters of the game with limited options. If only my issues with the game ended there.
You may have noticed that I only listed male characters when talking about confidants I like, and that is not a mistake. Persona as a series, or at least starting from 3, has had issues depicting women and your relationship with them. Hell, one of the biggest memes I hear about the series is how the writer doesn't think men and women can exist in non sexual/romantic relationships. This has lead to issues throughout the latest 3 games, but as I have not played those, I would rather keep my discussion to 5. Now granted, I have not finished Persona 5. I played the original release up until the end of Futaba's palace and Royal up to the end of Kaneshiro's, which is earlier than in the vanilla game. As such, I will mainly only talk about what I have experienced while also somewhat mentioning other issues I have heard later on in the game.
To say the writing of persona 5 objectifies women is a complete understatement. They're half baked and uninteresting characters at best and completely disgusting in their portrayals at worse. Of the ones I've seen so far, Makoto is by far the least offensive, but she also doesn't do much besides be the general brains of the thieves. She's not who I have issues with however. Ann is a character I just feel bad for. A victim of sexual grooming in the first arc, the fact that she then goes on to be constantly hit on, sexualized, and otherwise just made into a general pin up model is appalling. While yes I understand that she still wants to become a model, it feels off when the game makes it a constant joke to point out her in universe hotness, from her cleavage revealing skintight thief costume to out of character moments such as Yusuke asking her to strip model for him. And to those who say that her wanting to be a model empowers herself and has her growing out of an abuse, why would you give this sort of arc to a 16 year old? Even then, shes more of a victim of this games writing, and she actively wants to not be sexualized outside of her modeling gig from what I've seen. The same cannot be said for Kawakami. After your local incel forces you to order a maid you get to see your teacher all dressed up to work for you wow! While she doesn't want to work for you and would wish you to forget about that encounter, the fact you can have her still be her maid and still press on in the relationship is borderline creepy. It gets worse with the fact you can eventually romance her like any other women in this game, especially after the first arc made it a point that teachers dating students is wrong. I guess if you don't outwardly abuse them it's fine I guess! Absolutely horrid.
Those are the main two I wanted to talk about, but they're not the only ones I have problems with. I think Mishima is a fucking tool, the jailkeep twins are annoying, and while Haru is an aesthetic gender apparently her arc has her dealing with her getting sold off and then having little to no screentime afterwards. They're all pretty minor gripes for characters sure, but I wasn't done yet. There's something evil left in this game. A being that haunts my brain stem and I only wish absolute suffering on. Anyone who has played this game talking about, so I'm just going to get to who it is.
Morgana is straight up my most hated characrer in gaming. This whiny shit bitches 24/7 and does nothing productive at all. He contributes to Ann's horrible treatment and has the gall to make everything about him. Never have I wanted to erase a character off my screen more than him, and from what I hear he gets even worse later in the game. He is just generally unlikable and I don't know how else to explain it. The biggest irony of his existance is that his VA has also voiced my favorite character in all of gaming (Nami from League of Legends), so that's like one positive I guess? Except not really because that ties him to League which is a massive L in itself, lmao.
Persona 5 is a game I want to really like. I want to take the gameplay and art syle and apply it to games that aren't pedophelic or hate women, but I can't. I'm still going to finish this game, but probably on PC so I can mod over it and have a more ironic enjoyment. While my experiences are often mixed to positive in the moment, it's one of those games where I sour on it more and more as I distance myself from it. Considering this is the first MegaTen I've ever played, it doesn't set a good precedent, yet I'm still morbidly curious to play other Persona and SMT games when I'm done. It's weird, but for as much as I hate this game, there's something weirdly charming like that. That I can just want it play it and other games in its series even with its humongous fault. I don't see my opinion on this game changing anytime soon, but hopefully the good parts of it shine more when I get my third fucking copy of this game (why) and beat it for real.
It goes without saying that Persona 5 is a visual marvel. It oozes flair and confidence in its music and especially visual presentation that has left me awestruck on multiple occassions. The UI feels like a streamlined and futuristic graffiti, aptly representing how the Phantom Thieves rebel against their society. It's one of my favorite art styles for a game and I have tried to emulate it on my own time it's that good. But that is just the style, how is the substance?
Gameplay has this weirdly satisfying pacing to it. Whenever I get bored with dungeon crawling is just often when I near the finale of a palace (I usually do palaces in one day if possible), and when I'm wanting to get back to it the game usually starts heading towards its next arc. Persona fusion makes Joker feel like an invincible badass, which is funny because if he dies your game instantly ends. A bit of a side tangent but I never liked that in games, why have the party leader be the load bearer in jrpgs when revival items work on other party members. Sometimes Joker just keels over because of a few enemies targeting him and that just feels frustrating and unfair, especially with this game having quite a few instant death spells. Besides that however, gameplay is pretty simple but pretty enjoyable which is usually how I like my JRPGs. Blasting enemies with your favorite colors of magic and shooting them in the head with assorted firearms is satisfying due to all the vibrant and poping effects. That is only half of the gameplay, and sadly is what I think is the better side of the coin.
Now, that doesn't mean I think the social sim is without merit. Theres a lot of various activites, especially in royal, to take care of, with just enough days to get what you want done. Routing what you want to get done feels satisfying, and it feels nice to see your bonds grow closer with others. Ryuji, Yusuke, Sojiro and Yoshida are very charming characters that have great moments, and raising not only their confidants but of everyone else is satisfying due to their affects on gameplay. I just wish that the game didn't spend an eternity to unlock certain things to do in the city, from locations to other confidants. Considering each arc can take 10+ hours, it feels like I'm just waiting to unlock certain mechanics as I wade through the first few chapters of the game with limited options. If only my issues with the game ended there.
You may have noticed that I only listed male characters when talking about confidants I like, and that is not a mistake. Persona as a series, or at least starting from 3, has had issues depicting women and your relationship with them. Hell, one of the biggest memes I hear about the series is how the writer doesn't think men and women can exist in non sexual/romantic relationships. This has lead to issues throughout the latest 3 games, but as I have not played those, I would rather keep my discussion to 5. Now granted, I have not finished Persona 5. I played the original release up until the end of Futaba's palace and Royal up to the end of Kaneshiro's, which is earlier than in the vanilla game. As such, I will mainly only talk about what I have experienced while also somewhat mentioning other issues I have heard later on in the game.
To say the writing of persona 5 objectifies women is a complete understatement. They're half baked and uninteresting characters at best and completely disgusting in their portrayals at worse. Of the ones I've seen so far, Makoto is by far the least offensive, but she also doesn't do much besides be the general brains of the thieves. She's not who I have issues with however. Ann is a character I just feel bad for. A victim of sexual grooming in the first arc, the fact that she then goes on to be constantly hit on, sexualized, and otherwise just made into a general pin up model is appalling. While yes I understand that she still wants to become a model, it feels off when the game makes it a constant joke to point out her in universe hotness, from her cleavage revealing skintight thief costume to out of character moments such as Yusuke asking her to strip model for him. And to those who say that her wanting to be a model empowers herself and has her growing out of an abuse, why would you give this sort of arc to a 16 year old? Even then, shes more of a victim of this games writing, and she actively wants to not be sexualized outside of her modeling gig from what I've seen. The same cannot be said for Kawakami. After your local incel forces you to order a maid you get to see your teacher all dressed up to work for you wow! While she doesn't want to work for you and would wish you to forget about that encounter, the fact you can have her still be her maid and still press on in the relationship is borderline creepy. It gets worse with the fact you can eventually romance her like any other women in this game, especially after the first arc made it a point that teachers dating students is wrong. I guess if you don't outwardly abuse them it's fine I guess! Absolutely horrid.
Those are the main two I wanted to talk about, but they're not the only ones I have problems with. I think Mishima is a fucking tool, the jailkeep twins are annoying, and while Haru is an aesthetic gender apparently her arc has her dealing with her getting sold off and then having little to no screentime afterwards. They're all pretty minor gripes for characters sure, but I wasn't done yet. There's something evil left in this game. A being that haunts my brain stem and I only wish absolute suffering on. Anyone who has played this game talking about, so I'm just going to get to who it is.
Morgana is straight up my most hated characrer in gaming. This whiny shit bitches 24/7 and does nothing productive at all. He contributes to Ann's horrible treatment and has the gall to make everything about him. Never have I wanted to erase a character off my screen more than him, and from what I hear he gets even worse later in the game. He is just generally unlikable and I don't know how else to explain it. The biggest irony of his existance is that his VA has also voiced my favorite character in all of gaming (Nami from League of Legends), so that's like one positive I guess? Except not really because that ties him to League which is a massive L in itself, lmao.
Persona 5 is a game I want to really like. I want to take the gameplay and art syle and apply it to games that aren't pedophelic or hate women, but I can't. I'm still going to finish this game, but probably on PC so I can mod over it and have a more ironic enjoyment. While my experiences are often mixed to positive in the moment, it's one of those games where I sour on it more and more as I distance myself from it. Considering this is the first MegaTen I've ever played, it doesn't set a good precedent, yet I'm still morbidly curious to play other Persona and SMT games when I'm done. It's weird, but for as much as I hate this game, there's something weirdly charming like that. That I can just want it play it and other games in its series even with its humongous fault. I don't see my opinion on this game changing anytime soon, but hopefully the good parts of it shine more when I get my third fucking copy of this game (why) and beat it for real.
There's something amusing about seeing a lot of big fans of Persona 5 in my circle rag on Persona 4 constantly when, in reality, the core issues of both of their stories are near-identical. They both have very formulaic story structures that wear out their welcome by the time they do start shaking things up, they have fairly weak casts that are severely underwritten past their initial arcs, and they're both very non-committal or even contradictory with presenting their main themes. If this is the case, then why do I view Persona 4 in a somewhat more positive light while Persona 5 gets worse for me as time goes on, despite the fact that the lowest lows of 4 are far worse than 5’s? Well, not only does Persona 4 have its own unique strengths that 5 fails to capture, but these direct parallels in shortcomings give me the impression that Atlus learned practically nothing from the shortcomings of 4 after a near-decade, aside from slightly getting the memo that homophobia might not actually be that funny. (Emphasis on slightly)
The main cast is probably the worst out of any modern Persona cast. Not to say that they’re all irredeemably terrible, but they just become incredibly flat once their specific arc is concluded, which makes it even more damning when characters like Haru don’t even have that to their name with how poorly implemented Morgana’s arc is. It doesn’t really take long for them to neatly slot into their respective archetypes without branching out much beyond them. Ann probably gets this the worst, she doesn’t really get to go beyond being “the girl” of the group when she had so much going on during Kamoshida’s arc. I think a better approach would’ve been to limit the cast just to the initial trio. Their dynamic in the early game is very strong and could totally carry a whole game on its own. Yusuke felt pretty out of place once he fully joined the Phantom Thieves, and the sidelining of growth for each party member becomes very apparent once Makoto joins. I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to say it would work, with how often the series tries to push a “main trio” of their parties. Even Persona 4 directly did it, when it arguably started off with more of a quartet than a trio. I don’t know how it would affect the rest of the game, but what I do know is that the characters do need a lot more than they get, especially in a series that prides itself on interpersonal relationships like Persona does.
I don’t see myself as someone that’s too harsh regarding the “Show don’t tell” critique. I like a good chunk of media that are very in your face about their messages and themes. The point where I do feel it’s right to make that critique is when it feels like a piece of media is talking down to me, which is absolutely the case with Persona 5. It never trusts the player to come to their own conclusions about what they’re being presented, so it feels the need to spell the meaning behind every interaction out in meticulous detail so that a 3 year old can keep up with it. For example, there’s a reoccurring puzzle throughout the Pyramid of Wrath, (Which is my least favorite stretch of the whole game for a myriad of reasons that I don’t intend to go into) where you put together hieroglyphs that depict parts of the palace ruler’s past, and their relationship with a close family member. I thought it was a cool way to let the player piece together the trauma that they endured, especially with how that comes together with the palace’s boss, but every single time you clear one, the characters explain exactly what it means and tell you exactly how to feel. It’s really frustrating when it feels like it has to spell out every single interaction in the entire game. I feel like you could shave off 10 hours from the game just by giving it a tighter script, it’s unnecessary bloat that does nothing but dampen the storytelling. It’s even more baffling that it has this approach when ultimately, it doesn’t really have anything to say until the Royal arc hits. It’s trying to tackle much more grandiose themes of society and rebellion, but it always feels like it’s only putting a single toe into an incredibly deep pool. Let me be clear, I don’t need the PTs to start picking apart every aspect of each corrupt system in the nation. I feel like too many critiques go down that route, especially since it does place more of an emphasis on personal conflict. But even so, it could do a lot better with acknowledging it than the “All’s well that ends well, right?” approach we’re given. That’s honestly my biggest problem with the modern series. It’s so non-commital with presenting these potentially interesting ideas that the stick it’s hitting the issues it tackles seems to be more like a damp pool noodle.
As I’m writing this, I’m noticing a major pattern between each of this game’s aspects. I really like everything about it on paper. The general theme of rebellion that has sparks throughout the whole game, that’s cool! Too bad the ways it explores that theme are pretty paper-thin, even with the social links that usually thrive with conveying themes just as well as if not better than the main plot. Having social links teach you more specific abilities to use throughout the game for a sense of growth, that’s cool! Too bad that the way they’re balanced makes them range from practically meaningless to game-breakingly powerful. Every single addition to the game’s combat, the baton passes, the guns, all of that is cool! Too bad none of the game is balanced around it and it makes even a normal playthrough one where you’re stupidly overpowered. I think this is why Persona 5 fails for me in ways that the other games in the series don’t quite as much. As much as 3 and 4 had their low points and downsides, both of those did have consistent strengths that they were able to bring out exceptionally well. For every great and fresh idea that P5 has that isn’t strictly related to its presentation, there’s something else that ends up completely undercutting it.
In a way, that’s why despite how fun it can be to dunk on Atlus and this game, I don’t like the distaste that I have for it. It does have some genuinely fascinating ideas, I can see a spark of something truly spectacular trapped inside of this. The Royal arc proves this, it’s a fantastic piece of work that’s only weaknesses are the foundation that it’s built upon. If Atlus really is capable of being a tour de force in video game storytelling and can capitalize on the strengths of Royal’s writing, then Persona 6 could be the first game in the series that I really like without any caveats. All I need is proof that modern Atlus has that bite in its narratives, which it’s mostly consistently proven to not have over this decade. I want to believe that Atlus can pull through, and bring us one last surprise…
(Also maybe don’t have a prominent party member that plays into every single autism stereotype in the book at maximum capacity with the core point being “ooh she’s such a quirky gamer girl!” Cool? Cool.)
The main cast is probably the worst out of any modern Persona cast. Not to say that they’re all irredeemably terrible, but they just become incredibly flat once their specific arc is concluded, which makes it even more damning when characters like Haru don’t even have that to their name with how poorly implemented Morgana’s arc is. It doesn’t really take long for them to neatly slot into their respective archetypes without branching out much beyond them. Ann probably gets this the worst, she doesn’t really get to go beyond being “the girl” of the group when she had so much going on during Kamoshida’s arc. I think a better approach would’ve been to limit the cast just to the initial trio. Their dynamic in the early game is very strong and could totally carry a whole game on its own. Yusuke felt pretty out of place once he fully joined the Phantom Thieves, and the sidelining of growth for each party member becomes very apparent once Makoto joins. I don’t think it’s that much of a stretch to say it would work, with how often the series tries to push a “main trio” of their parties. Even Persona 4 directly did it, when it arguably started off with more of a quartet than a trio. I don’t know how it would affect the rest of the game, but what I do know is that the characters do need a lot more than they get, especially in a series that prides itself on interpersonal relationships like Persona does.
