December Musings: This Time It’s Persona(l)

I recently finished a second play through of Persona 5 Royal, and I’d gone through regular Persona 5 twice before that. I’m a big fan of the series, in case you couldn’t tell. Playing it a second time was more just because I felt like it than anything—I’d done a second playthrough of Shantae and the Seven Sirens a bit before—though some interesting things emerged. I’ve tried to keep this as free of spoilers as I can, even though the game is already a few years old.

Starting with Persona 3, the Persona games have been a hybrid of JRPG (in the mold of the Shin Megami Tensei series that it’s a spinoff from) and life sim. Your protagonist goes to school Monday through Saturday, and then in the afternoons and evenings you can pick his activities. You can spend time with party members and certain NPCs to build up your Social Links (called “Confidants” in Persona 5), which in turn give you bonuses when you fuse corresponding personas, plus in Persona 5 they unlock various special abilities. You also have a set of 5 social stats, and several things in the game are gated behind stat values, so you need to have a Guts score high enough to confront a tough guy, or a Kindness sufficient to help out a girl who’s having a hard time, or enough Proficiency to dodge the chalk that one teacher throws at your head. There are a wide variety of activities that contribute to raising your social stats, like working at a flower shop to raise your Kindness or visiting the batting cage to boost your Guts.

All of that is punctuated with visits to the otherworldly realms where you go through surreal JRPG dungeons that have different kinds of impacts on the real world. In Persona 4 a lot of the dungeons come from future party members’ dark selves manifesting, while in Persona 5 you’re going into the Palaces of people with powerfully distorted desires in order to make them stop the evil they’re doing in the real world.

Where in the Shin Megami Tensei games the world gets wrecked and there are demons just running around IRL, in Persona there are Shadows in a cognitive world (the “Metaverse” as they call it in the English version of P5). Each party member has one Persona—a second self with magic powers—that they wield, while the protagonist of is always a “wild card” who can use multiple Personas. The Velvet Room—which is something of a riff on the red room in Twin Peaks—is a place between dream and reality where the protagonist can go and (among other things) fuse the Personas he’s collected to create new ones.

It has a New Game+ mechanic, letting you carry over your money, social stats, certain items, and your “Persona Registry” as you begin the game again. The registry is especially important, because it means that you can go to the Velvet Room and spend some money to get any of the Personas you got before, whether a level 1 Pixie or a level 99 Satanel. Between that and keeping your weapons and armor from the end of the game, a New Game+ takes a while to start being challenging. I wasn’t able to squeeze in every social link all the way, but I got a lot closer than before.

Fighting

The combat system is the biggest thing that I took notice of this time around. As I see it, while the fights all use the same engine, they have three main modes.

• Normal fights with random Shadows are a thing where your goal is to exploit the enemies’ weaknesses to short-circuit the battle and end it as fast as possible. As you progress through the game, your characters get more tools to do that (things like multi-target spells, insta-kills, and spells that negate resistances), and as the player you develop a knowledge of how the designers tend to assign weaknesses to different kinds of Shadows. In Persona 5, when you get your link to Ryuji up to rank 7, you get an ability called “Insta-Kill” that lets you automatically kill weaker shadows (relative to you, I think based on level) just by running into them. This lets you even further skip past the minor battles, and after a while it makes excursions to Mementos feel like a surreal Carmageddon, as Morgana’s van form just keeps steamrolling Shadows.
• Boss fights on of other hand become more of an endurance test. You can’t just hit their weaknesses and then take them down, whether because they don’t have weaknesses or just because they have so many hit points that even if you can do an All-Out Attack every turn it’ll still take a while and they’ll get off some major attacks on your party.
• What I realized this time around was that there’s a third category. The game will sometimes put you into a sort of narrative pseudo-battle, where it uses the game’s normal battle engine, but it blatantly sets things up according to the pre-planned story. These often show up before and/or after a major legit boss battle, and there’s usually one or more of these near the end of the game, where your protagonist pulls out some deus ex machina to save mankind.

I think this is interesting to look at as inspiration for a TTRPG, though obviously the “narrative” battles have to become something more than just designer/GM fiat. The divide between minor and major battles is something I tried with the most recent iteration of Magical Burst, and I think there’s a lot to be said for having the ability to scale how crunchy your battles are going to be, especially when trying to emulate genres where combat is much more frequent than is really tenable to play out in detail when playing an RPG. Stripped of their railroading, the epic narrative fights have the potential to be an interesting addition to that formula, and I can envision giving players the opportunity to engage in a more narrative kind of conflict that deliberately lets them break the normal rules of the story.

Another thing I encountered was what the very high end of Persona gameplay looks like. After a while I got all of the characters up to level 99, and while that makes a huge difference, at a certain point the game caps how much benefit you get from leveling. There are three secret bosses that I’ve found, and all of them have the means to wipe out a level 99 party with the best gear in the game. The endurance element of boss battles gets turned up even further, with the bosses tossing out ruinous amounts of damage and status effects constantly, plus outright insta-kill attacks, all of which you need to strategize for in ways that don’t come up even for the final boss. I went through the hassle of creating a persona (Yoshitsune) that was practically immune to damage. In theory this would let me just let the other party members go down and leave the protagonist to do melee attacks, but through a combination of Almighty attacks (which ignore your resistances) and simply imposing a time limit, that otherwise game-breaking approach was thwarted.

