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.