The Flaws of Persona 5 (full spoilers)

Every time I look at this image I think to myself “man I wish this game was good.”

I had very tempered expectations for Persona 5. My feelings on the third entry have always been mixed, and while I loved Persona 4, it’s been so long since I played it that it’s hard to say whether I’d still enjoy it or not today with so much more experience in the Shin Megami Tensei series now under my belt. Add to that the crushing disappointment that was SMT IV Apocalypse for me and I had every reason to doubt what was for all intents and purposes Atlus’s biggest and most ambitious game ever.

For what it’s worth, then, I’d say my low expectations were about met, but not exactly in a way I saw coming. Persona 5 is a two-faced game: you have absolutely lavish production values and solid RPG mechanics on the one hand, but writing that can be only described as utterly condescending and abysmal pacing on the other. If you follow me on Twitter than you’ve probably heard me say this before, but Persona 5 was all but set to be the best game in the series, and the only thing standing in the way is itself. The vast majority of what brought down the experience for me could’ve been easily avoided, and it shows a disconcerting drive to broaden mass appeal that only results in the final product feeling watered down and aimless. I didn’t realize this until I actually wrote it down, but Persona 5 really reminds me of Apocalypse in that way: the way Atlus responded to fan feedback with that game was haphazard. The original SMT IV felt carefully considered and planned, but a lot of its most defining aspects were thrown out the window for the sequel without consideration only to please the masses.

This issue doesn’t manifest within Persona 5 to quite the same level, but nonetheless I can’t help but feel that it’s the source of the game’s internal conflict. There’s one specific moment that I keep going back to that perfectly encapsulates my feelings toward Persona 5: at the start of the game’s very final dungeon, a new puzzle type is introduced. You have these floor tiles that change color when you step on them, and the idea is to turn all of them a certain color to open a door. Anyone who’s played a video game before can understand this concept immediately either because they’ve encountered similar puzzles before or through simple experimentation (and remember, at the point this puzzle is introduced in Persona 5, you’ve likely crossed the 100-hour mark already).

I played through Oracle of Ages on the Game Boy Color recently and that game takes a very similar puzzle mechanic much further than Persona 5 ever does, and yet it trusts you to figure out the rules on your own because, like I said, they’re so simple that anyone can understand them. Persona 5 doesn’t trust you to figure anything out for yourself. When this puzzle type is first introduced, the game takes control away from you for a solid two minutes and walks you through the whole thing step by step. Even after this “tutorial” is completed, the game will hold your hand and push you in the right direction whenever any kind of new wrinkle or permutation is added to this puzzle. Not only is it laughably condescending, it completely ruins any kind of flow the game has, with constant and blatant interruptions that hinder you from ever really getting into a groove.

This is the most specific example I can think of, but trust me when I say this design philosophy permeates every aspect of the game. The first six hours of Persona 5 are spent walking from one agonizingly long cutscene to the next. There are a bunch of stores you can enter along the way, but the game won’t even let you buy items until you properly begin the first Palace. Every time you enter a room in a dungeon, cut to black, sixty-second cutscene explaining the situation; every time you encounter anything even slightly out of the ordinary there’s some kind of interruption. The dungeons in Persona 3 and 4 were randomly generated and, well… not very good, but at the very least the characters would finally shut up for a solid few hours and let you play the game. Persona 5’s “handcrafted” dungeons should be a net positive, but the game’s tendency to over-explain literally everything creates so many new pacing problems that just didn’t exist before. The designers have a hand in every aspect of Persona 5’s dungeons now, and they use this opportunity to shove cutscenes in your face wherever possible.

Even the game’s narrative elements suffer in a similar way: just like in Persona 4, the dungeons are a manifestation of their respective subject’s psyche, housing numerous visual metaphors for their mental state that give the player an idea of how they look at the outside world. Instead of letting the player take in the architecture and interpret it for themselves though, the characters go out of their way to explain their meaning through intrusive cutscenes, completely ruining any chance these elements had of being compelling or thought-provoking.

