Hi, I’m Hamish Black and welcome to Writing on Games. So I’ve been playing a lot of
Persona 5 lately and, of course, I’m adoring the hell out of it. One thing has become especially
apparent to me, though. I can’t help but love one of the game’s first objectives,
proudly displayed as you take control of your protagonist – “live an honest student
life”. It seems like a wry take on objective design
at first glance – there’s nothing concrete about this, nowhere to go; it’s too conceptual
to be a traditional objective. What I love about it though, is that as I play through
the game, it has become far less abstract – living what I believe to be an honest
expression of student life has become the driving challenge of the game. It takes on
something of a “Destroy Ganon” approach, where everything you do is in service of that
one objective. Through things as granular as stats and how rewards are handed out, Persona
5 shifts your expectations as to where the danger lies. It takes your focus away from
the Metaverse and makes real life, with all of the turbulence of carving your own identity
under suppressive social institutions, the far more perilous endeavour.
You see, Persona 5 is a game in which you and a bunch of other teens-with-‘tude (and
a goddamn annoying cat) enter people’s cognitions in order to perform elaborate heists to steal
their innermost desires which, in turn, will completely alter the way that person views
the world, causing ripples that effect almost everyone you come across. It’s also a game
in which you can’t talk to a girl or eat a big burger if you don’t have enough
guts. This is where I started to realise just how
deeply things like stats are telling the game’s story; that living your life as a student
and building yourself up in the real world, whilst somewhat more mundane, is infinitely
more compelling than altering things in the Metaverse (and, in my eyes, deliberately so).
For example, I remember playing Persona 4 and thinking, especially towards the end,
“man, for a game so focused on grinding and improving your characters, it’s sure
hard to know where I stand with these social links.” The same is true in 5: whereas in
dungeons each battle ends with a detailed breakdown of exactly how much XP and gold
you won, your interactions outwith the Metaverse (where the heists take place) never foreground
the stat rewards you receive. There’s a lot of vague talk of “I don’t
know if this interaction will actually do anything” or “we’re gonna get closer
soon” but you never see the numbers attached to that; and there are numbers at work here,
you’re still building those stats. You just never really get a good feel for what those
stats are. Then you begin to analyse why the stats might
be presented in such a way, and things begin to make a bit more sense. The Metaverse is
where you feel your most powerful; where you make a name for yourself fighting mighty
creatures. It’s also explicitly a numbers game; go into the Palace at any point and
if you’re finding things difficult, grind for a bit until the numbers are more to your
liking. Like the dreamy environments you somnambulate through, the characters are idealistically
crafting and controlling their own identities. After a while in these palaces, you go into
auto-pilot. You enter a fight, you hit the weakness button, hold them up and perform
an all-out attack. Don’t get me wrong, thanks to snappy combat and an art style that is
all the better precisely because it shouldn’t be this pleasing or even legible, it’s still
incredibly fun. It’s just that after a while, killing monsters becomes just as much of a
routine as going to school everyday. In fact, what ends up happening is that the real
world starts to become more treacherous and tense—not only are your activities coming
under more intense scrutiny the more you raise your profile, but you also can’t directly
control the outcome of any scenario here. You pull off an immensely intricate heist
essentially within someone’s heart, and yet initially there’s always a sense of
trepidation as to whether or not it’s worked. Even aside from that though, I n between all
the cardboard cut outs and faceless ghosts you phase through – seemingly remnants of
individuals, their souls handed over to the grind of adult life – lie some
truly despicable characters abusing their positions of power and trust, threatening
anyone who would take a stand against the way things are. The real world is a terrifying,
often random place, and the game wants you to know it.
And so you frantically spend your time in the real world trying to fit in as much as
you can, while you still can because hey, you don’t know what’s going to crop up
next. You manage your personal relationships, your schoolwork, your stats as an individual, all
of which are often disparate and offer tough choices as to which you’re going to neglect.
All of this on top of a time limit; watching that calendar tick through often fills me
with more dread when I’m not on a mission than when I am. I know I can beat that palace
in the time limit specified – the game’s story is designed as such to allow the numbers
to line up that way. When I’m given the choice of having to pick one thing to do in
real life at the expense of everything else, knowing it’ll cost me a day AND not being
sure if it’ll get me anywhere? That’s a borderline existential crisis. That’s
tough. But in much the same way as the nature of
challenge is reversed between worlds, so too is the reward for those challenges. Getting
a predictable XP reward for Metaverse battles ends up giving way to moments of subtle triumph
in the real world as, for example, you get a seat on a train to read a book. Either
that, or that message pops up saying “I think my relationship with this character
will deepen soon” alerting you that you’re going to be able to dig further into the personalities
of those around you. The nature of these rewards may seem random
at times because the game doesn’t foreground the numbers controlling them, but it doesn’t
stop these instances from feeling incredibly satisfactory. That’s because reading a book
on that train seat builds a certain stat that in turn might allow you to pursue that other
thing you wanted to do with that other confidant, which itself will give you a deeper understanding
of the story, as well as new abilities for battle.
All these systems and mechanics are interconnected in a way that makes them feel as if not
more vital as grinding in the Metaverse. When they drop rewards may seem random,
but hey, so is real life. It’s what makes navigating it so tense, because you have no
idea what’s going to happen no matter how hard you try to control it. It also makes
things like talking to that girl or finishing that big burger feel all the sweeter since
you did it in the face of such overwhelming sociological adversity. This is arguably the
key thematic thrust of Persona 5, and the fact that it can convey the importance of
the little victories in life through things as granular as the way it handles stats, marks
it as a real achievement in the way RPGs tell their stories.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on Persona 5. If you did, why not tell a friend about
it, hit subscribe, hit the lil bell thing and check out the podcast in the description.
If you want to go the extra mile however, I’d be immensely grateful if you checked
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Special thanks to Thomas Coker, Nicolas Ross, Charlie Yang, Justins Holderness, Nico
Bleackley, James Doering, Biggy Smith, Mark B. Writing, Christian Koneman, Artjom Vitsjuk
and Peter. And with that, I’m Hamish Black and this has been Writing on Games. Thank
you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.