At this point, enough time should have passed for something to “sink in”. We are close to 4 years since the worldwide release of Persona 5, and almost a year since tRoyal. Upon its initial release, it has been met with absolutely spectacular reviews for a JRPG, a genre that has been called dead, uninnovative, stale and whatnot for many years by that point by game journalists — and Atlus provided the genre, after so many years, with a hit the critics could get behind. IGN even called it the “strongest story to date” in the series. But after a few years, there seems to have been a bit of a counter-reaction to Persona 5 and its personality. Reading through online forums of Personafans, whether reddit or elsewhere, reveals a more and more common different interpretation. Persona 5 is often considered to have the worst story, or one of the weakest in the series, certainly weaker than the long-time fan darling Persona 3, and often considered to have much worse characters, setting and dialogue than Persona 4. It has come to the point where the defense of P5 compared to its predecessors is focused down onits gameplay and art direction. Since Royal’s release, the very strong third semester additions has saved for many an overall mediocre story.
But was P5’s story that bad? Let’s try to understand what it was trying to say, whether its storytelling achieved in conveying what it was trying to say, and why some people might not have received its message.
Summary
Our hero, codename Joker, has a false judicary case on his back after he tried to protect a woman from the politician Shido, who then promptly made her make a false testimony that Joker assaulted Shido, transfers schools and then meets several other bad guys who abuse their power for their own personal gain. The game is divided into several arcs, all centered around new party members that join and a central villain who either oppresses them or represents some kind of oppression. Kamoshida is the abusive teacher of the first arc who sexually harasses Ann’s friend Shiho and ruined Ryuji’s chances at getting a sports scholarship. Joker and Ryuji join up, make it to the “metaverse”, in it, they meet a talking cat that guides them through the mind palaces that the villains create in the world of the collective unconscious as a result of their “distorted desires”. By materializing and then stealing what the subject in question is desiring, said palace collapses and with it the subject’s desire to do the things it wanted to do. After having their desires stolen, the subjects are suddenly overcome with guilt over what they have done and feel the need to confess, as they cannot bear with the crimes they commited any longer — as they lost the desire to even commit them. A certainly idiosyncratic view on crime.
Through, essentially, a form of brainwashing or corrective therapy, the new group of 3, now called Phantom Thieves, is seeking to reform adults who are abusing their power by stealing hearts from the palaces. In those palaces, they are given Personas, which have a double purpose — as the Jungian concept that gives them their name — a mask you put on in real life to deal with a certain issue or challenge — as well as a demon you summon in battle. In this game, the Phantom Thieves are supposed to be outcasts from society. Joker is ostracized for having a case, Ann is a halfu foreigner who’s bombarded with nasty rumors, Ryuji is considered a delinquent and trouble-maker when he truly is not. They are faced with the struggle of dealing with their school, which is the entire game’s society in miniature form: A school harboring an adult, Kamoshida, who is abusing his powers to get whatever he wants along with a school body that protects him because Kamoshida benefits the school’s reputation. The Phantom Thieves’ Persona in this situation is the trickster — the trickster being an archetype from Jungian psychoanalysis that is supposed to linger in humanity’s collective consciousness and is a concept of a “person” that stands outside the rules of society and uses said standing to challenge the powers that be for the benefit of the average person.
The trickster, for those kids, is a mask, a facade to deal with the specific problem of adults abusing their power, they put on the personality of the trickster — in the metaverse they are badass, confident and can stand up to authority, and, simultaneously to a new mental strength, said trickster personalities can fight literally by manifesting themselves into a “Persona”, in this game a trickster character from fiction.
The Phantom Thieves repeat the process of stealing the desire of the villain of the week multiple times, gaining new allies on their way, and increasing their notoriety, because everytime they want to materialize and steal a treasure from a palace, they need to make the palace ruler conscious of their treasure as well as desire, which they do by sending a card announcing their intent to steal, which no doubt is a clever reference to the way sympathetic gentlemen thieves are often handling their heists in fiction. With each heist, their notoriety increases until they are set-up to make it seem like they actually killed the palace ruler, after which their image as gentlemen thieves collapses and society turns against them. The conspirators who set them up have been using the world of the collective unconsciousness not for “good”, but to get rid of political enemies and rivals in order to set up a vague dictatorship whose message is not much deeper than “Make Japan Great Again”.
