Persona 5 is a long, loitering tale of disaffected youth desperate for a shift in the status quo — in short, the most millennial game that I’ve ever played.
Like esteemed role-playing games Persona 3 and 4, Persona 5 places players into the shoes of Japanese high school students who spend as much time balancing busy social calendars as they do fighting creepy demons. It takes an anime approach to storytelling, cramming several seasons’ worth of plot and character development into one extremely long game, with all the expected themes of friendship, growth and change.
But what surprised me about Persona 5 — what sets it apart from its predecessors — is just how much it has to say. Persona 5 is a game about rebellion, politics and enacting social change — and it’s not afraid to be brash and outspokenly stylish while addressing those concerns.
Persona 5 frequently pulls its fascinating subtext into the spotlight
Told via a frame narrative — the opening moments of the game are set near the conclusion, which opens up the plot to some clever tricks later on — Persona 5 stars a teenage boy who eventually goes by the name Joker. After a questionable incident in his past puts him in legal trouble, Joker is sent to Tokyo to live out a year of probation at a new school, under the supervision of a new parental guardian.
Bad Romance
Persona 5 wears progressive values on its sleeves, which makes its approach to non-straight romance all the more baffling. Joker can choose to start a relationship with every single female party member and non-player confidant in the game, but none of the men are romanceable. This is despite the fact that one of the male party members is heavily implied to be at least bisexual, claiming to have no interest in the female form outside of art and often interacting with Joker in a flirty manner.
The lack of same-sex relationship options in Persona 5 would be little more than a frustrating omission, but the game pushes it into much more aggravating territory in a few scenes. Specifically, there are two recurring gag characters who are clearly homosexual. They show up at a couple of points throughout the game specifically to act effeminate and stereotypically gay, and to freak out Ryuji by flirting with him. Essentially, some of Persona 5’s only examples of queer characterization are there as a terrible joke.
This would be disappointing in any game in 2017. For a game that’s explicitly about social reform and youth being misunderstood, it’s a complete breakdown, a hamfisted misunderstanding of the values and diversity of a younger generation.
It doesn’t take long before Joker gathers a ragtag group of friends, including a disgraced ex-track star, a troubled teen model and a student council president struggling with school corruption. In true anime fashion, these friends each discover that they have a strange power: the ability to enter a bizarre shadow world known as the “Metaverse” and, once there, to summon powerful creatures called Personas.
Aside from a few wrinkles, the core plot of Persona 5 follows the series’ standard narrative closely. The big change is one of perspective. Rather than shying away from their powers or only using them when necessary, Joker and his new friends embrace those abilities. They take on a moniker — the Phantom Thieves — and learn how they can use the Metaverse to “steal” hearts, which in turn causes people in the real world to change and repent for evil they’ve done.
It’s all a little heavy on the hokey pseudo-science, but Persona 5 openly and frequently pulls its fascinating subtext into the spotlight. When the Phantom Thieves talk about stealing hearts, they’re clear about the goal: to change the world. Not in a generic “make the world a better place” sense, but in very concrete, definable ways.
To be more specific still: Persona 5 is a game about how shitty most adults are, how they’ve robbed the younger generation of a future in numerous awful ways, and how it’s up to that younger generation to step up, push back and force a change. Persona 5 also refuses to bend to irony, and despite — or perhaps because of — this overwhelming sincerity, it makes some smart and effective observations about society, what drives people to change and what allows them to refuse change even when it would almost certainly be for the better.
Atlus
Longtime Persona fans reading all of this may be wondering what happened to all the characters. After all, it was relationships between both the playable cast and a wide range of non-player characters that drove much of the momentum behind Persona 3 and 4. Those relationships still suck up a lot of time in Persona 5, but they weren’t what pulled me through. Even this game’s more interesting characters — such as a functioning alcoholic of a reporter desperate for scoops on the Phantom Thieves, or a socialist politician who is basically the anime version of Bernie Sanders — tend to follow a very similar formula. These side stories are essential to the game’s overall thrust, but they never grabbed me as much as those in Persona 4 Golden.
