Time Extend
How the world’s most stylish prisoners stole our hearts BY JON BAILES Developer/publisher Atlus Format PS3, PS4 Release 2016
How the world’s most stylish prisoners stole our hearts in the stiflingly oppressive Persona 5
The city is a usually a cultural symbol of liberal values, a place where anything goes. In Persona 5, it’s a prison. When your character arrives in Tokyo at the start of the game, the first thing Persona 5 does is lock the city down, subjecting you to its systems of control and surveillance. There’s no escape, no matter where you go. You’re a prisoner of fate, of social hierarchy, even of your own mind. Except with Persona there’s always another hidden dimension. It doesn’t want to crush your spirit so much as fire it up until it explodes.
Much of the Persona formula is well suited to representing confinement. For one, the quantity of dialogue and exposition means that for the first few hours especially you’ll be held captive by the plot. After a tantalising peek at your dynamic alter-ego to come, the main character is thrown into a cell and forced to recall his story from its low-key start. As this out-of-town highschooler, on probation for a crime he didn’t commit, you spend your first days getting dragged between story beats, clicking through dialogue while the game’s world and systems are introduced at a glacial pace.
When you finally get to wander, you remain highly regulated. The sprawling city is recreated as a series of discrete spaces with hard borders and a handful of interaction points. The division of time into strictly segmented calendar days determines what you can do and when. Every choice of activity you make is recorded. All your conversations and free-time exploits are numerically systematised to rate your progress with mathematical precision. In this atmosphere of assumed criminality, minor freedoms are a privilege to be earned through meeting targets and deadlines. Even the NPCs police your behaviour, whether it’s your distrustful guardian Sojiro checking on your movements or magical talking cat Morgana telling you to go to bed.
Not that even sleep grants respite. In your dreams you find yourself transported to the mysterious Velvet Room, whose appearance supposedly reflects the state of your own heart. And of course it’s a prison cell. On the other side of the bars, long
nosed series regular Igor and his diminutive wardens, Justine and Caroline, demand you fulfil a greater purpose, by achieving some cryptic form of ‘rehabilitation’. Whatever’s going on, it’s another form of monitoring, and you have no say in the matter.
Feeling oppressed yet? You should be. Desperate to escape? Hold on to that. Because there’s something bubbling under the surface in Persona 5 – a sense in every constraint that things have to change. The big-city setting, in contrast to Persona 4’ s rural locale, is already telling. It bursts with the promise of alternative lives, eye-popping sights and endless pleasures. As for the protagonist, what can hold back a curious high school student looking to express himself, forge relationships and discover new experiences, especially a victim of injustice with an urge to strike back and clear his name? There are hints in the narrative, too, from that taste of excitement in the game’s opening to the mysteries surrounding the Velvet Room.
More than that, Persona games are exemplars of youthful energy, and Persona 5 positively sparkles with it. It’s there in the title sequence, with its impossibly cool graphic design and lyrical command to ‘wake up, get up, get out there’. It’s in the game’s menus, uncompromising blocks of red and black poised at chaotic angles that threaten to break out of the frame. It’s in the cheeky sound effects and brash voiceovers, and in the character designs, from your fresh-faced pals to the outlandish personas. And it’s in the soundtrack, from its dirty bass lines and funky organ melodies through to its big, show-stopping songs of empowerment.
The secret to success in this series is a style that bleeds out of the screen and becomes infectious. In Persona 5, it’s a mirage so powerful that it twists oldfashioned turn-based battles into anarchic showdowns peppered with meaty gunshots, played out to a vocal track mocking the audacity of your enemies, and ending with an unfazed victory strut. It’s indicative of an aesthetic that works expertly to rub against the repressive narrative and systems, communicating the vibrancy of your characters’ hidden selves with confidence.
As the friction builds, it needs an outlet, and it comes in the shape of the
Metaverse, a parallel dimension formed from people’s unconscious desires. It’s here that ordinary routine is suspended, and the protagonist and his friends symbolically tear off their masks to unleash their repressed inner personas and become the Phantom Thieves. It’s also here that the villains of the outside world can be opposed.
