“Every decision, however, bases itself on something not mastered, something concealed, confusing; else it would never be a decision.”1
Introduction: What I most dread writing is not an academic paper but an informal review like this one. And few subjects give me more trouble than a work like Persona 5. The chief difficulty is that, before you know it, an informal review can turn academic. In my case, after so many academic papers, a touch of the pedant creeps into whatever I write. Still, I would like to do my best to put down some thoughts about P5.
Wittgenstein once compared people who like asking why to tourists standing before a scenic attraction: uninterested in looking at the view, they rack their brains and scour their guidebooks, desperate to learn its history. Admittedly, that is one way to travel. You could even call it an important one. But to me, the scene itself is rather more interesting than its history. By the same token, describing a scene is rather more interesting than writing its history. After all, what we see stands in its own right: its appearance is its reality, with nothing deeper hidden inside. The same goes for criticism. Once the details and the whys start piling up, scholarly investigation—and the scholarly air—comes with them. So I do not intend to ask too many whys here. I do not even want to dwell too much on the details of the game as a whole. I want only to draw on what I remember and put together three sketches, hoping they will make a passable review and do some justice to my own experience of playing it.2
How Persona 5 Speaks: Truth and Naturalness
Among the JRPGs I have played, P5 ranks high for its writing: plain in its narration, natural in its transitions; tightening the pressure at every turn of the plot, winding through intricate setups, then resolving them cleanly without dragging things out.
P5’s characterization is straightforward and lively. Japanese anime, comics, and games have a distinctive way of portraying people—symbolic and stereotyped, to put it unkindly. But this manner of writing extends from traditional East Asian art forms, and there is nothing inherently wrong with it. Contemporary Western works tend to approach their characters through intricate twists and turns. In other words, they concentrate on complexity of character and emphasize people’s opacity.
The artistry here lies in revealing directness through complexity. Done well, the writing brings out something true through its twists: a sudden turn, where the path seems to end and a new prospect opens, reveals something true and straightforward. Everything that came before gives it a weathered fullness. Done badly, it produces endless complications with no firm center. The whole work becomes a heap of mud, full of sour, evasive characters who are neither one thing nor the other. Reading it turns the stomach.
Japanese anime, comics, and games begin instead with a pure directness, without twists or turns. This approach prizes naturalness over contrivance. A tsundere character is endearing precisely because something genuine in their nature cannot be concealed. A compelling villain, too, commands our respect because there is something genuine in his life. Such characterization succeeds only when it emerges naturally from the character’s own necessity. Force a character into a ready-made mold, and the life drains out of them. They mouth grand, empty platitudes, become mouthpieces for a lesson, become false symbols that make the viewer sick. What is true is always simple. But if even that simplicity has been contrived, it is bound to be tiresome.
Soon after Futaba joins the Phantom Thieves, everyone goes to the beach. In a typically offbeat moment, Yusuke Kitagawa catches a lobster, and the others have a good laugh at him. I immediately declared that this lobster must be setting something up. Yet by sunset, the payoff still had not arrived. When the others asked about it, Yusuke merely replied, quite untroubled: no idea where it had gone. My expectations for the lobster came to nothing. But that was how I knew P5’s writer was a formidable talent.
From a writer’s point of view, if the lobster sets nothing up, most would leave it out, or give it only a passing mention. But think about it another way. If the lobster exists to set something up, it is a narrative prop, no longer the lobster itself. P5 devotes only a few strokes to it, yet those strokes release it from a teleological narrative framework. The lobster episode is of no use whatsoever to the story. Yet precisely through its uselessness, it comes into its own: the lobster becomes a lobster, Yusuke and the others become fully themselves, and, beyond them, P5 becomes P5.
This is natural writing. We might sum it up as letting things follow their own nature. But we must distinguish one sense of “natural” from another. Here it means a thing’s own necessity. Nietzsche suggests that we might regard the author as the soil from which the work grows. Works, and the characters within them, have lives of their own. Natural writing lets those lives fulfill themselves, lets them grow. Words then become a support rather than an obstacle; the story tells itself through your pen. As the old saying goes: “Writing is formed by heaven; a skilled hand chances upon it.”