I don’t see myself as someone that’s too harsh regarding the “Show don’t tell” critique. I like a good chunk of media that are very in your face about their messages and themes. The point where I do feel it’s right to make that critique is when it feels like a piece of media is talking down to me, which is absolutely the case with Persona 5. It never trusts the player to come to their own conclusions about what they’re being presented, so it feels the need to spell the meaning behind every interaction out in meticulous detail so that a 3 year old can keep up with it. For example, there’s a reoccurring puzzle throughout the Pyramid of Wrath, (Which is my least favorite stretch of the whole game for a myriad of reasons that I don’t intend to go into) where you put together hieroglyphs that depict parts of the palace ruler’s past, and their relationship with a close family member. I thought it was a cool way to let the player piece together the trauma that they endured, especially with how that comes together with the palace’s boss, but every single time you clear one, the characters explain exactly what it means and tell you exactly how to feel. It’s really frustrating when it feels like it has to spell out every single interaction in the entire game. I feel like you could shave off 10 hours from the game just by giving it a tighter script, it’s unnecessary bloat that does nothing but dampen the storytelling. It’s even more baffling that it has this approach when ultimately, it doesn’t really have anything to say until the Royal arc hits. It’s trying to tackle much more grandiose themes of society and rebellion, but it always feels like it’s only putting a single toe into an incredibly deep pool. Let me be clear, I don’t need the PTs to start picking apart every aspect of each corrupt system in the nation. I feel like too many critiques go down that route, especially since it does place more of an emphasis on personal conflict. But even so, it could do a lot better with acknowledging it than the “All’s well that ends well, right?” approach we’re given. That’s honestly my biggest problem with the modern series. It’s so non-commital with presenting these potentially interesting ideas that the stick it’s hitting the issues it tackles seems to be more like a damp pool noodle.
As I’m writing this, I’m noticing a major pattern between each of this game’s aspects. I really like everything about it on paper. The general theme of rebellion that has sparks throughout the whole game, that’s cool! Too bad the ways it explores that theme are pretty paper-thin, even with the social links that usually thrive with conveying themes just as well as if not better than the main plot. Having social links teach you more specific abilities to use throughout the game for a sense of growth, that’s cool! Too bad that the way they’re balanced makes them range from practically meaningless to game-breakingly powerful. Every single addition to the game’s combat, the baton passes, the guns, all of that is cool! Too bad none of the game is balanced around it and it makes even a normal playthrough one where you’re stupidly overpowered. I think this is why Persona 5 fails for me in ways that the other games in the series don’t quite as much. As much as 3 and 4 had their low points and downsides, both of those did have consistent strengths that they were able to bring out exceptionally well. For every great and fresh idea that P5 has that isn’t strictly related to its presentation, there’s something else that ends up completely undercutting it.
In a way, that’s why despite how fun it can be to dunk on Atlus and this game, I don’t like the distaste that I have for it. It does have some genuinely fascinating ideas, I can see a spark of something truly spectacular trapped inside of this. The Royal arc proves this, it’s a fantastic piece of work that’s only weaknesses are the foundation that it’s built upon. If Atlus really is capable of being a tour de force in video game storytelling and can capitalize on the strengths of Royal’s writing, then Persona 6 could be the first game in the series that I really like without any caveats. All I need is proof that modern Atlus has that bite in its narratives, which it’s mostly consistently proven to not have over this decade. I want to believe that Atlus can pull through, and bring us one last surprise…
(Also maybe don’t have a prominent party member that plays into every single autism stereotype in the book at maximum capacity with the core point being “ooh she’s such a quirky gamer girl!” Cool? Cool.)
Being ported to everything doesn’t save the fact that the game is mid.
This review contains spoilers
I've played this game twice, and the more time passes, the more I realize that the story and everything surrounding it is honestly kinda doo doo balls.
Persona 5 is a game that tries to paint itself as being progressive and forward thinking, but ultimately just ends up becoming reactionary in the proccess. Well, I would say try, but it really doesn't. The game kinda namedrops some key words like "rebellion" and "opression", but it never really goes anywhere with it beyond "man it's kinda fucked up how that one evil guy is doing that one evil thing we gotta kick his ass." It's not a sentiment I necessarily disagree with, but I honestly just find it to be really shallow, and not interesting enough to make a 90+ hour long game out of. By the end of vanilla, good old Yaldy is spouting off some buzzwords about the "collective unconscious" or whatever, and my eyes are just rolling into the back of my head because this is the third time in a row Hashino has done this shit. It's probably even worse in Royal's 3rd semester, as the Phantom Thieves finally cement their role as the secret defenders of the status quo. Welp, there goes all of the borderline nonexistent messaging and thematic structure built over the last ~90 hours!
Beyond that, this game undercuts itself in multiple other ways. My favorite example of this first arc of the game. Basically there's a predatory teacher in relationships with his high school students, so you fuck him up and make him suffer for his crimes. This stance and message the game pushes is completely contradicted by the fact that this game lets you date one of the school's OTHER(???) predatory teachers relatively soon afterwards. Not only that, but it then takes Ann (one of the abuse victims) and dresses her up in a dominatrix fit for the rest of the entire game. The worst part is that she doesn't even have agency over wearing it either. I've seen some people pass this off as "reclaiming her sexuality" but just like, no. The game evidently doesn't take her seriously, as it makes an incessant amount of creepy ass jokes about it. I don't care if you throw some 12 hour long YouTube video at me, I'm not buying that shit. All I'm gonna say is that Epstein would've been all over this game.
On the topic of the characters, they suck so much dude. Persona 5 might have one of the most bland casts I've ever seen in a JRPG. As said before, this game is like 100 hours long, and I've played it twice. So, when I tell you that I genuinely can't think of anything remotley compelling about any of these characters, I mean it, all of them. Persona 5 also continues the awful trend of hiding key character moments and development (lol) behind optional social links. The worst part is that because they're optional, they can't be a part of the main story in nearly any capacity. The weird thing about this is that ATLUS nailed this balance extremely well in Persona 3, so seeing them completely unlearn it during Persona 4, and then continue to double down on it in Persona 5 is just absolutely bizzare to me. Witnout fail, the cast is also extremely annoying. Sure, Akechi might secretly be some "uber complex flawed character" or whatever, but that motherfucker sounds like a 15 year old on a message board trying to talk like Sephiroth. Like you cannot be asking me to take his ass seriously.
Okay, so I gave this game a 6/10. What's up with that?
In a cruel twist of fate, just about everything else in this game is pretty much great. From the frenetic fast paced combat, to the music, to the striking art style, it's all there. Admittedly, there's some pretty good reasons people don't shut up about this game, and I get it. I know I talked some mad shit about Yaldy and Maruki earlier, but they do genuinely have some very good fights that I absolutely adore, and Maruki's dungeon is fantastic. An awful story can only really dampen my experience with a game so much if the act of playing it is reminiscent of having heroin getting shot straight into my veins. If you were ever wondering why I played this game twice, this is it.
At the end of the day, Persona 5 strikes me as a game that doesn't really fully believe or commit to anything. It's almost as if ATLUS made a really good JRPG, but forgot that they were also supposed to be writing a story for it. It kinda strikes me as one of those visual novels where some really crazy shit happens, but they do the whole dramatic sing and dance of "oooohh this is what it means to live" so people just kinda get tricked into thinking it's good. Clearly it worked in this game's case, since there's legions of 15 year olds willing to sell their soul to this game. And you know what? That's fine. If I was 15 years old, I'd probably think this game is the shit too.
Persona 5 is a game that tries to paint itself as being progressive and forward thinking, but ultimately just ends up becoming reactionary in the proccess. Well, I would say try, but it really doesn't. The game kinda namedrops some key words like "rebellion" and "opression", but it never really goes anywhere with it beyond "man it's kinda fucked up how that one evil guy is doing that one evil thing we gotta kick his ass." It's not a sentiment I necessarily disagree with, but I honestly just find it to be really shallow, and not interesting enough to make a 90+ hour long game out of. By the end of vanilla, good old Yaldy is spouting off some buzzwords about the "collective unconscious" or whatever, and my eyes are just rolling into the back of my head because this is the third time in a row Hashino has done this shit. It's probably even worse in Royal's 3rd semester, as the Phantom Thieves finally cement their role as the secret defenders of the status quo. Welp, there goes all of the borderline nonexistent messaging and thematic structure built over the last ~90 hours!
Beyond that, this game undercuts itself in multiple other ways. My favorite example of this first arc of the game. Basically there's a predatory teacher in relationships with his high school students, so you fuck him up and make him suffer for his crimes. This stance and message the game pushes is completely contradicted by the fact that this game lets you date one of the school's OTHER(???) predatory teachers relatively soon afterwards. Not only that, but it then takes Ann (one of the abuse victims) and dresses her up in a dominatrix fit for the rest of the entire game. The worst part is that she doesn't even have agency over wearing it either. I've seen some people pass this off as "reclaiming her sexuality" but just like, no. The game evidently doesn't take her seriously, as it makes an incessant amount of creepy ass jokes about it. I don't care if you throw some 12 hour long YouTube video at me, I'm not buying that shit. All I'm gonna say is that Epstein would've been all over this game.
On the topic of the characters, they suck so much dude. Persona 5 might have one of the most bland casts I've ever seen in a JRPG. As said before, this game is like 100 hours long, and I've played it twice. So, when I tell you that I genuinely can't think of anything remotley compelling about any of these characters, I mean it, all of them. Persona 5 also continues the awful trend of hiding key character moments and development (lol) behind optional social links. The worst part is that because they're optional, they can't be a part of the main story in nearly any capacity. The weird thing about this is that ATLUS nailed this balance extremely well in Persona 3, so seeing them completely unlearn it during Persona 4, and then continue to double down on it in Persona 5 is just absolutely bizzare to me. Witnout fail, the cast is also extremely annoying. Sure, Akechi might secretly be some "uber complex flawed character" or whatever, but that motherfucker sounds like a 15 year old on a message board trying to talk like Sephiroth. Like you cannot be asking me to take his ass seriously.
Okay, so I gave this game a 6/10. What's up with that?
In a cruel twist of fate, just about everything else in this game is pretty much great. From the frenetic fast paced combat, to the music, to the striking art style, it's all there. Admittedly, there's some pretty good reasons people don't shut up about this game, and I get it. I know I talked some mad shit about Yaldy and Maruki earlier, but they do genuinely have some very good fights that I absolutely adore, and Maruki's dungeon is fantastic. An awful story can only really dampen my experience with a game so much if the act of playing it is reminiscent of having heroin getting shot straight into my veins. If you were ever wondering why I played this game twice, this is it.
At the end of the day, Persona 5 strikes me as a game that doesn't really fully believe or commit to anything. It's almost as if ATLUS made a really good JRPG, but forgot that they were also supposed to be writing a story for it. It kinda strikes me as one of those visual novels where some really crazy shit happens, but they do the whole dramatic sing and dance of "oooohh this is what it means to live" so people just kinda get tricked into thinking it's good. Clearly it worked in this game's case, since there's legions of 15 year olds willing to sell their soul to this game. And you know what? That's fine. If I was 15 years old, I'd probably think this game is the shit too.
Shin Megami Tensei fans when you say that your favorite Atlus game is Persona 5 instead of something like Majin Tensei released in 1994 for the Super Famicom (Japan only):
https://imgur.com/gallery/C2GCJHA
https://imgur.com/gallery/C2GCJHA
The game is very good, yes. You've heard all the positives by now anyways (in case you missed it, I'm talking about soundtrack, artstyle, characters, gameplay and level design), so I'm just gonna mention the small things that keep a very solid JRPG from being a 10/10 in my books.
The most apparent flaw in the game in my opinion is the pacing and how the story sometimes unnescessarily drags on just for the sake of padding the game's length. Sometimes the dialogue goes on for ages, just to resolve a matter that could've been solved in two or three sentences. Oh well.
Now the next issue is how the developers treat the Royal-only girl Kasumi Yoshizawa. Unlike many others, I don't believe that she feels shoehorned into the story and never overstays her welcome. Of course she's going to get screentime, but that's because she's one of the main additions to Royal and NEEDS that screentime to shine and stand out among the rest of the cast. Like I said, this wasn't an issue for me, but rather how they integrated her into the gameplay. I'm not going to spoil anything specific here, but I'll just say that she unfortunately joins very late in the story and you can't use her in your party any earlier. Really a weird choice if you advertise her so much, feels like Atlus just didn't bother enough to rewrite the story to include her earlier, since that would be very possible given the in-game circumstances.
With the main complaints out of the way, there isn't really a lot I could list as a negative. Atleast not enough for me to substract a whole star. As I mentioned in the beginning, the game is really good and the third semester in one of the best written arcs in the franchise, so I'd recommend anyone to play through this game atleast for one time - it doesn't matter if you've already played Persona 5 or never touched a JRPG in your life, the first playthrough of this game is magical and absolutely worth your time. Thanks for reading :)
The most apparent flaw in the game in my opinion is the pacing and how the story sometimes unnescessarily drags on just for the sake of padding the game's length. Sometimes the dialogue goes on for ages, just to resolve a matter that could've been solved in two or three sentences. Oh well.
Now the next issue is how the developers treat the Royal-only girl Kasumi Yoshizawa. Unlike many others, I don't believe that she feels shoehorned into the story and never overstays her welcome. Of course she's going to get screentime, but that's because she's one of the main additions to Royal and NEEDS that screentime to shine and stand out among the rest of the cast. Like I said, this wasn't an issue for me, but rather how they integrated her into the gameplay. I'm not going to spoil anything specific here, but I'll just say that she unfortunately joins very late in the story and you can't use her in your party any earlier. Really a weird choice if you advertise her so much, feels like Atlus just didn't bother enough to rewrite the story to include her earlier, since that would be very possible given the in-game circumstances.
With the main complaints out of the way, there isn't really a lot I could list as a negative. Atleast not enough for me to substract a whole star. As I mentioned in the beginning, the game is really good and the third semester in one of the best written arcs in the franchise, so I'd recommend anyone to play through this game atleast for one time - it doesn't matter if you've already played Persona 5 or never touched a JRPG in your life, the first playthrough of this game is magical and absolutely worth your time. Thanks for reading :)
Sou rigoroso com JRPG pois raramente jogo, mas este aqui é uma obra-prima. Nunca entendi por que tanto se falava de P5 e agora entendo, se passei 1min entediado ou indiferente nas minhas 100h de jogo, foi muito.
O gameplay é muito divertido e viciante. A narrativa é lenta, mas no bom sentido, não tem pressa em contar sua história e principalmente apresentar seus personagens que são carismáticos e bem construídos (Futaba já mora no meu ❤️), junte sua OST super cativante e temos um game com uma vibe sempre empolgante, onde você joga o dia todo e mal vê o tempo passar.
De longe o melhor que joguei em 2022.
ALGUMAS OBSERVAÇÕES DEPOIS DE FINALIZAR
• Platinado 💯🏆
• YOU'LL NEVER SEE IT COOMIIIIIING 🖤❤️
• Epílogo (Royal Palace) agrega muito.
• SHOWTIME ATTACKS são muito bons, um melhor que o outro.
• BY THE MYRIAD TRUTHS!
• Impressão minha ou o boss do Palácio Espacial é muito mais DIFÍCIL e APELÃO que qualquer outro?
• New Game Plus poderia ser melhor hein?!
• As músicas disso aqui simplesmente formam o Exodia, absurdo de boas.
