Words, Words, Words
At… some point in Persona 5, two standers-by at a diet member’s campaign rally discuss the importance of voting.
“I’m gonna vote this time for sure! This man has my support.” Younger Employee casually declares, fully voice-acted, as though he were speaking like an actual human being.
Even in the diorama universe of Persona 5, this expression borders on ridiculous oversimplification.
Why does he declare this aloud? Why does he refer to Masayoshi Shido as “this man” instead of “Shido”? Maybe if these lines were not voiced by a living, breathing human being we would not feel such a dissonance.
In anticipation of the defense that Japanese is one language and English is another language and they express things differently blah blah blah: we believe emphatically that a focus on localization — that is, how naturally the language sounds in the ear of the final audience meant to hear it — is preferable to a focus on more literal translation. Much of the dialogue in Persona 5 reads with a kind of simplicity and literalness that smells to us like hasty, unpolished, if-it’s-technically-readable-good-get-’er-done-and-out-the-door translation, rather than tasteful localization.
Older Employee is not impressed with what he immediately presumes to be laziness on the part of Younger Employee:
O. EMP. “You haven’t voted until now? That’s problematic as a member of society, you know…”
Y. EMP. “Politics just never interested me before, but this politician seems pretty amazing. He’s passionate and thinks of the future. I mean, someone like that should be prime minister. I’m definitely voting for him.”
O. EMP. “Well, I suppose that makes sense since the other politicians seem so unreliable…”
Exeunt
O. EMP. allows the player to fill in the rest of the thought. The narrative of Persona 5 is like political mad-libs, for all its noncommittal social commentary. The game’s characters speak in such vague generalities that we hesitate to blame all the script’s problems on its translation. Politicians are unreliable, says Persona 5. Adults are shitty. Shitty adults! Ef them! Does anyone actually say “ef” anything out loud? Say FUCK if you really mean it, or saying something else!
Other problems with the script involve framing: how do the developers talk about certain narrative events? How do they present certain pieces of dialogue to the player?
We do not believe storytellers need to put a big sign onscreen each time a bad character does a bad thing saying “THIS IS BAD,” but we also believe there are other ways to tell how a storyteller feels about their characters. Furthermore, sometimes it just doesn’t matter how the storyteller feels: Martin Scorsese and Terence Winter may claim that The Wolf of Wall Street is no kind of glorification of Jordan Belfort and the men like him, but it doesn’t stop their film from being a 3-hour hilarious party train. There is a vital difference between the crude, brutish, disenchanted males in 1999’s Fight Club and characters of the same cloth in 2004’s DodgeBall, but some people will find both movies empowering for the wrong reasons.
Persona 5’s opening hours follow a child rapist who is also a high school gym instructor. The man is able to get away with coercing his female students to have sex with him. The New Party Members introduced in this scenario are Ryuji and Ann, the latter of whom makes regular social appearances alongside the instructor in order to protect other female students from him. Eventually Ann refuses the instructor’s advances, and the instructor rapes Ann’s friend Shiho in an act of revenge.
To be clear, Persona 5 does not wish for the player to sympathize with this villain. But then, thirty hours later, the crew travels in the sun-bleached desert on the way to palace #4, and Persona 5 asks the player to laugh as Ryuji and the player-named protagonist ogle Ann’s boobies.
Persona 5 is so interested in having and eating its cake that it forgets it is supposed to be about something other than cake.
It should be mentioned that the developers of Persona 5 believe the mild homophobia of certain characters (Iwai, Ryuji) is amusing, or at the very least “no big deal, dude.”
Do these lines influence any other interaction with either of these characters throughout the entire rest of the game? No. The scene in which two flaming stereotypes harass Ryuji is maybe two minutes long and never comes up again. Does their brevity and irrelevance make these scenes permissible?