Romance

Aside from ditching its over the top heteronormativity, one major thing on my wish list for a Persona 6 is for the game’s text to be more aware of what’s going on. The last time I played, I had my protagonist get into a relationship with Futaba. When you develop your link to her father Sojiro, there’s a part where he asks you not to date her—which is reasonable on his part in a lot of ways—but you can be dating her and not have anything interesting at what should be a hilariously tense moment. This time around I had my protagonist start dating Makoto, and a few times he was face-to-face with her older sister. Likewise, the game isn’t especially aware of how powerful your party is, and for example you’ll sometimes have Futaba or Morgana shouting about how dangerous a Shadow is, even if mechanically you can beat them within one round, or in some cases even a single turn. (On the other hand, I love how if you do the optional fight with the twins, Futaba starts off saying “They’re so cute I want to take them home!” but quickly starts telling you that they’re seriously dangerous. She is completely right about this no matter what level you are.)

The way the game handles romance is kind of weird too. For most of the female characters, if you develop your link to them up to rank 9 or 10, there will be a binary dialogue option that determines whether or not your protagonist will start dating them. From there, for the most part this will be inconsequential to the story up until there are a couple of date events near the end of the game. There are some touching moments (the date with Chie in Persona 4 comes to mind), but the games treat a romantic relationship as a finish line to a social link rather than the starting point of a connection between characters. Given that I myself am aromantic, it feels weird that I can come up with this kind of criticism of a game from a team of adults who presumably have more than my minimal level of experience with that kind of thing. While I’d like to see options for same-sex dating for those that want it (apparently there’s some unused code in Persona 4 for an aborted plan to make Yosuke dateable), I’d also like to see something in the game for playing the protagonist as asexual beyond simply having the normal game minus romance and maybe a Valentine’s Day hangout with the guys.

(Also, although I’m sure folks in the fandom has done some shipping, I have a really hard time imagining any of the party members dating each other. Well, Morgana has his crush on Ann, but it doesn’t go anywhere because, you know, cat.)

Social Change

Persona 5 tries to tackle some social issues, and I find its successes and failures rather interesting. While I know more about Japanese culture than the average American, I’m still necessarily coming at it from a Western POV, so take what I say here with a grain of salt.

There’s a kaitou (phantom thief or gentleman thief) trope, where you have a heroic thief who does daring heists. It existed in Western fiction, but the iconic status of Lupin III made it very popular in Japan. Where Persona 4 played out a murder mystery in the setting, Persona 5 plays with the phantom thief trope. The protagonist and the other party members become “The Phantom Thieves,” and try to use their ability to steal a person’s twisted desires to make the world a better place. A harassing teacher, a yakuza boss, and an abusive fast-food magnate are among their targets.

The flaw in this—which the game does touch on—is that by itself affecting individuals doesn’t necessarily create the desired change in a world where the larger problems come from entrenched systems. If we could steal Jeff Bezos’ heart and make him stop wanting to build a dystopian sci-fi future with Amazon employees peeing in bottles, there’s a good chance the board would quietly remove him from the public eye and carry on like they have been. Even if Amazon did become a force for good, there’s still the exploitation ingrained in basically every major retail operation, and even more so the factories that supply them with goods. There’s an element of self-preservation in the Phantom Thieves’ actions as well, since in order to create a time limit, the game has each mission kick off with the target having backed them into a corner in some way. The teacher is going to get you expelled, the yakuza boss is going to release incriminating photos, and the fast-food magnate is going to force his daughter into an arranged marriage.

The series’ treatment of gender and sexuality remains shall we say problematic as well, which undercuts the theme of social reform in that the LGBT+ community’s fight for equality is one of the most pressing movements for change right now, and one that's just starting to heat up in Japan. The P5 protagonist is assumed to be heterosexual, and while the game does have a drag queen as a relatively positively-portrayed minor NPC (Lala, the proprietor of the Crossroads bar in Shinjuku), it also has a couple scenes where The Gays show up and drag Ryuji off. It’s not as extreme as Kanji and Naoto’s gender issues in Persona 4 (which brazenly tease the possibility of them being gay and trans respectively, but then reveal they were each misunderstanding their true selves), but it’s definitely a low point in an otherwise enjoyable game.

The government’s reaction to the Phantom Thieves however seems pretty spot on. As bad as the American justice system is, the Japanese system largely acts on the assumption that anyone tried for a crime must be guilty (instead of heavily incentivizing guilty pleas like we do here). The opening scene, a flash forward where the cops are beating the shit out of the protagonist in a secret underground interrogation room and making him sign a confession, is entirely too believable. The Japanese public as portrayed in the game is slow to even believe the Phantom Thieves are real (reasonable given that they're using an unknown supernatural method of affecting people), and quick to turn on them when they get framed for murder, even though it’s the murder of a despicable CEO. While there definitely would be people taking that stance, I think even in Japan there would be a significant number of people cheering for there being one less rich asshole in the world, and lots of obnoxious Twitter threads where people argue about it.

