[Warning: Gigantic endgame spoilers.]

It’s no secret that Persona 5 has an explicit political bent. As USgamer’s Caty McCarthy’s wonderful piece discusses, director Katsura Hashino created the game with the Japanese body politic in mind. He states that the game addresses endogenous ills, ones “risen from within their own society”. It would seem intuitive to identify these ills as their externalized forms, as the “bad adults” who act as reinforcers of authority and hierarchy that the player investigates throughout the game, such as a high-school teacher, an industrial capitalist, and a politician. Hashino hopes that the audience is provoked by the story’s progression to ask “What, exactly, drives adults to dark desires?” I think the answer lies within Persona 5’s representation of Mementos.

Mementos is initially introduced as the dregs formed as a byproduct of an operational collective subconsciousness, but the true nature of Mementos is only revealed during the game’s final hours, when it becomes clear that it is to be the final dungeon. Just as the previous dungeons, it is a mindcastle crawling with shadows acting as antibodies, but Mementos’ final floor is more of an aesthetic object for narratological purposes, rather than a psychogeographic playhouse to be conquered with clandestine, parabolic movement and a calling card. The dungeon is comprised of visual puzzles, long sprints, and, interactions with people… in cages. These exchanges are some of the most essential to witness for a better understanding of what Mementos truly represents. Talking to these people reveals that Mementos is less an object created of and from a collective subconsciousness, and more one created of and from a collective false consciousness. It is an object reified by a form of ideological labor reliant on self-flagellation, subsumption of the radical into the counterrevolutionary, and of a willful yielding to hierarchy. The prisoners you encounter are there by choice. “You end up searching for stuff or being troubled because you’re outside the prison”, states one prisoner. Another remarks that binding all meaningful decisions to those that lie within the confines of their cognitive prison is the greatest form of liberation — freedom from critical thought. “Who made of all of this?”, asks your party, searching for an ontological character to Mementos. The response is that that character is social: “Every member of the general public”.

Of course, upon this revelation, your party’s reaction is to abolish Mementos by the only means of abolition made available throughout the game: turn-based combat. Still, Persona 5’s Mementos functions as ludic and critical exploration of the perversion of ideology and its ability to obfuscate exploitation, inequality, and abnegate the potential for an awakening in those most alienated. In Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord states that “ideological entities have never been mere fictions — rather, they are a distorted consciousness of reality, and, as such, real factors retroactively producing real distorting effects…” — in ritualistic Shin Megami fashion, a God Between Worlds or Maker is ultimately responsible for the material-to-ideological cycle of distortion, but such characters present as vestigial accouterments of SMT games, as opposed to their central theses.

I won’t go as far as to state that Persona 5 has an authentically emancipatory reading hidden behind a thin veneer of powerfully anime perspectives on gender and sexuality. However, the red-drenched color palette, the glorification of transgression in its celebration of thievery and in the main character’s criminality, in its (sometimes ham-fisted) dialogue simultaneously critiquing oppressors but understanding how one could sympathize with them — there’s something there. Perhaps subconsciously.

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Leftist readings aside, the game does do quite a few things worth noting. Persona 5 has a way of making you feel as if you are the world’s greatest talent manager for the world’s most pedestrian mega-celebrity. As the protagonist’s handler, you handpick jobs to do, perform PR tasks like select what to say for the cameras, and even advise the protagonist on their romantic life (duh). You constantly attempt to maximize the amount and the quality of tasks you can fit into a single day until the chrono-clown car is packed, and Morgana shuts the door (eventually, you can add an extra row of seats to the chrono-clown car via Confidant rank-up). After the first month or two, it actually begins to feel like a neo-Neopets; you develop a codified but flexible decision tree, allowing for amendments given the occurrence of special and unexpected events, such as unusual weather, or a story-driven intrusion. When the perfect confluence of psuedo-random events occur, such as when multiple Confidants text or call lining up to meet without schedule conflicts, I experience the very same dopaminergic response societally conditioned to arise when I’ve maximized my productivity.

The battle system is pretty standard for a Persona game, though the addition of guns and in-battle Confidant augmentations do affect strategy meaningfully. I would still maintain that the attempts at increasing variance in outcome measured against the player’s skill still feel additive, rather than multiplicative. Given the natural progression of Confidant rank-ups, idiosyncrasies of combat, such as having a status ailment cured or being rescued from an otherwise fatal strike, begin to manifest so frequently that they become commonplace. It starts to get old, which can be grating for a game that is minimally 80 hours long.

I want to believe that the use of iterative mini-bosses elevates the cliche to self-parody given their historical usage. Boss battles are mainly event-driven, and victory conditions are gated by successful completion of said events. In form and function, the battles invoke what it looks like to fight Andross in Star Fox 64, a remembering to guard after cautionary dialogue, and the patented Shin Megami Tensei meta-combat of jockeying for control of the battle’s topography via buffs and debuffs as the contouring tools.

Persona 5 also does some odd, but expected (and unexpected) things. At a cursory glance, the plot is an amalgam of Death Note (a tool that can manipulate other human beings is discovered and utilized, its ethics are questioned, and there is an ace detective on your trail) and Inception (theives stealing from people’s subconscious). It does the Symphony of the Night thing, where the reward of progression is made sweeter by the presentation of new and comfortable music. There’s a parody of The Dark Knight Rises in it. It’s a really, really horny game, and one cut-scene involves tentacles. It mentions Hegel’s dialectic triad. It only barely skims the surface of a wide variety of issues, like innappropriate tropes based on visible identity and the objectification of women in Japanese culture, despite having an absurd amount of lines of written and spoken dialogue. But hey, at least it calls Kawakami a sex worker.