This is not about our soup being made of hair; it is about there being a hair in our soup at all. If Persona 5 had something to say about perceptions of masculinity and sexuality within the patriarchal culture of modern-day Japan, like its older sibling Persona 4, which also contained a bounty of mild and casual homophobia in dialogues with one Yosuke “Brosuke” Hanamura, often but not always directed at resident tortured soul Kanji Tatsumi —
— if Persona 5 had something to say about it, we think coloring its characters with unflattering opinions about whether it is acceptable to be seen publicly as “just two dudes” would come across better. As it stands, it plays these moments more for a chuckle than anything. Is there a reason why these two characters — an ex-Yakuza with a dark, hypermasculine past and a 17-year-old boy with a less dark, less hypermasculine past (though one nevertheless troubled and still pretty macho) — should express this sentiment? Yes.¹¹ But a more important question: is the game’s texture any richer for their having expressed it?
The writers of Persona 5 have tried to illustrate their massive and complicated narrative through use of what we would like to call “signpost dialogue.” That is to say the writing in Persona 5, and in particular the words issuing from the mouths of its characters, sacrifices hyperrealism, which, if such a tone were furnished here, would make impossible the Persona series’ recent penchant for frequent fluctuation between convivial cartoon high jinks and more sobered, sometimes violent, interpersonal (and intrapersonal) confrontation.
This is why bit parts in Persona games are always assigned fun names like “Disgruntled Gentleman” or “Handsome Grocery Checkout Boy.” Atlus and the audience both understand that gentlemen everywhere are not defined by their disgruntitude, and that checkout boys, though handsome, also have deep personal narratives that cannot be expressed in a brief, superficial assessment of their smoldering eyes and Michelangelic cheekbones. The agreement is that, in these cases, there is little harm and a surplus of pleasant comedy in naming characters this way.
Furthermore, more realistic dialogue would also make the game three thousand hours long, which, as has and will be seen, is not a prospect that in any way appeals to us. In its way Persona 5 is not unlike the highly stylish movies of American cineaste Wes Anderson, who is no stranger to comically absurd dialogue (the films also seem to have Persona 5’s taste for the odd peppering of French here and there).
In order to maintain tonal flexibility, then, Persona 5’s dialogue is written in a kind of dramatic shorthand. Each line is written — in accordance with the name — as if on a large sign, in bubble letters, in an attempt to steer the player’s brain down the correct highway of thought. Dialogue hands the player ideas packaged into easily comprehensible bites.¹²
It follows that the characters of Persona 5 are not rendered in photographic detail; they are more like the lovingly crafted, abstract dolls of a diorama. They are only representations of human beings.
We take no issue with this approach (as long as the bubble-letter dialogue is purposeful and not casually harmful, q.v. earlier remarks about homophobia). It seems, however, that as the diorama makers¹³ filled in their cartoon dialogue bubbles with their characters’ hopes and passions, these same makers forgot their copies of Strunk & White at home and were using as a writing tool not an elegant, deliciously expensive fountain pen, but rather several half-eaten crayons which aren’t even all the same color.
When Persona 5 was released, a few articles came out discussing the game’s troubled translation. Connor Krammer published one such article, “Persona 5’s translation is a black mark on a brilliant game.” We would dispute the game’s brilliance, obviously, but Krammer’s conclusion is that the translation winds up being only sort of an issue. We contend that it is more than just sort of an issue. Krammer also authored a website dedicated to examining particular dialogues from the opening hours of Persona 5. Krammer’s analysis is excellent, and highly recommended.
For the next several hundred words, we would like to pay tribute to Krammer’s work in an extended analysis of the script of Persona 5. Here we go with some artless pedantry. Please, for not the final time, bear with us.¹⁴
On beginning with a scene taking place 66 hours into the game: many of Krammer’s chosen text boxes came from the early hours of Persona 5, and we feel there is value in answering the question, “Well, but, like, surely it can’t all be like that. Right?”
It can, indeed.