Ryuji may be rash, but there is an innocent exuberance in his rashness. Yusuke may be eccentric, but now and then he says something remarkably perceptive. P5 has many such touches of natural writing.
As for the plot, apart from its many tangled, convoluted premises, I find little that feels forced or abrupt. Every NPC you can talk to has a little story of their own. By the end, whether it is the foreigner diligently studying Japanese or the young rocker who keeps singing and playing in the square, each has found somewhere to be at peace. This often brings a smile of recognition to my face.
Among the characters, we have the straightforward innocence of Ryuji, Ann, Yusuke, and the others on the side of good, and the ruthless unscrupulousness of Shido and Akechi on the other. The good characters are full of charm, simple and lively, with a palpable vitality. Shido, as the principal villain, is consistently ruthless from beginning to end. He will sacrifice anything for power, and he acts decisively, without fuss. Even after his heart has been stolen, he refuses to give up, taking poison to feign death in one final gamble. He is plainly no paper tiger, all bluster and no substance. Faced with a villain like this, I for one cannot bring myself to loathe him. Or rather, you may hate what he stands for, but you cannot help feeling some respect for the man himself. Such a villain makes the final boss, the Holy Grail, seem pale by comparison.
After Shido falls, his subordinates panic, but, remarkably, they do not scatter. They keep the social machinery running and hold out to the bitter end. This, too, follows naturally from the characters’ own necessity. Imagine if, the moment Shido fell, all the ministers under him collapsed in a heap. That would make the work ridiculous and repellent.
Persona 5’s Threads of Thought: Reification and the Straightforward Mind
Lately I have been asking myself: what distinguishes a game like P5 from other games with grand narratives? And what makes it good? Perhaps the key lies in the “straightforward mind.”3
In the real world, apart from a few particular talents, the Phantom Thieves are ordinary people. As players get to know them, we discover that each has things they feel lost about—and these, too, are ordinary matters, not great affairs of state, the world, or the universe. We might say they are ordinary people in the real world whose own fates have swept them into tragedies doomed to end in failure.
Set against them are the NPCs we encounter near the end, confined in prison cells. They, too, have some understanding of their fate, but choose self-deception and resignation. The Phantom Thieves choose instead to resist to the end. This difference, turning on a single thought, is what I mean by the “straightforward mind.” Futaba, for instance, still roars back at the abusive apparition of her mother: “Even so, I will go on living.”
There is a great deal in those words, “even so.” They reveal a spontaneous, unconditional act of will. To be unconditional is to be what Zhuangzi calls “dependent on nothing”; it is the subject standing forth in its own right; it is freedom. A will dependent on nothing is a free will. The formation of the Phantom Thieves can almost be seen as this free will taking personal form. Wherever there is injustice, large or small, and whether they succeed or fail, the Phantom Thieves immediately step in to put things right. But it would not be true to say that they were so steadfast from the outset. The whole plot is more like a process of moral formation. Whenever they hesitate in what they are doing, whenever they doubt their own principles, whenever they become absorbed in fame or gain—in short, whenever their resolve becomes divided—the undertaking is bound to fail. Conversely, once they understand that afflictions are awakening, that the here and now is the whole, their actions immediately seem divinely aided. This is an old anime routine, of course. Old, but it is the truth.
And truth is always simple. The simplest things are also the hardest.
Before the final battle, the protagonist confronts his companions, sunk in despondency in prisons of their own making, with a splendid wake-up call: “Did we become Phantom Thieves to meet other people’s expectations?” They immediately take his meaning and each finds their ultimate motive: simply to carry through their own convictions, whether anyone expects it of them or not. At the first sign of injustice, they rush straight toward it, regardless of its scale, regardless of success or failure, neither elated by outward fortune nor saddened on their own account. They come and go freely, unencumbered.