An example: The fifth Palace is a futuristic space station born from the mind of a corrupt CEO who mistreats his employees; naturally, you encounter their cognitive representations in the form of robot slave workers, who have no regard for their own well-being and live only to serve their boss. The whole thing isn’t particularly deep or shocking (we’ll get into that later), but just taking in the sights and drawing your own conclusions from it while you’re exploring could’ve been interesting. Not only does Persona 5 frequently interrupt gameplay to shove cutscenes in your face though, the way the characters beat you over the head with it is nothing short of insulting and embarrassingly flat. “Wow! I can’t believe THAT’S how Okumura looks at his employees! That’s terrible!” “Yeah! We gotta stop him!”

So not only is it condescending and completely shatters my ability to enjoy the game at my own pace, it’s also childish and overly simple. In fact, none of the subjects Persona 5 tackles are approached with much nuance or in a way that’s layered or interesting. People have showered the game with praise for daring to talk about things like abuse or sexual harassment, but it’s one thing to present these problems and another entirely to talk about them with the necessary depth and care, and provide a real solution, not this fantasy anime bullshit. The subjects our party are trying to “reform” over the course of the game aren’t explored in any real depth: the (not so subtle) implication is that all of them let past life events get to their heads, becoming one-dimensional villains without any redeeming qualities in the process. While the game does do a decent job portraying power dynamics in its first arc, the way every situation is resolved isn’t something you can derive any meaning from in the real world. You just beat the crap out of everyone until they realize they’re a bad person or whatever. This is another point where a direct comparison between Persona 5 and its predecessor doesn’t favor the former: to reach a solution in Persona 4, acceptance and acknowledgement of who you are and what you’re struggling with are essential. The game arguably flubs this royally with Naoto and Kanji, but it’s a powerful message regardless. You’re trying to help real, layered people move on with their lives, and the only way to do that is letting them find peace within and by themselves.

It’s also worth noting that Persona 5 just loses bite the further it goes on. Despite everything I’ve said, the ways in which the first two subjects abuse their students is still really nasty and almost painful to watch in places. After that though, the conflicts between our party and the “shitty adults” become either a lot less personal (Kaneshiro) or are wrapped up in a way that’s too quick and flat (Okumura). The way some of the later villains present themselves borders on cartoonish and it’s hard to look at them as a real, tangible threat. I mean, just look at their dumb faces. At points, Persona 5 feels more like Scooby-Doo than Persona 4 ever did.

Threatening.

Pre-release trailers gave me the impression that this game was going to take a much darker turn than Persona 4, with themes like oppression and rebellion pervading the entire experience. Presentation-wise, Persona 5 completely nails this with its red-and-black color scheme and its busy, noisy rendition of Tokyo — it reminded me a lot of The World Ends With You in that way. Narratively though, it feels weirdly torn between those kinds of vibes and the more lighthearted slice-of-life elements of the previous two Persona games. This has become sort of a meme, but the main story leaves next to no breathing room for anything else to happen. The majority of in-game days consist entirely of dialogue, always ending with Morgana telling you to go to bed, and almost every line of dialogue is in service of the main plot. It’s only when you start a dungeon heist that you’re given some free reign over what to do with your time. I played through the game on Hard Mode, and every dungeon took me a good number of days to finish, leaving frustratingly little time for Confidants and other activities.

Pacing-wise this is really exhausting and aggravating, but it also has the knock-on effect that even within those auto-play days I mentioned there’s not enough time for anything else. Social events like school trips always come out of nowhere and feel completely half-assed. The time dedicated to them is only a fraction of what it was in Persona 3 and 4 (despite the game being significantly longer than its predecessors in total), making them ultimately ring hollow. The fact that Persona 5 spends time on these slice-of-life elements at all then only serves to detract from the more serious main story: I understand that some levity is needed to avoid the player getting exhausted, but as it is Persona 5 feels tonally inconsistent and not exactly in-line with what all those trailers promised. Again, this becomes more and more true as the game goes on. An atmosphere of hostility and danger permeates the first couple of hours, but eventually it settles into what you’re used to from previous Persona games and it just feels insanely jarring.

A good example of this is Ryuji, a character who has come under fire for a lot of different reasons. His first impression was a pleasant surprise to me, with his subdued and relatively quiet exterior hiding intense anger and resentment within. Just like the game’s tone in general though, he loosens up over time to reveal a nasty, idiotic loudmouth, who has zero tact and proves to be a liability for his friends on numerous occasions. It’s like his brain starts to slowly leak out his ears the moment you start a new game, and it’s just painful to watch.