• Enfrentei uma Shadow com o formato de pênis, juro que não estou louco (Mara).
• NÃO TOQUE NOS POWER RANGERS DA FUTABA, INARI!!! 😡😡😡
O gameplay é muito divertido e viciante. A narrativa é lenta, mas no bom sentido, não tem pressa em contar sua história e principalmente apresentar seus personagens que são carismáticos e bem construídos (Futaba já mora no meu ❤️), junte sua OST super cativante e temos um game com uma vibe sempre empolgante, onde você joga o dia todo e mal vê o tempo passar.
De longe o melhor que joguei em 2022.
ALGUMAS OBSERVAÇÕES DEPOIS DE FINALIZAR
• Platinado 💯🏆
• YOU'LL NEVER SEE IT COOMIIIIIING 🖤❤️
• Epílogo (Royal Palace) agrega muito.
• SHOWTIME ATTACKS são muito bons, um melhor que o outro.
• BY THE MYRIAD TRUTHS!
• Impressão minha ou o boss do Palácio Espacial é muito mais DIFÍCIL e APELÃO que qualquer outro?
• New Game Plus poderia ser melhor hein?!
• As músicas disso aqui simplesmente formam o Exodia, absurdo de boas.
• Enfrentei uma Shadow com o formato de pênis, juro que não estou louco (Mara).
• NÃO TOQUE NOS POWER RANGERS DA FUTABA, INARI!!! 😡😡😡
Brown Bricks eat burger everyday to get better personality.
CW for a very brief mention of self-harm toward the end of the “Deja Vu” segment
Okay please bear with me until we get to the hook here I promise I'm working my way up to something. (this writeup is about fanfiction)
I’ve got a flavor of depression called dysthymia, which is just like, when you’re just kind of a little bit depressed all the time, ambiently, forever. I had more immediately obvious emotional issues and more attention-grabbing family members growing up, and ours wasn’t the kind of family that acknowledged this sort of thing in the first place really, so this went undiagnosed until I essentially shut down altogether as a functioning person during my first year of college and had to drop out of school and move back in with my parents. Even then, I didn’t get consistent treatment for a few years after that. BUT, my mental health has never been as bad as it was that year, real low point for me.
A cool thing that can happen when you’re dysthymic though, is that you can still be prone to the big, fuck you depressive episodes that characterize major depressive disorder. This is called Double Depression when it happens, that’s the official medical terminology, which IS very funny. So that happens to me in a way that lasts for a couple-ish weeks usually maybe two or three times a year.
Alright so PERSONA 5 is IMO a like, vacuous game. Completely empty of themes and ideas at best, contradictory of its purported ideas and deeply mean-spirited at its worst. Fails entirely to capitalize on almost every seed it plants, uninterested in plumbing the depths of almost any of its characters in an interesting way beyond their introductions (and sometimes even during them). (Don’t argue with me in the comments if you think this game rocks that’s not what we’re doing here just keep reading I promise I’m doing a thing here.) But it IS a compelling game in your hands. I’m by no means immune to the charms of Persona, even if my feelings towards the modern iteration of the series are lukewarm. I played Persona 5 on its initial release and didn’t particularly enjoy myself. I caught Royal on a MASSIVE discount sometime since it came out but never really had it in mind to play it until one of my mutuals did a few months ago and was tweeting a lot about it, in such a way that reminded me of the kind of fun there is to find in these games if you’re willing to take them as they are and not as you wish they were. So right at the end of August I booted up Royal to see if I could find that. And I did! I’ve had a pretty good time with it over the last couple months. If nothing else, Persona 5 is an incredibly smooth game to play at all times, and Royal even more so. Goes down easy.
Then at the beginning of September my brain just like completely fell apart. I entered the worst depressive episode I’ve experienced in over a decade, since that time when I was 18 that I mentioned earlier. All kinds of weird brain shit that I haven’t had problems with for years and years has been coming back to me and it’s been hitting hard. And I don’t even know why! No apparent trigger. And it’s still happening! This is a very long time for me to be like this dude it sucks. I can’t get in with my doctor until the end of November, hopefully we can figure something out man idk.
All of this is to say that Persona 5 became a weird thing that I have clung to for these last couple of months; the game’s looping structure makes it easy to indulge in “one more day” thinking, punctuated by long stints of very relaxing, methodical dungeon crawling. There’s a rhythm to it, and enough depth that I could really sit down and crack the thing open to engage in the challenge content after a certain point. Max out the compendium, all that shit. As much engagement as you want it to be, but never any friction.
I also, have read, uh, somewhere between 6 and 7 million words of Persona 5 fanfiction since the beginning of September. I think this game’s cast, widely, is pretty easily my favorite in the series, or the IDEAS of them are. As I’ve mentioned, I think almost everyone in this game is an incredibly compelling SKETCH of a person, and that Atlus has almost across the board fudged the details in coloring them in. So I was like damn I bet there’s some good fanfic for this game. And there is, of course. P5 is one of the most popular games around, especially with the kinds of people who write fanfiction. And bro I sleep like four hours a night at absolute maximum right now, I have needed a lot of shit to get me through those hours without thinking about, y’know, anything else. So that’s what I’ve been doing with almost every moment of free time for ten weeks.
I didn’t initially intend to review Persona 5 here – I think it’s a game that’s been pretty thoroughly discussed over the years - but I thought it might be fun to recommend some of the fics that I’ve enjoyed during this very bizarre chapter of my life. Of course, in talking about what I like so much about a lot of these stories, there’s going to be a lot of natural comparison to how the game handles parallel ideas, so evaluation of the game is going to be peppered throughout. This isn’t a comprehensive review by any means, just a small sampling of stuff that I’ve read recently and stuff that’s really stuck with me since I’ve started my reading. Most if not all of these should be tagged pretty well and a lot of them are good about giving content warnings at the top of individual chapters if there’s tough shit in them. I didn’t include anything here that’s just porn but a few of these have sex in them at some point, AO3 has a whole rating system, you can’t miss it if you don’t want to see that stuff. Okay so let’s get into it:
Actually, I have to disclose first that I fuckin hate when people have personas talk to their persona users inside their heads, nobody has ever done it in a way that I didn’t think sucked ass but it IS gonna be in some of these and I think those stories are cool anyway but bro I need you to know I don’t condone that practice okay now we can get to it.
This is a very small sample size of only a few fics that I quite liked off the top of my head, in no particular order:
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One Year On Probation by FlOrangey 44 chapters, 214k words, last updated June 2020
My favorite kind of fanfiction for stories like this has always been the sort that removes the supernatural elements. My favorites of these stories are always conduits for human drama, so foregrounding that sort of thing always appeals to me. A project like One Year On Probation is especially interesting, because where most fics that I’ve read that do stuff like this will put characters and perhaps versions of their canon conflicts into mundane scenarios (including some I’ll recommend further down), this one aims to retell the events of the game, just, without the superpower bits.
It makes for an interesting thought exercise when you take a scenario that is to some degree about offering powerless people the power fantasy of being able to exert influence over abusive elements of society that are otherwise untouchable and take that catharsis away from them. But if we’re still adapting the narrative beats, how do these kids handle the people hurting them? I think FlOrangey does a good job here of not letting those answers feel cheap or easy, especially not for the Madarame story, which this fic, seemingly long abandoned (dropped for two years in 2018, a few chapters in 2020, and nothing since), comes so close to finishing that you can see the outline of where it’s going.
The removal of the metaverse has other ripple effects – characters tied closely to it lead very different, more stable lives, particularly Futaba and Akechi. Without the narrative out of just showing it to him, Yusuke’s wake-up call is longer and colder. Morgana is, obviously, a regular cat. And this interpretation of Joker is just a guy tryin’ to get by, dealing with a pretty bad anxiety disorder that he’s at least developed since the events leading up to the game, but it’s implied he could have exhibited signs of earlier. Author’s notes suggest that FlOrangey is writing that stuff from experience and it does read like it. While that becomes a big part of Akira’s character here, and you might expect it to given his circumstances, he’s not like, a conduit for trauma, he’s a pretty roundly written guy.
These are very warm iterations of these characters without feeling like they rely much on you being a fan of the game to like them, which is always nice. You can tell it was being written with that really long plan in mind, and Makoto, despite being essentially the secondary main character by the time the fic stops, is definitely the character who feels the most like “ah damn yeah I bet this version of her would really go places if this writer had gotten the chance to get to the parts of the story where she’s center stage.” As it is though I don’t think this fic feels terribly incomplete, even if it does abruptly end like 9/10ths of the way through the second part of a like eight part story. It’s very long as it is, 215k words, and there’s a lot of good shit here to dig into.
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Black & Red by Alexilulu, 18 chapters, 126k words, last updated April 2020
Another one loosely adapting the events of the game that gets cut off midway through the Madarame story arc, Black & Red’s method of shuffling the story around is by being entirely from Haru’s perspective and moving her whole central story up to take place during and after the initial story arc of the game. It’s nice to have a story that makes the main character transgender but doesn’t have her constantly thinking about that, tbh, even though I have read other fics where trans characters ARE thinking about it all the time and that can be good too, I like diversity in my t-slur representation. It’s also an interesting choice to make her the perspective character and putting the focus on her burgeoning relationship with Joker without actually having her get involved with the Phantom Thieves.
There’s not NOTHING else happening but this fic is pretty heavily focused on Haru and Joker coming together, and a big part of that early on is them being edgy teens smoking on the high school roof in the rain, him clearly wanting to let down the walls of his goofy Dangerous Delinquent persona that he’s built up so people don’t approach him and he can be a Phantom Thief in relative solitude, while also trying to keep her at arm’s length because obviously being a Phantom Thief is scary and dangerous, and Alexilulu does interpret their adventures more violently than average, and without the conveniences of extreme healing magic a lot of writers adapt from the games. This could all be fine on its own but it reflects really well on Haru’s character – Alexilulu really emphasizes an anger that is present in the game but never really explored. As someone who is in a genuinely horrific abuse situation, having it made pretty obviously clear that she’s being fucked around with by one of the very few people she’s been able to open up to leads to a lot of really good scenes of the teens Sitting Around And Talking About How Fucked Up They Are which is one of my favorite kinds of fanfic writing.
The elements of Haru’s story that are fleshed out are pitched well too – it’s easy to write her abusive fiance really over-the-top and Alexilulu occasionally rides that line but never in scenes where it really matters. Essentially too, they give Haru’s father some more, uhhh, I’ll say believable notes of humanity, without making him sympathetic (I think he is actually more evil than he is in the game, on a personal level, by the time he makes his final appearance in this story). Elements of Haru’s family history and social link story also get folded in here and complicated in ways that the game simply isn’t interested in and they all make for a richer personal tableau; there was a lot of meat left on this bone, should the fic have continued, but given that it didn’t, it’s good that Persona 5’s inherently clean, arc-based nature got us through the one so heavily focused on the fic’s main character. There’s some sense of closure even without a resolution.
Alexilulu has written a lot of Persona 5 fics, mostly one-shots and most of them porn. I’ve read several of them and like pretty much everything I’ve read of theirs, but I might particularly also recommend What I Want to Say (Without Saying ‘I Love You’), about post-school-aged Ryuji and Ann and their nebulously defined sexual relationship as they feel like they’re kind of adrift in that ennui of being an adult with no direction and no sense of future, surrounded by peers who are Doing Stuff and Going Places (10k words) and A Garden For Traitors, two stories about Ann and Haru getting together, both short one shots, both very sweet. Alexilulu seems to have moved on from P5 writing but they did have a great voice for these characters.
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i wanna kiss your silhouette by wtfoctagon, 5 chapters, 35k words, complete
My favorite thing about fanfiction generally speaking is the way writers naturally bring out and emphasize different aspects of characters they’re writing about. Maybe someone is gonna hit a character pitch perfectly the way they’re portrayed in the original work, but I’m a lot more interested when you see people’s inclinations drawing stuff that’s already present in a character and sharpening it. Persona 5, having most of its characterization be so scattered and messy throughout, has a lot of potential for this.
wtfoctagon stages this fic as a romance between Ann and Makoto (imo an EXTREMELY underrated pairing), and it is, and it’s a really compelling one too, but it’s also a pretty thorough look at a side of Ann we don’t see much after the opening hours of the game – the one who is contemplative, keen, and empathic. The Ann in this fic is the Ann from that scene where she sees Yusuke’s painting and feels the honesty of intention behind it, and touches him with her comments, and knows intrinsically that Madarame can’t be who he says he is. This is a good look for her, and it comes through without losing the way that she is also easily flustered, easily bored, compassionate, and quietly the emotional rock of her friend group.
The dialogue is really sharp but a lot of this characterization – for both girls — comes from the prose. The narration from Ann’s perspective carries a loose, casual vibe but communicates strongly her ability to perceive every small detail about Makoto: her anger, her insecurity, her practiced way to use body language to hide herself in plain sight. Something that’s not really emphasized in Persona 5 but makes for great food for fanfiction writers is that almost any combination of main characters in that game can relate to each other on some level via their bad experiences. The specifics of their hardships don’t always align but portions of them do, and the ways people react to trauma can. Ann and Makoto both know what it is to feel small, to wish to not be seen at all, and to have that contradictory feeling of simultaneously wishing to be seen on their own terms. They both know what it is to be lonely, and to be powerless, and to be angry.
It’s also just, genuinely, a really romantic story. Lovely writing. Other good stuff by wtfoctagon includes i’m just feeling low, feeling low, a one shot where makoto and akira commiserate over their respective bad days on the roof for 1500 words, and several Tales of Berseria fics that you know I gotta shout out because I’m a huge ToB head over here. Mostly their stories are shipping fics between Magilou and Eleanor but wtfoctagon does seem to know in their heart that magilou/eleanor/velvet is a true OT3 and I respect them hugely for this. They run the gamut from real world AU stuff to stuff set during the game to an 80k word post-game story that I haven’t gotten around to but I’m saving for a rainy day. Big fan of this writer's voice.
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a storm is coming in by canticle, 6 chapters, 40k words, complete
A fic that takes place the summer after the events of the game, where Ryuji goes to visit Akira for the entire break. It’s evident that Ryuji is depressed and that he’s avoiding SOMETHING that’s happened in Tokyo since the game ended but it takes a long time for Canticle to get around to disclosing that stuff. This is a very slow-paced fic, very much more about soaking in the vibe of a bad summer than the catharsis of a horrific revelation. The revelation isn’t horrific either, it’s really mundane, and so is the depiction of Ryuji’s depression. He’s just really tired, he doesn’t want to do stuff, he avoids talking to his friends. His time with Akira is fun, sort of, but it’s also a form of harmful escapism, even as they figure out a routine, and even as things get……….a little bit homo.
Not to open THIS can of worms, I PROMISE I don’t mean anything by this I’m JUST more familiar with the girl shit, but the whole romance carries the vibe of a soft yuri, one where all the moves on both ends are hesitant. The most like, romantically forward thing anyone does before they’re kissing is when Ryuji starts sad wearing the hoodie that Akira wore when he was pretending to be dead during Persona 5, without commenting on it, which could be perceived as a power play but could also just be like, a weird thing to do. Mostly it’s a lot of increasingly gay cuddling, falling asleep with his forehead pressed against Akira’s which is NORMAL FOR BROS. When you’re sad it’s normal to wear your bro’s hoodie all week.