These sentences here are not the worst in the game, but they do condense several of the script’s problems neatly into one text box. What are the “incentives” Akechi refers to? Why is their use affected by headlines? The arrest warrant?
We’re exaggerating a bit, as it’s not too difficult to figure out what he’s getting at based on context clues (he mentions the arrest warrant two sentences before), but “easy enough to figure out after some mental somersaulting, a second read, and a spike in blood pressure” is not an ideal average assessment of text decipherability in your video game.¹⁷
Akechi has three lines before this which are displayed below for the sake of transparency, i.e. to let the reader know that we are not deliberately being buffoonish and that even we know how much we seem in this moment to be cherry-picking:
(1/4) According to Akechi: both the posted bounty, which demands information from anyone who may know something, and the arrest warrant together constitute desperate measures on the part of the investigation team (or Sae Niijima, more specifically, as the player is about to find out).
(2/4) Just in case the player did not know, 66 hours into Persona 5, just exactly who is heading the criminal investigation which itself was revealed in flash-forward at the very beginning of — and referred to endlessly throughout — Persona 5, Akechi reminds us he is talking about Sae Niijima.
A suggested rewrite that serves the same purpose but sounds more like a human being speaking English: “Sae-san seems to be at wit’s end. I assume you all feel the same.” (Maybe we could even spice things up artistic liberty-wise by changing “assume” to “presume.” Akechi seems the type to say that.)
(3/4) See here Akechi flexing his big boy detective vocabulary. We consider this text box to be an example of what Akechi’s general tone of voice was intended to be (which is why we think he would say something like “presume”).
Returning to the mentioned problem box.
Detective Niijima intends to attract attention to her investigation with the announcement that her team possesses a warrant for the Phantom Thieves’ arrest. Presumably anyone who has any information to share will feel compelled to come forward with it, or else find himself in very hot legal water indeed. It’s not a bad method.
But “incentives” are not what Akechi means here. He’s saying the police are going to strong-arm testimonies out of people. Not “use incentives,” but “use leverage.”
Possible change: “Garner attention with the arrest warrant . . . intimidate those who have information to share . . . . It’s not a bad plan.” Again, this suggestion is not perfect. Our suggestions are not meant to be perfect replacements, but they are meant to demonstrate the sloppy imprecision of the game’s language — these lines are so vague they can be written ten different ways.¹⁸ This text box is all kinds of sloppy and imprecise.
- “Make headlines” is a colloquialism that muddles the voice of someone who in this cartoon universe has written “vex (v.) — def. to irritate; provoke; distress” on a vocabulary flashcard at some point during his schooling. “Use incentives” is so nonspecific that it makes confusing something the player thought she understood only a moment ago.
- “Method” is one of the most overused words in the game, along with “act,” “crime,” “incident,” “action,” combinations thereof, and “LOOKING COOL, JOKER!” DO YOU REALLY NEED THIS?!
“Groundwork” cannot be “underway.” It is “laid.” “The laying of the groundwork for . . .” would be acceptable, but also kind of a mouthful (though wordy mouthfuls seem to be in line with Akechi’s character anyhow).
Furthermore, “groundwork” is a singular subject, but “are” refers to it as though it is plural (“concocting,” in this context, is not a subject unless it is “the concoction of”). Akechi means to say, perhaps, that “the fabrication of testimonies and a culprit is underway,” or “the fabrication of testimonies and the concoction of a culprit are underway.”
It goes on.
Ah, but it all “makes sense,” and is totally not even worthy of criticism because Akechi obviously inherited his ridiculous and tonally whiplashed vocabulary from his father. “Criminals doing whatever they want under the guise of justice — this is an issue that cannot be ignored!” This is still awkward, but it at least fixes the opening construction, “An issue in which.”
This December scene is such an important moment in the game that it boggles our mind to wonder how Atlus and Atlus USA didn’t descend from the heavens to allow the translation and editing teams more time for polishing.
