As I mentioned in the Bayonetta 3 piece, Persona is a series that’s had a lasting impact on me in a few different ways. It’s convinced me to broaden my horizons into genres like visual novels, it’s changed how I think about writing my own characters, and it’s given me a deep appreciation for atmosphere in games, particularly narratively heavy ones like Persona.
I’d call “atmosphere” the defining trait of modern Persona titles. Some of that is wrapped up in the color scheme of the three newest entries in the format, Persona 3, 4, & 5.
Persona 3’s blue tones do a decent job of capturing a game whose primary atmosphere is mystery. Persona 3 feels like the game where you’re the least certain of your destination throughout your time playing it, despite the game’s main and only dungeon having a relatively predictable number of floors. Persona 3, in my memory, is defined by mystery, sadness, and angst, all emotions very evocative of 2006, and bridging a lot of the themes of Persona 1 & 2 in a way that would be largely absent by Persona 4.
Persona 4’s defining atmosphere is one shared by both joy and melancholy. Persona 4 has boundless optimism for the futures of its main cast, with their own uncertainty about those same futures offering the initial conflict for each of them relative to the narrative. Persona 4’s sense of melancholy is harder to communicate, but well conveyed through its soundtrack and perpetually rainy, foggy atmosphere, along with the lives tertiary to the main cast. The yellow feels counterintuitive to this, but contrasts the atmosphere is a way that becomes easier to interpret at the story progresses.
Persona 5’s red completes Atlus’s primary color journey, which I assume means Persona 6 will have a monochrome color scheme, if not for 5 having made liberal use of that already. Persona 5 has so many clashing atmospheric elements that I feel like the red is less identifiable with the game compared to the prior two entries. Persona 5 is atmospheric down to its bones, it’s scenic big-city Tokyo vibes, its disparately themed cognitive dungeons, its jazzy soundtrack, every aspect of Persona 5 feels atmospheric, even if those elements clash with the other aspects of the game.
Blue and Yellow feel immediately identifiable with Persona 3 & 4, where, I mean I guess the Persona 5’s red symbolizes freedom, passion, anger at the system. They’re raging at some kinda machine, I guess. Or maybe black and white is a good fit for Persona 5 after all considering the sum total of their narrative and character motivations.
I’ve been writing for a pretty long time, and that’s given me the insight to guess with a fair bit of certainty that many of Persona 5’s issues likely come from its protracted development time. Write any story long enough, and you’re unwilling to give up on any and every good idea you’ve had for it, whether or not those elements work together to form a coherent story. My own review for Persona 5 from 2017 is widely positive and decidedly uncritical, which stems from both my desire to fit in with what I assumed other reviewers would say at the time, but also honestly serves as a testament to how good the first dozen or so hours of Persona 5 are.
Persona 5’s narrative rather noticeably dips in quality around halfway through the game, when the writing team ran out of compelling machines for the party to rage against, and slips into a protracted monster of the month setup that has the unfortunate quality of lasting the rest of the game. It’s easy to understand what Persona 5 wants you to think about it’s narrative and characters, it practically shouts it at you through every line of main story dialogue, every vocalized song, and so on. It’s hard to infer anything about the story and the characters when it’s all being spoon-fed to you.
Persona 4 came out in 2008, two years after Persona 3, and the nine-year drought between 4 and 5 was very noticeable by the numerous ports and spinoffs of both 3 and 4, including the quote unquote definitive versions of both games. The spin-offs in particular feature character moments to the maximum, completely divorced from the main narrative they originally appear in. Atlus learned a lesson from these, that character relatability was the most marketable aspect of their franchise, and that became the wrong lesson. Persona 5 doubled down on this by stripping away even the most minimalistically unique elements that 4’s cast had, leaving Persona 5 with a cast of relatable, but very boring characters.
That’s not to say that Persona 5 is devoid of characters that don’t have fantastical experiences that make up their story. Persona 5’s Tae Takemi and Chihaya Hifune are both victims of mildly fantastical life events, and 4’s Eri Minami and Shu Nakajima are both fairly mundane in comparison. Of the main cast, Persona 3’s feels the most fantastical, in part because of the entire cast of that game being so linked to the main plot, whereas the cast of 4 and 5 are largely unconnected to the driving forces behind the main storyline.
In that way, Persona 3 is the bridge between Persona 1 & 2 (and in a way, the rest of the larger Shin Megami Tensei series) and Persona 4 & 5. Persona 4 & 5’s characters are required to be removed from narrative importance due to the amount of investment the player is expected to have in them. All modern Persona games have dating sim elements baked into their visual novel sections, but it grows more apparent with each entry in the series. That requirement means that the writers can’t place too much narrative weight on any particular character lest their role in the player’s romantic life clash with their place in the narrative.
This leaves the main cast of 5 with very little to do in the plot outside of their introductory chapters, leaving their defining moments to their individual character episodes instead. The success of the cast to the player then, depends on how much they like and/or identify with that particular character’s emotional journey through the nine or so side chapters before they reach the end of their individual character journey and are once again removed from plot relevance for the rest of the game. This is mostly the case with Persona 4’s as well, but 4 maintains a slightly stronger back end to the narrative that isn’t marred by the game shouting its narrative’s intentions at you for the last 30 hours.
