“Persona 5”: The Medium is the Message
Let it be said in preface that this essay may not be for you.
If you like Persona 5; if you have a relationship with the game that is beautiful and innocent, like a spring garden in bloom; if you are not in the market for a wild egotist with a stomping addiction to be let loose all over your garden, you are here advised:
Go away.
We fear that no monetary restitution will make up for the mean names we have inscribed on the graves of your flowers. We cannot say in brief what these names are.
We may be here all day.
SPOILERS for Persona 5 : Persona 4 : Metal Gear Solid 2 : Metal Gear Solid 4
notes
Preamble
Persona 5 is a game about ideas.
Is that absurd to say?
We think so.
We acknowledge the absurdity of that sentiment.
But Persona 5 is not “about ideas” in the way that other games and stories are about stuff. Stuff is different from ideas. Everything is about stuff, but the specifics of the stuff isn’t always ideas.
We mean to say that Persona 5’s narrative concerns the ideas of specific, often evil persons. Their ideas about the world are weird. These ideas veer so starkly from reality that they are referred to by Persona 5’s characters as “distortions.”
Persona 5 is a game about ideas, and it is also a game about lies.
Or, Persona 5 at least believes it is a game about ideas. It wants to be. This is what it is on paper, de jure. This is the lie it tells itself. In reality Persona 5 isn’t sure what it’s about. It has become too lost in the web of distortions.
De facto, Persona 5 is mostly concerned with the player’s performance of rote, mundane chores. On paper, it is concerned with challenging systems of oppression; in play, it is about wasting the player’s time. We are not referring to working at the mall, or watering your plant, or making infiltration tools, or hitting baseballs, or calling your teacher to come clean your room for you, or any of the daily stat-boosters that come to mind at the center of the usual word-association between “Persona” and “chores.” This is not a word game.¹ The chores we’re talking about are the peaks of its narrative arcs. The dungeons, the battles, the confidants, the plot. Meet bad guy. Bad Guy is Bad. Enter Bad Guy Brain. Steal Bad Guy McGuffin. Learn nothing of value. Feel nothing. Feel dead. Feel existentially at risk while wasting hours of single lifetime playing unfun video game.
Rinse.
Repeat.
Take your time.
Persona 5 professes to be a game about theft. Its characters are likened to gentlemen and lady thieves of the night. Big bads leech the blood, sweat, and tears out of persons lower on the socioeconomic ladder, and then our protagonist Robin Hoods sneak into the Sheriff of Nottingham’s brains and fundamentally alter reality. There are a lot of Inception jokes that have been made in the past decade. Putting a banana inside a banana! It’s banana Inception, ho ho! But this is actually basically Inception with high schoolers. And boob jokes. And your teacher cleaning your room. You’re seventeen! You can become romantically involved with people who are probably thirty!
What was this about, again?
Oh yeah. Thieves. Persona 5 is about stealing things. But the greatest victim of Persona 5’s theft, unexpectedly, is not one of the Bad Guy Boss Boys at the peaks of its narrative sinusoid. Persona 5 burgles the most — as a sequel often does — from its predecessors, Personas 3 & 4.
What‘s a “Persona”?
Plenty of what Persona 5 pilfers from its parents poses a plethora of pleasing… mechanics. The Confidant system is a renamed forgery of the Social Link system, which is a cool system. It’s like in real life, where you get to know people better over time, and you might know Friend A better than Friend B, but that doesn’t mean you don’t like spending time with Friend B — it just means you haven’t leveled up your slink enough yet. Over time you get to know each other better, and on some occasion you’ll be at Friend B’s apartment until 4:29am and you’ll be talking about really deep things, man, and you feel a moment of genuine connection between the two of you that’s so potent and so beautiful you feel like crying about it, but you go home and you don’t cry about it, because all those years of steeling yourself against sudden emotional distress weren’t for nothing, OK?! The smell of stale cigarette smoke will remind you of this evening for years afterward. And then eventually your friendship caps at 10 and you just stop talking to or doing anything with that friend. And their spirit Pokémon evolves into God. We don’t spend THAT much time in our basement. We have real friends, just like you.