There is much of the spirit of righteous outlawry in this state, but less of the social entanglement of factions pursuing private interests. There is also much of Chan Buddhism in it. Chan calls it “here and now, it is already so.” Eternity can appear in an instant, and eternity can be gathered into a single instant. This is “here and now, it is already so,” the body laid bare to the autumn wind.4 This is what Persona 5 calls the “straightforward mind.” It is difficult to speak of this state, for words are rigid, while “here and now, it is already so” is alive: at once concrete and universal. To perceive the straightforward mind in the Phantom Thieves perhaps demands more of the audience.
Opposed to this path of the straightforward mind is another thread running through the game. I prefer to call it the path of “reification.” This, of course, is the negative one.
Reification is easier to discuss. One reason is that ours is an age of pervasive reification. The phenomenon is more widespread and more familiar to all of us. If the straightforward mind takes no account of cause and effect, and hence of ends and means, the path of reification takes far too much account of both. Material things, as parts of nature, belong to a universal network of causal relations. Once something is subject to causal relations, there can be no talk of freedom. Likewise, once one is caught in a chain of means and ends, there can be no talk of the straightforward mind.
For example, if Shido uses a cup to drink water, the cup is the means and drinking water is the end. If he uses Akechi to gain power, Akechi becomes the means and gaining power the end. Akechi and the cup thus occupy the same position: both are being used. A cup is a thing, and there is nothing objectionable about its serving as a tool. Akechi, however, is a living person, reduced here to the status of a tool. This is what is meant by the reification of a person. P5 gives us many instances of it. In the bosses’ Palaces, other people often appear as things—paintings, ATMs, robots. These images make it very clear how the Palace’s owner sees them.
This imagery reaches its peak in President Okumura’s mind. His employees appear as tireless robots, working diligently until the last moment of their lives. Even death cannot release them from work: their corpses must serve as firewood, fueling the factory’s production. On the other side is Akechi’s brand of brutality, which treats other people’s lives as things that may be taken at will. Here is what distinguishes the Phantom Thieves from Akechi, and indeed from the likes of Shido: first, whether a person is regarded as a person in their own right; second, whether people are treated as ends rather than means. In this respect, the Phantom Thieves’ change-of-heart operations are meaningful. Their aim is not to eliminate wrongdoing, nor could they do so. They make offenders accept responsibility for their own wrongs.
Only when a person can accept their own responsibility can we truly speak of that person as free.
Just as wrongdoing cannot be eliminated, neither can reification. As P5’s metaphor suggests, human beings inhabit both the world of mind and the world of nature. With nothing but a body, a human being would be a thing; with nothing but a mind, a god or a Buddha. As Aristotle puts it, outside the city-state, one is either a god or a beast. So long as human beings remain finite rational beings, the possibility of being reified will remain. Since human finitude is something that must necessarily be so, there are all sorts of things we have no choice but to accept. Hence the sayings of sages, knowledge, science, education and culture, political systems, rules and social courtesies. All this endless business is what we must resort to: a bend, a detour, an unavoidable accommodation. We must remember that society, politics, and culture have no place among gods and Buddhas. Their realm has no winding paths; everything is direct and immediate. There is, then, a divine world and a human world.
As Mou Zongsan says, the “Water Margin world” constitutes a third world outside these two.5 Similarly, I would say that the Phantom Thieves inhabit this Water Margin world. To them, social systems, cultural factors, benefits and rewards, other people’s expectations—all are secondary, of no consequence. From petty thugs to evil gods, however powerful you may be, if you have done wrong, do not imagine you can get away. The Phantom Thieves pile in together. The matter is settled, but often at the cost of an enormous social storm. Imagine a political system accommodating such a disruptive element. The Phantom Thieves, then, cannot get along in society after all. To us, they are childish, carried away by hotheaded passion, heedless of consequences and of rank or seniority. But to them, we are the ridiculous ones. We are, after all, people within the conventional order, social beings. Society contains restraint and indirection; indeed, that is what makes it society. And yet the Phantom Thieves, doing the work of gods and Buddhas in mortal bodies, still constitute a realm of their own: what Mou Zongsan calls the “Water Margin world.”
