Note: This contains spoilers for Persona 5, but not for Persona 5 Royal. I’ll post some thoughts on Royal another time.
Persona 5 is both way too long and the perfect length.
Yeah, let’s start there. Because this is the game that I most often get cited as an example of a game that grown folk with jobs don’t have time for. It’s not the only long, popular game, of course — I sunk more hours into The Witcher 3 and Dragon Quest XI — but it’s one that can feel a lot longer because you don’t have any control over how long it is. Whether you’re the type of player who wants to explore every inch of the game or just wants to play through the story, your playthrough of Persona 5 is still going to cover the same number of in-game days. It’s a game where all of the sidequests are effectively a part of the main story, and when you want to get to the end, having it constantly so far away can feel exhausting. (Even for me, it was making my head explode, having these thoughts for a review germinating in my brain for two and a half months before I could finally sit down and confidently write something up.) Some palaces can seem like they go on forever, and there’s some fat in the cutscenes that could’ve been trimmed. The puzzles in the palaces are rarely very interesting — a lot of graph theory — and it feels like they don’t have much new to show you after the first few. The battle system, which altogether is very good and reveals quite a bit of depth, nevertheless starts to feel stale in the middle part of the game, when you’ve learned some good strategies but you haven’t gotten the broken skills that open up new ways to play the game. Most of the boss fights are extremely long, which are sometimes more interesting for their length but can also feel excruciating at times. (The half hour timer during the Okumura fight felt like a taunt.) Some of these things might not feel as bad in a shorter game, but in a game of this length they can really drag at times. By 75 hours, I was a little burnt out, especially when I knew there were still another 50 to go.
Yet I also can’t really imagine the game any other way, because the game derives all its power from its length. I felt hollow finishing this game, more than the normal feeling you get when finishing a game of this size. Because there were no breaks, no detours that you might get exploring an open world game or most other JRPGs; every single day in the game was a steady onward march towards March 20th, the final day of the game’s calendar when the Phantom Thieves finally go their separate ways. Every character arc had been steadily building for that entire in-game year, every plot point moving towards its final resolution, and on that day it just… Ends. You don’t have any post-game to ease you out of things, no lingering sidequests you can wrap up. That’s it, the game’s over, 125 hours of your life, seemingly countless after-work sessions finally reaching their conclusion. (The game makes a big deal out of it, too, letting you give a drawn-out goodbye to every single character you met along the way.) It hits differently from a boundless world like Xenoblade Chronicles where you can choose how much time you want to invest in exploration and sidequests, and it also hits differently from a similarly-contained but much shorter RPG like Final Fantasy IX. The game forces the max length of the former, while keeping the tighter structure of the latter; it’s a sweetspot that works because you’ve invested so much time in the game and its characters.
That’s not nothing — actually, it counts for a lot. I have a lot of problems with how the game approaches its loftier themes and overarching plot, but in reality a significant portion of the game is just hanging out with characters and learning about them; and these are characters I really enjoyed spending time with over such a long period of time. Their arcs of personal growth are often convincing, and because they’re usually doled out in small portions across long stretches of the game, it does start to feel like you’re watching them slowly reflect; that you are helping them grow, even if it’s just by selecting the option you think they want to hear. It feels like you’ve made a lot of friends, gotten to understand the world just a little bit better. It even helps Joker out; most of the perks that you get from levelling your confidants are not just window dressing, but actually very helpful within palaces. It suggests that Joker himself is growing in many ways, and there are mechanics built around that as well, as you have to build Joker’s social stats in order to be able to further develop his relationships while also gaining access to better tools. I really like how just about anything you can do in the game gives you some kind of material benefit, with an assertion that just about anything can help you improve yourself if you approach it in the right way. Publicly eating an oversized burger can make you braver; watching a rom-com with a friend can make you more charming; cleaning up the café can make you kinder. No, these activities won’t actually make you a better person, but at the same time it feels kind of encouraging to try to be more well-rounded.
To call these segments of the game a social sim is, to me, to give the game too much credit. There’s inevitably only so much socializing you can do with an effectively silent protagonist like Joker. Most of the relationships he forms with other characters in the game ultimately feel hollow because he himself is not a real character, nor is he even someone the player can insert themselves into — in fact, the game actively discourages that. In conversations, you’re rewarded by choosing what you think the person you’re talking to would want to hear the most, not what Joker might say. (Which I think the game is fully aware of, and they even nod to this during a puzzle in the Royal palace.) He becomes nothing more than a sounding board for the other characters, a conduit who doesn’t actually have emotions of its own, thereby breaking any attempt at real connection between the player or Joker and the rest of the cast. Every time someone says their life was changed by Joker’s worldview (or God forbid, that they love Joker, and boy do the girls love Joker), I can’t help but think… What worldview?
Yet ultimately, I didn’t really care about that, because really, the focus was on the characters themselves. Though each confidant concludes with the character profusely thanking Joker for changing their life, the entire journey before that wasn’t about Joker changing their life; it was simply about their life being changed, and usually it’s the character themselves making the changes. All Joker — or, I suppose, the player — is doing is giving them a nudge in the right direction. Ultimately Ann made her own decisions on how to handle her modeling career and her relationship with Shiho, just as Yusuke found his own path as an artist, both commercially and artistically. The writers were also very deft in ensuring that these confidant stories — which are technically optional — don’t interfere with the main story on any level. The characters grow, yes, but the fundamental core of who they are never really changes; they’re just a better version of that person. This way, the main story can continue along with those same characters regardless. (Contrast this with Fire Emblem: Three Houses, which has the characters change so drastically through support conversations that the main story can only accompany the dumbest, most basic characteristics of your team.)
That story, in a broad sense, also works because of how those characters work. The game’s story was inspired by the adventure of picaresque fiction, which is clear even when you ignore the Personas named after Zorro and Milady. Again, I have my problems with the finer details of the story, but the sense of adventure throughout — sweeping through diverse palace environments, fighting wild and weird monsters, keeping up a roguish attitude the whole time — is sublime, and the game works overtime to make sure those pleasures are in abundance. The game’s sense of style is maintained through even elements as basic as its menus, and so many of the game’s best moments come repeatedly like clockwork: a character awakening to their Persona into a battle scored by “Will Power” (one of the game’s best, most triumphant rock tracks); tearing through the palace at maximum security while the urgent-yet-suave funk of “Life Will Change” always feels impossibly cool; knocking out all of the enemies to hold them up and perform an All-Out Attack; performing one of the Showtime team attacks added to Royal. The game is just so effortlessly cool, which is especially impressive for a JRPG, which can too often feel dorky in their fantasy settings and rigid combat systems.
But with all that out of the way: yes, the game does suffer for its length. A lot of the problems I mentioned off-handedly come from the game’s sprawl. Ideas that crop up early on are rarely followed up on in a meaningful way as the story changes to make way for new ones, leaving the impression of a game that’s not as focused or committed to its ideals as it’d like you to believe. For example: one recurring idea in the story, essentially, is that the Phantom Thieves are operating in uncharted territory, using methods for which the underlying ethics aren’t very clear; and this is muddied by the fact that the people doing this are teenagers who are still growing, who barely understand themselves, much less the world. Yet this naivete is precisely what gives them the perspective to take on such lofty crimes.
On its face, this is a great premise. It provides lots of opportunities for these kids to learn and grow while still asserting themselves in the face of an often oppressive world. Yet it often feels as though the game lets them off the hook a little too easily, offering little to suggest that they may not be doing everything right. Almost everyone trying to keep them down is either a villain or horribly misguided, and any doubts that crop up within the team are shot down immediately by a positive affirmation from Morgana or Ryuji (or often the player themselves, who get roped into making Joker band everyone together under his leadership). The Phantom Thieves assuredly do make mistakes along the way, and they see the horrible things that the villains they fight do; yet I’m not always convinced they’ve learned their lesson.
The only real, consistent ideological opposition that the Phantom Thieves ever run into comes from Goro Akechi. Akechi is introduced as a character with a firm commitment to justice, one which seems more resolute and convincing than many of the game’s supposed other seekers of justice like Sae. He opposes the Phantom Thieves, believing that their insistence on following their own rules, their own justice, is something that cannot go unchecked. (He is essentially the Ganimard to Joker’s Arsène Lupin, to use the game’s own literary references.) There’s truth to those statements, an idea well worth exploring. As a high schooler himself, his reviews are as unrefined as the Phantom Thieves; admirable, but rough around the edges. His constant presence is a reminder that the Phantom Thieves are not an unquestioned force for good.
Yet the rest of the game doesn’t really support that. Each palace that the Phantom Thieves go into showcase the cognition of a person whose perception of the world has become so undeniably fucked up that they don’t even see it as the same reality everyone else does. We have a clear sign that something is Not Right, that it needs to be changed. Even Futaba’s and Sae’s palaces — stemming from people that everyone agrees aren’t inherently bad — still represent a worldview that isn’t healthy for them or others, that clearly needs to be changed. The rest of them, well, they’re criminals, and if you had any doubts about that, the game makes it extra clear that they’re bad guys. Madarame stealing his artists’ work might seem like small potatoes; so if you have any doubts about it, well, they thrown in some light flavour text about him physically abusing his students (that is mentioned briefly once or twice and never again), and they let you know that one of his students killed themselves. Do you think that Medjed might have some legitimate points about your personal justice? Well, their idea of justice is to just leak random peoples’ bank information, so clearly they don’t know what they’re talking about. Past that, we’ve moved onto literal drug kingpins and murderers. No ambiguity allowed.
Once you’ve stolen their treasure, their distortions — rendered incredibly literally by viewing the people they oppress as slaves/tools/robots/what have you in ways that don’t even necessarily map to their real life views — fade away and you’re met with some kind of ‘pure’ self free from these distortions. There is some cosmic force out there telling you exactly what is wrong with these people, and you only have to do one simple task to make them into a Good Person. Easy as 1–2–3. Crucially, we don’t ever see what this pure self looks like, at least not for the outright villains; we merely get a tearful apology as they confess what they’ve done, and then they’re locked up never to be seen again. (That weird little scene in the depths of Mementos doesn’t count.) The entire process is rendered such that there’s no way you could possibly think that the Phantom Thieves aren’t just.
Because of this, any attempt from Akechi to cast doubts onto the Phantom Thieves never feels entirely convincing. (Well, that, and also bundled in is the fact that in practice he mostly seems like a TV celebrity that the police occasionally humour. And that Sae takes completely seriously, for some reason.) And of course, even that gets blown up in the game’s big twist, where he reveals that he’s actually a murder who’s been causing people to have mental shutdowns in the name of a corrupt politician. Not only that, but everything he’s done was in an effort to eventually use the reverse Uno card on said politician, who is actually the father who abandoned him as a bastard child. On every level, this twist fucking sucks. It reduces one of the game’s most potentially interesting characters into a simple, worn-out trope that revolves around one of the game’s many uninteresting villains. (Shido’s plot as the mastermind behind all of the game’s mishaps essentially boils down to “become rich fascist”, and as much as I hate to say it, even our real life aspirational fascists have a little more depth than that.) The scene where he and Shido tell each other the entire history of their relationship — deep into a 90-minute exposition dump with other tangentially related topics — is embarrassing to watch, two poorly mishandled characters giving out some of the most important plot details in the game to no one in particular. And from this point, the game doesn’t seem to know how to handle Akechi. His showdown with the Phantom Thieves in Shido’s palace mostly amounts to him yelling, and it’s hard to gauge what kind of a person he really is; unfortunately giving the Phantom Thieves an easy way out of any of their doubts. Not everything that Akechi said before the grand reveal is a complete lie — the new content in Royal does an admirable job of attempting to connect the two versions of Akechi — but it does take away almost all of the credibility he ever had, and is a complete damper to portraying the Phantom Thieves in a complex way.
Because the game’s perspective — not even the Phantom Thieves, but the game itself — isn’t willing to cast real doubts on its heroes. This is where I have to bring up — and I I know I’m only the eight millionth person to do so — how fucking pervy the game can get. It’s strong whiplash when the first villain of the game is a literal ephebophile trying to sleep with Ann — who implicitly rapes Shiho after beating her, which alongside her suicide attempt is the darkest moment in the whole game (setting a tone early on that I’m glad they didn’t try to keep up) — only to have Ann similarly blackmailed to pose nude for an artist who quickly becomes a good guy who joins your team without as much as an apology. The game plays this situation for laughs at Ann’s expense, and it’s something the game keeps doing over and over. Ryuji and Joker constantly ogle at Ann — when she awakens to her revealing leather catsuit Persona, in the hot and sweaty desert, all over Morgana’s creepy ‘Lady Ann’ pining — something that Ann is clearly not okay with, but this is never put into conversation with how she felt when Kamoshida was harassing her. It could be turned into good storytelling, much as Ann’s modeling career could be played as a way of her reclaiming her body, but instead the game opts for horny camera angles and plays it off as a ‘boys will be boys’ and ‘girls will be girls’ thing. It felt so weird to me because there really was unexpected pathos and nuance in the Kamoshida arc that just got thrown out the window.
There’s similar whiplash in the aftermath of Okumura’s palace, where the Phantom Thieves witness firsthand the kind of exploitation and abuses going on under Okumura’s supervision as CEO of a fast food company. Employees are underpaid and overworked, treated as disposable by executives. Yet mere days after seeing this happen, Haru spends her father’s money on an impromptu private trip to Disneyland (or wherever they called it in-game, I don’t care, Ryuji was wearing fucking Mickey Mouse ears) for the Phantom Thieves, renting out the entire fucking park on a whim, to the point where Haru even notes that the people working there couldn’t get the full fireworks show together on such short notice. At no point do any of the Phantom Thieves try to make a connection between the things they’ve just seen.