Which brings us to Persona 5’s main plot itself. Comparing Persona 3 and 4, it became obvious to me that plot isn’t necessarily a strength of the team rather than characters. Persona 3 is a very plot-focused game, and in my opinion to its own detriment: android waifus, government conspiracies, cartoony super villains and a general sense that the game takes itself way too seriously for how asinine its plot is. With Persona 4, the team wisely decided to have the plot take a backseat and ground it a bit more with a simple serial killer story. The killing method is supernatural, but other than that Persona 4 never reaches the magnitude of insanity of its predecessor, keeping things relatively small-scale and easily relatable. Relatable is the key word here: Persona 3 featured layered characters with real everyday problems, and while that aspect is somewhat muddled by the ridiculous anime plot, 4 goes all-in on it. The entire flow of meeting a new character, helping them grow and in doing so getting closer to the truth of this (ultimately very simple) murder mystery is satisfying and so much easier to care about than all the supernatural BS in Persona 3.

Persona 5 attempts to strike a balance between these two extremes. The aspect of character growth is handled decently well, the way you recruit new people into your party as the game goes on is not dissimilar from Persona 4. Except for Futaba, there is generally less time dedicated to their development within the main story, and the Confidants could’ve been more impactful, but overall it could be a lot worse. Where it kind of drops the ball is with the main plot though. While again not nearly as deranged as Persona 3, there are some ridiculous leaps in logic, laughable character arcs and moments which are supposed to be “super epic,” but only come off as childish and hollow instead.

A lot of these feelings center around a single major character in the game, and if you’ve finished it you probably know where I’m going with this: Akechi Goro essentially turns out to be Persona 5’s equivalent to 4’s Tohru Adachi, a seemingly friendly individual that is later revealed to be the perpetrator behind a number of homicides. While it is disappointing that they’re essentially repeating an old trick, Akechi could’ve still been a compelling character in his own right. All that potential is squandered though. Adachi was interesting because the entire premise behind his character was so simple: he’s nothing but a lame, antisocial asshole who REALLY hates people (especially women), and he happened to acquire the power of Persona by complete chance, which he then abuses to satisfy his primal urges. He doesn’t need a weird origin story or deeper justification for his actions, you can easily buy into the idea that he would commit these crimes simply from the way he speaks and presents himself.

This has been a pet peeve of mine for a while: a lot of stories feel like they prop the serial killer persona onto any random character, meaning their “true” self only comes to light once their identity is revealed. These crazy personality shifts a lot of killers in fiction go through have never been compelling to me because they feel random and unearned. Characters like Yoshikage Kira, Light Yagami and yes, Adachi, are compelling because their personalities are entirely consistent, and the ultimate “reveal” only re-contextualizes their previous everyday behavior rather than simply overwriting it. It’s not hard to believe that those kinds of people exist in real life, and Adachi specifically is a brilliant personification of Persona 4’s themes of identity and acceptance: he shows the player what happens if you don’t deal with your problems and let your fear of other people turn into outright disdain.

When I talked about how a lot of serial killer stories get this wrong, Akechi was who I was thinking about. Virtually everything I’ve said applies to him: his reasons for committing murders are explained in drawn-out exposition dumps and can essentially be summed up as “daddy issues,” which, gee I haven’t seen that before. His usually suave and collected exterior instantly gives way to a screaming brat once his true identity is revealed, complete with an evil laugh and the classic twisted anime villain face. The game clearly cares more about shocking you with his reveal than making him a genuinely compelling character, considering the ridiculous lengths to which it goes to justify his actions, and the fact that his character is ultimately taken nowhere. While the whole “daddy issues” aspect of his character does tie into Persona 5’s larger themes (suffering unfairly under the people in power and the effect that has on someone who’s young), his arc doesn’t come to a satisfying resolution: Akechi ends up sacrificing his life to save your party, his death never being really acknowledged by anyone after, which to me is just an insanely lazy way to resolve everything. Judging purely from his troubled past I could actually sympathize with him somewhat, but his entire attitude is so stubborn and just beyond redemption that it makes any attempt to humanize him ring completely hollow.