Persona dominated the conversation around Japan-produced RPGs in America from around 2007 to 2012, a time period where the entire genre was often dismissed by mainstream gaming outlets as either being too niche, weird, or whatever, in part due to its (relatively at the time) complex storytelling in regards to its characters and themes. It was easy to point at Persona 4 in 2012 and go “Look! JRPGs can have complicated and realistic characters! One of them is gay and traumatized about it!” but let’s please not get into that one exact example.
I’ve often felt that the ultimate value of the cast of a Persona game, or rather any RPG, to a player depends on that player’s individual investment in their motivations and struggles, either in relation to themselves or the game’s narrative. Persona 4's narrative doesn’t concern itself with the coming of age challenges the game’s cast struggles with, but it’s easy for someone playing Persona 4 to empathize with one or all of them, particularly if you’re depressed, queer, jobless, and it’s 2011, but maybe that’s just me.
That gives you as a player a reason to see the game through to the end, because you’ve developed a certain level of investment in these characters and want them to succeed, if only because their success, even if it is divorced from the game’s narrative, means that their success can continue long after the story ends and you’ve turned off the game console.
Another factor in this is time, the individual relationships that players build with these casts grows more intense the closer in age the player is to them. I played Persona 3 and 4 during my last year of high school, where Persona 5 I played in the sixth year of my adult life. That’s not to say that there aren’t elements to the characters of Persona 5 that I can relate to, but their weight is diminished by my lack of relation to the struggle of the cast in relation to the game’s main narrative.
In a 2017 podcast episode I remember quite vividly, Griffin McElroy from Polygon described the struggle in Persona 5 as “…the older generation taking advantage of the younger”, and that’s a good way to describe the broad themes that Persona 5 wants you to think it has. Persona 5 wants to have a struggle, it wants to have a machine to rage against, but it’s so desperately afraid to say anything that would anger any of its potential audience that it ultimately is unable to say anything meaningful.
There’s also an extremely bad Twitter thread from around the time of Persona 5’s release that I can also vividly remember but can’t find, calling for players to avoid relating to the game too strongly due to being heavily based on the experience growing up in Japan. Which is fine and all, except for that’s not how media works and also definitely not how localization works, but whatever. The game has little good to relate to considering how many of the game’s narrative beats completely fall flat on their face.
At the same time, Persona 5 did release in 2017, a year when the idea of rebelling against oppressive forces was very appealing if you were depressed, queer, jobless, etc. etc., and perhaps even more so if you were living in the U.S. in the wake of the 2016 election, I guess. There were no lack of machines to rage against in any part of the world in 2017. I can imagine playing Persona 5 had I been 17 when it came out, and I can absolutely see how it might have resonated with me better than it did to me being 24 at the time.
Persona 5’s success in the long term, then, depends on how well you relate either with it’s narrative, which again, is bad; or how well you relate to the characters, either on a personal level, or on that weird para-para-social way that you relate to romanceable characters in dating sims. Persona 5 from a purely mechanical standpoint is, well, pretty good. Persona games have a pretty addictive gameplay loop, and Persona 5’s emphasis on polish and atmosphere makes it easily the most accessible and eye-catching game in the series yet, which is part of what makes its mainstream appeal so understandable.
Referring back to that bad Twitter thread I mentioned, Persona 5 does offer something that the vast majority of its American audience will never experience, a (very, very, skewed) glimpse into living in Tokyo as a high schooler on the verge of adulthood, and that is something unique and broadly appealing to the type of audience that Atlus sought to cultivate with Persona 5. This fits in well with modern Persona’s deviation into player-insert characters that the first two entries lacked. Persona 5 is more an experience to be played than a story to be told, and maybe that’s just the direction that Atlus wishes to take the series.
To me, the takeaway from Persona 5’s divisive success is that it hit audiences in different ways depending on their experience with the franchise and the genre as a whole. It’s been a runaway success in the mainstream, but has had extraordinarily mixed success and lacked some lasting impact with an entrenched Persona and Shin Megami Tensei fanbase. Similarly players who may not usually enjoy RPGs may find themselves sucked in and strung along by the atmospheric elements that drench every menu, set piece, and and detail of Persona 5, while players familiar with the franchise and the genre as a whole are more likely to be turned off by its narrative fumbles.
Atlus’s investment in every character being as widely relatable and marketable to as wide of an audience as possible hurts any chance of their characters having any major role in the main narrative, which then weakens the strength of the narrative in turn as none of the cast is required to be invested in it outside of whatever world-ending nihilistic calamity is threatening Japan this year.
It’s easy to deride Persona 5 as being style over substance, but ultimately, that’s what as it is. It’s a very fun to play RPG with some very easily likable characters, but future entries in the series will likely struggle with weak storytelling so long as they continue to rob their characters of motivations within the main narrative.
…Even if they are extremely relatable.
