Persona 5 Pulls its Punches

I’m going to preface this by saying that I played about halfway through Persona 4, with about 50 hours, and at the time of writing this I am currently about 25 hours into Persona 5. And I'm honestly enjoying it a lot. Its endlessly charming and stylish and I really like the cast of characters so far. The artstyle is flashy and bombastic but manages never to be intrusive or confusing. It’s dungeon-crawling and strategic turn-based battles are better than they’ve ever been. The small improvements made over Persona 4's combat system definitely go along way here. Single button presses now easily fulfill an action that previously had you scratching your head, six layers deep in a menu. It’s a really rewarding, fast paced battle system that keeps the long dungeons moving along nicely. The dungeons or “palaces” themselves have newfound verticality, puzzles and cover mechanics, that add a lot to the experience and avoids falling into the mundanity of Persona 4's endless hallways and doors.

I admire a lot about the Persona series: the complicated themes that it always tries to navigate and having you balance a student’s social life with a job, school and mystery solving. It’s a unique thing. There aren't a lot of other games that I can think of, that give you the opportunity to form the kind of social connections that Persona lets you create with its characters, either. These games average over 100 hours of playtime, so you're given more than enough time with the characters that surround you to get to know them. Some more than others though, as Persona 5 also moves those hundred hours along at a brisk pace, forcing you to constantly choose how you want to spend your precious free time. By choosing to spend time with one character, you may be losing out on forming a connection with another. Deciding to go to the movies instead of studying for upcoming exams can leave you under-equipped for future quests or character moments. This barrage of constant choice making can be actually be stressful as hell. It's also oddly kind of antithesis to the spinning loading icon always telling you to "Take Your Time". But in my 20 hours with Persona 5, I’ve actually found that a lot of it's design choices actively fight against its narrative intentions.

Persona 5’s relentless pace doesn't give you time to reflect on the complicated social issues it places on you. I’m pretty sure they're meant to provoke prolonged self-reflection in the player. But instead, seconds later it will tell you exactly how to feel, by making you choose between two or three dialogue options that mean the exact same thing. So I choose either “yes” or “yeah” or “I guess” and brace to be punched in the face with why the “shitty adults” are being so selfish. There is zero interpretation here, as it has very little respect for the intelligence of it’s audience. These games are about 75% X-ing through dialogue and making minor choices on how to reply. But its on-the-nose writing can often times come off as unnatural in conversations and feels immature in its context a lot of the time - which can be kind of abrasive considering this is an M-rated game already dealing with difficult subjects like bullying, shame, harassment and suicide. The weirdest part, is that all of these social and cultural and political issues it brings up are all solved away through essentially magic, giving no real insight on how to actually deal with them, making it all seem kind of trivial. And because of that, it feels like Persona 5 really doesn’t have much to say, beyond 'bad should be good'.

I can ignore some of this, to an extent, because I think a large amount of it can be attributed to an ocean of difference in Japanese culture - it being the game’s primary target audience. As well as the sheer cliffside of translation work that was conquered by the localization team. The style of writing found in anime is very similar to the kind of stuff found in Persona 5. It’s usually pretty idiot proof in its story delivery. Western writing tends toward 'show don't tell', while Japanese prefer melodrama and stylized theatrics - it’s not exactly subtle. And Persona is no doubt a Japanese creation. Japan simply has a different sense of drama than we do which is something I try to keep in mind when I play Japanese games or watch the occasional anime, but I do admit it can be pretty grating.

There also aren’t many games that are attempting the huge amount of character dialogue that Persona has, but in the almost 10 years that have passed since Persona 4’s release in 2008, games like The Witcher 3, Mass Effect 2, Spec Ops: The Line, The Last of Us and even this year’s Nier: Automata, have set new and higher expectations for players with the way they deal with human relationships, emotional drama and socio-political issues. Not every game needs to elevate the medium but for a series of games that's main focus is on it’s characters and written dialogue, there are higher standards to work by.

And I honestly don’t think it's all terrible. In fact, like I said before, I really like a lot of the characters and appreciate the kinds of themes they are taking head on, but sometimes the levity that certain characters bring to scenes feels misplaced. Especially when they tick off the anime checklist for having a talking cat. While Persona 5 initially feels like it has the potential and drive to dive deep into its concepts, it ultimately chooses to wear its water-wings in the deep end.