After so much restriction, the aim of stealing the hearts of your adversaries to erase their darkest drives and punish their transgressions is massively enticing. It helps that your first target, school PE teacher and ex-Olympian Kamoshida, is particularly nasty. His abuse of volleyball team members, ignored by the adults around him, is so personal, and your position as students so powerless, you can’t help but share the group’s righteous indignation. By the time you get the chance to face his shadow and steal his heart, you’re itching to destroy him.
From there, your Phantom Thieves will target elite sinners in the art world, organised crime, business, law and politics. This is a bold move for Persona, tackling social issues with a sweeping critique, and bringing a political dimension to its notions of constraint and freedom. In keeping with the teenage cast, there’s a certain naivety to it still, not least in its philosophical idealism. But it’s an inspiring call to action, especially to youth against the ageing established order, and the downtrodden against the elite, which demonstrates that the first step to breaking free from a prison is recognising that you’re in one.
Equally fascinating is how different concepts of incarceration are woven through the game’s structure. All the talk of ‘hearts’, for example, is a return to the series’ fascination with psychoanalysis and the composition of the mind. It asks us whether we’re prisoners to our innermost desires, or whether consciousness grants us agency, no matter how small, to forge alternative paths. It also asks about our social programming, or how determined we are by the fate of our circumstances and cultural norms, and where the limits of our conformity lie.
In the end, the biggest crime of all for
IT ASKS WHETHER WE’RE PRISONERS TO OUR INNERMOST DESIRES OR WHETHER CONSCIOUSNESS GRANTS US AGENCY
Persona 5 is doing nothing, or tolerating unjust conditions. This reflects in your progress, so the more you act to determine your own fate, the more the game opens up with more places to go, people to see and time to play with. Meanwhile, the characters grow in confidence about their feelings and potential, eventually realising that their path is the only escape from the most stultifying prisons of all – apathy and sin.
Yet in some ways this celebration of self-realisation doesn’t carry through the whole game, and even serves to highlight its weaknesses. Structurally, there’s still a great imbalance between daily life and the game’s dungeons, or ‘palaces’. As the months go by, the real world becomes stuffed with things to do, each one delivered in a fun-sized chunk. In particular, hanging out with ‘confidants’ becomes a priority, given that
the game’s individual stories are often the most personal. In contrast, a single visit to a palace can take an hour or more, especially as it’s more economical to make fewer, longer trips to maximise your time slots.
The palaces are more varied, bespoke locations than in previous games, but working through them is still a trudge. Simple puzzles are introduced that increasingly function merely to pad out your visits, while no amount of presentational flair can keep repeated fights against samey enemies fresh. Given that this is where your team is supposed to be unleashing their repressed selves to become masked crime fighters, the pedestrian pace is incongruous. Deciding where to go after school shouldn’t be more exciting than battling supernatural monsters and saving the world.
More alarming is how the game’s radical themes jar against its cultural conservatism. Too many female characters suffer from being written (and drawn) as varying types of dating material, with romantic relationships still ultimately triggered unilaterally by the male protagonist. Courtship remains superficial and calculated, based on selecting the best dialogue and gift options, turning each woman into a puzzle that requires the correct code to unlock. It’s worse for gay characters, whose only representation comes in comedy skits featuring a duo of hypercamp sexual predators. If in Persona 4, backwards attitudes in some way reflected the cast’s small-town mentality, there’s nowhere to hide in the city. Not only has another decade passed; Persona 5 also explicitly sets out to valorise social change, self-expression and nonconformity, and features a gang whose experiences and goals should make them more switched-on.
There’s no doubt that Atlus deployed its established formula smartly in Persona 5, taking it to a new level of polish and building a multi-layered story that plays to its strengths. But it’s hard to ignore that the formula itself is becoming confining, perhaps weighed down by expectations, not to mention all the associated cartoons, dancing games and merchandise that go with them. That super-hip theme song asks: ‘Can we make a difference, if we don’t break outta here?’ It’s a question that Atlus could pose itself going forward. Is it also a prisoner of fate, or does it want to break out and make a difference next time?