There’s a bit in this fic where Akira helps him re-bleach his hair, and afterwards Ryuji can’t stop thinking about how he LOOKS the same as he always does after he does his own hair but he FEELS different because it was Akira putting his hands on him and it was like, in a way Akira marking him and holy SHIT dude that energy is nowhere else in this thing. Just the tiniest hint of the kind of shit I like but I was hooting and hollering. I know I can get that elsewhere in P5 fandom and I can probably even get it from canticle but to do so in an m/m situation you pretty much HAVE to be willing to let one of the boys be Akechi and I am simply NOT INTERESTED.
This one’s really pleasant though. Eventually all the other Phantom Thieves come to hang out and Ryuji gets scenes specifically with Ann and Makoto, who are always good characters to pair him with. Ryuji and Makoto are another one of those duos who Just Work that basically nobody is really tapping into, but when people do it rocks. BUT HEY HOW ABOUT ANOTHER ONE ABOUT AKIRA DYEING RYUJI’S HAIR BUT THAT’S THE ENTIRE THING THIS TIME
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Dyeing To Kiss You by Mysecretfanmoments and Suggestivescribe, one shot, 9k words
This one really only aims to be a romantic moment of an initial getting together between Ryuji and Akira, and it does that well, but there’s more meat on the bone than I might have expected going into it. Both boys are really well characterized, especially when they’re being described from the other one’s perspective (something I always like to see, I’m realizing as I write about these various fics), and there are little hints at the deeper layers to each of them – specifics about Ryuji’s relationship with his mom, hints at Akira’s sensitivities about how much living at Leblanc actually would suck and how fragile his pre-Tokyo relationships turned out to be.
But the really great shit here IS the stuff centered specifically on the romance. Ryuji only realizing his feelings are romantic like forty minutes into being actively aroused by his buddy having a degree of intimate control over him while they go through the steps to bleach his hair really just rules, and when things to escalate to acting and, later, talking, the authors do a good job at keeping Ryuji sounding gruff and inarticulate without making him sound stupid or cartoonish, which is something a lot of writers struggle with for him and characters like him.
Likewise I think the authors are really great at just like, describing the sensation of touching? Of how good it can feel to touch someone and be touched by them in an uncomplicated way, especially when it’s in places that people don’t normally touch each other (i’m not even talking about sex stuff!), and the sense of romance is palpable without omitting things like pauses to negotiate how they want to go about stuff once they are going. This kind of writing isn’t easy to do as well as they’ve done it here but they make it LOOK easy which is about the highest compliment I can think to give.
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The Lonely Fortune Teller’s Club by petaldancing, one shot, 14k words
I have found that other than the shockingly high number of Joker/Iwai fics, there really aren’t very many out there that focus on the adult cast members of Persona 5, and even fewer that are like, actually very good lol. Takemi and Kawakami and Iwai to a lesser extent are often PRESENT because so many stories try to adapt the events of the game and those three have prominent early roles in a logical progression of the story, and they’re well-liked characters for sure, but it’s rare to really get to see these people as actual people beyond the limits of what the game gave them, and even rarer to get inside their heads. This is one of the few stories I’ve seen that’s not porn that’s focused on Chihaya and I think petaldancing does very well by her.
Chihaya is one of my favorite confidants in Persona 5, kind of existing in a middle space of age and maturity between the teenaged characters and the rest of the adult cast. As with most of them, her story gets a little goofy in the details and is let down thematically and in its resolution by Being In Persona 5 but in the broad strokes I think it’s pretty affecting and she’s characterized in a really charismatic way throughout it.
This story takes place in the year after the game, and manages to make Chihaya getting a job working the desk at Takemi’s clinic seem entirely un-contrived, which is a genuine feat, and while this is a story about the two of them making a romantic connection, and it indulges in my least favorite romance story structure (a long tease out and then ending with the acknowledgment of feelings when it feels like there are a lot of depths to plumb still, were the actual relationship to be explored), the story really reads more as a character study on Chihaya, a what-if story about what her life would logically have to look like after she blows it up at the end of her social link, which was a good thing that she was right to do, but did leave her at a crossroads that the structure of a Persona game is unprepared to address. In that regard I think petaldancing does everything right here; they nail the voice, they nail the beats, they say what they want to say and get out in a relatively succinct little story.
Petaldancing has one other Persona story called But Even Iron Trembles, another long oneshot from Hifumi’s perspective in a version of the game events where her mother has a full-blown palace that the Phantom Thieves draw themselves into in the time between stealing Kunikazu Okumura’s heart and the press conference he calls to resolve that story arc. It’s got a backgrounded Hifumi/Makoto romance built entirely off of the supposition that those two would hit it off and start hanging out after that scene in the game where you might run into Hifumi while hanging out with Makoto in the neighborhood with all the bookstores, and that stuff is good, but it’s also the best fleshing out of Hifumi’s family life and her feelings about her situation that I’ve read, which there aren’t MANY of (Hifumi another character I would have expected to be more popular with fanfic people tbh) but like, I’ve tried them all lol. So I recommend that too.
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Fate Written Into Stone by KindredTea, 24 of 26 planned chapters at time of writing, 394k words, ongoing haha oops nevermind I’ve been writing this document for so long that she actually finished the fic while I was working on it, 26/26 chapters, 405k words
This one feels a little bit like cheating because at first glance it’s much more a Persona 3 fic than a Persona 5 one. I AM about to spoil Persona 3, which due to its upcoming remake is presumably about to get a lot of first timers but the premise of this story is like entirely predicated upon the ending of that game so if you care that’s the heads up.
FWIS takes place ten years after P3 and three after P5, opening with an extremely frail, malnourished, 28-year-old Kotone Shiomi (the official name for Persona 3’s female player character) being found on the side of the road by Ann from Persona 5, and it’s immediately clear to the reader that this is not a coincidence, but that Kotone, who by all means should not be alive, was placed deliberately in Ann’s path by someone who knows the identities of all of the Phantom Thieves and is deliberately fucking with them. It doesn’t take long for the Thieves to find out Kotone is a Persona Protagonist and take her under their wing, but it also doesn’t take long for all the guys from Persona 3 to figure out that she’s mysteriously alive and also presumably not in place over the Great Seal, which does herald the return of the Dark Hour and apathy syndrome and all that other bad shit from Persona 3, so very quickly the questions are raised of How Did This Happen, Why Did This Happen, Does Kotone Need To Sacrifice Herself Again, Are We Willing To Seek Another Solution While Things Fall Apart, and also Is Kotone A Human Person?? We did, after all, cremate her body ten years ago.
That describes maybe the first like, six? Chapters of this story, which is dense with plot and is constantly twisting and turning with big new ideas and huge swerves, which I mean in a complimentary way. I usually find really plot-heavy stuff that’s entirely original kind of boring or unconvincing when it’s trying to build out the existing supernatural elements of the work, but KindredTea has it down pat dude. She’s doing a ton of stuff in this fic that feels like it fits right into the shared world of these games but more importantly has kept me on the hook for hundreds of thousands of words beyond a desire to get to the next set of character interactions.
Those are great too, though, don’t get me wrong. KindredTea makes a fascinating Kotone here; it’s not unusual to interpret this character as one who wears a mask of really overt cheerfulness to cover some combination of depression or anger or loneliness (she is the protagonist of Persona 3 after all lol, but also dialogue options in the game support this) but KT’s Kotone is eventually fleshed out into someone who WAS like that as a kid, grew into genuinely being cheerful and fulfilled by her experience in Persona 3, and is now faced with the dilemma of having to choose to die again, alone, and confused, and without the support of the people who she loves dearly, all of whom feel really differently about her after she’s been dead for ten years and they’ve done varying degrees of moving on.
All of the P3 cast’s characterizations kick ass in this fic, and they all respond differently to the idea that some version of Kotone may be alive, but the real star of probably the entire story is Yukari. In KindredTea’s telling of Persona 3, Yukari and Kotone were a couple, and she both had the hardest time moving on from Kotone’s death and the most virulent reaction to the idea that she could be alive again (and also may need to die again too). Yukari is a character who is in a lot of ways defined by grief – throughout all of the games she appears in, and I think KindredTea does a really great job of not simplifying the complex weirdness of this scenario for her.
I lied when I said she’s the star though the real star in my heart is SAE NIIJIMA, a character who I think is very cool, like at least 60% because I think she’s cool LOOKING, but another one who I think is just really underserved by the Persona 5 Fanfic Community. Sae is often treated as a cartoonishly evil character, with people just like grossly overdoing her mistreatment of Makoto (I think the way Sae is abusive in the game is actually generally well handled – passive aggressively, mostly quietly screw-turning in a way that just never really lets up, it’s so normal – just not very present due to the way the game is structured), or, in works set post-game, she’s usually just Nice. And that’s fine for what it is I guess; these stories are rarely ABOUT Sae, but I guess I just wish that they were! She’s cool! You could do a lot with her! And guess what mother fuckers FWIS does! Sae may be a good person now but she’s also portrayed as deeply lonely here, someone who turned her career around to suit her idealism but that didn’t like, solve any of her personal problems, it just made her a Good Person. She’s still a woman ambiguously in her late 20s with no social life because she had one friend who was really a coworker she didn’t like and he’s a dead teenager. When she meets Kotone she kind of throws herself at her, romantically, but also because they both immediately pick up that the other is really aching for a connection with someone their own age who gets what they’re feeling. And this new, kinder, gentler Sae isn’t a different person either; some of the best writing around her comes from when she gets hurt or other people fuck up around her and she reflexively snaps into the cold, mean personality she carried in Persona 5. Easier than being hurt again, easier than admitting that you can be suckered into feeling so bad about people leaving you, again.
I haven’t mentioned that the other pillar of this fic is the long-term romantic relationship between Makoto and Ann? And it’s great? This story is technically a sequel to two fanfictions KindredTea previously wrote, Whim of Rebellion, a huge oneshot following Makoto and Ann figuring their shit out over the entire course of P5, and I didn’t compromise just for the love, which does something similar for P3, intercut with scenes of Yukari grieving Kotone in the year following her death. All of these stories are good, but I do think FWIS is the crown jewel here (and it even adapts the P3 portions of I didn’t compromise late in its run). KindredTea is a deft plotter, and has come up with a really fun premise and multiple really fun twists to go along with it, but I think her biggest strength as a writer is how good she is at understated character writing. It’s an underrated skill in fanfic writing to be able to say a lot with a little, or to strongly communicate what characters think and feel without coming out with it, but KT’s got that down hard. There’s a bit in chapter 8 of this fic that I’ve shown like four people, two of whom don’t even know what Persona is, I just can’t stop thinking about it. Good fic. I like it. I still need to read the last six chapters lol but I really want to post this writeup at some point.
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Deja Vu by Daxiefraxie and JaneTheNya, 101 chapters at time of writing, 645k words, ongoing
There’s a somewhat popular subgenre of video game fanfiction called New Game + fics, where the main character is forced, usually by some supernatural means, to relive the events of the game with all of their memories and usually all of their powers or abilities or whatever that they had at the end of the story, as if they were experiencing a new game plus of their story but like, y’know, applying the logic of that to them being a real person. The idea is usually that things will play out somehow differently, or they might try to make them play out the same way but the effects of their knowledge and power will ripple out until things go off the rails irreparably. I find this type of story to be almost uniformly uncompelling, either because the writers trying to take this format on don’t seem to really have any ideas on how they want to make the story particularly different or more interesting for having the wrinkles they’re introducing, or because the ways these experiences affect the characters going through this time travel often boil down to the subject feeling TORTURED and ANGRY about it in a very rote, juvenile sort of way, the way you think of when you’re being really mean about fan fiction.
I haven’t fucked with a lot of Persona 5 NG+ fics, largely because, having dipped my toes into a few, I’ve found my opinions to be largely validated, but in running my filters by things like “SHOW ME STORIES WITH TRANS CHARACTERS” (don’t make fun of me), Deja Vu did just keep popping up until I gave in and checked it out. Being awake all night every night means anything THIS long warrants at least a look for me. Deja Vu’s trick is that rather than the standard P5 NG+ tactic of having Joker return to the beginning of the game upon being killed by the traitor in the bad ending, the writers simply have Ren receiving packages with letters and items from a version of himself in the doomed future of a previous timeline, something that’s it’s suggested has actually happened to many Rens over hundreds of cycles. Eventually he starts seeing memories belonging to the previous Ren too, intrusively, and it’s all pretty fucked. This creates a lot of drama without making our Ren knowledgeable or powerful or out of place in his own story, and the variables that the authors introduce right off the bat and continue to introduce throughout the story, including the casts of Persona 3 and 4 (ALWAYS DICEY but it pays off here in a big way) make this plot feel like it could be anything, even when it’s still adhering fairly strictly to the tenants of Persona 5’s story arc before things do eventually fly entirely off the rails.
While I do think the balancing act that Daxiefraxie and JaneTheNya manage with their plotting is really impressive, I’m certainly personally here for the character work. There are some clear objectives in Deja Vu when it comes to how the characters are approached: the first is to make much more explicit their social vulnerabilities. Every Phantom Thief is somehow queer now, many of them are transgender in ways that profoundly affect their experiences, and disabilities and mental health issues are given serious consideration in how everyone is written throughout. The second is to emphasize the ways these kids are trauma survivors, and in this story that means pretty much universally digging a lot more deeply into the effects of their experiences than the game did, and occaionally making things explicit that were left to implication in the canon story. Everyone’s stories are tweaked, with Ann and Ryuji getting a lot more detail and time spent on their feelings during and after their spotlight arcs, Yusuke and Haru’s stories see significant additions, and Kasumi and Makoto’s are reworked entirely - Makoto’s in a way that brings her experiences more in line with the rest of the crew’s and, I think, reflects the authors’ contempt for the police as an institution (rightly lol get Makoto’s cop shit from the game OUTTA MY FACE please, every writer who makes Makoto be like “what the fuck was I thinking I am not going to be a cop actually” is a hero).
There’s certainly a way about this story where just by describing the kinds of things that happen in it, or going by its tags, or by its very careful chapter-by-chapter content warnings, that would make it easy to write it off as over the top in its darkness, as edgy, and it’s definitely true that this is pound for pound the most intense story I’ve got on this list. But it’s not about rolling around in that, and it’s certainly not GRAPHIC when it gets into this stuff. It’s a lot more about these characters opening up to each other and finding a sense of solidarity together; the hot pot scene from early in the game becomes a recurring moment in this fic, where every time a new thief joins the group they share a meal and let each other in on their baggage, give the new person space to do that or not at their discretion. There’s a lot of careful attention paid to how even though the supernatural power to force the immediate change you need IS cathartic, it doesn’t FIX you the way you might wish it did or feel like you need, and the lingering effects of everyone’s experiences are present thought the narrative.
I think maybe the best, most obvious example of all of these factors together is the way Akechi is handled. While he pretty much retains his characterization and role from the game for most of this story, and certainly he’s a sicko and a turbo murderer, there’s also an acknowledgment that he was an abused child who was groomed into being basically a serial killer by the adults who had complete authority over him?? And regardless of his own motivations and how complicit he may be and how he may feel about his own actions, a kid in that situation simply can’t be fully responsible for the person he’s become and the shit Akechi’s done. But it’s not treated in such an open-and-shut way either. He’s a lot closer to being an adult than a kid at this point, and he’s not stable, and him having been manipulated isn’t gonna un-murder Futaba’s mom. There’s an entire story arc dedicated to the problem of What To Do About Akechi, and exploring how the very large cast feel about him as individuals, with a lot of characters arguing for and against how sympathetically he should be handled, and a wide gradient of feelings across both sides of the debate. Even when things are made more severe and more explicit in Deja Vu, they’re also treated with a degree of nuance that the game isn’t interested in. Here, exploring that nuance feels like one of the driving motivators of telling this story.
