Welcome to the second part of our Game In Progress review of Persona 5. This entry discusses light structural issues with the game up through the end of the second Palace and contains some plot details through the end of the first Palace. You can read our first installment here.
Writing is what matters in a Persona game. The general high school demon-hunting design and bright, J-pop aesthetic were crystallized back in Persona 3, after which the game’s creators could only really iterate. What matters—what’s sacrosanct—is the writing. It’s how they fill in that outline.
Structurally speaking, Persona 5’s writing is as good as it has ever been. This isn’t slight praise: A game like this is essentially a multi-volume epic, the length of several seasons of television all cobbled together into a single coherent arc, with many plot points shuffled up based on the decisions you make with your afternoons and evenings. My first few months in the game-world will have undoubtedly played out very differently than yours did—the disgraced goth doctor gets as much of my time as she needs, and Mishima, who provides all-important experience-point boosts, gets a response any time he contacts me, while I’ve utterly ignored my supposed best pal, Ryuji. I spend a lot of time in the bathhouse and doing the cheeseburger challenge. Maybe you’re spending time in the library and kicking it with Ann. That it holds all of these competing plot lines together while still pushing its larger story forward is a masterclass in interactive fiction, breaking all of these vast narratives down into compulsively playable bite-size chunks.
I said last time that I wasn’t sure if Persona 5’s larger story had the same mysterious hooks as previous games, but this one is slowly gaining on me. The decision to tell it all in flashback totally changes the player’s expectations. We’re told in a present-tense interrogation scene who each Palace belongs to long before we even meet the character who will serve as its boss, seemingly robbing us of some sense of suspense. But the life here is in the information gaps created by this premature reveal—figuring out each Palace owner’s wrongdoing and the form of their treasure, and the secret-laden architecture of the Palace itself, all becomes part of a series of discoveries. This more discretely chunked structure also breaks up the game’s notoriously long runtime, with each Palace offering its own self-contained arc. There is some larger malaise crippling Tokyo, and the writers continue to seed plot points patiently, like Niijima’s slow-boiling investigation into the Phantom Thieves’ activities and the true nature of Sae.
And yet, Persona 5 is clearly wanting when it comes to its dialogue. Something about the repartee of party members feels decidedly unpolished, with banter sounding alien and plot points conveyed more obtusely than they need to be. It’s not that it’s necessarily worse than other games—it’s that it feels on par with other translated games, as opposed to the noticeably sparkling sense of wit in previous Personas. Other people seem to be noticing it, too. An online compilation of examples made by one translator has turned into a thread on the problem.