Tying this whole thing back together with Persona 4, Adachi’s rationale behind his actions effectively drives the point home of him being nothing but a sad loser acting instinctively on feelings that have consumed him for his entire life — in his mind, everyone who’s not him is trash and doesn’t deserve to live. The game recognizes how genuinely pathetic he is and wisely doesn’t attempt to get you on the same page with him. Akechi is a mess of ideas in comparison, killing people is only a means to an end (= exacting revenge on his dad) to him, and yet he never seems to reflect on his actions or be fazed by them. I find it impossible to believe someone like him could exist (keep in mind he’s 17 years old…) and the game trying to ultimately redeem him just doesn’t work.

The reveal of Akechi’s true identity also serves as the catalyst for some of Persona 5’s most baffling plot points. First off, all of the foreshadowing (PANCAKES!) proves to be completely unnecessary if you just use common sense: who else would the “traitor” in your party be if not the police detective who happens to join last and was the only one barely talked about in pre-release material? The moment the idea of a traitor existing was even mentioned in the game’s intro, I guessed it was Akechi, not because I’m smart or whatever, but because it’s so obvious. It’s aggravating to think that the writers thought they were being super clever with his reveal, considering the insane lengths they go to to hide his identity.

Did someone say pancakes?

It doesn’t stop there though. Both the way the Phantom Thieves confirm that Akechi is the traitor and the way he is eventually killed by Shido make use of the weird, convoluted rules of the Metaverse, Persona 5’s take on the demon realms of past SMT games where the Palaces are located. The main mechanic at play here is the idea of “cognitive replicas” of different people: Akechi enters an underground interrogation room to kill the protagonist, only to instead kill their cognitive replica which was “set up” in advance by the Phantom Thieves to confirm his identity and lure him further into their trap. He is then ultimately killed by a cognitive replica of himself, once again “set up” by Shido within his own mind to take care of Akechi should he attempt to enter the Ark (Shido’s Palace) and induce a so-called Mental Shutdown, killing Shido.

I find this whole idea in itself laughable and incredibly hard to buy into, and the way the game barely touches on this until the very last minute makes it feel like an absolute ass-pull. Suspending my disbelief a little bit, I can’t say I can find any critical plotholes for the first part, but that’s not really saying much. Any issue raised can be explained away by making up dumb rules and mechanics. The second example though is where it gets too ridiculous to make excuses for in my book. Shido’s cognitive image of Akechi is him lurking around inside the Diet building, waiting for his real self to show up so he can kill them? If Shido has that much control over his “cognition,” how does he not come to the conclusion that that’s what happened to Akechi after his death? There’s a cutscene shortly after Akechi’s sacrifice showing Shido in his office, screaming at his employees and wondering “where the hell that brat is.” For the entire rest of the game, he never even considers that his son might have been killed through the method that the game is telling me he specifically and intently set up. Not to mention that the idea of “controlling your cognition” goes against basically everything the game had previously established. Going back to the first example, the Phantom Thieves have to essentially force the idea into Sae’s head that the protagonist is stuck inside the underground interrogation room I previously mentioned. Not once in the entire game does anyone have the ability to willingly alter their own cognition until Shido shows up. I speculated that it is because he, unlike most people, is aware of the Metaverse, but then how can he be so clueless about what happened to Akechi after his death?

Can’t say this whole ordeal did anything to invest me further into Persona 5’s overarching plot (spoilers: it actually did the exact opposite), which is unfortunate because I was already tuned out of it for most its duration to begin with. The game’s narrative arcs are greatly defined by the perception of the Phantom Thieves by the public eye, and generally, there’s way too much time spent just hammering home the current situation. People hate us. People are slowly starting to like us. People love us! People hate us again! People love us even more than before now! The only thing that is really meant to bolster this basic framework is the hunt for the culprit behind the mental shutdowns (Akechi), but unlike Persona 4 it isn’t the main hook of the story that is supported by everything else. In that game, everything you did was in service of that larger goal and somehow related to it, having you inch closer and closer toward the killer as the story progresses. What is Persona 5’s main hook? Akechi is only a small part of this muddled narrative. There are too many individual parts with too little synergy and no clear objective. The whole premise of “we’ll take down one random villain (random meaning they aren’t all established going in) after the other and see what happens” is inherently aimless, and every attempt to give it a clear direction (Shido and Akechi) is poorly handled as I’ve already outlined.