Daxiefraxie told me in a comment reply that they were using both authors’ first and secondhand experiences to inform all of the hard stuff in the fic, and I think you can feel that here. There’s a lot of shit in this story that I also have firsthand experience with and while it can be an emotionally intense read, it’s never been an overwhelming one for me; this is one of the only stories I’ve read, particularly in fanfiction, that deals directly and extensively with cutting that hasn’t triggered me, which I think says something about the approach the writers have taken given the active intrusive thoughts I’ve been having over these last couple months.
So yeah idk I think the whole package is pretty good. I’m maybe ten chapters away from being caught up – I stalled out on a lot of these really long fics when I got close to current with them because I hadn’t finished the game yet, and I do think that having the events of the game in mind has been good while reading these stories. Not that all of them feel like they rely on you knowing the plot of the game to fill in gaps – I would say any good one that aims to retell the story of the game doesn’t, for example – but knowing where we came from helps me appreciate what we’re doing now. So I’m eager to go back and catch up fully. These might be my favorite takes on Ann and Haru especially.
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Aces High and Queens Wild by SpellStruck, 3 chapters at time of writing, 21k words, ongoing
This is a VERY new story, which seems to post a chapter every couple months so far, but it’s very COOL so I wanted to include it here. Will it continue? Idk. Will it finish? Who can say. But it’s got a sick opening.
There’s a popular type of story in Persona fanfic called Arcana Swaps, which uh, is what it sounds like. In the games all the important characters have a Tarot arcana associated with them which usually offer some narrative relevance to the themes of their personal stories, and in arcana swap fics the author will shuffle those arcana around, which can mean a lot of things, but always means familiar characters assuming the narrative roles of other characters in the stories. Sometimes this means also bringing with them elements of their own stories, sometimes it means pasting them into an adapted version of the original story for the arcana they’ve stepped into. If the writer is trying, or they’re good, they will still take the narrative significance of the arcanas into account when they’re writing the new stuff. Lots of ways this can play out.
So in this story our main character, our Fool, is Ann. She’s joker in this story, coming to Tokyo on a train to live with a guardian she doesn’t know after doing some kind of criminal assault that we don’t get the full details for. Her guardian is Maruki rather than Sojiro, and he is recognizably Maruki, but we get to see a side of him we don’t see in the game – his personal home, his neighborhood, his job before going to Shujin. He’s Maruki though, and he’s friendly, and welcoming, and tries to be really openly communicative with Ann. A human Morgana is the Ryuji, Yusuke is the Ann, and Madarame is the Kamoshida. That’s about as far as these early chapters take us.
It’s just really well-written, I think! I think I’m pretty on the record at this point as an Ann Liker, and to see an introspective, maybe insecure, definitely uncertain version of her trying to feel out her place in a new world is really stimulating, especially her interplay with Maruki, a type of adult she very clearly has no idea what to do with. There’s drama just pulsing through the establishing moments of this story in a way that makes me wish it was a no metaverse thing because I’m just like that BUT as it is I’m just happily waiting for whatever we get, whenever we get it. I really do hope that SpellStruck keeps posting chapters, it’s off to a sick start.
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Not Enough Time by SpaceCakes, 29 chapters, 102k words, complete
Finally, I am closing it out (more because I am tired of writing this document and want to get this thing out the door than because I have run out of Persona 5 fanfiction to talk about), with one for the heterosexuals.
This is another of my precious No Metaverse AU stories that follows a college-aged Haru who, in this telling, has managed to stave off her arranged marriage until after she finishes her university education. The story begins right at the end of her second of three years, and she’s starting to really keenly feel the time slipping away from her. The key difference between this story and canon, besides the lack of supernatural elements, is that Haru didn’t know any of the other characters in high school, and at the start of this story is only friends with Makoto, who is her ONLY friend, actually, and whom she met in college. This is a romance between Ren and Haru, and that’s good, I like the mellow but sure characterization he gets here, and think it pairs especially well with this somewhat rattled, insecure version of Haru, but I do think Haru’s internal life is the good shit in this fic.
This is a pretty grounded take on Haru’s situation, and in that sense it can be a tough read without ever becoming explicit or graphic in content. She’s a woman who has learned, desperately, how to manage the men in her life, but who knows she can’t walk that tightrope forever. She’s bargained a tiny amount of freedom from her father – single life for a couple extra years, and an apartment to live in while she’s in school – but it’s all conditional. She has to answer her phone quickly enough and often enough, she has to answer questions in a satisfying way, she has to wear the right clothes and say the right things and of course, she has to marry a man that she and her father both know is vile. Sugimura too, is a constant presence who has total power over her and knows it, constantly pushing the already paper-thin boundaries between them, held at bay more by his own ultimate disinterest in Haru as an object than by a belief that he couldn’t get away with anything he wanted to. And the moment she’s out of line all of the freedoms she’s bargained for herself as insulation from these pressures could disappear isntantly. They’re going to disappear anyway, in a year.
That’s why Haru only has one friend, and hasn’t told her about her upcoming marriage. The plan is to quietly cut contact with Makoto and assume Makoto cares a lot less about Haru than Haru does about her, not enough to really care where she went. And selling this oppressive atmosphere of resignation is what makes it feel like such a relief when Haru does start hanging out with Makoto’s friends (and not only Ren either), something that takes a surprisingly long time to happen. It’s scary, too, though. The other shoe is always ready to drop.
This is, of course, a fluffy romance story with a sex scene at the end, so things do resolve sweetly, but they don’t resolve cleanly, which is something I always appreciate about good Haru stories. And the sex scene at the end is good! Shoutouts to the heteros. See? I am a fair and balanced media consumer.
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Edit 12/17/23: Even as I have finished the game and I quickly approach the end of a couple of the spinoffs I find that my appetite for P5 fanfic hasn’t really left me, so I may turn this review into something of a living document, come back and add stuff to it as I read new things that really catch me, and I have read a couple of really good ones since I initially posted this so that first one may come soon. My hope is that this thing will be like a good pu’er tea, y’know - it’s good if you drink it right now but it will probably continue to improve with age. Thanks for reading!
Okay please bear with me until we get to the hook here I promise I'm working my way up to something. (this writeup is about fanfiction)
I’ve got a flavor of depression called dysthymia, which is just like, when you’re just kind of a little bit depressed all the time, ambiently, forever. I had more immediately obvious emotional issues and more attention-grabbing family members growing up, and ours wasn’t the kind of family that acknowledged this sort of thing in the first place really, so this went undiagnosed until I essentially shut down altogether as a functioning person during my first year of college and had to drop out of school and move back in with my parents. Even then, I didn’t get consistent treatment for a few years after that. BUT, my mental health has never been as bad as it was that year, real low point for me.
A cool thing that can happen when you’re dysthymic though, is that you can still be prone to the big, fuck you depressive episodes that characterize major depressive disorder. This is called Double Depression when it happens, that’s the official medical terminology, which IS very funny. So that happens to me in a way that lasts for a couple-ish weeks usually maybe two or three times a year.
Alright so PERSONA 5 is IMO a like, vacuous game. Completely empty of themes and ideas at best, contradictory of its purported ideas and deeply mean-spirited at its worst. Fails entirely to capitalize on almost every seed it plants, uninterested in plumbing the depths of almost any of its characters in an interesting way beyond their introductions (and sometimes even during them). (Don’t argue with me in the comments if you think this game rocks that’s not what we’re doing here just keep reading I promise I’m doing a thing here.) But it IS a compelling game in your hands. I’m by no means immune to the charms of Persona, even if my feelings towards the modern iteration of the series are lukewarm. I played Persona 5 on its initial release and didn’t particularly enjoy myself. I caught Royal on a MASSIVE discount sometime since it came out but never really had it in mind to play it until one of my mutuals did a few months ago and was tweeting a lot about it, in such a way that reminded me of the kind of fun there is to find in these games if you’re willing to take them as they are and not as you wish they were. So right at the end of August I booted up Royal to see if I could find that. And I did! I’ve had a pretty good time with it over the last couple months. If nothing else, Persona 5 is an incredibly smooth game to play at all times, and Royal even more so. Goes down easy.
Then at the beginning of September my brain just like completely fell apart. I entered the worst depressive episode I’ve experienced in over a decade, since that time when I was 18 that I mentioned earlier. All kinds of weird brain shit that I haven’t had problems with for years and years has been coming back to me and it’s been hitting hard. And I don’t even know why! No apparent trigger. And it’s still happening! This is a very long time for me to be like this dude it sucks. I can’t get in with my doctor until the end of November, hopefully we can figure something out man idk.
All of this is to say that Persona 5 became a weird thing that I have clung to for these last couple of months; the game’s looping structure makes it easy to indulge in “one more day” thinking, punctuated by long stints of very relaxing, methodical dungeon crawling. There’s a rhythm to it, and enough depth that I could really sit down and crack the thing open to engage in the challenge content after a certain point. Max out the compendium, all that shit. As much engagement as you want it to be, but never any friction.
I also, have read, uh, somewhere between 6 and 7 million words of Persona 5 fanfiction since the beginning of September. I think this game’s cast, widely, is pretty easily my favorite in the series, or the IDEAS of them are. As I’ve mentioned, I think almost everyone in this game is an incredibly compelling SKETCH of a person, and that Atlus has almost across the board fudged the details in coloring them in. So I was like damn I bet there’s some good fanfic for this game. And there is, of course. P5 is one of the most popular games around, especially with the kinds of people who write fanfiction. And bro I sleep like four hours a night at absolute maximum right now, I have needed a lot of shit to get me through those hours without thinking about, y’know, anything else. So that’s what I’ve been doing with almost every moment of free time for ten weeks.
I didn’t initially intend to review Persona 5 here – I think it’s a game that’s been pretty thoroughly discussed over the years - but I thought it might be fun to recommend some of the fics that I’ve enjoyed during this very bizarre chapter of my life. Of course, in talking about what I like so much about a lot of these stories, there’s going to be a lot of natural comparison to how the game handles parallel ideas, so evaluation of the game is going to be peppered throughout. This isn’t a comprehensive review by any means, just a small sampling of stuff that I’ve read recently and stuff that’s really stuck with me since I’ve started my reading. Most if not all of these should be tagged pretty well and a lot of them are good about giving content warnings at the top of individual chapters if there’s tough shit in them. I didn’t include anything here that’s just porn but a few of these have sex in them at some point, AO3 has a whole rating system, you can’t miss it if you don’t want to see that stuff. Okay so let’s get into it:
Actually, I have to disclose first that I fuckin hate when people have personas talk to their persona users inside their heads, nobody has ever done it in a way that I didn’t think sucked ass but it IS gonna be in some of these and I think those stories are cool anyway but bro I need you to know I don’t condone that practice okay now we can get to it.
This is a very small sample size of only a few fics that I quite liked off the top of my head, in no particular order:
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One Year On Probation by FlOrangey 44 chapters, 214k words, last updated June 2020
My favorite kind of fanfiction for stories like this has always been the sort that removes the supernatural elements. My favorites of these stories are always conduits for human drama, so foregrounding that sort of thing always appeals to me. A project like One Year On Probation is especially interesting, because where most fics that I’ve read that do stuff like this will put characters and perhaps versions of their canon conflicts into mundane scenarios (including some I’ll recommend further down), this one aims to retell the events of the game, just, without the superpower bits.
It makes for an interesting thought exercise when you take a scenario that is to some degree about offering powerless people the power fantasy of being able to exert influence over abusive elements of society that are otherwise untouchable and take that catharsis away from them. But if we’re still adapting the narrative beats, how do these kids handle the people hurting them? I think FlOrangey does a good job here of not letting those answers feel cheap or easy, especially not for the Madarame story, which this fic, seemingly long abandoned (dropped for two years in 2018, a few chapters in 2020, and nothing since), comes so close to finishing that you can see the outline of where it’s going.
The removal of the metaverse has other ripple effects – characters tied closely to it lead very different, more stable lives, particularly Futaba and Akechi. Without the narrative out of just showing it to him, Yusuke’s wake-up call is longer and colder. Morgana is, obviously, a regular cat. And this interpretation of Joker is just a guy tryin’ to get by, dealing with a pretty bad anxiety disorder that he’s at least developed since the events leading up to the game, but it’s implied he could have exhibited signs of earlier. Author’s notes suggest that FlOrangey is writing that stuff from experience and it does read like it. While that becomes a big part of Akira’s character here, and you might expect it to given his circumstances, he’s not like, a conduit for trauma, he’s a pretty roundly written guy.
These are very warm iterations of these characters without feeling like they rely much on you being a fan of the game to like them, which is always nice. You can tell it was being written with that really long plan in mind, and Makoto, despite being essentially the secondary main character by the time the fic stops, is definitely the character who feels the most like “ah damn yeah I bet this version of her would really go places if this writer had gotten the chance to get to the parts of the story where she’s center stage.” As it is though I don’t think this fic feels terribly incomplete, even if it does abruptly end like 9/10ths of the way through the second part of a like eight part story. It’s very long as it is, 215k words, and there’s a lot of good shit here to dig into.
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Black & Red by Alexilulu, 18 chapters, 126k words, last updated April 2020
Another one loosely adapting the events of the game that gets cut off midway through the Madarame story arc, Black & Red’s method of shuffling the story around is by being entirely from Haru’s perspective and moving her whole central story up to take place during and after the initial story arc of the game. It’s nice to have a story that makes the main character transgender but doesn’t have her constantly thinking about that, tbh, even though I have read other fics where trans characters ARE thinking about it all the time and that can be good too, I like diversity in my t-slur representation. It’s also an interesting choice to make her the perspective character and putting the focus on her burgeoning relationship with Joker without actually having her get involved with the Phantom Thieves.
There’s not NOTHING else happening but this fic is pretty heavily focused on Haru and Joker coming together, and a big part of that early on is them being edgy teens smoking on the high school roof in the rain, him clearly wanting to let down the walls of his goofy Dangerous Delinquent persona that he’s built up so people don’t approach him and he can be a Phantom Thief in relative solitude, while also trying to keep her at arm’s length because obviously being a Phantom Thief is scary and dangerous, and Alexilulu does interpret their adventures more violently than average, and without the conveniences of extreme healing magic a lot of writers adapt from the games. This could all be fine on its own but it reflects really well on Haru’s character – Alexilulu really emphasizes an anger that is present in the game but never really explored. As someone who is in a genuinely horrific abuse situation, having it made pretty obviously clear that she’s being fucked around with by one of the very few people she’s been able to open up to leads to a lot of really good scenes of the teens Sitting Around And Talking About How Fucked Up They Are which is one of my favorite kinds of fanfic writing.
The elements of Haru’s story that are fleshed out are pitched well too – it’s easy to write her abusive fiance really over-the-top and Alexilulu occasionally rides that line but never in scenes where it really matters. Essentially too, they give Haru’s father some more, uhhh, I’ll say believable notes of humanity, without making him sympathetic (I think he is actually more evil than he is in the game, on a personal level, by the time he makes his final appearance in this story). Elements of Haru’s family history and social link story also get folded in here and complicated in ways that the game simply isn’t interested in and they all make for a richer personal tableau; there was a lot of meat left on this bone, should the fic have continued, but given that it didn’t, it’s good that Persona 5’s inherently clean, arc-based nature got us through the one so heavily focused on the fic’s main character. There’s some sense of closure even without a resolution.
Alexilulu has written a lot of Persona 5 fics, mostly one-shots and most of them porn. I’ve read several of them and like pretty much everything I’ve read of theirs, but I might particularly also recommend What I Want to Say (Without Saying ‘I Love You’), about post-school-aged Ryuji and Ann and their nebulously defined sexual relationship as they feel like they’re kind of adrift in that ennui of being an adult with no direction and no sense of future, surrounded by peers who are Doing Stuff and Going Places (10k words) and A Garden For Traitors, two stories about Ann and Haru getting together, both short one shots, both very sweet. Alexilulu seems to have moved on from P5 writing but they did have a great voice for these characters.
