Persona 5

How the world’s most stylish prisoners stole our hearts

- Jon Bailes

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.