There’s one interesting localization point from another menu — the persona subscreen, which lists information about the game’s hundreds of persona monsters. Along the top, the screen lists the attacks and magic elements each persona is strong and weak against.

The Japanese persona description screen lets the player switch between the kanji and icons for elements

In the Japanese version of the game those icons can switch between kanji for each element (above) and icons (below). The English version removed the ability to switch to the kanji icons. While more or less useless for most people playing the game in English, for a game set in Tokyo, it does seem a chance for more verisimilitude was lost.

The English screen only shows the icons

Big Bang Burger March: Shopping in Persona 5

Shopping in Dragon Quest —despite the decades of tech advancements, things haven’t changed much in Persona 5

Charlie discussed the shopping experience in Breath of the Wild; that game allows your character to move from item to item in (the game’s) physical space, something I was initially confused by, because most RPGs, including Persona 5, handle shopping differently. The player character initiates a conversation with the shopkeeper character, and choose items to buy or sell from a menu. Here again, Persona 5 doesn’t re-invent the systems pioneered by its hallowed forebearers, but it does amp the stylishness to eleven.

Unlike previous Persona games, you can strike up cooperation relationships with some of the shopkeepers in Persona 5, meaning that talking to them opens you up to several possible actions. Take the weapons shop, a military goods seller in Shibuya as an example. The menu below opens when you talk to Iwai and choose the shopping option.

An animation of the initial Iwai Military Shop shopping menu

Here, the player has the option of buying standard weapons, guns, armor/clothing, and accessories.

Despite how bold and stylish the shopping menu is, many elements make it easier to use. For example, the amount of money you have, an important attribute in any shop, is constantly visible in the right-corner. The English explanation of the shop is clear in the upper-left corner. The animation between it and the next explanation (“BUY WEAPON”) helps establish the relationship between each step. And like the main menu we discussed above, each menu is broken up by character (since each weapon, gun, and arm can only be purchased for a specific character (the dog tags list each party member’s name), while accessories can be used by multiple characters.

Notice also how the menu reinforces information about Iwai. The large black and white animation of the character reinforces what menu the player is in, and what they’re doing. The military stencil typeface, dog tags, and even the radar overlay and animation help reinforce the idea of Iwai as a shady dealer of military equipment. It all screams “you’re buying weapons!”

The game makes another smart move in the weapon shop menu — it changes the overall color scheme depending on what you’re doing. Buying items, the most common action, is in green, and reinforces the shop’s reputation as a military shop. On the other hand, buying custom guns, shows up as red, while selling items overlays in yellow.

This red version of the weapon shop menu indicates the player is shopping for custom guns

I do wish the game used character art in some of these submenus, like it does in the main menu. Likely, art of the character would interfere with the graphic of the shopkeeper here, but would make it more clear who you’re shopping for. The game does prominently display each character’s names on the dog tags, however.

Compare the Persona 5 weapons shop to the one in Persona 4, which is essentially a static menu, though an attractive one.

The Persona 4 weapon shop menu is beautiful, but a fairly static list of choices

Shopping for black market medicine with Tae Takemi, the punk-rock neighborhood doctor, is a similar experience. There’s no need for character specific art, since the items she sells can be used by anyone in your party. Ultimately Tae’s menu is less complex than Iwai’s, but it makes clear what you’re doing (アィテムを買う or buy an item is displayed prominently in a heavy Japanese font with blue highlights), how many of an item you already have, and how much money you have on hand. The animation is stylish, and draws you in, even late into this long game.

Tae Takemi’s black market medicine shop has a simpler list of items and thus is less complex than the weapons shop

New Beginning: New Users

Persona 5 is a contradictory game. If, like me, you’ve been playing menu-based Japanese RPGs since the jurassic period, it makes total sense, and in fact, Persona 5 does very little fundamentally different from those games. On the other hand, if the the player hasn’t play many of those games, Persona 5 can be confusing (and with the game’s popularity since it’s U.S. release, it seems likely that many people will be playing this genre for the first time).

An additional complication for me in assessing the game’s accessibility is that this is the first Persona game I played entirely in Japanese (other than Persona 4: Dancing All Night, which was a much simpler game).