But the simple motivations of the villains are intended to be exactly that simple, because as the Phantom Thieves expose this conspiracy to clear their name, the people of Japan, Tokyo do not care, despite how brazen the conspirators are. They don’t want to hear about the corruption and crimes the head of the conspiracy, Shido, the man who has a personal beef with Joker, has been fostering in his backyard. They prioritize the “Shido” that is promised to them, a stable hand that deals with the numerous issues that plague their society, allowing is the actual people to not worry or think about things all too much and go about their life. Over the last few months, this man, who appeared in numerous talk shows and promised many things, became the figure of the “strong man” who everyone could burden the responsibility of “fixing the country” with. Shocked by the lack of reaction over Shido’s confession of crimes, the Phantom Thieves seek to instead steal humanity’s treasure and change humanity’s heart, in order to make it realize the error of their ways. On their way down the palace of humanity, which is the collective unconsciousness itself, they find the Demiurge (Yaldabaoth), a false creator God from the Gnosticist sect who according to Gnostic lore has imprisoned humanity into flesh bodies and prevents it from ascending to the higher, more enlightened spiritual realm. A God who is ironically described as lesser than humans, because humans can see the spiritual thanks to the divine spark sophia while the Demiurge can only see the flesh and physical. Humanity wished him into existence, and is the true manifestation of society’s desire for Shido, the desire to be ruled over. Yaldabaoth threatens to remove humanity’s free will, in order to ensure a completely issues-free running of society. He saw the abuse of adults such as Kamoshida and is here to save the day for humanity’s sake: Removing free will, he can imprison humanity and force it under a tight discipline where transgressions such as Kamoshida’s are no longer possible. For Yaldabaoth, the protagonists’s journey through the corrupt dreck of society, and society’s unwillingness to stop Shido even after his crimes were revealed, is proof that humanity cannot be left to its own devies.
As the stakes of the story rises from high school drama to the threat of loss of free will to the God of control, so do the Personae. They are upgraded from tricksters from fiction to tricksters from mythology, with Ryuji’s Captain Kid becoming the more dignified trickster of Greek lore, Hermes, for example. In the world of the collective unconsciousness the demiurge has slowly been imprisoning the souls of humanity and put them under strict observation, something the souls are quite happy about, and in a big twist, the protagonists find Kamoshida and Shido imprisoned. Turns out, when prisoners escape in the collective unconsciousness, their desires can go amok and create palaces. By defeating the palace rulers and stealing their desire, they were sent back to Yaldabaoth’s prison.
The bad ending of the game is Yaldabaoth offering Joker a world without free will, where the Phantom Thieves are known and feared by all, and where they change the hearts of whoever dares to escape the prison of virtue. Joker becomes the personal cop of Yaldabaoth in the world of collective unconsicousness, catching whoever steps out of line.
The good ending is having the now upgraded God-like Phantom Thieves kill the false God Yaldabaoth. In gnostic lore, the Demiurge is the God of the old testament, and thus the evil God. He tried to stop humanity from eating the fruit of knowledge, and sought to keep it ignorant. Who was the Demiurge’s foil? The snake! Who is identified as Satan. Appropriately, Joker’s ultimate trickster Persona, and likely the ultimate trickster figure in the actual real life collective consciousness is summoned: Satanael, Satan before he fell from heaven. He has no problem dispatching of the false God Yaldabaoth, just as he gave humanity the chance to know the real God by allowing them to eat the fruit of knowledge in its conception. In this ending, humanity’s desire for control and for lack of free will is defeated and with it, the Phantom Thieves’ access to the collective unconsciousness is removed.
Message
By showing us the good and the bad end, we can understand the message of the game quite clearly. It not only lambasts the entire work the Phantom Thieves have been doing — brainwashing humans to repent — as not the right way, as showing that as exactly the thing that Yaldabaoth was seeking to do himsel. Neither a controlling regime by Yaldabaoth, nor forcing redemption — as the Phantom Theives have been doing — is the way to deal with society’s issues. Instead, the game encourages humanity to both allow the chaos of free will to reign over society, with the risk of crimes and authority abuse, and to accept that transgressions simply happen as a necessary consequence of a free society. Rather than dealing with the problems within through control and observation, to instead emancipate humanity itself to stand up for itself and its own problems. Essentially, it encourages us to even the ground between the abuser and the abused, to battle the power gap between them, and to allow the abused to stand up for themselves and confront their enemy head-on. The Phantom Thieves are much better at what they do if they mimic their Personae — role model tricksters that give hope and courage to humanity to overcome structures of control and governance that suffocates them.
