persona 5 royal thoughts

[queenlua]

lassarina’s post reminded me that I never finished my own Persona 5 Royal writeup, heh. (Surprisingly, there's no particularly big spoilers in this post. Apparently I just wanted to blather about high-level stuff.)

plot

When I first watched Inception, I immediately went home and started writing fanfiction. Not about any of the characters—about the universe itself.

I made up two OCs, two teenagers in one of those intense, codependent, destructive friendships that are so common in high school. They were messing around with one of those dream machines—using them to enter each other’s dreams, recreationally, and stumbling over secrets about each other in the process, becoming more and more obsessed with each other’s perception of themselves, and so on. I was so interested in what it would mean, to connect with people this way—via something that wasn’t quite mindreading, wasn’t quite telepathy, but was so close that it was dangerous, so close it called into question: even if we could know everything about our partners, would we want to?

Deeper into each other; deeper into themselves. I had so much fun writing that.

Similarly, when I finished playing Persona 5, I wasn’t particularly interested in the story or the characters; I was interested in the universe, and in particular, the implications of that brain-hacking power. (Sure, sure, “stealing people’s hearts from their palaces of cognitive distortion” is what they call it in-game, but c’mon. It’s brain-hacking.) Persona 5 never digs quite deep enough into what “literal brain-hacking” would entail, in terms of its fridge-logic horrors, the ethical implications, what it even means for someone to “suddenly start listening to their conscience” (like, that doesn’t seem to quite work, based on what we know about theory of mind in the real world...?). And I wanted to know!

To be clear, I don’t begrudge Persona 5 this narrative choice. Persona 5, like Inception, did not want to be some gritty prose-poem musing over the ethics of mind-exploration; it wanted to be a fun heist story, a power fantasy where the bad dudes were Totally Obviously Bad and the high school students Totally Rule. And it is fun! It just wasn’t what my brain glommed onto after I walked away from the controller.

(“Wow Lua aren’t you overthinking this game in all the wrong ways” hi, welcome to the blog, you must be new here)

characters

A thoroughly likeable crew—so likeable that I couldn’t figure out what was missing for the longest damn time. Like, Yusuke and Futaba are the kinds of characters I love, and while I certainly liked them throughout, I never felt like we got quite deep enough with them—even though, of course, they both have perfectly long & interesting confidant chains. What gives?

I think, ultimately, the issue is that we interact with so many of the characters in a vacuum. I never got a sense of strong ensemble chemistry between the main phantom thieves—agreements about whether to do a thing were generally unanimous, with only minor quibbles, and the end-of-mission parties relied on pleasant-yet-shallow rehashings of everyone’s Designated Personality Quirk. I know what Yusuke is like when he’s baring his soul to Joker, but I honestly don’t know what he’s like with Futaba, or in a large group, or a small group, and so on and so forth.

Morgana and Ryuji butting heads until Morgana said “screw it, I’m out” was good; I wanted more texture like that.

And of course the non-party-member confidant chains had this problem but even moreso; by the nth time I solved someone’s problem via some brain-hack I was hoping for some kind of variety. (Surely I’m not the solution to everyone’s problems, yaknow?)

writing

Something about Persona 5's writing feels bloated to me—not gratuitously so, but just enough to be a little bit grating. Before every mission, we receive so many reiterations of the same information, from so many characters—whose voices are distinct, but not quite distinct enough to alleviate the repetitiousness at play. Character development is presented, but in a piecewise, excruciatingly gradual fashion that always leaves one feeling a touch unsatisfied. Some of this is necessary due to how the game’s structured (they need to remind you to finish the palace in time, after all!), but, well...

I’m reminded a bit of—I think it was Emily Short who made this observation?—that, often, in video games, the story isn’t the point. Sure, that’s self-evidently true in fighting games. But even in so-called story games, the story still isn’t the point. The story exists to be doled out in bits and scraps, to keep your anticipation of “what will happen next?” just high enough to push you through the next gameplay goal. Just like someone pausing in the middle of some intriguing chord sequence—I don’t necessarily slam “play” on the stereo again because I love the music, but because I just want the fucking chord to resolve.

To some extent it’s inherent to the medium, and I don’t think it’s necessarily always bad —but in Persona 5, it’s in that uncanny valley of, not so bad as to undermine the story (and in fact the story’s plenty fun overall), but bad enough to be noticeable, and to grate. It gets a little... ADHD-feeling...? to have to context switch between a bunch of confidant dialogues for an hour when really what you’re dying to see next is what happens in the main plot. Not because you don’t want to find out what happens with the confidants—you do!—but because it feels like the game pulled you into focusing/caring about one thing and now you’re having to care about twelve other things before you go back to that one thing.

(Traditionally I’m a blaze-through-the-main-plot-no-sidequests kind of gal, and pick up sidequests postgame if I’m feeling it, if that gives any context :P)

gameplay

Ah, it was so compulsively, dangerously, thoroughly fun. It’s the most I’ve enjoyed the “basic” JRPG combat formula in a long time, and I think it’s because they made every aspect feel so right, so fun—the music, the leaping-from-shadow-to-shadow sneaking, the visceral joy of pulling off a baton pass chain, even just all of Joker’s fun visual tics while walking around. I know a guy who has a “FASHION OVER FUNCTION” banner strewn over his bed, and I was thinking of that banner while playing the game, except: fashion is the function. And it rules.

Also, the dungeons! The biggest thing I was dreading about playing this game was my memory of just how ugly/joyless the dungeons in Persona 4 felt (from the bit I played)—minority opinion, I know, but god they just all felt like long monotonous drab hallways to me and I hated it.

Whereas, with this game: my partner walked in while I was playing through Madarame’s palace, and asked, “Is this some kind of Puella Magi Madoka Magica thing?”—and I can totally see where he was coming from. It was gorgeous and weird in all the right ways; I loved it.

...

...and, okay, yeah, skimming this over, this makes me sound like I’m way more down on Persona 5 than I am :P So for full disclosure: I had a rollicking good time; I was pleased & impressed with how engrossing it felt; fusing new personas was addictive good fun; I’ll prob write some overthinky fun fanfic once I figure out how to do something fun with Yusuke; thank you for coming to my ted talk