What really drove this home for me was the game’s final act, in which the whole thing turns into SMT Nocturne for some reason except it’s not subtle or intriguing, instead you get “epic” supernatural twists every five minutes that are supposed to be super shocking, and then it ends with you literally fighting god, cheered on by the masses of Tokyo going “We believe in you Phantom Thieves!” and it’s just the lamest thing ever? I know the idea behind Persona 5 was to give a voice to marginalized and oppressed groups, but this comes off as nothing but cheap wish fulfillment and yet another tired example of the Power of Friendship trope you’ve seen in every anime ever.

Which brings me to the final nail in the coffin: Persona 5 is an offensive and terribly regressive game in places. I don’t want to disparage anyone who likes the game and enjoys aspects of it, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve had to cringe so hard and so frequently at a piece of media, not out of embarrassment, but out of discomfort and disgust. Queer people basically don’t exist in the universe of Persona 5, except when it’s for a cheap, hurtful joke, and the way it approaches darker subject matter is so tone-deaf and lacking in self-awareness that it makes me legitimately angry. The only two gay characters in the entire game are depicted as pedophile sexual predators, and victims of sexual abuse in earlier parts of the story (Ann) become the frequent subject of fan service and objectification by other characters later. I’m not a prude at all, but Persona 5 wants to have its cake and eat it too: the idea of having character archetypes that would usually be nothing but wank material in other games be a symbol of body/sex positivity is great in theory, but you can’t have those same characters then be creeped on every five minutes by other party members (Ryuji’s behavior in particular is disgusting considering he’s fully aware of everything Ann went through) and then encourage the player to take part in such objectification with gross dialogue choices and, again, blatant fan service. There are much more thorough examinations of this topic you can find online than what I could possibly provide, but needless to say it’s a huge mark against the game and I can only hope the outcry against it will result in some kind of change within Atlus so we don’t have to witness those same mistakes be repeated in future games.

If you know me, you might be surprised to learn just how harsh I am on the narrative and presentational aspects of Persona 5 when I’m very much a mechanics-focused person in regards to games. It’s very much worth noting that I enjoy aspects of this game and that I did have fun with it in places: some of the dungeon design is great, and a lot of different elements of Persona 5 can often work in unison to provide a surprisingly tense and challenging RPG experience (on Hard mode, that is). While I really wasn’t fond of just how slowly certain mechanics are doled out and behind how many different walls they’re hidden, additions like Baton Pass and Technical Attacks really manage to bridge the gap somewhat between Persona and SMT. The third dungeon especially featured a good number of enemies without significant elemental weaknesses, and I not only had to make good use of status ailments, I also had to pay close attention to the order in which I dealt with enemies and how I dealt with them, otherwise every turn could’ve been my last, erasing a good chunk of progress.

I feel like for a lot of people “good gameplay” isn’t enough to push them through any given title, and since I’ve never really shared that same sentiment, I should probably like Persona 5 much more than I do. The problem for me in this case is that the issues I outlined present a huge barrier of entry to get to the good stuff; it’s not that there’s nothing to enjoy in this game, it’s that there are way too many intrusive elements hindering me from doing so. Even if that weren’t the case, Persona 5 still doesn’t reach the heights of some of its contemporaries. Despite what I’ve said about some of its mechanical aspects, it still doesn’t even begin to approach the flexibility and depth of other SMTs, deliberately limiting your options early on for the sake of not overwhelming new players. Even stripping away all the needless interruptions, the dungeons are still very linear affairs, a far cry from the evocative and absorbing exploration and world-building of a game like SMT IV. There is good in Persona 5, but I can’t say it’s worth pushing through all the garbage to get there. At least for me this wasn’t worth the wait, and while I’d love to be proven wrong, there are too many problems for a re-release to possibly be able to fix. Better luck with Persona 6 and a new team?