Persona 5: What Does it Mean to Game Your Friends?
If when you died you could have a checklist of every opportunity you had and hadn’t taken, how would it skew the ways in which you reflect upon your life? Wouldn’t you be curious what romantic connections you missed, jobs squandered, and near dances with death you had? What if you could explore those anxieties through a turn-based visual novel with a talking cat burglar and a long-nosed tuxedo wearing mystery man named Igor, set to a funky jazz soundtrack?
Persona 5 (or Persona 5 Royal in my case), a JRPG released by Atlus and developed P-Studio lets you play in those existential waters. The basic plot setup is that you play as a highschool student expelled from school and kicked out from his home as a result of being wrongfully arrested for stopping a sexual assault from taking place. Once in Tokyo you find yourself with the ability to phase into an alternate reality the game refers to as the Metaverse, which allows you to interact with and alter the psychology of those with particularly warped views of themselves and reality. This then leads to you and your ever increasing band of similarly abused and mistreated youth venturing into the Metaverse to course-correct the various predatorial adults in positions of power around Tokyo. This also splits the game into about two thirds visual novel and one third JRPG dungeon-crawler.
To say that the only plot in Persona 5 is simply one of shonen anime teens versus bad adults via supernatural hijinks would be deeply misleading however, as just about every day for a simulated school year you have to make choices. As your time in the Metaverse and investigating the villains can be made to only last around a week or so total out of every arc, it is left up to the player to decide how to spend whole months of time in game. For example, after school you could hangout with your friend Ryuiji, get some ramen, listen to him reminisce about his time on the track team, maybe watch him get beat up by some of the track team, etc. After you choose what to do with your “After School’’ slot of the day, you get pushed to the “Evening” slot where you again get to choose from a list of people to spend time with, or activities to do. Most of these activities are fun small moments that serve to boost social stats that allow you to progress or in some cases initiate relationships with characters in the world. The catch of sorts is that there are so many potential people to spend time with, and they all have their own specifications you occasionally need to meet, whether it be a stat requirement or they only hangout on Tuesdays and Thursdays, that unless you are strictly following a guide you will most likely miss out on entire swathes of stories.
On the surface this looks like what your average dialogue heavy RPG tends to do, give you some choices, lock out the others. Do you save this person or this person? Or some other binary choice between some heroically good and a moustache twirling Trumpian bad option. But that isn’t quite what Persona 5 is doing, since you rarely can shape the big A to B plot, or even branch much of the game at all beyond a few lines of differing dialogue. Your choices are not heroic or villainous, they are about who to spend a sunny afternoon with in your fleeting highschool days. If the days and time of Persona 5 stretched on forever, you could befriend, or at least spend time in a seat next to all its characters and hear their stories. There are only about 380 days in their world however, and new people are constantly coming in and out of your grasp. As some characters can leave the game after set dates, and no longer can you spend your days and nights with them discussing friendship, trauma, and jazz.
When I originally Played Persona 4 for the PS2 in maybe 2010–2011, I was young and emotionally unstable. A deeply traumatic upbringing led to me having few and often strained relationships with people who otherwise likely would have been in my life longer. During that time the weight of these kinds of choices felt poetic and beautiful, even when those games had their fair share of problematic elements. The game felt different and interesting from the other games I was playing at the time, those games being random indies like the Stanley Parable and Bastion. It felt like I could boot up my PS2 after school and I could be friends with whoever I wanted to for however long I wanted to.
Now however in the newly welcomed year of 2021, with almost every game being some sort of spin on RPG and open-world mechanics I cannot help but feel stressed out by Persona 5. Game trends have swayed as they always do, and filling games with endless content and checklists is largely the woefully accepted norm. I’ve always been someone to do all the side content I can, which once meant finding all the odd nooks and crannies games had to offer. And so knowing that every choice either unlocks or locks away content that I want to see, and that I won’t even know how much I’ve really missed until my in-game days start becoming numbered, is a stress I don’t know I expected from Persona 5.
Within my time spent with its cast of characters I have to worry about my dialogue choices, as they can either slow down or speed up their plotlines allowing me to see more content. As a series of the “wrong” dialogue choices can result in having to spend filler days with characters while you two get closer predominately off-screen. Making me feel like the fakest person in the world as I choose almost universally the most syrupy sweet things to say to my burgeoning friends. Often trying to play 4-D chess to figure out exactly what the game thinks is the best thing to say at any given point in time. This system winds up seeming somewhat at odds with itself as beyond simply de-incentivising player driven roleplaying, it also makes your player character seem like a bit of a human mirror. As choosing the optimal responses does not often tend to lead into making your character have much, well, character. You’re joke-y with the joke-y character, model-UN optimistic with the failed politician, vapidly supportive of your aspiring model friend (even to the point of encouraging some self-destructive behaviors), and so on. And while this could be leading to some poignant point about how drastically we change ourselves to try to fit in, or how we choose to show different angles of our personality to different people, it doesn’t really give off the feeling that that’s what the game is aiming for. Given that when you do play into saying all the right things to the people you’re trying to befriend you level up with them, and they themselves thank you.
This all serves to simultaneously make me feel stressed when I think I’ve hungout with the wrong person on the wrong day, and incredibly fake when I actually have to talk to those I hangout with. It is also important to note that the game itself is around eighty to one hundred hours long. As I think both of these issues revolve around simply how much real time is spent interacting with these characters and these systems. I am also only about 40 or 50 hours into the game, and thus am unable to say whether or not the elements I’ve discussed will become more or less intentional as the game continues. For all I know Persona 5 could totally pull the rug out from under me and call me out for being fake. However such a twist would be taking place after potentially seventy hours of my time spent with the game feeling how I’ve outlined. Which itself could spawn an entirely separate long exploration into what it means to try to alter a players view of a game after weeks of play. This also is not a roast or indictment of Persona 5, but rather a look into what effects its systems have on a player, choosing to sit with it time and time again.
