Before I start my rambling, I want to clarify that I have only played the original Persona 5, not Persona 5 Royal. As a result, most of the article will be focused on the base game. However, I have still seen plenty of gameplay of Royal, and so there will be some mention of it. Additionally, some character art from the Strikers spinoff will be shown as well.
For the uninitiated, the Persona series is a delectable little JRPG franchise by Atlus. It features a rotating cast of characters that all happen to get tangled in metaphysical worlds with people’s unfiltered selves, also known as shadows. A common theme in the series is coming to terms with how you present yourself to the world, how the world presents itself to you, and how you really feel. Most people in the Persona universe have a strong disconnect between how they present themselves and how they truly feel, but the main characters have the strength of character development on their side. When they reconcile their outward presentation and inward emotions, they achieve a level of self- acceptance that transforms their shadow into a persona that they can summon in battle.
While it’s taken to a fantastical level of exaggeration, I do love the core message: self-denial is crippling and self-acceptance is empowering. Persona 5 in particular stars a high school boy who is arrested, put on probation, and transferred to a new high school after using physical force to stop an assault. Throughout the game you meet other teens who are equally frustrated with society’s current state of affairs and decide to form a vigilante justice group called the Phantom Thieves of Hearts. When acting as a Phantom Thief, the protagonist goes by the name Joker and battles using his persona, Arsene.
Persona 5 has a very obvious anime influence in its style. Character portraits have smooth lines, cel shading, bright colors, and very expressive faces. Every member of the main cast has two main outfits: their real-world clothes and their Phantom Thief attire. The real world outfits are fine, just like Persona 5’s real world design is fine. You don them going to school or working your job or meeting up with the rest of the main cast. I don’t really want to spend too much time talking about them.
The real stars of the shows are the Phantom Thief costumes that characters wear in the game’s metaphysical world. Party members gain these costumes through self-acceptance, just as they do their personas. This process isn’t pretty though- it comes with them verbalizing things about themselves that they need to change and issues that they have been denying or ignoring. All of this cumulates in a painful (for the character) but extremely badass awakening in which they get their attire and their persona. It's basically like they condense five years of therapy into three minutes. These are some of the coolest moments in the game, and I’m going to drop my favorite one below.
Costumes and personas do an excellent job of representing the resolution of each Phantom Thief’s inner conflict. Makoto Nijima (shown in the above scene) dons an iron mask, brass knuckles, and a body suit adorned with spikes, and reveals her persona as a radioactive motorcycle. (To clarify though, nobody actively determines what their costume or persona will look like. Their attire and persona come from the heart).
It’s a stark and powerful contrast to her straight A+, people pleaser, metaphorical doormat character that you’ve known up until this point. She is done being nice. She is done staying quiet and being told to not make a fuss about various issues. She is done keeping the peace at the expense of victims of the status quo. She does not care anymore. If someone is making problems, she will pummel them into the ground and then run them over for good measure.
While Makoto’s attire has her character doing a thematic 180, Ann Takamaki’s costume puts an empowering spin on a concept that the game initially presents negatively. Persona 5’s first villain is a gym teacher that sexually harasses his students, and Ann is one of his next targets. The inciting incident for the formation of the Phantom Thieves is an escalation of one of these incidents involving Ann’s best friend. In Persona 5’s metaphysical world, you see representations of how this gym teacher views his female students: they are all scantily clad and fawning over him. Up until this point, the game uses sexuality as a point of weakness and vulnerability.
However, this concept is flipped on its head when Ann dons her attire and awakens her persona. She wears a bright red, zippered, skin-tight latex suit with a cleavage window, thigh high boots, and a clip-on tail. Her weapon is also a whip. There’s no beating around the bush- this is a dominatrix outfit. Her persona also has fully exposed breasts and is using a swooning man as a stepping stool. Ann takes her sexuality and changes it from a point of weakness to strength.
She also comes extremely close to killing the perpetrator (like as in, firing two killing blows at him but changing their trajectory at the last second). She has to talk herself down from doing it. Most Phantom Thieves have a main villain that corresponds with them, but the end dynamic between Ann and her villain is by far the most cathartic and dramatic. The difference in perceived power when she nearly kills him (but chooses not to so that he is forced to confess his crimes) is lightyears greater than the difference between any other Phantom Thief/villain pair.