In the story it’s also possible for there to be collective manifestations in the Metaverse—it’s the whole basis of the final non-secret dungeon—and it’s easy to imagine a Persona story where the characters fight to change collective beliefs and systems. It would be unrealistic but very satisfying to have the ability to go into another world to find and kill the cognitive manifestation of QAnon and thus make people forget about it for example. Of course, that would also mean that bad actors could do the same, sending teams in to eliminate notions of e.g., racial equality or democracy, or just to make everyone want to buy something. The more I think about it, the more it sounds like Edward Bernays—who applied psychoanalysis to marketing and invented the modern concept of PR—amped up an order of magnitude. My own unrealized premise for a Persona-inspired story involves a social media company looking for ways to abuse the Other Side to make a profit. (Facebook was an important inspiration.)

The ability to retrieve physical objects from a cognitive world has implications too, as Persona users can come back with more than enough valuables to make a living before long. While the games don’t depict items taken from the Metaverse as having any supernatural properties, they can include precious metals and rare collectibles.

Futuristic

Since I was playing P5R when the new Dune movie came out, I tweeted out a joke about Morgana’s blue eyes coming from Spice, which got me thinking about Persona’s notions of a cognitive world in a futuristic setting of some kind. Persona 5 tries to grapple with the implications of the series’ main conceit, showing us research into “cognitive psience” and elements in the Japanese government looking for ways to exploit it. This initially takes the form of untraceable assassinations, though there’s also a villain with countermeasures against the Phantom Thieves. In a world where the Pandora’s Box of cognitive psience gets opened, the Other Side could become a new front for every kind of conflict and exploitation imaginable. In the games things like mankind’s desire to be controlled and the yearning for the eschaton take the form of final bosses, so bigger changes to humanity’s ways of thinking take a great deal more power, albeit power that a group of teenagers with attitude can attain.

One of the things that makes Dune interesting is how it takes place in a setting where humanity has abandoned computers, and instead taken to giving people intense training to fill those roles and more. Mentats are effectively human computational engines, the Bene Gesserit have an incredible mastery of the human body and mind, Navigators can use Spice to fold space (in case you were wondering, in the setting humanity had FTL travel before the discovery of Arrakis, but ships would simply disappear one time out of ten), and the Sardukar were just intensely trained and given religious indoctrination to make them into living weapons. In a universe with cognitive psience, leaders would bend the minds of people to create powerful, controllable societies. Since objects can be taken from the Other Side into the physical world in some form, shaping people’s cognitive worlds would be a way to bring things into existence.

I want to do something with this line of thinking, but as you can see, it quickly becomes so expansive that it’ll take a long time to even worth through the basics. In Twin Peaks the other world of strange spirits and lodges is so surreal and harsh that very few people can use it to their own benefit, and doing so can have strange costs, whether it means losing an arm (like Philip Gerard) or becoming something altogether non-human (though that was partly because Michael J. Anderson and David Bowie weren’t available to reprise their roles in the show, albeit for very different reasons).

Appendix: Megaten

After I finished P5R, I started on Shin Megami Tensei V, which is my first foray into the main SMT series. I like it so far, though not to the level of obsession that Persona inspires in me. Instead of a cognitive world that most people aren’t aware of, it takes place in a world where Tokyo is overrun with literal demons. Where in Persona your protagonist has a party of fellow Persona-using humans, in SMT he has to put together a party of demons that he variously recruits (mostly by negotiating with them in battles) or creates through fusions. While the characters in SMT5 are vividly realized, the overall story is comparatively light and procedural, leaving the gameplay to be much more about going around to fight demons, do side quests, and find items. Or to put it another way, unlike with Persona, with SMT5 I can listen to podcasts the majority of the time I’m playing.

While the game has the convention of elemental weaknesses playing a major role, it’s not nearly as overwhelming as in the Persona games. Hitting an enemy’s weakness will do more damage and give your party a bonus action, but it won’t knock the enemy down or open up the possibility of doing an All-Out Attack that wipes out most non-boss enemies. It’s also just generally less forgiving, and even on the Casual difficulty setting it’s not at all unusual to get a game over screen. The game has some optional bosses scattered around that are much too high level to fight when you first encounter them, and even regular bosses that you’re supposed to be able to beat can potentially wipe your party out if you’re not properly prepared.

Lastly, while Persona largely uses the same set of demon/Persona designs based on mythology from around the world, in SMT they really go all-out on using quasi-Christian imagery, in ways that your average Evangelical would despise. Several of the games have “YHVH” as a tyrannical creator who unleashed the apocalypse—and a boss you can fight and defeat—and in SMT5 there’s a scene where Lucifer declares that he’s slain God.

Anyway, it’s been 25 years since the first Persona game came out—and the original Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei came out 9 years before that, in 1987—and it’s interesting just how much they’ve let the spinoff deviate from its origins, even as it retails a whole lot of SMT conventions and lore.