That said, the game has a number of features to ease new players into the fray, especially at the beginning of the game. It starts with a tutorial on basic movement and battle, and incentivises the player by starting the narrative at pivotal moment in media res.

The gameplay gets more complex from that initial tutorial, but the game has a few methods of aiding the player. As new complexities are added to the basics, the game pops up modal dialogue boxes, like the one below (a video example from an early battle is available here on YouTube). These dialogue boxes can be a several pages long and often include helpful screenshots.

Moreover, Morgana, the cat-like cat burglar who joins your party early in the game offers advice, especially during battle, in text dialogue that is also spoken out loud (you can see Morgana and its dialogue across the top of several battle screenshots above).

An example of the Tutorial modal from the English release

The downside, especially for those of us familiar with the Persona-series structure, is that much of the first dungeon and even into the second, there is little freedom. In the grand course of the game (again, over one-hundred hours) it’s not that much time, but it does feel restricting. Certainly the game’s process of onboarding new players is not as seamless and invisible as the learning curve in Breath of the Wild, which thoughtfully teaches the player game mechanics without even appearing to (itself a reinvention compared to the last few The Legend of Zelda games).

Persona 5 has a few other minor features that help new players. As a non-native speaker of Japanese, the ability to roll back through previous dialogue and even have it respoken was extremely useful. As shown in the main menu screen above, there’s also the ability to access information from the tutorial, and to review the story so far. The latter feature is especially useful for anyone who has put down an RPG, come back after a while, and completely forgotten the story.

Unfamiliar Anger: User Hostile “Features”

It’s clear that the developers of Persona 5 thought deeply about making the game more accessible for players by improving the established conventions of the Japanese RPG. However, there are elements in the game that make the game harder for players.

Some of these obstacles are “game” features, like hiding enemy weakness. It’s counterintuitive coming from a SaaS worldview, but sometimes a game wants to hide the ball to improve the gameplay. Saving is similar — unlike Breath of the Wild, which allows the player to save anywhere — Persona 5 limits the ability to save. Yet, this is part of the game, and the feeling of rushing to a dungeon’s safe room to regroup and save is part of the excitement. In fact, Persona 5 actually makes this easier than previous Persona games; in this game, outside of dungeons the player can save anywhere, whereas previous games had specific save areas.

Similar black and white scene transitions happen frequently through the game

Another poor UX experience is loading times. As the game transitions between scenes, when the player-character moves through locations, the game is forced to load the next section from the game’s disc and into the console’s memory. Load times are almost always bad, as no player likes to wait for the next scene to load. Some games hide loading intelligently; for example Metroid Prime (2002) hides this heavy-lifting behind its door open animation.

2002’s Metroid Prime hid loading times behind these doors

Here again, Atlus doesn’t re-invent the wheel. Persona 5 has ample loading times as the player moves from section to section (either locations within Tokyo or floors in dungeons), but tries to liven them up with animations of the main character jumping and sneaking. Like other animation in the game, it makes otherwise boring, static sections dynamic, reinforces the main character’s alter-ego as the leader of the Phantom Thieves, and helps alleviate some of the boredom of loading screens.

It’s not perfect by any stretch; I complained about multiple loading sections, especially in the game’s last dungeons in my import review. Indeed, toward the end of the game, some large dungeons have multiple load screens — especially annoying since defeated enemies respawn when a section reloads!

Moreover, some screens use a less-interesting “soft” loading screen like the one below with a rotating static image (though even that image changes based on the situation). If the game’s developers took advantage of the PS4’s hardware, perhaps they could have hidden loading, and improve the user experience. Atlus didn’t innovate the problem away, but instead saw an opportunity to add visual interest to an existing limitation.

The other loading screen, shown here, is somewhat boring, but even the player icon here changes depending on the situation

There is, however, one other “feature” that is thoroughly hostile to the player. If you recall the picture of the Playstation 4 controller above, you’ll remember there’s a “Share” button on the left side of it. The PS4 has a dedicated share feature, run through the machine’s OS, allowing players to share screenshots and videos (including streaming to Twitch or YouTube) from the games they’re playing. Most games are pretty liberal in allowing users to share screenshots, but not Persona 5.

