I missed my subway stop going downtown because I was in such a trance. I wasn’t staring at my phone - I was thinking of Persona 5!
Specifically, I was thinking of the moments in the game where you’ve just spent a few hours going through the remainder of an oppressive dungeon (oppressive in an audiovisual sense) and finding a route to the end, you arrive back at Café Leblanc, the song ‘Beneath The Mask’ plays in the background, and Sojiro remarks that you’ve arrived home.
This moment is perhaps my favourite moment of the many moments in Persona 5 that make me grateful for video games as an art form. It’s this kind of experience I think can’t be conveyed in other art forms with quite the same level of potency as a video game.
It’s a moment that reminds me of taking the subway to its terminal stop and waiting for a ride to pick my friends and I up, listening to jazz in an empty outdoor apartment exterior after almost missing the last ferry back to mainland in downtown Toronto.
It’s a moment that reminds me of simply seeing a friend for the first time in a while during a busy semester.
It’s a moment that, for the last 3 years since I first played Persona 5, that has instilled a sort of nostalgia for the simple act of “coming home.”
It’s a moment that makes the rest of Persona 5’s flaws worth it, and makes all of its strengths that much stronger.
The rest of it is irrelevant, this one moment, singlehandedly solidified Persona 5 (Royal) as one of my favourite games of all time, and a piece of art worth remembering.
Specifically, I was thinking of the moments in the game where you’ve just spent a few hours going through the remainder of an oppressive dungeon (oppressive in an audiovisual sense) and finding a route to the end, you arrive back at Café Leblanc, the song ‘Beneath The Mask’ plays in the background, and Sojiro remarks that you’ve arrived home.
This moment is perhaps my favourite moment of the many moments in Persona 5 that make me grateful for video games as an art form. It’s this kind of experience I think can’t be conveyed in other art forms with quite the same level of potency as a video game.
It’s a moment that reminds me of taking the subway to its terminal stop and waiting for a ride to pick my friends and I up, listening to jazz in an empty outdoor apartment exterior after almost missing the last ferry back to mainland in downtown Toronto.
It’s a moment that reminds me of simply seeing a friend for the first time in a while during a busy semester.
It’s a moment that, for the last 3 years since I first played Persona 5, that has instilled a sort of nostalgia for the simple act of “coming home.”
It’s a moment that makes the rest of Persona 5’s flaws worth it, and makes all of its strengths that much stronger.
The rest of it is irrelevant, this one moment, singlehandedly solidified Persona 5 (Royal) as one of my favourite games of all time, and a piece of art worth remembering.