Persona 5 apes the structure of Persona 4, too: meet party member, take party member into dungeon where his/her arch-nemesis awaits, introduce narrative threads to be later mulled over in party member-specific conversations. In Persona 4, this arch-nemesis was New Party Member’s very own shadow, the lean, mean, unsexy and not-actually-so-insane part of New Party Member’s self. In Persona 5, Mr. Nemesis is always a member of the social elite who has exploited (or will exploit) New Party Member in some way.
Stealing these isn’t a bad thing. These mechanics worked before, and they could work again. But we wonder whether Persona 5, with its particular narrative goals, should have been a Persona sequel at all.
Persona 4 was built around stories about confronting the self, where Persona 5 is ultimately about characters who have to confront something wholly outside themselves and outside of their control. The game tries to be about confronting this lack of control, about breaking the chains of oppression and sticking it to The Man.
Given this new thematic framework, Persona 5 nevertheless does very little to change the series’ established structure, and it still wants to flirt with the same Jungian glossary of terms that composes Persona’s aesthetic foundation. Our heroes’ Personæ now manifest as literal masks in the world of the unconscious, though this doesn’t serve much of any narrative or thematic purpose. It’s just another piece of party trivia: Hey! Did you know that Jung referred to the social presentation of oneself as one’s persona, or like a MASK, and that the characters in this game wear MASKS with their PERSONAS?! DUUUUDE!
As mentioned, the characters in Persona 5 who embody the series theme of duality of self are the not the protagonists, but the villains, who are, ironically, often one-dimensional.
Can the narrative still work if it’s about the villains confronting their selves? Every Persona game has its own take on the Jungian Shadow; in Persona 5, these are the villains’ (mis)conceptions of themselves (and Futaba, who for all intents and purposes functions as a Persona 4 character).
When the villains confront their shadows, it’s not really about them accepting that they have this unflattering part of their identity. They just go, Oh, I have been dastardly, haven’t I? I must repent for ever having been that! That isn’t how you’re supposed to be! I have no personality now and I doom myself to society’s punitive whims! But I had noble goals, right? I only wanted to be the king of McDonald’s! Uh…
We are being marginally disingenuous about this. We will address this in further detail. We are taking our time.
This all sounds like we’re trying specifically to pigeonhole Persona 5 into the thematic orientation of Persona 4, and we are, because it is more similar to 4 than it is to 3, where shadows were the monsters you fought in Tartarus, and you weren’t followed everywhere by a talking animal mascot.
Persona 5 takes the shape of its immediate parent and tries to use it to say something new. But the mechanics that drove Persona 4 are not well suited to the narrative interests of Persona 5, and the resulting game is as overwrought narratively as it is aesthetically. But this is not meant to be a comparison between the minutiae of the fifth sequel and the fourth sequel, which seems altogether too masturbatory an exercise for our taste.
We believe Persona 5 should be evaluated on its own terms, and will work toward that end. We are sure, nevertheless, that the matter of series comparisons will rear its beastly head again before our words expire.
A Little Night Music (ten thousand times)
It is difficult to take any game “on its own terms” as such, since games — especially sequels — are so given to iteration. It’s tempting, when trying to make a thing, to just go for a more refined execution of the clumsy mechanics of yesteryear. And we take no inherent issue with iterative improvement. Devil May Cry 5 and Celeste and Sekiro, for instance, are by no means wild innovations, and they’re great. We love them.
But as we see it, for each improvement Persona 5 makes to the series user interface, it has failed to improve upon key areas of its design.
There is a much proliferated quotation that goes something like “Good artists copy, great artists steal.”² This is, of course, ridiculous, given that there is no obvious difference between charming homage and bald-faced plagiarism. It is fallacious too because all art steals, you silly willy.
Perhaps at one time in the forty-first century BCE there were works that we might have called “original.” Not even Pong is original. That game is old. It is based on tennis: modern tennis was “invented” in the nineteenth century. We can’t even tell you when two probably intensely ancient persons got the idea to hit a ball back and forth with sticks. When did they add a net between the players?