The origin story of the entire Megaten franchise could be described as this: Humanity’s perception and thoughts shape reality. Demons spawn in Shin Megami Tensei IV through humanity seeking to understand and give reasons to occurrences in their surroundings, from love to thunderstorms. The world is reformed as soon as an observation is made, referencing quantum mechanics, and the observation of love being caused by Aphrodite reforms the universe into one where an Aphrodite which creates love truly exists. In Persona, the archetypes of humanity that inform most of our behaviour and understanding of the world manifest themselves in the collective unconsciousness physically, which in turn affects reality, and can create a God that seeks to remove free will. Persona 5’s ending references this origin story, and Morgana, the talking cat, symbolizing humanity’s hope that eventually saves the day, in a corny scene, explains to the world (or Tokyo) that the world is created from observation, from our subjective views, and if we change our view of things, we, too, can change reality.
Oppressive structures often appear like a huge Monolith. It’s something that stands in your way, unmoving, unchanging, as they are reinforced through belief by other people, by other figures of authority, by the police, by parents, by teachers, by journalists, by newspapers. It can appear as an unmoving obstacle one can only resign oneself against, as humanity was attempting to in front of Yaldabaoth.
Persona 5 however is a story of how an impenetrable wall of control and oppression can be overcome through a change of perspective. A change of perspective that is spread around by the critical actors who through their lives on the fringe have developed a “different perspective” naturally, on their o own — those onthe outskirts of society, who do not participate in society fully for one reason or antoher, and thus “think outside the box”. Such people can become tricksters, people who can embarrass the ruling structure, someone who can point out inconsistencies, lies or the ridiculousness of its existence because by standing outside the house of society, they are able to see it for the mere edifice that it ultimately is, supported by pillars made of human heads.
Persona 5 does in essence nothing but reiterate something that is clear as day by simply looking at every-day events as well as several historical events. The critical individuals instrumental for change in society are those charismatic enough to force a change of perspective in those around them. Enlightened bourgeois were essential to the French Revolution, they introduced ideas that embarrassed the ruling royal family and convinced many in the country to look past a monarchical government and demand for more participation. The Russian Revolution was lead by a persecuted criminal, Lenin, who dared ask the government for more food and instead for more war, whose speeches were legendary in rousing the masses, who managed to build a massive movement that eventually toppled the 500 year old tsarist regime and take control despite their small numbers. The Russian politician Navalny has released a video exposing the corruption of Russia’s Neo-Tsar Putin, a video that has amassed 119 million views (in a country of 140 million), that ended up getting him arrested, but, above all, inspired thousands of Russians to protest— and demand consequences for this corruption. Putin and Shido paralells are as clear as day, both are supported by the population for perceived stability and protection they might bring, as well as the promise for greater days for the country, with Putin finally expanding Russia’s territory after the humiliation of the Soviet break-up and Shido promising Japan to become a name to be feared again. And Navalny, who exposes and ridiculs Putin, could be the trickster that acts as his foil. We could look at Martin Luther King, who defied conventions, spoke out about the ridiculous contradiction between the egalitarian constitution of the United States and the mistreatment of its black citizens, to create a massive movement that eventually changed society.
All of those individuals — Lenin, the French revolutionaries, Martin Luther King and even Navalny — the way they behave, the way they wrote their speeches, the way they’re remembered in the collective unconscious of humanity— they are all tricksters. People from the “outside” of the established order, who have nothing to gain by submitting to it and acting loyal, people who are not integrated into the system, but who thanks to that have the courage and the ability to see past it and inspire others to do the same.
In the end, even Persona 5’s fantastic and stylish art direction play a huge part in the trickster archetype. Essential in toppling authority is appearing more interesting, cooler, more up-to-date, more fashionable. The trickster is not only the role model by doing the right thing, he also does it in a cooler, more appealing way. The trickster represents truth, and exposes the truth behind the edifice of lies by embarrassing the powers that be and exposes the shaky foundation they built themselves upon, and, interestingly, he can do it best by representing himself in the most up-to-date, impressive and stylish fashion, because said stylish fashion shows that he is closer to the pulse of time, closer to the youth, to the upcoming, to the new.
The ultimate message of Persona 5 is thus precisely not to reform and brainwash adults into becoming what you want them to be, and to replace free will with control, but to become symbols of change and inspiration, to playfully and stylishly undermine and embarrass ruling structures, to inspire the masses to become the same, and to inspire the masses to want for more.