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i wanna kiss your silhouette by wtfoctagon, 5 chapters, 35k words, complete
My favorite thing about fanfiction generally speaking is the way writers naturally bring out and emphasize different aspects of characters they’re writing about. Maybe someone is gonna hit a character pitch perfectly the way they’re portrayed in the original work, but I’m a lot more interested when you see people’s inclinations drawing stuff that’s already present in a character and sharpening it. Persona 5, having most of its characterization be so scattered and messy throughout, has a lot of potential for this.
wtfoctagon stages this fic as a romance between Ann and Makoto (imo an EXTREMELY underrated pairing), and it is, and it’s a really compelling one too, but it’s also a pretty thorough look at a side of Ann we don’t see much after the opening hours of the game – the one who is contemplative, keen, and empathic. The Ann in this fic is the Ann from that scene where she sees Yusuke’s painting and feels the honesty of intention behind it, and touches him with her comments, and knows intrinsically that Madarame can’t be who he says he is. This is a good look for her, and it comes through without losing the way that she is also easily flustered, easily bored, compassionate, and quietly the emotional rock of her friend group.
The dialogue is really sharp but a lot of this characterization – for both girls — comes from the prose. The narration from Ann’s perspective carries a loose, casual vibe but communicates strongly her ability to perceive every small detail about Makoto: her anger, her insecurity, her practiced way to use body language to hide herself in plain sight. Something that’s not really emphasized in Persona 5 but makes for great food for fanfiction writers is that almost any combination of main characters in that game can relate to each other on some level via their bad experiences. The specifics of their hardships don’t always align but portions of them do, and the ways people react to trauma can. Ann and Makoto both know what it is to feel small, to wish to not be seen at all, and to have that contradictory feeling of simultaneously wishing to be seen on their own terms. They both know what it is to be lonely, and to be powerless, and to be angry.
It’s also just, genuinely, a really romantic story. Lovely writing. Other good stuff by wtfoctagon includes i’m just feeling low, feeling low, a one shot where makoto and akira commiserate over their respective bad days on the roof for 1500 words, and several Tales of Berseria fics that you know I gotta shout out because I’m a huge ToB head over here. Mostly their stories are shipping fics between Magilou and Eleanor but wtfoctagon does seem to know in their heart that magilou/eleanor/velvet is a true OT3 and I respect them hugely for this. They run the gamut from real world AU stuff to stuff set during the game to an 80k word post-game story that I haven’t gotten around to but I’m saving for a rainy day. Big fan of this writer's voice.
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a storm is coming in by canticle, 6 chapters, 40k words, complete
A fic that takes place the summer after the events of the game, where Ryuji goes to visit Akira for the entire break. It’s evident that Ryuji is depressed and that he’s avoiding SOMETHING that’s happened in Tokyo since the game ended but it takes a long time for Canticle to get around to disclosing that stuff. This is a very slow-paced fic, very much more about soaking in the vibe of a bad summer than the catharsis of a horrific revelation. The revelation isn’t horrific either, it’s really mundane, and so is the depiction of Ryuji’s depression. He’s just really tired, he doesn’t want to do stuff, he avoids talking to his friends. His time with Akira is fun, sort of, but it’s also a form of harmful escapism, even as they figure out a routine, and even as things get……….a little bit homo.
Not to open THIS can of worms, I PROMISE I don’t mean anything by this I’m JUST more familiar with the girl shit, but the whole romance carries the vibe of a soft yuri, one where all the moves on both ends are hesitant. The most like, romantically forward thing anyone does before they’re kissing is when Ryuji starts sad wearing the hoodie that Akira wore when he was pretending to be dead during Persona 5, without commenting on it, which could be perceived as a power play but could also just be like, a weird thing to do. Mostly it’s a lot of increasingly gay cuddling, falling asleep with his forehead pressed against Akira’s which is NORMAL FOR BROS. When you’re sad it’s normal to wear your bro’s hoodie all week.
There’s a bit in this fic where Akira helps him re-bleach his hair, and afterwards Ryuji can’t stop thinking about how he LOOKS the same as he always does after he does his own hair but he FEELS different because it was Akira putting his hands on him and it was like, in a way Akira marking him and holy SHIT dude that energy is nowhere else in this thing. Just the tiniest hint of the kind of shit I like but I was hooting and hollering. I know I can get that elsewhere in P5 fandom and I can probably even get it from canticle but to do so in an m/m situation you pretty much HAVE to be willing to let one of the boys be Akechi and I am simply NOT INTERESTED.
This one’s really pleasant though. Eventually all the other Phantom Thieves come to hang out and Ryuji gets scenes specifically with Ann and Makoto, who are always good characters to pair him with. Ryuji and Makoto are another one of those duos who Just Work that basically nobody is really tapping into, but when people do it rocks. BUT HEY HOW ABOUT ANOTHER ONE ABOUT AKIRA DYEING RYUJI’S HAIR BUT THAT’S THE ENTIRE THING THIS TIME
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Dyeing To Kiss You by Mysecretfanmoments and Suggestivescribe, one shot, 9k words
This one really only aims to be a romantic moment of an initial getting together between Ryuji and Akira, and it does that well, but there’s more meat on the bone than I might have expected going into it. Both boys are really well characterized, especially when they’re being described from the other one’s perspective (something I always like to see, I’m realizing as I write about these various fics), and there are little hints at the deeper layers to each of them – specifics about Ryuji’s relationship with his mom, hints at Akira’s sensitivities about how much living at Leblanc actually would suck and how fragile his pre-Tokyo relationships turned out to be.
But the really great shit here IS the stuff centered specifically on the romance. Ryuji only realizing his feelings are romantic like forty minutes into being actively aroused by his buddy having a degree of intimate control over him while they go through the steps to bleach his hair really just rules, and when things to escalate to acting and, later, talking, the authors do a good job at keeping Ryuji sounding gruff and inarticulate without making him sound stupid or cartoonish, which is something a lot of writers struggle with for him and characters like him.
Likewise I think the authors are really great at just like, describing the sensation of touching? Of how good it can feel to touch someone and be touched by them in an uncomplicated way, especially when it’s in places that people don’t normally touch each other (i’m not even talking about sex stuff!), and the sense of romance is palpable without omitting things like pauses to negotiate how they want to go about stuff once they are going. This kind of writing isn’t easy to do as well as they’ve done it here but they make it LOOK easy which is about the highest compliment I can think to give.
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The Lonely Fortune Teller’s Club by petaldancing, one shot, 14k words
I have found that other than the shockingly high number of Joker/Iwai fics, there really aren’t very many out there that focus on the adult cast members of Persona 5, and even fewer that are like, actually very good lol. Takemi and Kawakami and Iwai to a lesser extent are often PRESENT because so many stories try to adapt the events of the game and those three have prominent early roles in a logical progression of the story, and they’re well-liked characters for sure, but it’s rare to really get to see these people as actual people beyond the limits of what the game gave them, and even rarer to get inside their heads. This is one of the few stories I’ve seen that’s not porn that’s focused on Chihaya and I think petaldancing does very well by her.
Chihaya is one of my favorite confidants in Persona 5, kind of existing in a middle space of age and maturity between the teenaged characters and the rest of the adult cast. As with most of them, her story gets a little goofy in the details and is let down thematically and in its resolution by Being In Persona 5 but in the broad strokes I think it’s pretty affecting and she’s characterized in a really charismatic way throughout it.
This story takes place in the year after the game, and manages to make Chihaya getting a job working the desk at Takemi’s clinic seem entirely un-contrived, which is a genuine feat, and while this is a story about the two of them making a romantic connection, and it indulges in my least favorite romance story structure (a long tease out and then ending with the acknowledgment of feelings when it feels like there are a lot of depths to plumb still, were the actual relationship to be explored), the story really reads more as a character study on Chihaya, a what-if story about what her life would logically have to look like after she blows it up at the end of her social link, which was a good thing that she was right to do, but did leave her at a crossroads that the structure of a Persona game is unprepared to address. In that regard I think petaldancing does everything right here; they nail the voice, they nail the beats, they say what they want to say and get out in a relatively succinct little story.
Petaldancing has one other Persona story called But Even Iron Trembles, another long oneshot from Hifumi’s perspective in a version of the game events where her mother has a full-blown palace that the Phantom Thieves draw themselves into in the time between stealing Kunikazu Okumura’s heart and the press conference he calls to resolve that story arc. It’s got a backgrounded Hifumi/Makoto romance built entirely off of the supposition that those two would hit it off and start hanging out after that scene in the game where you might run into Hifumi while hanging out with Makoto in the neighborhood with all the bookstores, and that stuff is good, but it’s also the best fleshing out of Hifumi’s family life and her feelings about her situation that I’ve read, which there aren’t MANY of (Hifumi another character I would have expected to be more popular with fanfic people tbh) but like, I’ve tried them all lol. So I recommend that too.
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Fate Written Into Stone by KindredTea, 24 of 26 planned chapters at time of writing, 394k words, ongoing haha oops nevermind I’ve been writing this document for so long that she actually finished the fic while I was working on it, 26/26 chapters, 405k words
This one feels a little bit like cheating because at first glance it’s much more a Persona 3 fic than a Persona 5 one. I AM about to spoil Persona 3, which due to its upcoming remake is presumably about to get a lot of first timers but the premise of this story is like entirely predicated upon the ending of that game so if you care that’s the heads up.
FWIS takes place ten years after P3 and three after P5, opening with an extremely frail, malnourished, 28-year-old Kotone Shiomi (the official name for Persona 3’s female player character) being found on the side of the road by Ann from Persona 5, and it’s immediately clear to the reader that this is not a coincidence, but that Kotone, who by all means should not be alive, was placed deliberately in Ann’s path by someone who knows the identities of all of the Phantom Thieves and is deliberately fucking with them. It doesn’t take long for the Thieves to find out Kotone is a Persona Protagonist and take her under their wing, but it also doesn’t take long for all the guys from Persona 3 to figure out that she’s mysteriously alive and also presumably not in place over the Great Seal, which does herald the return of the Dark Hour and apathy syndrome and all that other bad shit from Persona 3, so very quickly the questions are raised of How Did This Happen, Why Did This Happen, Does Kotone Need To Sacrifice Herself Again, Are We Willing To Seek Another Solution While Things Fall Apart, and also Is Kotone A Human Person?? We did, after all, cremate her body ten years ago.
That describes maybe the first like, six? Chapters of this story, which is dense with plot and is constantly twisting and turning with big new ideas and huge swerves, which I mean in a complimentary way. I usually find really plot-heavy stuff that’s entirely original kind of boring or unconvincing when it’s trying to build out the existing supernatural elements of the work, but KindredTea has it down pat dude. She’s doing a ton of stuff in this fic that feels like it fits right into the shared world of these games but more importantly has kept me on the hook for hundreds of thousands of words beyond a desire to get to the next set of character interactions.
Those are great too, though, don’t get me wrong. KindredTea makes a fascinating Kotone here; it’s not unusual to interpret this character as one who wears a mask of really overt cheerfulness to cover some combination of depression or anger or loneliness (she is the protagonist of Persona 3 after all lol, but also dialogue options in the game support this) but KT’s Kotone is eventually fleshed out into someone who WAS like that as a kid, grew into genuinely being cheerful and fulfilled by her experience in Persona 3, and is now faced with the dilemma of having to choose to die again, alone, and confused, and without the support of the people who she loves dearly, all of whom feel really differently about her after she’s been dead for ten years and they’ve done varying degrees of moving on.
All of the P3 cast’s characterizations kick ass in this fic, and they all respond differently to the idea that some version of Kotone may be alive, but the real star of probably the entire story is Yukari. In KindredTea’s telling of Persona 3, Yukari and Kotone were a couple, and she both had the hardest time moving on from Kotone’s death and the most virulent reaction to the idea that she could be alive again (and also may need to die again too). Yukari is a character who is in a lot of ways defined by grief – throughout all of the games she appears in, and I think KindredTea does a really great job of not simplifying the complex weirdness of this scenario for her.
I lied when I said she’s the star though the real star in my heart is SAE NIIJIMA, a character who I think is very cool, like at least 60% because I think she’s cool LOOKING, but another one who I think is just really underserved by the Persona 5 Fanfic Community. Sae is often treated as a cartoonishly evil character, with people just like grossly overdoing her mistreatment of Makoto (I think the way Sae is abusive in the game is actually generally well handled – passive aggressively, mostly quietly screw-turning in a way that just never really lets up, it’s so normal – just not very present due to the way the game is structured), or, in works set post-game, she’s usually just Nice. And that’s fine for what it is I guess; these stories are rarely ABOUT Sae, but I guess I just wish that they were! She’s cool! You could do a lot with her! And guess what mother fuckers FWIS does! Sae may be a good person now but she’s also portrayed as deeply lonely here, someone who turned her career around to suit her idealism but that didn’t like, solve any of her personal problems, it just made her a Good Person. She’s still a woman ambiguously in her late 20s with no social life because she had one friend who was really a coworker she didn’t like and he’s a dead teenager. When she meets Kotone she kind of throws herself at her, romantically, but also because they both immediately pick up that the other is really aching for a connection with someone their own age who gets what they’re feeling. And this new, kinder, gentler Sae isn’t a different person either; some of the best writing around her comes from when she gets hurt or other people fuck up around her and she reflexively snaps into the cold, mean personality she carried in Persona 5. Easier than being hurt again, easier than admitting that you can be suckered into feeling so bad about people leaving you, again.
I haven’t mentioned that the other pillar of this fic is the long-term romantic relationship between Makoto and Ann? And it’s great? This story is technically a sequel to two fanfictions KindredTea previously wrote, Whim of Rebellion, a huge oneshot following Makoto and Ann figuring their shit out over the entire course of P5, and I didn’t compromise just for the love, which does something similar for P3, intercut with scenes of Yukari grieving Kotone in the year following her death. All of these stories are good, but I do think FWIS is the crown jewel here (and it even adapts the P3 portions of I didn’t compromise late in its run). KindredTea is a deft plotter, and has come up with a really fun premise and multiple really fun twists to go along with it, but I think her biggest strength as a writer is how good she is at understated character writing. It’s an underrated skill in fanfic writing to be able to say a lot with a little, or to strongly communicate what characters think and feel without coming out with it, but KT’s got that down hard. There’s a bit in chapter 8 of this fic that I’ve shown like four people, two of whom don’t even know what Persona is, I just can’t stop thinking about it. Good fic. I like it. I still need to read the last six chapters lol but I really want to post this writeup at some point.
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Deja Vu by Daxiefraxie and JaneTheNya, 101 chapters at time of writing, 645k words, ongoing
There’s a somewhat popular subgenre of video game fanfiction called New Game + fics, where the main character is forced, usually by some supernatural means, to relive the events of the game with all of their memories and usually all of their powers or abilities or whatever that they had at the end of the story, as if they were experiencing a new game plus of their story but like, y’know, applying the logic of that to them being a real person. The idea is usually that things will play out somehow differently, or they might try to make them play out the same way but the effects of their knowledge and power will ripple out until things go off the rails irreparably. I find this type of story to be almost uniformly uncompelling, either because the writers trying to take this format on don’t seem to really have any ideas on how they want to make the story particularly different or more interesting for having the wrinkles they’re introducing, or because the ways these experiences affect the characters going through this time travel often boil down to the subject feeling TORTURED and ANGRY about it in a very rote, juvenile sort of way, the way you think of when you’re being really mean about fan fiction.