The last bit of character design I want to comment on is Yusuke Kitagawa’s. Up until gaining his persona and costume, he is living in the shadow of his famous “mentor” and allowing this mentor to pass off his (Yusuke’s) works as his own. His awakening largely symbolizes him finally acknowledging that his mentor is a fraud and he himself is the true artist. His Phantom Thief attire is dominated by dark blue shades along with highlights of light blue on his gloves and white and red on his mask and tail. This design clearly takes inspiration from the supernatural kitsune. The blue colors contribute a feeling of mysticality and wisdom, which both correlate with the kitsune theme.
Yusuke going from his street clothes to his Phantom Thief attire is also a parallel to how a kitsune often reveals itself in folklore. They often assume the forms of humans and blend in with humans around them but can be forced to return to their fox form by various means. It is only after the kitsune is forced to reveal its true form that the humans around it realize they have been in the presence of a powerful, mystical being.
Similarly, Yusuke gaining his persona and attire drives home that he is the actual talent and genius behind his mentor’s works. Another nice touch that contrasts him from his mentor and also works in kitsune lore is the use of white on his mask and tail. Kitsunes range from being protective to malicious. Those with white fur are considered to be guardians that serve the benevolent Shinto god Inari. This coloration creates a foil between him (a humbled and genuinely talented artist) and his mentor (an arrogant and greedy fraud).
Meanwhile, his persona’s design is quite bizarre and loud, even by the game’s standards. There are so many elements, patterns, and colors that clash with each other, but in a synergistic way. The massive pompadour, the pink leopard print inside the robe, the gigantic blue and white ropes above his shoulders, the black and white diamond print- they all scream for your attention, because after all, you are in the presence of the talent behind a famous artist.
During the course of combat, you gain opportunities to perform super attacks on enemies, called all-out attacks. Each of these attacks ends with a splash image of the character that initiated the all-out attack. These illustrations do a great job of conveying each character’s personality and how they operate to achieve their justice. Makoto’s is appropriately aggressive; I love the bloody tire tracks (you might also be able to tell, she is my favorite member of the main cast). But between all of the illustrations, you see a spectrum of attitudes ranging from cool and confident (Joker’s) to prim (Haru Okumura’s) to energetic (Ryuji Sakomoto’s).
Besides traditional visual topics, I also want to talk about Persona 5’s user interface and user experience. Game menus are something I normally don’t think about much. Depending on the type of game I’m playing, I’m either barely using them (platformers, beat em’ ups, hack and slashes) or I’m spending so much time in them that my brain is basically on autopilot and I’m ignoring almost everything that isn’t the option I’m looking for (JRPGs, SRPGs, action RPGs). Because of this, I’m generally don’t give much consideration to how good or bad the UI is. It’s just there. Even if a game has genuinely awful UI, chances are I won’t care as long as the game itself is fun.
Once in a while, however, there comes along a game with genuinely incredible UI that truly grabs my attention and demands something be said about it. And Persona 5 is definitely one of those gems. It is filled with style but also substance. It’s flashy with whites, red, and blacks, but is not distracting. The loudness and boldness of its UI guides you in a way that most games don’t; the majority of UIs are too cluttered to be easily interpretable or too subtle to provide strong direction. Persona 5 is such a rarity in this regard.
Take its initial battle menu for example. Your options spring out from Joker or whoever you’re controlling at the moment. They’re in all capitals, making them easy to ready. More importantly though, they can each be accessed with a single button press. This is a far cry from most JRPG battle menus in which you need to scroll through each option and make a choice with the select button. Finally, the crowning jewel of this menu is the physical arrangement of each option. The persona, item, sword, and guard options mimic the actual layout of the shape buttons on a PS4 controller. If you somehow forgot where the triangle button is, the menu would remind you that it’s the top button. Similarly, the order and gun options mimic the L button’s location above the d-pad. This intuitive layout is largely carried over in the game's Switch and Xbox ports as well.
Now onto the party member select screen. Here, the game really shows the genius of its boldness. Rather than opting for a little start or some other icon to indicate that a character is in your party, it just flat out slaps PARTY in front to make it clearly and easily visible. Additionally, it wisely deviates from the games established UI color palette of black, white, and red. Putting the HP and SP in red would have kept in line with the theme, but as anyone familiar with games knows, putting multiple stats next to each other in the same font color makes them hard to distinguish. Instead, the game runs with teal and magenta to make sure that nobody is confusing HP for SP or vice versa. And this choice actually persists throughout the entire game. Any mention of HP is always in teal, any mention of SP is always in magenta, and these colors are used almost exclusively for such.
