Welcome to our Game In Progress coverage of Persona 5. Over the next several weeks, Internet Culture Editor Clayton Purdom will be playing through the long-awaited latest entry in Atlus’ acclaimed high-school role-playing games. As always, we invite you to play and comment along (once the game is released on April 4).
It’s been almost a decade since Persona 4 came out. (Nine years, but who’s counting.) That’s a long time in any medium, but an eternity in video games, where annualized sequels are supplemented with a steady trickle of year-round downloadable content. To take a full console generation off, as Persona did, is an unconscionable indulgence. True, Persona 4 was polished and rereleased in near-perfect form for Sony’s portable Vita console in 2012, and the team did release a low-key classic in its psychosexual block-climbing game Catherine from 2011, as well as a handful of spin-offs developed by other studios. But the fact remains that it was 2008 when people first got their hands on Persona 4, and it’s now 2017 and Persona 5 is just coming out. And holy shit, it’s great.
If you have never heard of or invested in the Persona series, the first thing to know is they are a singular experience, ostensibly balancing the day-to-day decision-making of a Japanese teenager—who to have a crush on, where to get a job, what sports to play—with the pressures of occasionally fighting and befriending demons in an endlessly shifting nightmare labyrinth. But that doesn’t really capture the whole appeal of these games, because, in practice, they are created with a polish that simply needs to be felt.
This is particularly true of the game’s writing, which evokes the smartass teenage soap operas of Buffy The Vampire Slayer or Dawson’s Creek at their best, as well as the writing of the game’s greater, psychology-obsessed mythos, which suggests a Lynchian underworld layered atop the real world, a place where our darkest desires are manifested and confronted. The games use the pressure-cooker anxiety of being a teenager to comment on the archetypes we use to construct our selves, alluding liberally to Jung’s theory of a collective unconscious but also pulling in Japanese folklore, occult symbolism, pop-art iconography, and a brand of pure gonzo eccentricity seemingly without precedent. One of the first bosses in Persona 5, for example, is a literal dick head—the circumcised tip of a man’s penis. You kill it with wind magic.
These are stories told across an unusually long arc, with plot lines that rise and fall convincingly across that entire runtime. They refuse to tell stories any way but through direct, forward action, with each new investigation or idea meted out through elaborate adventures, careful planning, and white-knuckle confrontations. They write out everything—every hard talk, every argument, every flame-out, every insecurity, every stupid joke. It’s all in there, lived out by characters that can be in foul moods, go through half-assed phases, and quietly develop new characteristics. This richness is part of why they could take a decade off in between games: They require a rare investment in time and emotional space even among the high standards of Japanese role-playing games, a genre that prides itself on depth and length.
The grand masterstroke of the Persona games—what renders them so compulsively playable, night after night, month after month—is the way the real-world psychodrama interconnects with demon-bashing and dungeon-crawling. Relationships forged in your after-school job might lead to a stronger demon working for you in the netherworld; plot points subtly introduced early in gym class might find their resolution in a boss battle. (That is exactly what happens with that dick head, for example.) The arcana of the battle system is such that one bad fight can damn near kill your entire squad, and, while the core rule of a JRPG is that you can always grind up a few levels to beat something, in Persona you can also do that by being a better, more productive teenager. The snaking path toward making out with your crush is thus more than mere melodrama. It doesn’t just feel life-and-death; it is.