I haven’t fucked with a lot of Persona 5 NG+ fics, largely because, having dipped my toes into a few, I’ve found my opinions to be largely validated, but in running my filters by things like “SHOW ME STORIES WITH TRANS CHARACTERS” (don’t make fun of me), Deja Vu did just keep popping up until I gave in and checked it out. Being awake all night every night means anything THIS long warrants at least a look for me. Deja Vu’s trick is that rather than the standard P5 NG+ tactic of having Joker return to the beginning of the game upon being killed by the traitor in the bad ending, the writers simply have Ren receiving packages with letters and items from a version of himself in the doomed future of a previous timeline, something that’s it’s suggested has actually happened to many Rens over hundreds of cycles. Eventually he starts seeing memories belonging to the previous Ren too, intrusively, and it’s all pretty fucked. This creates a lot of drama without making our Ren knowledgeable or powerful or out of place in his own story, and the variables that the authors introduce right off the bat and continue to introduce throughout the story, including the casts of Persona 3 and 4 (ALWAYS DICEY but it pays off here in a big way) make this plot feel like it could be anything, even when it’s still adhering fairly strictly to the tenants of Persona 5’s story arc before things do eventually fly entirely off the rails.
While I do think the balancing act that Daxiefraxie and JaneTheNya manage with their plotting is really impressive, I’m certainly personally here for the character work. There are some clear objectives in Deja Vu when it comes to how the characters are approached: the first is to make much more explicit their social vulnerabilities. Every Phantom Thief is somehow queer now, many of them are transgender in ways that profoundly affect their experiences, and disabilities and mental health issues are given serious consideration in how everyone is written throughout. The second is to emphasize the ways these kids are trauma survivors, and in this story that means pretty much universally digging a lot more deeply into the effects of their experiences than the game did, and occaionally making things explicit that were left to implication in the canon story. Everyone’s stories are tweaked, with Ann and Ryuji getting a lot more detail and time spent on their feelings during and after their spotlight arcs, Yusuke and Haru’s stories see significant additions, and Kasumi and Makoto’s are reworked entirely - Makoto’s in a way that brings her experiences more in line with the rest of the crew’s and, I think, reflects the authors’ contempt for the police as an institution (rightly lol get Makoto’s cop shit from the game OUTTA MY FACE please, every writer who makes Makoto be like “what the fuck was I thinking I am not going to be a cop actually” is a hero).
There’s certainly a way about this story where just by describing the kinds of things that happen in it, or going by its tags, or by its very careful chapter-by-chapter content warnings, that would make it easy to write it off as over the top in its darkness, as edgy, and it’s definitely true that this is pound for pound the most intense story I’ve got on this list. But it’s not about rolling around in that, and it’s certainly not GRAPHIC when it gets into this stuff. It’s a lot more about these characters opening up to each other and finding a sense of solidarity together; the hot pot scene from early in the game becomes a recurring moment in this fic, where every time a new thief joins the group they share a meal and let each other in on their baggage, give the new person space to do that or not at their discretion. There’s a lot of careful attention paid to how even though the supernatural power to force the immediate change you need IS cathartic, it doesn’t FIX you the way you might wish it did or feel like you need, and the lingering effects of everyone’s experiences are present thought the narrative.
I think maybe the best, most obvious example of all of these factors together is the way Akechi is handled. While he pretty much retains his characterization and role from the game for most of this story, and certainly he’s a sicko and a turbo murderer, there’s also an acknowledgment that he was an abused child who was groomed into being basically a serial killer by the adults who had complete authority over him?? And regardless of his own motivations and how complicit he may be and how he may feel about his own actions, a kid in that situation simply can’t be fully responsible for the person he’s become and the shit Akechi’s done. But it’s not treated in such an open-and-shut way either. He’s a lot closer to being an adult than a kid at this point, and he’s not stable, and him having been manipulated isn’t gonna un-murder Futaba’s mom. There’s an entire story arc dedicated to the problem of What To Do About Akechi, and exploring how the very large cast feel about him as individuals, with a lot of characters arguing for and against how sympathetically he should be handled, and a wide gradient of feelings across both sides of the debate. Even when things are made more severe and more explicit in Deja Vu, they’re also treated with a degree of nuance that the game isn’t interested in. Here, exploring that nuance feels like one of the driving motivators of telling this story.
Daxiefraxie told me in a comment reply that they were using both authors’ first and secondhand experiences to inform all of the hard stuff in the fic, and I think you can feel that here. There’s a lot of shit in this story that I also have firsthand experience with and while it can be an emotionally intense read, it’s never been an overwhelming one for me; this is one of the only stories I’ve read, particularly in fanfiction, that deals directly and extensively with cutting that hasn’t triggered me, which I think says something about the approach the writers have taken given the active intrusive thoughts I’ve been having over these last couple months.
So yeah idk I think the whole package is pretty good. I’m maybe ten chapters away from being caught up – I stalled out on a lot of these really long fics when I got close to current with them because I hadn’t finished the game yet, and I do think that having the events of the game in mind has been good while reading these stories. Not that all of them feel like they rely on you knowing the plot of the game to fill in gaps – I would say any good one that aims to retell the story of the game doesn’t, for example – but knowing where we came from helps me appreciate what we’re doing now. So I’m eager to go back and catch up fully. These might be my favorite takes on Ann and Haru especially.
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Aces High and Queens Wild by SpellStruck, 3 chapters at time of writing, 21k words, ongoing
This is a VERY new story, which seems to post a chapter every couple months so far, but it’s very COOL so I wanted to include it here. Will it continue? Idk. Will it finish? Who can say. But it’s got a sick opening.
There’s a popular type of story in Persona fanfic called Arcana Swaps, which uh, is what it sounds like. In the games all the important characters have a Tarot arcana associated with them which usually offer some narrative relevance to the themes of their personal stories, and in arcana swap fics the author will shuffle those arcana around, which can mean a lot of things, but always means familiar characters assuming the narrative roles of other characters in the stories. Sometimes this means also bringing with them elements of their own stories, sometimes it means pasting them into an adapted version of the original story for the arcana they’ve stepped into. If the writer is trying, or they’re good, they will still take the narrative significance of the arcanas into account when they’re writing the new stuff. Lots of ways this can play out.
So in this story our main character, our Fool, is Ann. She’s joker in this story, coming to Tokyo on a train to live with a guardian she doesn’t know after doing some kind of criminal assault that we don’t get the full details for. Her guardian is Maruki rather than Sojiro, and he is recognizably Maruki, but we get to see a side of him we don’t see in the game – his personal home, his neighborhood, his job before going to Shujin. He’s Maruki though, and he’s friendly, and welcoming, and tries to be really openly communicative with Ann. A human Morgana is the Ryuji, Yusuke is the Ann, and Madarame is the Kamoshida. That’s about as far as these early chapters take us.
It’s just really well-written, I think! I think I’m pretty on the record at this point as an Ann Liker, and to see an introspective, maybe insecure, definitely uncertain version of her trying to feel out her place in a new world is really stimulating, especially her interplay with Maruki, a type of adult she very clearly has no idea what to do with. There’s drama just pulsing through the establishing moments of this story in a way that makes me wish it was a no metaverse thing because I’m just like that BUT as it is I’m just happily waiting for whatever we get, whenever we get it. I really do hope that SpellStruck keeps posting chapters, it’s off to a sick start.
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Not Enough Time by SpaceCakes, 29 chapters, 102k words, complete
Finally, I am closing it out (more because I am tired of writing this document and want to get this thing out the door than because I have run out of Persona 5 fanfiction to talk about), with one for the heterosexuals.
This is another of my precious No Metaverse AU stories that follows a college-aged Haru who, in this telling, has managed to stave off her arranged marriage until after she finishes her university education. The story begins right at the end of her second of three years, and she’s starting to really keenly feel the time slipping away from her. The key difference between this story and canon, besides the lack of supernatural elements, is that Haru didn’t know any of the other characters in high school, and at the start of this story is only friends with Makoto, who is her ONLY friend, actually, and whom she met in college. This is a romance between Ren and Haru, and that’s good, I like the mellow but sure characterization he gets here, and think it pairs especially well with this somewhat rattled, insecure version of Haru, but I do think Haru’s internal life is the good shit in this fic.
This is a pretty grounded take on Haru’s situation, and in that sense it can be a tough read without ever becoming explicit or graphic in content. She’s a woman who has learned, desperately, how to manage the men in her life, but who knows she can’t walk that tightrope forever. She’s bargained a tiny amount of freedom from her father – single life for a couple extra years, and an apartment to live in while she’s in school – but it’s all conditional. She has to answer her phone quickly enough and often enough, she has to answer questions in a satisfying way, she has to wear the right clothes and say the right things and of course, she has to marry a man that she and her father both know is vile. Sugimura too, is a constant presence who has total power over her and knows it, constantly pushing the already paper-thin boundaries between them, held at bay more by his own ultimate disinterest in Haru as an object than by a belief that he couldn’t get away with anything he wanted to. And the moment she’s out of line all of the freedoms she’s bargained for herself as insulation from these pressures could disappear isntantly. They’re going to disappear anyway, in a year.
That’s why Haru only has one friend, and hasn’t told her about her upcoming marriage. The plan is to quietly cut contact with Makoto and assume Makoto cares a lot less about Haru than Haru does about her, not enough to really care where she went. And selling this oppressive atmosphere of resignation is what makes it feel like such a relief when Haru does start hanging out with Makoto’s friends (and not only Ren either), something that takes a surprisingly long time to happen. It’s scary, too, though. The other shoe is always ready to drop.
This is, of course, a fluffy romance story with a sex scene at the end, so things do resolve sweetly, but they don’t resolve cleanly, which is something I always appreciate about good Haru stories. And the sex scene at the end is good! Shoutouts to the heteros. See? I am a fair and balanced media consumer.
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Edit 12/17/23: Even as I have finished the game and I quickly approach the end of a couple of the spinoffs I find that my appetite for P5 fanfic hasn’t really left me, so I may turn this review into something of a living document, come back and add stuff to it as I read new things that really catch me, and I have read a couple of really good ones since I initially posted this so that first one may come soon. My hope is that this thing will be like a good pu’er tea, y’know - it’s good if you drink it right now but it will probably continue to improve with age. Thanks for reading!
Really good when you don't have someone in your ear telling you it's mid
The developers heard that male fans of the original Persona 5 never got girlfriends. To counteract this, they improved Akechi's confidant in this version to make those fans realize that they should just get a boyfriend instead
Persona 5 Royal has sat in my library for a while now. I bought the PS4 version of the game literally a month before the PS5 version was announced (thanks for not allowing upgrades, Atlus), which is discouraging enough, but the capital-C Conversation that has raged over Persona 5 since I first played the base game back in 2016 has continually left me exhausted and unwilling to "start the show." The mere invocation of this game's name is enough to summon at least one ardent defender and one detractor who is very excited to let you know how much they hate Joker's stupid face. Want to start an argument on the Internet? Easy. Talk about Persona.
Coming off the heels of Final Fantasy XVI - a game which is already generating its own debate - I figured now's as good a time as any to slide into another 80-hour RPG. Nearly a month later, my in-game time is sitting near 140 hours, but my PlayStation 5's internal clock says I've only been playing it for 60. One head tells the truth and the other lies... But no matter how much real-world time I put into this thing, I can confidently say Royal adds a substantive amount of content, and that it would be difficult to go back to the base Persona 5 given the sheer quantity of valuable gameplay tweaks I'd be giving up in the process.
I've heard it argued that Royal is the "true" Persona 5, the game Atlus always intended to make but couldn't get to market back in 2016. I think this is a little ridiculous. The original version of Persona 5 already feels significant in scope and narratively complete, and its development troubles are so well-documented that we know precisely which characters and features were cut. They certainly weren't Kasumi, Maruki, or the whole of the third semester - Royal's most impactful inclusions. Indeed, the third semester itself feels almost comically wedged between the original's climax and epilogue, and it actually got a laugh out of me when I saw how quickly it resolves in order to return to the status quo so the game could end.
Just because the seams are apparent doesn't mean the third semester feels entirely contrived, however. In fact, I really enjoyed it and found it to be the strongest part of the game. The process of finding a shitty adult to target, bumbling into a deadline, and subsequently changing their heart and gaining a new team member starts to feel repetitious in the main game. It doesn't even seem like Persona 5 is all that interested in presenting compelling villains past Madarame, and despite several characters making the case that the Phantom Thieves are criminals themselves, the moustache-twirling villainy of each target doesn't encourage self-reflection on the part of the player. Some of the characters who disagree with the Phantom Thieves' justice end up turning on a dime later because the bad guys are just that bad.
In contrast, Royal's final palace ruler is cast in a far more sympathetic light. There are parts of his plan that are actually agreeable even if the means in which he's enacting it is not, and the trauma which informs his actions is made crystal clear. Both the Thieves and the villain are practicing their own brand of societal reform, but the enforcement of their will on others is not so different, and this in turn calls into question your actions throughout the game in a way it largely failed to do up to that point. I wouldn't go so far to say that it fixes some of the issues I had with the plot of the core game, but it did leave me feeling far more satisfied by the time the credits rolled.
I'm talking around who the final palace ruler is in consideration of those who may not want the end of the game spoiled, but honestly, I wonder how many people don't know who it is by now. Persona 5 is frankly inescapable. Atlus has been busy these past seven years as they work to exhaust whatever brand power Persona 5 has, turning it into a franchise unto itself with countless sequels, spin-offs, shampoos, clothing, toys, comics, stage shows, and an anime. I bet there's a radio drama in there somewhere. At this point, I can't blame anyone for developing an intense dislike for Persona 5 purely through burnout. I loved Strikers - more than Royal, even! - but I'm tired. Too tired to care about Tactica or whatever dumb mobile game they're currently working on, and far too tired to give a damn about the Phantom Thieves ever again.
The conversation around Persona 5 is every bit as omnipresent and tiresome. It is far too easy to provoke, and seeing as every conceivable criticism has been aired in the court of public opinion, it is also circular. The looping nature of the discussion gives way to petty arguments, and valid criticisms of how Persona 5 confronts real trauma inevitably dissolve into pointless sessions of politely nodding while people express violent discontent over Morgana's voice. I am waiting in breathless anticipation of the day Atlus and everyone else is ready to move on from Persona 5. Then we can all get mad as hell about Persona 6. Namaste.
IS IT A SUMMAH GAME?
It is a little known fact that I - the Magistrate of Summah - have declared Persona 5: Strikers as the quintessential Summah game. After all, it is set during the Summah, it is concerned with the Summah, and so it hath become Summah.
But is Striker's immaculate Summah vibes so strong that they reflect in its predecessor? To find out, I conducted a blind playtest. I enlisted the help of nine vagrants I met under the boardwalk and tasked them with playing a bit of both games, then had them provide feedback as to which reminded them most of Summah. So, how did Persona 5 compare?
The results were inconclusive as a surprising 100% of participants complained that they couldn't see either game through their blindfolds and became irate when I told them I could only compensate them for their time in In-N-Out gift cards which I am embarrassed to say were expired. Two of the participants proceeded to cause excessive amounts of property damage which my insurance company refuses to indemnify because I was a "significant instigating factor."
Nevertheless, I have awarded Persona 5 Royal an 8.5 on the Summah index scale. While not as strong a contender as its sequel, Persona 5 excels at capturing a similar Summah mood through its use of vibrant colors, jazzy music, and focus on spending time with your friends. The adventure only ends when it starts to cool off, and as the pain of parting makes your chest feel heavy, the weight is lifted when you remind yourself that you'll see each other again soon - and then you'll have a Summah.