The point here is not to say that Persona 5 is doing anything wrong by stealing from Persona 4 and other games. What it has done wrong: it has broken into the Louvre, and instead of stealing The Coronation of Napoleon, it settles for a Mona Lisa lunchbox³ which someone “accidentally forgot” on a bench outside the men’s bathroom.⁴
What does Persona 5 steal? What is inside this lunchbox? Getting away from the Louvre for a moment: We are about to spend several hundred words discussing, dryly, something that has nothing to do with art and everything to do with animal-brained pleasure.
In 2006, Nintendo, Brownie Brown, and HAL Laboratory released Mother 3. Mother 3’s music was composed exclusively by Mr. Shogo Sakai.
Mother 3 contains over 18 unique battle-accompaniment tunes, not including tunes for boss-fighting. This means that, instead of hearing the same song four-hundred-and-sixty-two times throughout the game, the player is hearing eighteen pieces of music 25.67 times each (in a game in which the player enters battle exactly 462 times). Our playthrough of Mother 3 lasted just under 22 hours. We are not a credentialed doer of maths, but even we know that we listened to at least 0.83 new battle themes per hour.⁵ That’s pretty good. According to this same calculation, players of Persona 5 hear only 0.0099 new battle themes per hour.⁶
These numbers speak for themselves, shrilly, in both English and Japanese, and they are saying “The makers of Mother 3 know that nobody wants to listen to the same twenty seconds of music on repeat for tortured eternity.” In Mother 3, there are additionally at least ten boss themes. We counted the regular battle themes, but not the boss themes, so readers will just have to take our word for it about those boss themes. The Youtube playlist entitled “Mother 3 Battle Themes” comprises 58 different videos. You run the numbers, sport. The point is, unless a player is some kind of addict who prefers his songs to repeat, from the beginning, nine hundred and thirty-eight times, before he moves on to another one, he will see that Mother 3’s approach to battle music design is something to admire.⁷
In 1994, Final Fantasy VI’s Nobuo Uematsu insisted that Square’s programmers make the world music resume where it had left off before the player initiated a battle. He anticipated that players probably did not want to listen to the same fifteen seconds of “Terra’s Theme” every time they returned to the overworld screen. (Persona 5, thankfully, implements this feature.)
Mr. Uematsu did not demand the same musical continuity for battles, but we can hardly blame pioneers for failing to blaze all trails. But Persona 5 came out 23 years later, and we think it may be judged according to modern standards.
One might say, in witty repartie, that Persona 5’s triumphs in user-interface design should make up for its failure to evolve musically, and perhaps there is some substance to that argument. Our bleeding ears seem less than willing to discuss, however.
In 2007, Nintendo and Intelligent Systems released Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn, which, incidentally, is one of the greatest games of its generation. It is unequivocally the best game released for the Wii. Readers are here encouraged to pay several seconds of homage to its potent greatness.
Before Radiant Dawn, Fire Emblem games took the same approach to music design as any other Japanese role playing game with discreet overworld and battle screens, playing a fight song from the beginning every time the player initiated a battle. In Radiant Dawn (and in all sequels released since 2013’s Fire Emblem: Awakening), battle music continues from where it left off at the end of the preceding encounter. The player initiates battle a lot in Fire Emblem. This was and is a valuable innovation. Additionally, Radiant Dawn has at least ten different common battle songs. That’s at least one battle theme for every four hours of play. We have done the math again, poorly.
Sometimes a chapter’s battle theme is the same as the surrounding map theme, so the total could be said to be a number greater than 0.25 themes/hour. This, it must be admitted, is noticeably fewer fight jingles than those found in Mother 3, but is nevertheless a sufficient number to stave off repetitious brainscratching lunacy. One never knows how the game will shake things up. It is full of many surprises. If dear readers should take anything away from this tirade, it is our plea that they admire, from a distance or intimately, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn.
Players of Persona 5 may see where this line of discourse is going.
Curiously, most Japanese role playing games released during the past twenty-five years have failed to experiment much in the design of their music placement beyond copying the model that was established in Dragon Quest. The first one. Nineteen Eighty-Six. One battle song, living in our brain forever.
Hallelujah.
Persona 4 failed to lift either of the mentioned design choices from Mother 3 and Fire Emblem. First released in 2008, Persona 4 had one intensely annoying battle theme. “Reach Out to the Truth” begins with a grating vocal line that the player will hear at the start of each enemy encounter in the 70-hour narrative.
