Chronicler
Habitué
- Messages
- 354
Decided to make this thread to talk about my thoughts as I play through Persona 5. This is my first time so I won't be able to make this a proper tour of the game, but I'm pretty excited and I think there'll be a lot to talk about, so I think it's worth a shot.
Gonna start by copying my comment from another thread here.
So, additional thoughts. This thing has a very anti-establishment theme. I've heard that the Persona Games all sort of start that way but tend to end with the characters all integrating into society properly, so I'm being careful not to expect to much there.
But before the game started, the player character saw a woman being assaulted in the streets, and stepped in. The man said something like "Stay in the kitchen while I run this country", so I think he was implied to be a person of power, like a politician or something. The assailant sues him for intervening, and you get a criminal record as a result.
Your school expels you. Your parents kick you out. They send you to live with this cafe owner, who sets you up with a room above his cafe. He has a home that he returns to after work but you live in the cafe. He's super stern about how he knows you're a troublemaker and if you cause any problems you're right out on the street.
Your new school is the only school that would take a kid like you with a criminal record. They do the same song and dance. If you cause any trouble, you're expelled, and then no school will take you. Nobody seems to have any sympathy for your circumstances at all, and it's unclear if they're even aware of what exactly you did to earn your criminal record.
Your narrative intertwines with this other kid at the school. His nameplate just said "Vulgar Boy" before you learned his name, and I can't actually remember what he's called right now. Vulgar Boy used to be the star of the track team, but then he had some violent incident, and fell out of grace. It seems to have something to do with the PE Teacher who coaches the volleyball team. The coach is a former olympic medalist who has taken their volleyball team to amazing heights, and he basically owns the school. He can do no wrong. He broke the vulgar boy's leg which is why vulgar boy can't run anymore.
We've been venturing into this world. Think they might've called it "The Metaverse". It's between dreams and reality. In this world, the school is a castle, and the PE Coach is its king. It sounds like there's basically two kinds of "real people" in this world. There's people like the coach, who bend reality to match his vision of it. And there's people like us, whose rebellious spirit allows us to resist this vision, and maintain our sense of self within his world.
So, the whole thing with the establishment being corrupt and us not fitting in with it is reflected in this metaverse.
Now, I thought this was going to be a simple thing, where we use our metaverse superpowers to beat him up in the castle and that would somehow fix things in the real world, but my first real surprise is that this doesn't seem to be where it's going. His castle is populated with slaves that he abuses, but the kicker is, they're not real. They're basically figments of his imagination. We don't need to save them.
Rather, the concerning thing about the abuse is that it's reflective of his true heart in the real world, and if this is how he sees his students surely he's treating them poorly too. So our first big mission is to track down the real world counterparts of these slaves, so we can investigate his crimes and try to expose him in the real world. This is obviously a much messier mission than it would've been to just brawl with his super powered inner id. We're basically teenagers who've taken it upon ourselves to be Junior Sleuths and try and take down this authority figure who probably brings in a lot of money for the school. Some of the students on his volleyball team have also been walking around covered in really obvious bandages and bruises so it doesn't seem like this guy has even been putting all that much effort into hiding what he does beyond like plausible deniability.
Gonna start by copying my comment from another thread here.
So, additional thoughts. This thing has a very anti-establishment theme. I've heard that the Persona Games all sort of start that way but tend to end with the characters all integrating into society properly, so I'm being careful not to expect to much there.
But before the game started, the player character saw a woman being assaulted in the streets, and stepped in. The man said something like "Stay in the kitchen while I run this country", so I think he was implied to be a person of power, like a politician or something. The assailant sues him for intervening, and you get a criminal record as a result.
Your school expels you. Your parents kick you out. They send you to live with this cafe owner, who sets you up with a room above his cafe. He has a home that he returns to after work but you live in the cafe. He's super stern about how he knows you're a troublemaker and if you cause any problems you're right out on the street.
Your new school is the only school that would take a kid like you with a criminal record. They do the same song and dance. If you cause any trouble, you're expelled, and then no school will take you. Nobody seems to have any sympathy for your circumstances at all, and it's unclear if they're even aware of what exactly you did to earn your criminal record.
Your narrative intertwines with this other kid at the school. His nameplate just said "Vulgar Boy" before you learned his name, and I can't actually remember what he's called right now. Vulgar Boy used to be the star of the track team, but then he had some violent incident, and fell out of grace. It seems to have something to do with the PE Teacher who coaches the volleyball team. The coach is a former olympic medalist who has taken their volleyball team to amazing heights, and he basically owns the school. He can do no wrong. He broke the vulgar boy's leg which is why vulgar boy can't run anymore.
We've been venturing into this world. Think they might've called it "The Metaverse". It's between dreams and reality. In this world, the school is a castle, and the PE Coach is its king. It sounds like there's basically two kinds of "real people" in this world. There's people like the coach, who bend reality to match his vision of it. And there's people like us, whose rebellious spirit allows us to resist this vision, and maintain our sense of self within his world.
So, the whole thing with the establishment being corrupt and us not fitting in with it is reflected in this metaverse.
Now, I thought this was going to be a simple thing, where we use our metaverse superpowers to beat him up in the castle and that would somehow fix things in the real world, but my first real surprise is that this doesn't seem to be where it's going. His castle is populated with slaves that he abuses, but the kicker is, they're not real. They're basically figments of his imagination. We don't need to save them.
Rather, the concerning thing about the abuse is that it's reflective of his true heart in the real world, and if this is how he sees his students surely he's treating them poorly too. So our first big mission is to track down the real world counterparts of these slaves, so we can investigate his crimes and try to expose him in the real world. This is obviously a much messier mission than it would've been to just brawl with his super powered inner id. We're basically teenagers who've taken it upon ourselves to be Junior Sleuths and try and take down this authority figure who probably brings in a lot of money for the school. Some of the students on his volleyball team have also been walking around covered in really obvious bandages and bruises so it doesn't seem like this guy has even been putting all that much effort into hiding what he does beyond like plausible deniability.
Last edited:
