How Johnny Anime Completely Changed My Spotify Wrapped — Part 1 of My 2023 Recapped
Author’s Note: This is the first in a two-part series recapping my 2023. The second will focus on my year through food.
For the first time in six years, I did not know what my Spotify Wrapped was going to be.
This year, instead of sticking with one playlist and jamming it into my ears for 365 days (or however many Spotify tracks for Wrapped), I jumped around, sampling different playlists depending on my mood and location. Seeing “Shapeshifter” as my summary of the year according to the app was not surprising. It was my top artists and songs that were surprising.
In late 2022, a Twitch streamer I followed named RTGame began playing Persona 5 Royal. I knew nothing about the game, which is one of the best JRPGs of all time according to multiple sources, but decided to fully commit to watching the streams. I enjoyed RT’s last play through of an “anime game” (Ace Attorney: Trials and Tribulations) so I decided to give P5R a shot.
I was handsomely rewarded by the game’s plot, characters, variety of animations, and soundtrack. The streamer added quite a bit to my enjoyment as well through his interactions with chat (including naming the protagonist Johnny Anime, hence the title of the blog) and commentary on the game. What started as a silly game became must-watch TV for me and hundreds of thousands of others. By the end of 2022, I had already invested nearly 200 hours in watching the raw streams and highlight videos (linked below).
With RT going on break for the holiday season and no other streams to watch, I bought the game myself. (It also just so happened to be on sale with most of the DLC). While I couldn’t experience the game for the first time, I could explore all the content that wasn’t streamed. And in a game that averages a complete play through time of 120 hours, there was still so much more to see. So, every day during January I played the game, sometimes staying up until 2 or 3 in the morning just to reach a certain part of the play through, eventually surpassing 150 hours of gameplay.
Of course, none of this explains my Spotify Wrapped, but you can imagine the effect one piece of media can have on a person’s psyche. For the first few months of the year, my music selections hadn’t been much different from years past. You can see in the below images that I listened to a lot of Taylor Swift, Fall Out Boy, and Panic! At the Disco from January through March. Things began to take a turn when the weather warmed.
I distinctly remember walking home and using the soundtrack to Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight (a rhythm game in the Persona series that features remixes of the original songs) to help me power through some tough hills. And, of course, I wouldn’t have listened to that soundtrack if RT hadn’t streamed the game at the beginning of April. That was the first time I considered using the game’s soundtrack as a backdrop to my life, even though, while spending all that time watching the streams and playing the game, I recognized the soundtrack composed by Shoji Meguro (目黒 将司) as simply fantastic. I even listened to a few tracks at the beginning of the year, but only as parts of my normal playlists.
In April, I tried to listen to some of the chill songs from the OST, even making a playlist for the tracks. However, I quickly became bored with the lack of variety in the few songs I had selected, and I switched back to the old standbys for the summer. The summer was also the time when I dove headfirst into a book series, reading three novels from late June to the middle of July and then listening to over 55 hours of the same books on tape until the end of August.
On the graphs below, you can see a huge spike at that point in my listening to アトラスサウンドチーム (Atlus Sound Team) and Lyn (the main vocalist on the Persona 5 soundtrack) that did not abate for the rest of the year.
Those spikes mark the point that I created a new Spotify playlist for parts of the soundtrack and began adding to the one from earlier in the year. (both are embedded below) These two playlists represent two styles of songs on the Persona soundtracks: vibes and bops. I wanted to create a separate list exclusively for the songs that I enjoyed in a fun, high energy way.
I began by listening to all the songs on both the Royal and Vanilla versions of the soundtrack and placing them into the two playlists as I saw fit. Then I played the playlists using Spotify’s Smart Shuffle feature, which finds similar songs and allows you to add them to your playlist. The algorithm started with a wide variety of video game background music, but I was able to fine tune it to just play songs from the soundtracks of the games in the Persona series as well as covers of those songs. After a few weeks, I ended with easy-to-play soundtracks for my commute to and from work (either by bus or on foot) that corresponded with my mood. The vibes playlist was also a good companion for doing class reading and writing (I started working toward an MBA in September), and the bops playlist was nice to have on longer walks or during strenuous exercise.
Thus, I spent my fall months almost exclusively listening to songs on these two playlists, explaining my top two artists and two of my top five songs.
A secret, third thing explains the rest of my top five. In the early February, I created a playlist simply called “songs to play before work.” I wanted a group of songs that would hype me up for days when I required an energy boost. The playlist needed to be short (10–15 minutes) so I could play its entirety on my bus ride and walk to the arena or field prior to a game. I started with AJR’s “Bang!” (my number three song of 2023), followed by “Life Will Change” by Lyn from Persona 5 and Royal, and ended with Panic! At the Disco’s “High Hopes” (my number four song of the year) and the band’s version of “The Greatest Show” from the movie of the same name. The finale became a go-to listen for me to increase my energy before games or really at any time throughout the day, explaining its 64 total streams, the most of any song.
As you can see above, I later added Panic’s “Say Amen (Saturday Night)” as an opener to the playlist, given that most of the games are on Saturday nights, and my personal favorite rendition of “Last Surprise” from Persona 5 Strikers (also known as Persona 5 Scramble: The Phantom Strikers in Asia). These two additions led to the removal of “High Hopes” due to the increased length of the playlist and copious amounts of Brendon Urie vocals.
Was Persona 5 Royal the only pop culture I interacted with during 2023? No, not at all. But was it a large part of my listening habits for most of the year? My Spotify Wrapped certainly says so. And that was something I never saw coming.
Stay tuned for the second part of my 2023 in review, showcasing the top posts on MealsOnTheDaily.