We would not have described this song in such unflattering terms when we first heard it. It is curious how repetition has that effect.
Persona 3 made the same mistake. We suspect that recent series composer Shoji Meguro thinks it is funny to force players to endure obnoxious musical phrases at the beginnings of songs for many cumulative hours of their lives; that Meguro and series sound designers Kenichi Tsuchiya and Atsushi Kitajoh believe battles in RPGs are punishment for the player. You screwed up, player, for wishing to Level Up, i.e. to make progress and engage with the mechanical fulcrum of the video game in front of you. Welcome to hell.
Meguro et al.⁸ accidentally forgot to be so sadistic in Persona 4: The Golden, which contains a monumentally improved two battle themes (and we understand this is the same case for 2020’s Persona 5: The Royal), including a new one that does not begin with the loudly intoned and bumpily metered NOW I FAAACE OUT, I HOOOOLD OUT, etc. “Time to Make History” begins with an unobtrusive line of punchy guitar and uptempo percussion. Furthermore, in Persona 4: The Golden, “Reach Out to the Truth” is relegated solely to battles in which the player has gone out of her way to get the upper hand on the enemy in an ambush, which, although we find it troubling that here again the designers seem to wish punishment upon the player for doing what the game wants her to do, the addition of a second song is no less appreciated.
Persona 5 has one⁹ battle theme that begins obnoxiously and which starts over at the beginning of every fight. There is one mini-boss theme (“Keeper of Lust”) and there are five boss themes (“Blooming Villain,” “Will Power,” “Rivers in the Desert,” “Yaldabaoth,” “Our Beginning”). One boss theme plays overwhelmingly more often than any of the others, some of which only play once, sometimes (often) not even long enough to loop. We spent one hundred and one (101!) hours playing Persona 5. You do the math about how likely it is that we should ever want to hear “Last Surprise” again.
In Persona 5, palaces (the game’s version of “dungeons” or “levels” or “mazes”) frequently take upwards of 3–4 hours to complete. We wonder how it is possible that no Atlus staff observed that “Sweatshop” — which plays on the exploration screen of the fifth palace — causes aural displeasure within ten minutes of listening, never mind ten minutes times twenty-four (or longer!). A search of “persona 5 ost sweatshop” on Youtube yields two immediate results: one video running 18 minutes and 31 seconds, and another running 2 minutes and 30 seconds. The former, as of this writing, has 618 000+ views, the latter only 100 000+. This suggests that the majority of listeners either allow the algorithm to pick the next Persona 5 song for them, and that the most listened-to songs are these extended versions, or that listeners actually enjoy eighteen minutes and thirty-one seconds of “Sweatshop” infecting their headphones.
We wonder if we are insane.
Nor have we spent any time addressing the Persona series’ insistence that players in 2017 (and 2018, and 2019, and presumably in 2020’s Persona 5: The Royal) listen to the same version of “Aria of the Soul” that has accompanied demon fusion since 2006. Players who spent enough time in Persona 5’s Velvet Room to summon Lucifer know this is unacceptable. DO YOU REALLY NEED THIS? DO YOU REALLY NEED THIS? DO YOU REALLY NEED THIS? is what we have to say re: “Aria of the Soul.” Now we feel that to give any more written real estate to this piece of music would be to let it win.
It is necessary to put this subject to bed.
We see this diatribe about sound design as representative of the game’s problems on the whole. Persona 5 relies on tired mechanical conventions of its genre that were not only outdated in 2017, but which were already growing old when Persona 4 came out in 2008. That, and the script is terrible. And Caroline and Justine’s canned Velvet Room lines. And some[*] of the cutscenes look like garbage.
Re: conventions of modern video gaming, namely their insistence on talking to us, and cutscenes
[*]We’re talking about this asterisk right away. When we say some of the cutscenes, we do not mean to say some of them are arbitrarily, vaguely, minorly worse than others. We mean, specifically, that the hand-drawn cutscenes — as compared to the cutscenes using 3D models — do not look good. The hand-drawn cutscenes, whose placement in and significance to the story suggest that they are supposed to be some kind of visual reward for the player, are not much of a reward at all, because they do not look good.
