Persona

I finished Persona 5, and I had quite a good time.

On the surface, it tells the story of japanese highschoolers and their enactment of justice. Over a year, they/you encounter, and seek to right, adults that become more and more abusive (sexual assaulter, forger, yakuza, ceo, attorney, politician, culminating in the collective unconscious of the masses who worship said politician). The cheeky side is that you can infiltrate their minds (which become the traditional JRPG dungeon) to straighten them from inside, by finding the object of their (misplaced) desired, a sort of fetish in the Freudian sense, and stealing it from them. It’s half-way between Freud and Arsène Lupin with the kind of soundtrack that only Japanese productions hold the secret of. Brainwashing is a simplistic version of justice, but casting the psyche as a gameplay element is the thread that is exquisitely unfolded across different parts of the game. And yet, these simplistic notes often shine with a kind of innocent sharpness in the dialogue. Justice is love with open eyes, and those teenagers can see clearly how dumb some adults can be There are some of the best punchlines I’ve played in a game, but the PS system for screenshots is so fucked that I didn’t save any of them. , but how they could (and should) be made better. One of the final dungeons, the Palace of Regression, is full of everyday people who found solace in giving up, maybe the lamest thing can do an adult can do to the eyes of a teen.

It might be Atlus’s twelfth iteration of the formulation, and it shows. I’m not certain how well it applied here, but I’ve had recurrent encounters with the concept of moxie in Chinese art history, in which mastery of a technique, and achievement of a work, comes from copy and iteration, as opposed to trying to do something new everytime. On ne change pas une formule qui gagne, they say, but the implication here is rather to keep the doing same as long as it works. It does not necessarily imply improvement for refinement (see series such as Modern Warfare and Assassin’s Creed). I am not saying Atlus is beyond the milking of the cash cow when considering sequels and spinoffs, but rather that it feels like this one is reaching some sort of pinnacle within expected, familiar structures.

The theme of the psyche works across different levels: getting to know your enemy as a way to render them vulnerable (a vulnerability which unchangeably culminates in anger), getting to know the teenager the enemy oppresses and building up relationships with this teenager before and after their liberation from the oppression of the adult, and the framing of battle abilities through your relationship with these teenagers. Unleashing the rebellious spirit of teenagers, giving them confidence in who they are, or solace in how they consider their past, strengths them emotionally, and gives you access to better fighting possibilities strengths them emotionally, and gives you access to better fighting possibilities It’s like therapy meets Pokemon . The spirit, the unconscious, the persona(lity) is patterned all over the main narrative, dungeon gameplay and social sim. If one of the pitfalls of JRPGs tends to be the deus ex machina, the plot twist that shows up out of nowhere and plot twists the whole experience, the recurrence of the theme does not create overload but consistency. Over time, it feels like consequential intent.

The pacing of things is another lovely aspect. The investement of hundreds of hours is, to me, an integral part of the charm of a role-playing game. You can’t really start investing yourself into characters if you don’t spend time with the characters, if you don’t dwell in the world (especially whe the narrative development and characterization aren’t as developed as in cinema or theater). And this couple of spending and dwelling is very nicely represented in the ambivalence of time. Persona 5 unfolds in the simplest way possible: a series of days, split in different moments (morning, after school, evening), follow each other over the course of one year, from summer, to fall, winter, spring, and culminating in summer again. The (micro-)cyclical nature of the day fits within the (macro-)linear unfolding of the school year, itself supported by the succeeding seasons. When you’re a high schooler, every day feels like the same day—you go to school, you hang out with friends, you do homework—and yet the schoolyear that passes by can never be rewinded, as you gradually move to the next year. When you’re a hero, the narrative builds up dramatically in a linear way, but the seasons remind you that the next year will, in a sense, be the same year as the last one. Variation and development within structure and repetition.

Since it unfolds over a whole year, two emergent properties appear. First, playing everyday in the real world means playing everyday in the game world. You pick up the controller in the evening, and you’re ready to go to school again. Second, there is a moment where the day in the game world matches the day in the real world, in a sort of synchronicity, of two worlds sharing something that wasn’t expected to be shared. For me, it was in July, when the rainy season in fictional Tokyo matched the heavy summer atmosphere in real Berlin. It’s always the unexpected that I find the most touching.

The cyclical unfolding of linear time underscores a core aspect of the social sim: you hang out. You dwell in company of people you barely know and, overtime, you build up a bond. Most of the time, you don’t need to perform heroics to be a better friend (and have access to tougher personalities to fight with in the dungeon-minds of those shitty adults), you just need to be a nice human being. With time, you become friends. I did cry (a little) in the climax of the game, when the game world is completely turned into an ideal simulation of everyone’s perfect fantasies, and as you have to convince your friends to give up their perfect (fake) lives for their imperfect (real) ones. It turns out you were also living a fantasy, one in which a friend was still alive. It’s simple but it’s powerful—we’d rather have friends than not, and they’re more important than most typical fantasies.

This ultimate plot resolution, when you need to extract yourself from dream to reality, echoed distinctly on the other side of the screen. As a player, it was time to give up the stylized, fantastic world, leave the everyday life of a student to come back to my everyday life of a teacher. Formally, this closing concludes very well. At the closing of the game, the passing of the school year is also a nice way to provide closure: when the summer approaches, you prepare to say goodbye. In the real world, you say goodbye for the holidays; in the game world, you say goodbye for ever. When the game came to a close, I felt a pinch not unlike the ones not unlike the ones I used to have in the July of middleschool, bidding farewell over what seemed (then) to be an eternity.

And, in the end, I was not just saying goodbye to friends. I was saying goodbye to my own childhood. My daughter is going to be born in a couple of months, and I probably won’t ever have hundreds of hours to join the shenanigans of a bunch of kids in Aoyama-Ichitome, or to learn how to make curry in Yongen-Jaya, or kill time in Shibuya. It’s a whole new world of adventures that opens up and, who knows, maybe we’ll play Persona 8 together.