Yet it’s clear to me that the entire lens that the game itself views its events through is not willing to connect the larger systems at play. During their Disneyland trip, Okumura begins to make his heartfelt confession about his crimes, and during this confession he says something odd: that he alone was responsible for the abuses in his company. Implying that, if you simply remove him and his twisted desires from the root of the company, all of the problems will be solved. Now, anyone who has a basic understanding of these power structures know that the problems are rooted deep within how the company is organized, that these toxic workplaces can’t be solved by removing one person. And I think the game knows this, too; that line was so inelegant, so ugly, that it almost felt like the game was trying to cast away any doubts, because otherwise the entire premise of the game simply would not work.
The Phantom Thieves are only ever able to change the heart of one person at a time. They find a Palace, they steal the treasure, and change that person’s heart. This necessitates a belief that, by changing the right person, you can affect hundreds of others; otherwise, the Phantom Thieves will have too small of an impact for the epic sweep that the game is shooting for to work. It is true that there’s a real impact in changing the hearts of their chosen targets; the students of Shujin Academy affected by Kamoshida and Kaneshiro would surely agree. But it obviously has its limits, because the real way in which the people of the world are oppressed in a broad sense come not through individuals but through the structures that keep them down. Changing Okumura’s heart (or, uh, killing him, I guess) won’t really change anything unless there’s a real commitment to changing the entire way the company operates, but this isn’t something the game is interested in following up on even through Haru’s confidant conversations, which are actually centred around expanding the company’s scope to include coffee shops.
Now, I’m a reasonable person. I don’t expect every story to align with my personal political ideology, and if the game simply wanted to enact vigilante justice against a bunch of assholes, you wouldn’t catch me complaining. But the Phantom Thieves really do want to change the world, and the model the game gives for that just isn’t rich enough. Ryuji is obsessed with the Phantom Thieves being famous worldwide, and is thrilled when they take a trip to Hawaii to find that even people in another country have heard of them. And Ann says she wants to leverage that level of fame to inspire people to have the courage to stand up for themselves, the way that she feels she didn’t stand up against Kamoshida. There is something admirable about this, and we can actually see this in action at least once with Sae, a person who has some power that lacks the wherewithal to use that power to fight against genuine injustice until her mind is changed by the Phantom Thieves. (Without them stealing her heart, which is a nice twist.) But way more often, we see characters who are left completely helpless in the face of the systems they’ve been put in front of. Hell, it’s even a central game mechanic; the deadline to change someone’s heart is always caused by some situation that the Phantom Thieves would otherwise be helpless against. Without their powers, Joker would have been expelled, sued, imprisoned, and murdered, and while these are extreme examples, we see them crop up all over the game, especially through individual requests in Mementos.
These Mementos requests, where you change the hearts of people who are less fucked up than those with palaces but are still kind fucked up, are split between random NPCs you’ll never meet and people with a direct relationship with one of your confidants. I don’t really care about the randoms, but the targets connected to your confidants propel some of the most effective stories in the game. For those, your scope is limited: you have one person that you want to help, one person that you’ve gotten to know as a friend, and you’re changing someone’s heart in an effort to help them and them only. If someone else benefits from it, great! But your focus is more personal, and it’s when these changes of heart connect with the game’s strong character-building that the Phantom Thieves’ actions start to feel truly meaningful. (I also think that this is why the Kamoshida arc might be the game’s best, because his actions directly impact three Phantom Thieves, and even some other victims like Shiho and Mishima are characters you get to know quite well.) If you can only affect one person at a time, well, commit to that, and maybe you can change things. But you also have to acknowledge that you’re helping them, and they’re in situations they don’t have power in. Yoshida stood up to the political system but was ultimately helpless; Iwai tried to break ties with the Yakuza but found his past coming back for him; Takemi tried to work around medical bureaucracy to save lives, but was taken down by the corruption within. Just because you took out one person, that doesn’t mean that these problems couldn’t crop up again — and that same person would still be helpless on their own.
Ultimately, the Phantom Thieves do try to change everyone’s heart. After changing the heart of Shido, the mastermind behind dozens of murders, we see a cutscene where his complicit underlings panic and try to figure out how they can scramble their way out of the situation. They’re still corrupt, looking out for themselves and no one else, and they ultimately succeed in keeping themselves free; even after Shido confesses on national TV, the Phantom Thieves are stunned to realize that the public reception is muted, because those in power are still in power and have successfully suppressed information enough to make this a non-issue for the general populace. (I don’t really find this turn of events very convincing, but I do appreciate the attempt.) And so, deciding that everyone in Japan needs to have their hearts changed, the Phantom Thieves venture into Mementos to destroy the Metaverse once and for all.