This one isn’t relegated to an image caption, so read it, punk. We have a bone to pick with the present-day real-world overuse of reflexive pronouns ending in “-self,” which are correctly used when a subject performs a verb on himself. “I was talking to myself.” “She hummed to herself.” “He hurt himself.”
If one listens for it, though, one will certainly hear speech-givers and academics of the world say things like, “If you have any questions, you may ask my colleagues or myself,” or even more egregious, “Myself and my colleagues would like to welcome you here today.”
“Ask me or my colleagues.”
“My colleagues and I would like to.”
Not “myself.”
The text sounds awkward for reasons besides its erroneous use of “myself” where “me” would have been perfectly sound, but we find the latter to be more worthy of note here.
While we’re at it, we would just like to say one does not do a crime or an act. Acts and crimes are committed.
AAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!
Frankly, these are the kinds of errors we would expect to find in Resident Evil. It’s cute when a campy horror game from 2005 does it.
But Resident Evil 4 is not 95% words and 3% gameplay.¹⁹ Resident Evil 4 can suffer typos and come out on the other side as a masterpiece of action game design. But back to Persona.
Persona 4’s translators and editors deliberately litter Naoto Shirogane’s dialogue with polysyllabic words, but they take care not to screw up her usage. We find that Persona 4 is an eminently more readable story than Persona 5 for this reason.
We implore the frustrated reader to seek out the rest of this September dialogue exchange from Persona 4 in order to observe the full breadth of its grammatical and tonal consistency.
We do not mean to say Persona 4 is a perfect game with perfect dialogue. Oh no — the game has its own share of problems, some of which even have to do with the above complaints about Persona 5.
The valuable difference between the two is not even that Persona 5 is substantially worse²⁰ than Persona 4, but that Persona 5 came out nine years afterward. We would have expected the problems present in Persona 4 to have been corrected by the time its sequel saw a release (especially as some of them were corrected when Persona 4 was re-released five years before Persona 5!).
Persona 4 and Persona 5 both feature teenaged detectives²¹ with a whole lot of chips on their shoulders. Persona 4’s Naoto Shirogane worries about not being taken seriously by her colleagues: is it any wonder that she is anxious about her intelligence being underestimated by adult men in a small-town police station?
Her grandfather was a skilled and respected detective; she refuses to allow public expectations and norms dictate how she should live her life, and aims to follow in her grandfather’s footsteps in spite of it all. In order to earn the same respect from her peers, she speaks with clear diction and a more academic vocabulary, and also, most importantly, pretends to be male.
Naoto’s manner of speech is an affectation meant to contribute to her narrative, but she also plays the part well: her speech is not riddled with errors.
Persona 5’s Goro Akechi is the unplanned child of main antagonist and known bag of dicks, Masayoshi Shido. Akechi earns the party’s confidence under the pretense that he seeks justice, but this is a ruse. In truth he is juggling a multitude of allegiances on the way to his ultimate goal: establish his reputation as a detective, then shame his father by revealing their relationship publicly. Like Naoto, Akechi bought his big dictionary in order to erect a more credible façade. We imagine Akechi’s rationale was something like the following: people talk loud when they want to act smart, right?²² So if we talk big, people might think we’re a genius detective! And a-one, and a-two.
But, so, the point:
Is Akechi actually supposed to sound smart? We couldn’t tell if we were supposed to be buying the act or if it was supposed to be obvious that Akechi was always up to no good. There isn’t much of a choice in what to think if Akechi just sounds like a pretentious goober from the moment he’s introduced. What’s worse, and most damning, is that every other “smart” character sounds exactly like him.
Is the above moaning and groaning all to say that we expect a given character to speak in one voice, consistently, throughout a 101-hour narrative? Maybe not.²⁴ But it strikes us that Persona 5 — a gargantuan game only made even remotely coherent by the compression of its characters into bite-size, charming cartoons — would be better served by characters who each have a distinct vocabulary.