The 3D cutscenes, which use in-game character models, look fantastic! Why didn’t Atlus make all the cutscenes look that way? Why did they not learn this lesson from Catherine, whose 3D cutscenes were, though primitive, more expressive and full of character than the 2D ones?¹⁰
Nevertheless we must express our admiration for the game’s opening music video. It is a sight to see, and a delight (unlike the new one, which is definitely the straight-to-VHS sequel). From what we understand, the poor cutscenes and the opening were both animated by Production I.G., who are no slouches in the animation business. So why do the non-music-video 2D cutscenes look so unflattering? Why are they choppy? Why is their composition so uninteresting? Why is there no interesting character blocking going on? Did they have to fill them with CG lights and lens flare?
We do not think it is necessarily fair to blame their director in this case, so we will not.
Was it a matter of time? If it was a matter of money, we wonder what in the world Atlus felt they needed to spend money on instead of these scenes that come only once every ten hours and which are supposed to be visually delicious. Hmm.
Was it voice acting?
Let’s have the voice acting discussion. We do not like that modern video game developers feel compelled to include voiceover tracks for every line in their hundred-hour RPGs.
That is not to say we don’t appreciate a good bit of gab in our video games. We feel it suffices to say Metal Gear Solid 4 is one of our favorite games — as in the one whose story barely makes sense and which has nearly eight hours of cutscenes. But those actors really sell it, don’t they?
Furthermore, we do think the various regional accents in The Witcher 3 add a great deal of character to that game’s world. We cannot fathom how darn long and how much money that must have taken to record. Think of the paper! How many scripts did they print?!
We understand voice acting takes a lot of time, money, and effort to implement, even poorly. The voice acting is not even close to bad in Persona 5. Much of it is commendable. But it also seems redundant in a game like Persona 5, in which 97% of the dialogue is presented as text boxes anyway. This is not the same as having subtitles turned on in The Witcher 3. This is like listening to an audiobook while reading it at the same time. Persona 5’s dialogue is presented in huge, loud, wacky boxes that take up a fifth¹¹ of the screen. We love how big and easy to read the text is!
But the point is, the venn diagram comprising “players of Persona 5” in one circle and “readers of books and the Internet and things” in another is not two circles separated by hundreds of lightyears of space. Players of Persona 5 know how to read, and we can probably safely assume they enjoy the act of reading if they spend their video game time playing video games with this much goshdarn text in them.
Reading is fun.
Making voices for characters in your head is fun.
Reading an entire text box in your head before a voice actor finishes reading it out loud and then interrupting them by pushing the X button is not as fun. It is a crunchy stew of half-finished lines.
Reminding yourself not to push the X button so you can let the actor finish reading the text that you can clearly see and which your brain refuses not to read is not fun.
Playing a game for 101 hours with a bad script that you just know might have been better (maybe even really good!) if the editors had more time with it puts a sour look on our face. Dragon Quest head honcho Yūji Horii decided not to include voices in Dragon Quest XI in order to save time (and probably money), and it additionally allowed script changes to be made even late in development. Reading stupid lines is one thing, but hearing them spoken aloud is orders of magnitude more depressing. You ought to know. If we were reading this out loud you probably wouldn’t still be here.
(Thank you for being here.)
Notes (click to return to top)
¹ Though Persona 5, let it be said, is a game full of words.
² Which, humorously indeed, is always attributed to a different source.
³ In addition to game design elements that had been outdated for more than the whole decade before its release.
⁴ Yuck.
⁵ 18 songs / 21.75 hrs
⁶ 1 song / 101 hrs
⁷ Perhaps even something to steal.
⁸ We feel we are allowed to pillory Mr. Meguro in particular, as Mr. Meguro is one of the producers of the Persona series.
⁹ Giving the player the option to purchase — with real, hard, liquid dollars — and switch between in-game costumes in order to change the music is the video game equivalent of having to pay people to stop talking in the movie theater. In not-video games this practice is called “extortion” and it is illegal (but oh, you chose to play the game. It’s not like you had to, you dumbass, the lawyers will say; we know, we called their office already).
¹⁰ However, w/r/t the hand-drawn elements in Catherine, Atlus did some interesting experiments placing 2D animations inside 3D spaces, like in the game’s opening tour of the bar.
¹¹ Yes, yes, poor math again.