Coming off the heels of Final Fantasy XVI - a game which is already generating its own debate - I figured now's as good a time as any to slide into another 80-hour RPG. Nearly a month later, my in-game time is sitting near 140 hours, but my PlayStation 5's internal clock says I've only been playing it for 60. One head tells the truth and the other lies... But no matter how much real-world time I put into this thing, I can confidently say Royal adds a substantive amount of content, and that it would be difficult to go back to the base Persona 5 given the sheer quantity of valuable gameplay tweaks I'd be giving up in the process.
I've heard it argued that Royal is the "true" Persona 5, the game Atlus always intended to make but couldn't get to market back in 2016. I think this is a little ridiculous. The original version of Persona 5 already feels significant in scope and narratively complete, and its development troubles are so well-documented that we know precisely which characters and features were cut. They certainly weren't Kasumi, Maruki, or the whole of the third semester - Royal's most impactful inclusions. Indeed, the third semester itself feels almost comically wedged between the original's climax and epilogue, and it actually got a laugh out of me when I saw how quickly it resolves in order to return to the status quo so the game could end.
Just because the seams are apparent doesn't mean the third semester feels entirely contrived, however. In fact, I really enjoyed it and found it to be the strongest part of the game. The process of finding a shitty adult to target, bumbling into a deadline, and subsequently changing their heart and gaining a new team member starts to feel repetitious in the main game. It doesn't even seem like Persona 5 is all that interested in presenting compelling villains past Madarame, and despite several characters making the case that the Phantom Thieves are criminals themselves, the moustache-twirling villainy of each target doesn't encourage self-reflection on the part of the player. Some of the characters who disagree with the Phantom Thieves' justice end up turning on a dime later because the bad guys are just that bad.
In contrast, Royal's final palace ruler is cast in a far more sympathetic light. There are parts of his plan that are actually agreeable even if the means in which he's enacting it is not, and the trauma which informs his actions is made crystal clear. Both the Thieves and the villain are practicing their own brand of societal reform, but the enforcement of their will on others is not so different, and this in turn calls into question your actions throughout the game in a way it largely failed to do up to that point. I wouldn't go so far to say that it fixes some of the issues I had with the plot of the core game, but it did leave me feeling far more satisfied by the time the credits rolled.
I'm talking around who the final palace ruler is in consideration of those who may not want the end of the game spoiled, but honestly, I wonder how many people don't know who it is by now. Persona 5 is frankly inescapable. Atlus has been busy these past seven years as they work to exhaust whatever brand power Persona 5 has, turning it into a franchise unto itself with countless sequels, spin-offs, shampoos, clothing, toys, comics, stage shows, and an anime. I bet there's a radio drama in there somewhere. At this point, I can't blame anyone for developing an intense dislike for Persona 5 purely through burnout. I loved Strikers - more than Royal, even! - but I'm tired. Too tired to care about Tactica or whatever dumb mobile game they're currently working on, and far too tired to give a damn about the Phantom Thieves ever again.
The conversation around Persona 5 is every bit as omnipresent and tiresome. It is far too easy to provoke, and seeing as every conceivable criticism has been aired in the court of public opinion, it is also circular. The looping nature of the discussion gives way to petty arguments, and valid criticisms of how Persona 5 confronts real trauma inevitably dissolve into pointless sessions of politely nodding while people express violent discontent over Morgana's voice. I am waiting in breathless anticipation of the day Atlus and everyone else is ready to move on from Persona 5. Then we can all get mad as hell about Persona 6. Namaste.
IS IT A SUMMAH GAME?
It is a little known fact that I - the Magistrate of Summah - have declared Persona 5: Strikers as the quintessential Summah game. After all, it is set during the Summah, it is concerned with the Summah, and so it hath become Summah.
But is Striker's immaculate Summah vibes so strong that they reflect in its predecessor? To find out, I conducted a blind playtest. I enlisted the help of nine vagrants I met under the boardwalk and tasked them with playing a bit of both games, then had them provide feedback as to which reminded them most of Summah. So, how did Persona 5 compare?
The results were inconclusive as a surprising 100% of participants complained that they couldn't see either game through their blindfolds and became irate when I told them I could only compensate them for their time in In-N-Out gift cards which I am embarrassed to say were expired. Two of the participants proceeded to cause excessive amounts of property damage which my insurance company refuses to indemnify because I was a "significant instigating factor."
Nevertheless, I have awarded Persona 5 Royal an 8.5 on the Summah index scale. While not as strong a contender as its sequel, Persona 5 excels at capturing a similar Summah mood through its use of vibrant colors, jazzy music, and focus on spending time with your friends. The adventure only ends when it starts to cool off, and as the pain of parting makes your chest feel heavy, the weight is lifted when you remind yourself that you'll see each other again soon - and then you'll have a Summah.
p5r's gameplay is too perfect to be in service of a game as artistically bankrupt as this
I thought Persona 5 was massively overrated until I played it in 2022. But the game was amazing, it fixes a lot of the gripes that I had with Persona 4 Golden. It had way better pacing, introduced a lot of gameplay elements from the SMT mainline games, and massively expanded the life sim elements. Being someone who enjoys SMT, I still find Persona 5 to be easy, but it's way more enjoyable than 4. Bonus points for having acid jazz as the main music genre.
The Royal Edition included one of my most favourite villain archetypes in gaming.
The Royal Edition included one of my most favourite villain archetypes in gaming.
there are little story flaws and some poorly-designed mediocre boss battles, but as a whole, this game is arguably the best game you can experience on playstation 4 system, so go on, play it
R.I.P Billy Kametz, gone far too soon
120 hours. If you did it in one go it would take 5 whole straight days of nothing but playing Persona 5 Royal. If we add to that a previous attempt at Royal that lasted until the 40 hour mark before I dropped it + my original persona 5 vanilla run (which was staggered across many months) I have played persona 5 for about 240 hours. Which judging by my steam account would make it my 9th most played game of all time. And after all that I can confidently say that Persona 5 Royal is... alright.
Persona 5 is an interesting entry in the series because in theory its the best one, the baton pass seems like a no brainer in retrospect, the palaces being actual handcrafted dungeons is the fully realized version of what Persona had always tried to be (there's hints of this in a certain final dungeon in P4), the soundtrack is absolutely stellar and every social link having a gameplay benefit just makes a lot of sense and enhances the core appeal of the game.
And yet I think P5 is my least favourite of the modern persona games (overall I still hate P2:IS more but Im planning on replaying it soon). For one thing the crop of social links is somewhat weak. Not that they're terrible but there are very few that are actually memorable : the politician, iwai, mishima and maybe takemi? are the only truly great ones IMO. Most of the others are forgettable and especially most of the female social links which uhh might not be a coincidence given some of the game's treatment of women. Smarter and more articulate people have already written about it on this page so just go to them for more on that.
I think a game like Persona 3 benefits from having a more mixed quality of character stories ; it has the worst social links in the series (gourmet king, ken, the athletes etc) but also the absolute very best (akinari, mutatsu, bunkichi, tanaka). Speaking on comparisons to Persona 3, they are kind of opposite ends of the spectrum. P3 starts pretty slow and kind of boring/meandering for a lot of it (strega are still some of the worst antagonists in the series) but pulls off the best ending in the series (havent played Eternal Punishment so idk) whereas Persona 5 is pretty frontloaded in terms of quality.
-Spoilers for Persona 5 and Royal from now on-
Presumably this is why the Royal Additions were made to serve as an epilogue of sorts, replacing the boring final boss of P5 who was just a generic shonen JRPG giant God thing that didnt feel anywhere near as climactic as beating down the guy who was single handedly responsible for most of the events of the game. It replaces it with a much greater character with a really interesting storyline and makes a much more compelling villain thematically for the game than boring old yabbadabbadoo or whatever his name was... is what I would say if they didnt make you fight the boring villain again anyways. Why?! You're already rewriting the plot of Persona 5 in post, go all in! fuck the stupid god of control thing.
Another thing that sort of comes with the format that I found annoying was in this final battle with an interesting sort of puzzle element that tests everything you've learned you defeat him in a low key sort of confrontation where despite not wanting to your differences in philosophy come to a head which can only be resolved with a duel, the game still pulls the whole "this isnt even my final form!" bullshit and I was pretty annoyed ngl. The fight really only needed to be like 10 minutes long but I guess thats not "spectacular" enough even though we already did this whole song and dance for Yaldabaoth!
Another Royal addition I was very mixed on was the character of Kasumi. I was originally playing the game in Japanese until she came around and I had to switch it over to english cause her voice, cadence and tone actively damage my head. Its like scratching a chalkboard. Her actual character is well... ok I guess. I admire the attempt but it just compounds the fact that there is a lot of dead weight in the phantom thieves; not just gameplay wise but even storywise they start to blend together a tad. Did you know Ryuji was canonically born on July 1999? Just like I was. That means most of the Phantom Thieves are my exact generation and maybe If I had played Persona 5 when it came out in 2016 I would have had much more of a connection. Unfortunately I played P4G as my first instead.
In general the party dynamics of P5 are arguably the weakest of the series and obviously a lot of this is just personal opinion but they just don't quite connect with me the way the P4 and 3 and 1 cast do. Also Morgana manages to be more annoying than Teddie somehow, who at least had the decency to fuck off once in a while. Love being told what to do by a cat in a game about rebelling against authority.
I apologize for anyone who's actually read this far cause I imagine this is almost incoherent at this point but I honestly don't know how to write anything about this game in any way thats actually well structured, Im just shooting from the hip at this point.
The Royal additions also rebalanced the combat in ways that are mostly for the better but also made an easy game even easier. I played on merciless and still embarassed most late game bosses. But the focus has never really been the combat challenge so whatever.
Okay, so Ive spent this entire review talking shit about this game but Im giving it an 8/10 so what gives? You see, I am actually an IGN staff member. In all seriousness Persona 5 Royal for all its faults has kept me coming back to it for 120 goddamned hours. There is enough of the good stuff I come to this series for to make it worthwhile : namely cheesy shonen tropes and the hybrid game model that is so wonderfully addictive.
Modern persona is a bit like XCOM or Total War in that having a management side complement the "combat" side of the game makes each a welcome change of pace from the other and constantly gives out rewards that pass from one side to the next, giving that "just one more day/turn" that makes these games so compelling. The gameplay "loop" has never been more appropriately named and honestly it is like digital nicotine to me. Add to that a truly excellent soundtrack and a UX that is absolutely dripping with style and there is a lot of things I will overlook in all of these games in favour of their positives.
120 hours. If you did it in one go it would take 5 whole straight days of nothing but playing Persona 5 Royal. If we add to that a previous attempt at Royal that lasted until the 40 hour mark before I dropped it + my original persona 5 vanilla run (which was staggered across many months) I have played persona 5 for about 240 hours. Which judging by my steam account would make it my 9th most played game of all time. And after all that I can confidently say that Persona 5 Royal is... alright.
Persona 5 is an interesting entry in the series because in theory its the best one, the baton pass seems like a no brainer in retrospect, the palaces being actual handcrafted dungeons is the fully realized version of what Persona had always tried to be (there's hints of this in a certain final dungeon in P4), the soundtrack is absolutely stellar and every social link having a gameplay benefit just makes a lot of sense and enhances the core appeal of the game.
And yet I think P5 is my least favourite of the modern persona games (overall I still hate P2:IS more but Im planning on replaying it soon). For one thing the crop of social links is somewhat weak. Not that they're terrible but there are very few that are actually memorable : the politician, iwai, mishima and maybe takemi? are the only truly great ones IMO. Most of the others are forgettable and especially most of the female social links which uhh might not be a coincidence given some of the game's treatment of women. Smarter and more articulate people have already written about it on this page so just go to them for more on that.
I think a game like Persona 3 benefits from having a more mixed quality of character stories ; it has the worst social links in the series (gourmet king, ken, the athletes etc) but also the absolute very best (akinari, mutatsu, bunkichi, tanaka). Speaking on comparisons to Persona 3, they are kind of opposite ends of the spectrum. P3 starts pretty slow and kind of boring/meandering for a lot of it (strega are still some of the worst antagonists in the series) but pulls off the best ending in the series (havent played Eternal Punishment so idk) whereas Persona 5 is pretty frontloaded in terms of quality.
-Spoilers for Persona 5 and Royal from now on-
Presumably this is why the Royal Additions were made to serve as an epilogue of sorts, replacing the boring final boss of P5 who was just a generic shonen JRPG giant God thing that didnt feel anywhere near as climactic as beating down the guy who was single handedly responsible for most of the events of the game. It replaces it with a much greater character with a really interesting storyline and makes a much more compelling villain thematically for the game than boring old yabbadabbadoo or whatever his name was... is what I would say if they didnt make you fight the boring villain again anyways. Why?! You're already rewriting the plot of Persona 5 in post, go all in! fuck the stupid god of control thing.
Another thing that sort of comes with the format that I found annoying was in this final battle with an interesting sort of puzzle element that tests everything you've learned you defeat him in a low key sort of confrontation where despite not wanting to your differences in philosophy come to a head which can only be resolved with a duel, the game still pulls the whole "this isnt even my final form!" bullshit and I was pretty annoyed ngl. The fight really only needed to be like 10 minutes long but I guess thats not "spectacular" enough even though we already did this whole song and dance for Yaldabaoth!
Another Royal addition I was very mixed on was the character of Kasumi. I was originally playing the game in Japanese until she came around and I had to switch it over to english cause her voice, cadence and tone actively damage my head. Its like scratching a chalkboard. Her actual character is well... ok I guess. I admire the attempt but it just compounds the fact that there is a lot of dead weight in the phantom thieves; not just gameplay wise but even storywise they start to blend together a tad. Did you know Ryuji was canonically born on July 1999? Just like I was. That means most of the Phantom Thieves are my exact generation and maybe If I had played Persona 5 when it came out in 2016 I would have had much more of a connection. Unfortunately I played P4G as my first instead.
In general the party dynamics of P5 are arguably the weakest of the series and obviously a lot of this is just personal opinion but they just don't quite connect with me the way the P4 and 3 and 1 cast do. Also Morgana manages to be more annoying than Teddie somehow, who at least had the decency to fuck off once in a while. Love being told what to do by a cat in a game about rebelling against authority.
I apologize for anyone who's actually read this far cause I imagine this is almost incoherent at this point but I honestly don't know how to write anything about this game in any way thats actually well structured, Im just shooting from the hip at this point.
The Royal additions also rebalanced the combat in ways that are mostly for the better but also made an easy game even easier. I played on merciless and still embarassed most late game bosses. But the focus has never really been the combat challenge so whatever.
Okay, so Ive spent this entire review talking shit about this game but Im giving it an 8/10 so what gives? You see, I am actually an IGN staff member. In all seriousness Persona 5 Royal for all its faults has kept me coming back to it for 120 goddamned hours. There is enough of the good stuff I come to this series for to make it worthwhile : namely cheesy shonen tropes and the hybrid game model that is so wonderfully addictive.
Modern persona is a bit like XCOM or Total War in that having a management side complement the "combat" side of the game makes each a welcome change of pace from the other and constantly gives out rewards that pass from one side to the next, giving that "just one more day/turn" that makes these games so compelling. The gameplay "loop" has never been more appropriately named and honestly it is like digital nicotine to me. Add to that a truly excellent soundtrack and a UX that is absolutely dripping with style and there is a lot of things I will overlook in all of these games in favour of their positives.