The events down in the depths of Mementos feel like an attempt to bring out something that the game should have been pursuing, but the way they do it so late it the game feels disconnected from everything that happened before. It’s an attempt at elevating the Phantom Thieves to a cosmic scope that works for plot reasons but isn’t really convincing on a thematic level; like it’s just there to explain why the Metaverse exists and why Joker, Akechi, and Morgana had their powers. Apparently, the god Yaldabaoth has been enacting the will of the people by draining them of desires, leaving them to a Brave New World-esque reality where they never have to think for themselves. Joker and Akechi’s powers are gifts from the gods that amount to a cosmic betting match, and whoever wins decides the fate of humanity. And so, as one does in a JRPG, the Phantom Thieves must Kill God. (Joker eventually does so by literally summoning Satan, by the way, which is incredibly badass.) This basically has nothing to do with the rest of the game, and is not applicable to real life in any sense the way that the preceding events could be. The concept of humanity desiring a middling existence devoid of any kind of real emotion (basically, that everyone is bluepilled) could be an interesting one, if that was something the game had been pursuing the whole time. And it does relate to the idea that the Phantom Thieves are pursuing their own idea of justice, that despite what the masses may think of them, they know what they believe to be true and will work to achieve those ends. But this conception of the masses doesn’t track with anything in the game prior, and stuck at the end here, it just seems kind of… Random? Am I missing something? Nothing materially changes after you kill God, and the public acts more or less the same before everything happened. You kill God, and, I dunno, everything’s right back where it started? So what was the point of all of that?
The only real difference is that the Metaverse is gone (or is it…?), leading Sae to tell the Phantom Thieves that they’ll have to leave the world in the hands of the adults who hold power in the real world. That points to yet another thread that the game pursues. That word — ’adult’ — crops up over and over and over again through the course of the game; there’s a very clear delineation between kids and adults here. I’ve never heard the word so many times in my life, certainly not from teenagers, and part of me wonders if it is, to some degree, a quirk in the translation. (The original version of the game apparently had a spotty and occasionally homogenous translation that was cleaned up for Royal, which is the version I played. This feels like it might’ve been one of those things so central to an enormous body of text that it was impossible to rejig, though, especially considering the costs of revoicing those lines.) The game’s characters are always referring to “rotten adults”, even in situations where there’s more relevant identities at play. (The people who pin Wakaba’s death on Futaba are referred to as adults by both Futaba and even fellow adult Sojiro, and it seems like it would make more sense to refer to them by other roles.) There’s an implication that there’s something inherent about the nature of adulthood that stands in firm opposition to an implied purity of youth. This is well-trodden territory, especially in shonen manga and anime; so much so that the game seems to take that trope for granted, never really bothering to explain why adults are so much worse. The obvious guess is that they’ve been tarnished by the workings of society and the misdeeds of others — hence why you have to change their hearts — but that doesn’t tell the full story. After all, you change the hearts of other kids sometimes, and some of your confidants are adults.
It’s worth noting that almost all of the Phantom Thieves lack real parental figures; Ryuji and Ann are the only ones whose parents aren’t dead or absent, and even Ann mentions how her parents travel a lot and leave her on her own. This, to me, feels like an attempt to sidestep clarifying the exact nature of this youth vs. adult dichotomy. The ‘good’ adults — namely Sae after her heart’s been changed and Sojiro, who adopts Futaba, houses Joker, and becomes a father figure to the rest of the Phantom Thieves — can be presented as rare exceptions to the rule while the rest of the Phantom Thieves’ parents can be cherished as a faint outline of a memory. (Haru even reflects on her father with a degree of fondness.) So Sae’s insistence that they leave the world to the adults is… Well, it’s not all that promising. The structures haven’t materially changed, and the only adult whose heart that the Phantom Thieves changed that’s actually working to make a material difference in the world is Sae herself. (And technically, her heart changed all on its own!) One person isn’t gonna change the world.
But then, hey, these things take time. The adults may not change the world, but there’s still room for the Phantom Thieves and their cohorts to change the future. I’m not sold that they know how they’re gonna do that — Makoto saying that she was gonna become a fuckin’ cop the moment I locked Joker into a relationship with her was incredibly disappointing. But like I said: I spent 120 hours with these characters, and I came out the other side still liking them, still wanting to spend more time with them. I’d like to believe that they can do better than the people who nearly ruined their lives, and on my most optimistic days, I’d like to believe that we can do the same.