The last menu I want to talk about is the pause menu. Persona 5’s pause menu seems simpler than the other menus I’ve discussed so far, as there is much less information being conveyed here. It’s a stepping stone to access other, more detailed menus. However, it still embodies the game’s fondness for flashiness. It also features an excellent and extremely intelligent use of balance that is not only aesthetically appealing, but also guides the player’s eyes up and down the menu.
The screen is split roughly in half by a diagonal line- red dominates the left side while black and white dominate the right. The middle portion of the line is technically not even a real line, it’s just implied by Joker’s glove. The glove is roughly half white and half red here, however, his actual in-game model features a solid red color. The change to white here is not of particular interest, as it’s already been established that Persona 5’s UI is largely achromatic. What is more interesting is splitting the normally monochromatic glove into two colors, as it keeps the menu feeling balanced and not askew despite there being many slanted elements.
We have already established the diagonal line that splits the screen and that the red edge of Joker's glove helps form this line. Each of the menu options follows the line’s slant and many of them rest against the glove’s red edge. This creates a feeling of two opposing forces meeting and cancelling each other’s momentum to come to a controlled stop.
Joker leans in from the right and seems to press his hand directly up to the screen and use it as an anchor point to steady himself. The red implies a degree of pressure, as if his thumb, index finger, and inner palm are pressed much more firmly than the rest of his hand (considering that this half of his hand is closer to his body and that the thumb and index finger are actually physical stronger than the other fingers, this also makes practical sense). If we continue this trend of pressure, it appears as if the menu options were traveling along the thin, white line before they became trapped in place by Joker placing his hand over them. Despite this being a static image, there is so much previous movement implied here!
Now imagine if his glove was completely white. The screen’s divide becomes much weaker with the middle of the line being gone. It would only be visible above and below his glove. Much of the implied pressure from Joker’s hand now goes away as well. Joker no longer seems like he has firmly anchored himself to the screen. Instead, it appears as if the force created by his slant might overwhelm his hand and he could slip and fall into the other half of the screen.
This feeling is also created by the new proportions of red and white; there is now an unrelenting wave of white crashing into the left side of the screen. The red half of Joker’s glove acted like a large rock for the waves to crash and break against. Without it, there is nothing to slow the white waves down. They precede viciously and relentlessly into the left half. It’s total chaos.
Let’s also consider the opposite scenario: what if Joker’s glove was completely red? The most obvious issue is that it would blend in with the background of the paused game environment. It would still be somewhat distinguishable, as the menu coloring is solid red while the forms and values of the background bleed through the red filter placed over them. However, this is nowhere near the excellent contrast that the white coloring provides when placed over the red environment.
Also very noticeable would be the disappearance of most of the dividing line; only the parts above and below the glove would be visible. Additionally, the menu options would lose the feeling of resting against the line as the middle section of said line no longer exists. While the options still feel pressed under Joker’s glove in the actual menu’s colors, they feel suddenly stopped and squashed with this altered coloration. The movement feels much less smooth and much more abrupt. Lastly, with his glove being completely red, there is a stronger feeling of pressure. Now his entire hand is firmly pressed against the screen. There is enough potential energy here that is seems like Joker could, in one fell swoop, pull the red color from the left half of the screen and drench the right white half in red as well. The color split in his glove plays such a key role in keeping the red from swallowing the white and vice versa. It’s fascinating how much power it has.
I want to change gears now and talk about something with visible movement: the battle summary screen. This is a really clever transition between the battle and the return to the dungeon’s overworld. First, it changes depending on who is actually in your party. Secondly, there isn’t just one set loop of background imagery per dungeon. Anything that appears in that particular section of the dungeon can appear in this background loop. Rather than throwing all of your spoils at you at once, it displays them one at a time, first showing experience, then yen, and finally items.
As it progresses from one reward to another, a red line draws itself across the screen to further emphasize movement. It keeps this screen energetic while also hammering home that hey, you really are making progress because you just got some experience and money. It was also a great choice to have Joker be actively running in the background. It reiterates that these are the Phantom Thieves. If they get into a squabble, they are going to finish off the enemy as quickly as possible and then get the hell out of there. They are not going to putz around and get caught by some bulky reinforcements.
But, uh, yeah. Persona 5 is a gorgeous game, and those gorgeous visuals increase its functionality, rather than hinder it. Atlus was really firing on all cylinders during its development; it’s definitely one of the best games of the 2010s and I would highly recommend a playthrough to see all the sick visuals it has to offer.
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Persona 5 Royal is available for purchase on PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Nintendo Switch. It carries an ESRB rating of M for blood, drug reference, partial nudity, sexual themes, strong language, and violence.
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