Persona
I finished Persona 5, and it was quite a good time.
It is Atlus’s twelfth iteration in the series, and it shows. This feeling of excellence through repetition reminded me of the recurrent encounters I’ve had 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—you can keep doing the same as long as you are diligent, and you will get better at it. Not that 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, resulting from consequential intent.
Mind games
On the surface, the game tells the story of japanese highschoolers and of their enactment of justice. Over a year, they/you encounter adults that cover the whole spectrum of abuse of power (sexual assaulter, forger, yakuza, ceo, attorney, politician, culminating in the collective unconscious of all adult masses). To correct their wrongdoings, you infiltrate their minds, find the object of their (misplaced) desired—a sort of Freudian fetish—and steal it from them. It’s half-way between psychotherapy and Arsène Lupin with the kind of soundtrack that only Japanese productions hold the secret of.
Brainwashing is a simplistic version of reparative justice, but casting the psyche as a gameplay element is one of the threads that are exquisitely unfolded across different parts of the game. These simplistic notes of “let’s steal a treasure and they will be stop being bad people!” often reflect with a kind of innocent sharpness in the dialogue. After all, justice is love with open eyes, and those teenagers can see clearly both 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. , as well as how they could (and should) be made better. Case in point, 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 an adventurous teen.
The theme of the psyche works across different levels: getting to know your enemy to render them vulnerable (a vulnerability which unchangeably culminates in anger), getting to know the teenager the enemy’s victim (as someone is inevitably oppressed), building up a relationship with this victim to their liberate them from the grasp of the adult, and developing concrete gameplay abilities through your personal relationship with your friends. Unleashing the rebellious spirit of teenagers, giving them confidence in who they are, or solace in how they consider their past, 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. Granted, such social sim is nothing new (again, Atlus is not in the business of the original), but it works particularly well with teenage angst and yearn. Even the strange plot twists that can easily be brushed off to the fact that characters aren’t in their right mind.
A matter of time
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 hang out for long hours with the characters, if you don’t dwell in the world (especially when the narrative development and characterization aren’t as developed or punchy as in cinema or theater). And this duality of hanging out with people and dwelling in a world 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), days which 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, and learn more about the reality of who you are, and what the world is. When you’re a hero, the narrative tends to build up dramatically in a linear way, but here 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 this sort of unexpected that I find the most touching.
The An elegant paradox that ensures playful tension. underscores a core aspect of the social sim: you hang out. You dwell in company of people you barely know and, over time, through eating noodles, playing games, watching passers-by, you build up a bond. While you’re a real, super-powered hero in the minds of the enemies, in the real world you don’t need to perform any heroics to be a better friend (even though, in another feedback loop, you do gain access to tougher personalities to fight with in the dungeon-minds of those shitty adults). To become a stronger hero, you just need to be a nice human being, and a good friend.
And so, with time, I made friends, just like when you transfer to a new school. 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, the main character, 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.
Farewell to fiction
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. At the closing of the game, the passing of the school year is also a natural way to provide closure: when the summer approaches, you prepare to say goodbye (as all kids learn to do). 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 I used to have in the July of middleschool, bidding farewell over what seemed to be an eternity.
At the end of Persona 5, 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 will never again 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—let alone to dive into the twisted mind of adults to serve justice. No regrets, though.
It’s time for a new chapter, and for a whole new world of adventures that is about to open up.
Who knows, maybe she will play Persona 8.