Persona 5, for the most part,²⁵ accomplishes this: Ryuji’s all “eff this!” and Yusuke is all “salutations, chums, shall we take coffee in the salon on this fine Monetian morning my my this curry tastes like it was painted by Seurat how dainty indeed.” Futaba oscillates between states of OwO and >:3.
But at the same time many characters — Akechi, Sae, Makoto, Morgana, most of the villains (especially Masayoshi Shido) and anyone else described as a “shitty adult” — much of the time, seem to lack any particular personality outside of being “well spoken,” (or “well spoken, and a jerk” in the case of the shitty adults).
Persona 5’s Frankenstein’s monster factory of an English translation fits these well-speakers with speech that is redundant, redundant, and often perfectly superfluous, pleonasms of word salad which make speakers seem like they are trying to sound smart more than it actually makes them sound smart. Maybe this works for some characters, but we know Sae, Makoto, Morgana, Akechi, Okumura, and Shido are not all supposed to sound the same.
The problem in Persona 5’s case is not that Akechi speaks the way he does, but that it is not only Akechi who speaks in the way that he does. If it were unique to Akechi, it might make him a more particularly defined and interesting character. As it is, the game as a whole just seems unpolished.
A possible rebuttal to this criticism could be that the villains aren’t actually very smart at all, and that they are emotionally stunted, which is why they do bad things and are villains, and that the protagonists, though intelligent, are only seventeen (or ageless metempsychotic cat spirits) and therefore are not necessarily masters of grammar — and maybe just, like, none of us is very smart, in the end, y’know?
Maybe.
But we nevertheless feel that such a rebuttal would be coming from a place of desperately wanting to love Persona 5 despite its apparent flaws; that such a rebuttal would be offered after reading our many words in bad faith. We apologizes to such readers. We are sorry that they and we do not see eye to eye.
To the remaining three people reading this, we’re almost done here.
Notes
¹¹ Maybe to native Japanese players it would have been weird of Iwai and Ryuji didn’t say these things. Maybe banal homophobia is just that much of a staple of the Japanese quotidien. We nevertheless believe these bits of writing are worthy of criticism.
¹² Nevertheless we stand by our gripes w/r/t the ridiculous dialogue between the two employees at Shido’s speech. On the other hand, the disembodied dialogue bubbles shown during scene transitions, spoken by faceless citizens around Tokyo, are acceptably vague and sometimes silly. We take issue when the game addresses one of its main narrative subjects — Japanese politics — directly, and in such clumsy language.
¹³ Referring here to Atlus USA as well as the development team.
¹⁴ Take your time. ;)
¹⁵ “Correction” here meaning “obfuscation,” or even “fucker-upper.”
¹⁶ Hello, we are back from the shower we needed to take after quoting an advertisement.
¹⁷ A verbose, meandering, decidedly overlong essay on the game in question is a different matter.
¹⁸ They are also meant to demonstrate by their abundance that the script issues in Persona 5 are everywhere, and that they constitute more than what Krammer weakly, merely calls “a black mark on a brilliant game.”
¹⁹ And 2–7% using the Persona Fusion Calculator. We have, once again, done the math.
²⁰ But it is, to be clear.
²¹ In each narrative, the detective character reveals to the protag party that they have essentially discovered the truth, that the protags have superpowers and are fighting against the Big Bads. Detective-kun reveals this information using the sophisticated legal textbook words that anyone who deserves to be called a Genius Detective must use.
²² CORRECT!
²³ Other synonyms for “method” can be found in a good thesaurus.
²⁴ We know we have struggled/failed to maintain a consistent voice for even the duration of this writing. It has been a challenge. We do not mean to say it is easy.
²⁵ NB We use “for the most part” in only the most used car salesman-like, only-technically-not-a-lie sort of way, which is to say “for at least as much as — and very possibly no more than — 51% of Persona 5.”
