Persona 5 SteelBook Edition

I don't even know where to start with this review. How do I even begin to capture how utterly perfect this game is, how glad I am that I played it, and how I'm slightly worried about how it's set a benchmark that other games toying with the same themes and genres may never be able to live up to?

Maybe I should start by pointing to all the times in the past that I've argued that games should generally be shorter, and that unnecessary bloat under the banner of 'getting your money's worth' is one of the things that annoys me most about the medium - and yet, my save file for this as I come up to completing it for the second time currently sits at 174 hours and I don't feel like I'm completely ready to move on. Maybe I should tell you that I've had a list I'm making here on the backburner for a couple of years that ranks all of my favourite fictional characters ever, and I'm now considering not even bothering to complete it because it would look ridiculous with so many of the top 100 coming from this game. Maybe I should talk about I can scarcely remember the plot arc in anything gripping me so hard for so long, and how I'm reaching out to literary classics for reference points rather than other games (or films, or TV shows). But no - let's talk about the state of Japan in 2017.

I will be honest and say that I'm relying on second-hand info for the finer details here; I've never been to Japan (more's the pity) and only have a very small handful of friends that live there. You may well know better than I do from personal experience, and I'll own up to that up front. We do have some cold facts on the bigger picture, though. 16% of Japan's population currently live below the poverty line, the highest level ever recorded. The annual birth rate is below 1,000,000, also the lowest ever recorded, resulting in an overall decline in population and the average age shooting up, which is likely to have severe economic consequences. It has also increased the demands on the workers there, with women in particular now caught in a cultural catch-22 where they are under pressure both to enter the workforce and forge careers to make up for the deficit in the workforce, and to settle down and have families to make up for the deficit in birth rates, with government initiatives (briefly mentioned in the previous articles) targeting the latter in particular (and the former not exactly an easy ride). Then there's the cost of property in Tokyo, the cultural expectations placed upon men in the workforce, the suicide rates amongst young men, the dwindling prestige of Japanese exports, the lack of opportunities in the workforce, and the lasting impacts of The Lost Decade to factor in. The end result of all this is that the future for a teenager in Japan looking to enter the workforce is pretty bleak; a toxic mix of the culture, the economy, and political corruption that they're powerless to change, and the knowledge that comes with the Internet of how other countries either suffer from these problems to a much lesser degree or simply don't have these problems at all....it seems little wonder that the concept of hikikomori exists, even if it is one that the West sometimes likes to blow out of proportion a little bit. And hell, school isn't exactly a breeze either, with its six-day weeks, strong focus on discipline, bullying problems amongst both other students and teachers, and rigid standard testing placing huge pressure on the children there.

And so to Persona 5, which very rarely feels like an explicitly political game (at least, not to Western sensibilities), but that touchs on almost all of these themes and acts as wish fulfillment for Japanese youth in this climate. What if you weren't powerless? What if young people could get together, find strength in one another, and change things? (You'll note, of course, that this is a constant theme across the Persona games if you've ever played one - it's just being played out on a grander scale this time.)

What this essentially results in here is Adults Are Bastards: The Game. And god damn, are the adults in this game ever bastards. There are exceptions, but they are the ones that essentially have little power - your teacher Sadayo Kawakami and your carer Sojiro Sakura in particular, and even then, Sojiro seems like a bit of a dick at the start of the game, in service of the overall theme. You can also add - eventually - the prosecutor Sae Nijima to that list, and if you're really reaching into characters who were dead before the story even began, you can add Wakaba Isshiki. Other than that, the crimes perpetuated by the adults in this game are horrifying - and in the first half of the game in particular, many center upon the direct exploitation of the young, both financial and sexual.

(I've only just discovered now, through looking for all those links posted above, that a lot of these seem to be based on real-life incidents too; if you're interested, there are some theories and links in the review supplement below, but naturally these contain some huge spoilers about the antagonists you'll be up against and the nature of their crimes.)

Viewed through a purely political lens, this would be quite heavy-handed, but the game itself does not encourage you to do this - not until much later into the plot, at least. Instead, the battles between these antagonists and your party is explicitly personal; yes, you're taking them down because you want to stop them from hurting anybody else, but you're originally spurred into action because they've hurt you and your friends directly.

It's probably a good idea to take this back a step for a moment and explain what 'taking them down' means. As is typical for the Persona series, your character can access another 'dimension' which acts as a reflection of human consciousness. In Persona 3, it was Tartarus and it became visible during a secret hour of the day that was only visible to Persona users. In Persona 4, it was the Midnight Channel, which you could access on a rainy night through the static of a detuned television. Persona 5's version of this, the Metaverse, is immediately less silly, requiring much less suspension of disbelief - you do it through a smartphone app (a reflection of how protest is generally organized via social media these days?). This app gives you the best of both worlds - like Persona 4, the individuals you must take on all have their own individual 'palaces', while the randomly generated and persistent nature of Persona 3's Tartarus is reproduced here in an area called Mementos, which functions as the subconscious of the general public as a whole rather than of one person. Mementos becomes essentially a battle arena that acts as housing for a number of side-quests, where you can deal with bad people who aren't quite bad enough to have generated their own palace. The palaces, however, all act as the reflection of one particularly screwed-up person's view of the world. Your task as the Phantom Thieves is to identify the people that have palaces and infiltrate them. When your infiltration is complete and you have defeated the person's subconscious version of themselves, they then have a 'change of heart' in the real world and publicly admit to their crimes.

This is a major improvement over the previous two mainline Persona games in a number of ways. Firstly, the palaces being individually designed one-shot deals, each reflecting a single person, allows the game's designers much more scope and freedom to make each one visually distinct and keep them interesting as a result, something Tartarus in particular didn't allow and really suffered from. It also allows for the introduction of puzzle and stealth mechanics during the infiltration; these mechanics aren't particularly complex, but again, do a lot to vary the experience, and that matters in a game where you're liable to spend roughly 30 combined hours inside these palaces and Mementos. (The stealth mechanics, in turn, vary the battles themselves, allowing for the player to either ambush the enemy and have a full round of turns before they can act, or be ambushed and end up surrounded - which then allows a greater variety in the bonuses that your social links provide.) Most importantly, however, it means that your actions have a more direct bearing on what happens back in the real world than ever before. Never before has a Persona game demonstrated such a clear, tangible link between the two worlds you can inhabit, and even compared to the times in Persona 4 when you were literally saving people's lives, the stakes feel so much higher as a result.

And so back we go to the personal. Your character, officially named by the player but usually referred to as Joker, begins the game by being arrested twice. The first happens in media res, as Joker is ambushed by hundreds of armed police, thrown into jail, and has a false confession beaten out of him. This sets up the framework that the vast majority of the game takes place under - you regularly jump back to an interrogation room where Sae Nijima, the lead investigator into the Phantom Thieves, questions you about your actions, methods, victims, and accomplices. The first three-quarters or so of the game play out as your testimony, with Sae announcing who your next target is before you even meet them or know what they're guilty of. I'm a sucker for this kind of framing, so I might be biased here, but it does much to keep the plot ticking over both in terms of intrigue about what's coming next in the short term and building up a full head of steam as the story catches up with its own starting point. The second arrest is the very start of the story proper, as you see a man sexually harrassing a woman in the street and intervene; he then forces the woman to tell the police that you attacked him unprovoked, which results in Joker being put under probation and moved into care.

So right from the outset, your stall is set out as an outcast, screwed over by adults and treated like dirt by most of your peers - whispers about you being a dangerous juvenile delinquent follow you around for most of the game. The Phantom Thieves are then formed along the same lines, with every new member you pick up being a direct victim of one of the adults you're facing down, reduced to outcast status by the actions of the people that are meant to be caring for and nurturing them. This not only makes the social ranks more interesting than they've ever been before in this series, as you get to explore your friends' insecurities and weaknesses and help them to overcome them, it also plays out particuarly well in the mid-game, as the stakes become higher and higher and your team-mates start to doubt whether or not they're doing the right thing, whether they're saving society for society's sake or just taking down the people that have wronged them for selfish reasons - yet another example of the game favouring the personal over the political, and an important reason why the game still plays out so well to audiences that know little about Japan.