Hope you like this screen, because it’s the only one you can use the PS4’s sharing features on

Outside of the title screen, Atlus switches off the share features. The system can’t even take a screenshot when you earn a trophy (an in-game achievement), as it does with most other games.

On the one hand, I think I understand why the game does this. Persona 4 begins with a plea for users to not spoil the game’s murder mystery for other players. While Persona 5 doesn’t have the same suspenseful plot device as its immediate predecessor, there are a few major twists that could be spoiled.

That said, I don’t think preserving those mysteries is worth breaking player expectations by turning off a major console feature. There are people who will spoil the game’s plot, through camera phones or even plain text, while most other players will avoid spoilers until they finish the game. Moreover, people are used to these sharing features on the PS4. While Nintendo has previously taken steps against sharing content like screencaps and video, even Breath of the Wild allows you to take screencaps on the Switch. I see little practical reason for Atlus to completely block sharing.

The Poem of Everyone’s Souls: Typography

I’ve mentioned the Japanese version of the game’s use of typography several times already. The English text recalls ransom notes, especially when using boxed characters, and the creative lettering pulled from punk fanzines. Both references reinforce the themes of the game, focusing on the Phantom Thieves and the conflict between order and disorder.

For example the ad below clearly connects the ransom note-like text and the idea of the Phantom Thieves as picaresque heroes.

A Japanese ad for Persona 5, which features ransom-note like Japanese text

The graphic below, with its monochromatic character profiles, cheap Xerox-ed/newspaper look, and blocky text characters of various sizes (particularly the Cooperation text and Ann Tamaki’s name in kanji) recall those punk fanzines we saw above.

Ann Tamaki’s cooperation screen, which features a newspaper style for character images

Other text in the game helps personalize other characters. Iwai, the weapons dealer, uses a military stencil style typeface for the English explanatory text, character code names (Joker), and to display your money, appropriate for the owner of a military surplus shop.

The Iwai Military Shop uses a spray-paint military typeface

Tae’s black market pharmacy is a masterclass in attention to detail. The white silhouette of the doctor is holding a clipboard and the theme of a clipboard page permeates this menu. In fact, it looks like a form page from the clipboard, with “Takemi Medical Clinic”, and the Japanese kanji for month and day “printed” across the top. The date, prices, yen, and even the item names are written in a neat pencil-like typeface (even the second “1” in the date is off-center to resemble handwriting!). The item descriptions at the bottom appear to use the dialogue typeface, but the two faces go together well. This shop menu is a great example of letting a theme (the doctor’s clipboard) decide the appropriate typography. Finally, also note how Tae’s shop uses a color that is very different from the three used by Iwai’s weapons shop.

Tae’s black market medicine shop uses a more elegant handwritten font, especially for numbers and shows amazing attention to detail with the off center 1 in “11”

Like many RPGs, Persona 5 has a lot of written dialogue. As we discuss that text, let me recap a couple of typography terms. Legibility refers to whether the reader can read the text. Readability, on the other hand, is how much the reader wants to read the text. The distinction becomes important, especially as we look at the English-language localization.

The Japanese dialogue text is legible and readable

The Japanese dialogue typeface is a little heavy (perhaps medium or semi-bold according to Thurston Parkreiner), but (in my opinion) ultimately both legible and readable. Check out how Morgana’s name even has a white-on-black character, ル, which looks like it was cut out of a magazine. Persona 5 wastes no opportunity to support its narrative themes.

The dialogue box, with its dynamic rectangle shape, sets off the text well from the surrounding action. The bold white outline and translucent black background invites you into the textbox itself, while the word balloon “tail” almost acts as an arrow. The large, colorful character art also does a good job of attracting attention. These portraits even feature some limited animation, upping the visual interest. All these factors contribute to the text’s readability: the player wants to read this text.

Another example of the readability of the Japanese dialogue text

Even in battle, the character art draws you into the dialogue

The English localization did a good job of picking typefaces in some places. This menu, for entering a Palace, uses a reasonably legible font that looks like it might be from one of the magazines we saw above.