P5 is clearly aware of this. For most of the work, then, the world of mind inhabited by the Phantom Thieves remains separate from the real world. Public opinion about them is a jumble of conflicting voices. The older sister in law enforcement best embodies the detours one has no choice but to take: she is caught utterly between the social system and the Phantom Thieves’ system. The Thieves are plainly doing justice, yet society’s laws cannot tolerate them, and she must find every possible way to bring them in. Ah, what else can she do? As The Brothers Karamazov has it, even if Christ returned, today’s churchmen would ask him to leave. After school, the protagonist may command the world of mind; in class during the day, he still gets chalk thrown at him by his teacher. Here we glimpse what it means to have no choice in the human world.
Yet a game like P5 does not stop there. At the end of the Sun Confidant storyline, the politician who champions ordinary people says something intriguing. Roughly: I once met a young man who was also working for justice in this society, in his own way. Though we take different paths, I am certain we can meet at the summit. The different paths are those of the righteous outlaw and the politician. The outlaw’s path lies beyond the conventional social order; the politician’s lies within it. The two are fundamentally as incompatible as fire and water. What is remarkable is that P5 should voice a reconciliation between these systems through the politician. I cannot remember whether the actual words were “I hope we can meet at the summit” or “I am certain we can meet at the summit.” Personally, I would rather it had been certainty than hope.
Surely, once an archer has released the arrow, the thought is “It will hit,” not “I hope it will hit.”
How Persona 5 Becomes a “Vortex”
Let us return to the “change of heart.” If my reading makes sense, then this repentance is not simply a game mechanic but the indispensable core of the whole game.
Repentance means just what it says: bringing wrongdoers to a genuine awareness of what they have done and making them accept responsibility for it. This is precisely what distinguishes the Phantom Thieves from the likes of Akechi. Both practice extrajudicial punishment. Akechi may have killed a few people who deserved it, and so may seem to merit the name “Justice,” but examined closely, his way is still the inferior one. Killing is a last resort, to be used only when there is no alternative: punishment imposed by external force. The righteous path through the human world is one of upheaval and change. If an offender still has the chance to accept responsibility, to turn himself in voluntarily in the freedom that follows awakening, even to do everything in his power to make amends, then killing him under such circumstances looks more like serving a private interest in the name of the public good—merely satisfying one’s own appetite for justice.
Conversely, if repentance means accepting responsibility, and accepting responsibility means freedom, then what the Phantom Thieves do consists, in essence, of acts that make people free. For most of the story, their change-of-heart targets are particular villains whose grave offenses can be listed one by one. At the end, however, players make an awkward discovery: the final target is “the public” itself. This is quite a shock. What crime have the people committed? As those ordinary people in their self-made cells suggest, everyone is simply living an ordinary life, protecting themselves. What crime is there in that? Here we reach a fork in the road. We could readily read it as saying that “being ordinary is itself a crime.” But that seems too radical, taking us down precisely the path of the story’s villains. Clearly, there is something very wrong with such a reading. I think what P5 means to say is this: the Phantom Thieves’ entire process of stealing hearts and bringing about repentance is not fundamentally directed at “wrongdoing,” but at “freedom.” For the villains encountered earlier, guilt or innocence is not the ultimate question. Whether they are free is. Wrongdoing is only one manifestation of a failure to be free.
In this sense, the public is not guilty, but unfree. Lacking self-knowledge, accepting no responsibility, pretending not to hear or see—in a word, being irresponsible: this is what it means to be unfree. This is also what Arendt calls “the banality of evil.”6 And the Phantom Thieves’ final mission is precisely to set the public free. The irony, though, is that after they destroy the final boss, the Holy Grail, they look around at the people and nothing seems to have changed. They cannot even be sure whether the change-of-heart operation has succeeded.