While that has the potential to sound damning — particularly for this series — it ended up being less of a big deal thanks to how enthralled I was by the main story. I’ll keep this spoiler-free, but Persona 5’s plot takes some surprising twists and turns and includes a few extremely memorable villains that more than made up for the less exciting friendly characters.
dungeons are excellent and by far the biggest single point of improvement
Persona 5 also changes the social link system of the past games — now called confidants — to more directly impact gameplay. By improving your relationship with non-playable characters, you’ll unlock bonuses that can provide a lot of help in the game’s turn-based battles or in managing your ever-busy calendar. One character might unlock the ability to swap out party members on the fly during battle, while another offers to make health- and skill point-restoring items that you can take into dungeons.
Choose Your Own Challenge
The Persona series is a spinoff of Atlus’ long-running Shin Megami Tensei franchise, which is known for producing some pretty brutally challenging RPGs. Persona 5 is no slouch in this respect, particularly later in the game, where enemies grow increasingly complex and staying in dungeons longer becomes harder.
As an apparent acknowledgement of the growing size of the Persona fanbase, however, Atlus has put in a number of useful difficulty options. You can choose between easy, normal and hard from the beginning, and can swap to lower or higher difficulties on the fly as you play. An extra-tough difficulty level called “challenge” was released as downloadable content for Persona 5 in Japan, and will presumably make its way to North America as well.
But if you’re new to RPGs or not particularly interested in the combat, you might prefer another option: safety mode. Once you choose the safety difficulty, you won’t be able to change it. However, in this mode enemies are much easier and provide far more gold and experience points, and if you die in combat, you have the option to be resurrected immediately without losing any progress. Basically, if you’re looking to just enjoy the story and blow through dungeons, safety mode was made for you.
This meant that even when I wasn’t particularly invested in certain characters and how their arcs played out, I was rewarded for putting time into those relationships. For example, I would suggest working on your relationship with your homeroom teacher, Ms. Kawakami, as soon as you’re able. It will greatly improve your future ability to get stuff done on days when you choose to enter dungeons.
Those dungeons are excellent, by the way, and by far the biggest single point of improvement between Persona 5 and its predecessors. Rather than the randomized dungeons of past games, each “Palace” in the Metaverse is a meticulously designed setpiece, a series of challenges ranging from stealth to puzzles to just plain combat. Exploring dungeons was often one of the most boring parts of past Persona games; now it’s a delight that constantly pushed me into new ways of playing.
Atlus
If you miss the old randomized dungeons, they do still exist in a totally optional form. Since you cannot return to the main story dungeons once they’ve been completed, grinding is relegated to Mementos, a labyrinth that gets deeper and full of more dangerous opponents the further into the game you progress. Mementos provides a nice space to search for loot and complete side missions — including some that you’ll be sent on by your confidants to progress your relationship with them — but you can also completely ignore it if you’d rather not worry about it.
Persona 5’s battle system deserves some praise as well. In addition to being flashy and fun to watch — a necessity given the 100-plus hours the game takes to complete — combat is also much faster than in the average turn-based RPG. If you know what you’re doing and don’t mind fast-forwarding through the repetitive battle dialogue, the average fight can take less than a minute.
Whatever speed you play at, god, does it look so freaking good. It’s rare for an RPG, of all things, to make me feel cool. But when I pulled off the rock-paper-scissors-style combos in Persona 5, knocked enemies out of the air and sent my whole party into an all-out attack, I felt like pulling out a pair of sunglasses and slamming them on my face while mimicking my character’s victory pose. It feels good.
It’s been almost a decade since the original release of Persona 4, a game that introduced many players — including myself — to this series. With that amount of time, with the amount of energy and passion a lot of Persona 4 fans put toward that game, it would have been easy for Persona 5 to be a letdown. Instead, it successfully pushes this series to new heights of polish, allure and charm. It has a few blemishes, enough to distract a bit from the intriguing and weighty themes that the game wrestles with. But even through the rough patches, Persona 5 doesn’t give up a drop of its colorful personality.
Persona 5 was reviewed using final “retail” downloadable PlayStation 4 code provided by Atlus. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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