Heaven Will Be Mine is a flower growing defiantly in the hostile soil of cisheteropatriarchy. A stand against cishetero constructs like “physics” and “human” and “combat.” A rejection of the so-called natural sciences and their domination of metaphysical possibilities. The law of gravity is the law of gender binary and Heaven Will Be Mine rejects it, proposing instead a world where physics are subordinate. This is true science-fiction, science as a starting concept for what could be, because why couldn’t it? How could our fiction be shackled to their science? How could our bodies? A stand against Earth’s cultural authority expressed through its physical gravity, because culture and science have never been distinct concepts. A rejection of bioessentialism through an assault on objectivism. True subjectivism that rewrites ontology backward, to define being rather than allow being to define us. Earth’s inhuman, incontestable military power contested by girls in machines built to not kill. How could this be anything but pure hope?

I’m not familiar with NGE or 2001, I haven’t seen extensive Gundam, I’m a relatively new convert to the mecha genre and sci-fi in general, and I’m not a gender doomer. Maybe those associations are what lead to what I feel are unfair readings of this game. The conceit is obvious: Earth and “humanity” represent the cis world. The greater allegory may be a bit harder to fully accept, perhaps for those unable to identify with the metaphor or mesh with the flavour of sci-fi. “By becoming more human we become less human.” The core thesis of the game is provocative, but not ambiguous. What Saturn and Pluto and Luna-Terra do is right for humans because it’s right for them and they’re human, the most and least human of all. It’s designation they’re fighting, designation is violence, interpellation is violence. To accept their desire to stay separate from Earth is not to accept the incompatibility of the cisgender and transgender worlds, rather it is to accept the transgender world’s right to exist on its own terms, according to its own ontology; to allow humans to be free of the label human and trust it won’t lead to war. To reject this premise is to align with Iapetus, whose function is to “divide and categorize.” It is to condemn the girls to designation according to Earth’s ontological authority, to reject their wishes and thereby their being.

Heaven Will Be Mine is a surrealist piece that demands engagement on surrealist terms, but I’ll attempt to address it more concretely. Its prose is beautiful, poetic yet direct. It may be difficult to engage with for those unfamiliar with surrealist fiction, but don’t confuse this with confusing writing—it is intensely readable. Conflict and romance are written with chemistry and inertia, driving readers through scenes at a breakneck pace and punctuating kisses and combat with immense kinetic power. The game drops us into an established world but doesn’t expect us to immediately understand its jargon and lore, only to absorb the atmosphere; let the feeling of it envelop you, by the final playthrough it will all make sense. The characters are organic and realistic, queer down to their foundation but never superficially or ornamentally so. I’ve seen Heaven Will Be Mine compared to fanfiction, yet the prose is on par with that of professionally authored novels. Are we so afraid to legitimize works that tell our stories in our vernacular? Should our art not be grounded in our experience? This game shows that our right to exist is proven in our metrics of communication, our relationships, our community. It gives us recognizable characters with clear interiority and shows us how they clash and change each other, how they reshape through connection the same but different, a billionth at first then a hundredth, until it’s enough to live free of the Earth, to change the Earth’s gravity, to escape Earth’s designation.

Heaven Will Be Mine has no true ending. All of the endings are the true ending. None of them are. Who decides which ending is bad or good or true? “We don't need a true ending. We can make a true ending out of any ending. We can make it without the true end. We can make it out of the best ending, or the second best ending, or a bad ending. Beyond the part where there’s an ending. Until it’s something else.” Heaven Will Be Mine is pure hope. It announces a future where we can be whatever we are and not be held back by what already is. “When we let our children develop in the lightness of space, they chose their bodies, genders, souls, hearts of their own volition.” It is not a rejection of our compatibility with Earth and the cisgender world. It is a wish on a trinary constellation that Earth can become space, that its gravity can change, that the cisgender world can become ours too. You can hear this in the soundtrack, in Silly Game especially. It is art that could have only been born from our community with all of our hopes and dreams behind it. Heaven Will Be Mine is pure hope, hope for our future and our being and our humanity. “The human part isn’t the ear, but the hole in the lobes for your earrings, lipstick is real, lips are not, and we see humanity defined in its own gravitational output.” Heaven Will Be Mine is the pure hope that our gravitational output is enough to guarantee our existence no matter what obstacle may stand in our way. It’s right there in the title—we will achieve heaven, everything we want and deserve, to be free of 9.8 m/s^2 forever.

I played about 40 hours of Persona 5 in 2019 before circumstances led to the loss of my PS4. Waiting for 5 and later Royal to come to PC, I purchased Persona 4 Golden and played about 20 hours. That game unfortunately was a poor substitute for this one and I failed to get into it, so purchasing and ultimately playing through this behemoth of a game has been an immensely rewarding experience. To be fair to Persona 4 Golden, that game offered me a lot of what I love about this one. The gameplay loop of Persona games is something I find incredibly immersive; living out a chunk of time day-by-day (in Royal's case a year), growing social stats and developing relationships while the plot unfolds. I was drawn in by the steady but marked pace of Royal and the organic character development of my confidants that truly felt earned over time. I love the Megami Tensei shared universe lore, Persona combat systems, creature collecting, and storytelling approach of both Royal and Golden, and yet Golden was still a poor substitute.

Persona 5 Royal stands apart from other Persona games, from other JRPGs, indeed from other games in general primarily on vibe. This game offers a total aesthetic adherence unmatched by any game I’ve played. The visual design from costuming to setting right down to UI, music (of course), character writing, plot, and yes, the pacing all come together to form one message that you’re familiar with if you’ve played: Take your time. For my money this is the perfect comfy game. In 2019 my Saturday routine was to wake up, make a big breakfast with a pot of coffee, watch a couple episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and play a few hours of Persona 5, a weekend routine that I long for now that my life doesn’t accommodate it.

These last weeks have been incredibly cozy, curling up with my Steamdeck and getting lost in the game’s world. Yes, it’s long, probably the longest I’ve spent on one completion of a non-roguelike singleplayer experience, but the length only serves to compliment the experience. There’s no rushing here, no panicking, no missing side content to mainline the story. The game takes over 100 hours no matter how you play, and for that time it fully immerses players in its world that oozes coolness and comfort while leveraging raw time investment to form meaningful relationships with characters and build an impressive plot that feels epic because of how much of the player’s actual life it takes to unfold, reminiscent of art like Sátántangó and Jeanne Dielman. Though the visual novel elements offer a superficial illusion of choice while leading down only one set path, they allow players to project their personality onto Joker which goes a long way to bolster immersion, and this game single handedly seeded my interest in visual and kinetic novels. Persona 5 Royal is the comfiest game I’ve ever played and probably the best JRPG I’ve ever played from a gameplay and story perspective, and it has given me characters that I know I will remember and think of forever. I love this game a lot!! Now onto P4G (again)!