Persona 5 Will Steal Your Heart

By: Nathaly Perez

(Trigger warning: mentions of suicide, sexual assault, and murder. Reader discretion is advised.)

Ever since the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the world in 2020, video games became a big hit, entertaining us at home as we were quarantined. I was already into gaming before COVID hit, but I will admit that I took advantage of the situation to reacquaint myself with the game that stole my heart: Persona 5.

Persona 5 was one of Atlus’s first international successes in Japanese role-playing games when it launched in 2017. Persona 5 was originally made for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 and is part of the larger Megami Tensei franchise. Once exclusive to these older platforms, Persona 5 is now on PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One as Persona 5 Royal, along with its spin-off Persona 5 Strikers.

The game takes place in modern-day Tokyo, Japan, where the player is a male teenager named Joker, who is falsely accused of assault by a corrupt politician. He moves in with a family friend to complete his probation and attends a new high school, having been expelled from the previous one.

Along the way, Joker discovers and enters the Metaverse, an alternate dimension full of otherworldly beings, and helps form the “Phantom Thieves of Hearts,” an organization dedicated to stealing from those who have wronged them using mind control. These facts make Persona 5 a modern-day Robin Hood tale.

The player gets pulled into a world of supernatural elements while exploring darker themes, including suicide, sexual assault, murder, and human trafficking, all while pretending to be a “normal” high school student.

Although the video game industry is no stranger to covering heavy or even triggering subjects for marketing purposes, Persona 5 avoids the trap of exploring complex, real-world issues, only to scratch the surface without delving deeper and considering the consequences and their implications for the story. Instead, the game chooses to linger on those subjects and gives the player a deep narrative to follow.

For example, when one of Joker’s classmates, Shiho Suzui, is driven nearly to suicide after being sexually assaulted by her teacher, the story pivots to Ann Takamaki, one of Joker’s primary confidants and Shiho’s best friend, focusing on how Shiho’s suicide attempt impacts both girls’ lives. Persona 5 does not shy away from realistic portrayals of physical therapy, school transfer, and relationship dynamics. Not once does the game make the player feel like a voyeur; instead, they are an active participant in Shiho’s recovery.

What I love about this game is that rather than just being told about a character bouncing back to normal from an obstacle they just went through, we learn intimately how the recovery transpires in real time, forcing us to wait weeks or even months for signs of growth.

For example, when Yusuke Kitagawa, an artist friend of the protagonist, decides that getting paid for his work doesn’t sacrifice his integrity, the revelation does not feel like a hokey instructional, after-school message from the game to the player. Instead, it feels like a natural, organic conclusion that makes total sense to us, given the situation in which the artist finds himself and the long sequence of choices that lead up to the final decision.

The stories of Joker’s confidants and some other, less related non-playable characters make Persona 5’s main narrative stakes feel much more personal than the usual, overplayed “save-the-world” kind of JRPG plot.

Persona 5 brings much more depth and complexity to its Robin Hood-like tale because people are more important than profit. This game deceives the player into thinking it is a simple, fantastical take on the classic trope of stealing from the rich and giving to the poor, but it is not satisfied with scratching the surface. No, it uses the metaphor of the Phantom Thieves’ mind theft to explore the deeper issues of the benefits and consequences of revolution and social reform.

The player does not have a free pass to do whatever they want after discovering new methods of mind control. They and the Phantom Thieves must seriously consider the moral and ethical implications of entering and altering the minds of their targets without their knowledge or consent, even if they are villains, and they discuss them in detail as a group.

The characters eventually reach interesting moral conclusions far from the usual, dull, apolitical non-answers found in many other video games. It is a given that not everyone would agree with the decisions that the Phantom Thieves feel compelled to make: they determine that changing their targets’ hearts against their will is better than letting them continue killing, sexually harassing, and exploiting the working class, a direct critique of capitalism if ever there were one in a video game.

Persona 5 plays at a leisurely pace and invites us to focus on the social interactions with other characters. This game is about characters unloading all the horrible things done to them and a group of thieves debating their own morality about the decisions they feel compelled to make. Persona 5 rewards players who take the necessary time to make the many slices of life feel worthwhile. That is why this game has stolen my heart, and it will steal yours, too.