And this is precisely the crucial point. If P5 is a vortex, this is its center.
Because the player in front of the screen is a member of the public too. And the entire story of the Phantom Thieves is actually one long operation to steal the player’s heart. Why does the player’s heart need stealing? Is the player guilty? No. Not because the player is guilty, but because the player is unfree.
A salary you can spend as you please, spare time to play games, a choice between fish and meat today—this is not freedom. Freedom means being honest about your own life and taking responsibility for it. What makes people banal is not their social standing or anything of that kind. It is drifting through life without awareness, taking no responsibility, pretending to take responsibility.
Have the Phantom Thieves succeeded? I do not know. As the story itself shows, this remains a mystery. If players keep treating the Phantom Thieves as an object wholly unrelated to themselves; if they still put down the controller, pack away the disc, and get on with whatever they were doing; if they still cling to the argument that “People in games don’t have to eat. I do”—then the Phantom Thieves have failed. Play through it as many times as you like: the game will remain only a game, not a vortex. But if, after playing, players reflect even a little afresh on their convictions, their responsibilities, and their lives, then perhaps the Phantom Thieves’ operation has succeeded. P5 is no longer merely a game. It becomes a vortex drawing in reality and fiction together; it becomes itself.
At the end of the story, a few murmured words from Ryuji and Yusuke supply the finishing touch, inviting endless reflection. Everyone is driving the protagonist back to his hometown along a coastal highway. The spring breeze brushes their faces; sea and sky meet. Amid this dreamlike scene, Ryuji murmurs: it is so beautiful, just like a dream. Could we be living in someone’s dream? Yusuke answers at once: I don’t know, but none of that matters. We are free.
“We are free”: a sentence of extraordinary depth, all the more startling when spoken by a character in a work of art. It is the key to the entire story. After all, when we watch Braveheart, we do not deny Wallace his freedom because the film is fiction. Freedom is something transcendent, not something human beings can possess exclusively. Better to say that freedom takes possession of art and human beings. We pity the people in P5 as little paper cutouts, as fictions. They may not appreciate it. They may laugh at you instead, caught in the prison of actuality, spinning the cocoon that binds you.
Questions of freedom, dreams, and reality run from Zhuang Zhou’s butterfly dream in antiquity to the brain in a vat today. Persona 5 does not answer the question; it breaks its hold. Some questions are themselves endless tangles, and breaking their hold is the answer. Think of Alexander cutting through the knot with his sword. He knew that some answers do not reside in words, but in this stroke of the blade. Untying the knot and cutting it apart are two ways of seeing, and they mark the difference between us ordinary mortals and Alexander. Whoever understands P5’s final “We are free” will understand why Mona keeps insisting that everything is a product of cognition—and why, at the end of P5, belief in the Phantom Thieves’ existence on the message board settles at an even split.
This is something like “Believe, and it exists; disbelieve, and it does not.” But this belief is not superstition.
A Dragon Need Not Exist to Be Slain
A friend once offered me this quotation:
Fairy tales are truer than reality, not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons will be defeated.7
Wonderfully said.
Once our belief passes beyond “dragons exist” and reaches directly to “dragons will be defeated,” we can understand the freedom Yusuke speaks of, and Alexander’s sword. Persona 5 itself becomes, here and now, a vortex: a vortex sweeping reality and fiction, contingency and necessity, those who play and those being played into one. But if we still treat it as a means to a Platinum trophy, as a diversion, as something unreal, then it is a disc telling a story that makes no sense. Nothing more.
Which is right, and which is wrong? I do not know.
Editor’s Note
Our friend Yuan Danan has achieved both beauty of language and coolness of analysis. “Reification” here is not used in Lukács’s sense. Understood in the essay’s own terms, it means treating (other) people as objects within a series of causal relations resembling those of the natural world, considering them solely through the means–end calculations of instrumental reason.