It's not the key reason though; it may not even be in the top three.

The other things Persona 5 gets absolutely right are more universal, and more about it being a truly great game than a great statement. The first is the aesthetics; this is a rare example of a big-budget game that feels like it had an art director with genuine creative freedom heavily involved right from the planning stage, so distinctive and impressive is its style. Heavily influenced by pop-art and bathed in vivid red and black contrasts, everything from the battles and characters to the menus is memorable, sleek, and stylish as hell. It's a game that looks great, but crucially, would still have looked great on the PS2 without losing much, if anything, in the step down in processing power. The game occassionally breaks off into full-on anime cut scenes, and while those scenes are always welcome (particularly in the game's more light-hearted moments), they arguably look worse than the bulk of the game does because they don't have that same sense of style to them.

The second is the battles which, quite aside from looking great, are a joy to play through. Although I broadly prefer it to real-time, turn-based combat in RPGs often feels a bit stilted to me, but the battles here are fluid to the point of almost being rhythmic, and they never seem to stop adding extra layers of complexity without ever feeling complicated. The standard JRPG set of status affects and elemental affinities with corresponding strengths and weaknesses are all present, but the battles contain a dizzying array of other features that you can unlock throughout the game; you can weild guns, pass across a move to a team-mate to make it more powerful, gain random automatic stats buffs from your navigator, and teach characters to slap status ailments out of each other automatically, among other things. There's a system whereby both your characters and the enemies can be knocked off their feet by an attack, at which point other minigames can kick off - if your team-mates are knocked down your characters can be kidnapped and held hostage, while if you knock all of the enemies down you can either launch an all-out attack on them or enter negotiations with them to get money, rare items, or to have them join you as a further persona you can weild. The latter is a staple of the Shin Megami Tensei games that hasn't been seen in the Persona games since Persona 2, and is a very welcome return here, lending a much more enjoyable edge to completing the persona compendium (something I did for the first time ever here).

And, as alluded to earlier, the characters themselves are all brilliant. Even those that can come off as slightly annoying or two-dimensional at first unravel beautifully over the course of getting to know them, especially Yusuke Kitagawa, the character that plays a dual tortured artist/comic relief sidekick dual role. I'd occasionally find one or two of the confidants in previous Persona games to be a bit of a chore to spend time on, an obligation to go through just to get better Personas - that's not true of anybody here. There's a failed politician, a kid that hangs out in arcades all day, somebody who runs a website dedicated to you, an amateur shogi player, and all of them sound incredibly boring on paper....and yet, for each and every one of them, I constantly wanted to see what would happen next with them. Caring about the characters so much led me to actually feel genuinely guilty about turning some of them down for romantic relationships, although it's almost worth just dating all of them to see how hilariously it blows up in your face. Wanting to see how all of the social ranks play out was probably the #1 reason why my reaction to finishing this was to immediately start playing it again, something I almost never do and I'm sure I've never done with an RPG at all. Let's not forget, by the way, that they managed this while also closely pairing up most of the characters to the tarot arcana that have always been a staple of this series, with the concepts of Justice, Judgement, Hermit, Death, and Fortune all being so heavily linked to their characters that they damn near act as spoilers even if you know nothing about tarot. Incidentally, with a nod back to the art direction mentioned above, there was a full tarot deck designed for this game that acts as a set of profane corruptions of the Tarot of Marseilles deck and it's brilliant.

So to summarize - a gripping plot, wonderful characters, impeccable art direction, graceful, fluid, and varied gameplay, a wealth of converging themes shot throughout, sociopolitical commentary for those who care and personal drama and vengeance for those that don't, more than enough levity to balance out the heaviness and darkness of the main plot, and I haven't even mentioned the brilliant soundtrack or the beautifully realised vision of Tokyo yet. I'm left wondering what else I could possibly want from a game and coming up empty-handed. An utterly, utterly incredible piece of work.