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Persona 5 really drove the Persona series to the mainstream, similar to what Final Fantasy VII did for its franchise. While it didn’t de-throne Persona 4 Golden for me, I had a lot of fun with it. It heavily borrows concepts and mechanics from its two predecessors while adding new features and quality-of-life changes, thereby bringing the series forward in its own right. We play as the Phantom Thieves, a group of Persona-users who can infiltrate Facebook the Metaverse to change the hearts of despicable people and make them confess their crimes.
I maintained my 6-Persona limit and no-KO rule from past games. Beyond that,
As always, spoilers ahead. Also spoilers for God Eater Resurrection and Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
Phan-notes: Ren Amamiya/Joker
Persona 5 really drove the Persona series to the mainstream, similar to what Final Fantasy VII did for its franchise. While it didn’t de-throne Persona 4 Golden for me, I had a lot of fun with it. It heavily borrows concepts and mechanics from its two predecessors while adding new features and quality-of-life changes, thereby bringing the series forward in its own right. We play as the Phantom Thieves, a group of Persona-users who can infiltrate Facebook the Metaverse to change the hearts of despicable people and make them confess their crimes.
I maintained my 6-Persona limit and no-KO rule from past games. Beyond that,
- DLC Personas are all off-limits except for Raoul. Raoul is canonically the protagonist’s third-tier Persona. The other DLC Personas belong to prior games’ protagonists, which besides making the game WAY too easy, makes no in-universe sense for him to be able to summon.
- …that said, I made Raoul off-limits until New Game Plus.
- DLC items are all off-limits. They take away the early game’s challenge, which is the only time the game’s remotely challenging. In-universe, they don’t make sense either. Where would the Phantom Thieves get 10 Evokers or 10 Teddie glasses?
- Palace Security Levels can never go up, unless it’s story-based. We’re Phantom Thieves; our job is to remain completely undetected.
As always, spoilers ahead. Also spoilers for God Eater Resurrection and Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
Phan-notes: Ren Amamiya/Joker
I went with Ren Amamiya, the name used in the Persona 5 anime, because, as people who’ve played God Eater Resurrection (check out my review for it!) will recognize, that’s the name of Lindow’s and Sakuya’s son. In fact, the first time I saw that name on the Internet, I assumed it was talking about God Eater until I realized it was referring to this game. Ren has his best weapons the Paradise Lost R and the Nataraja EX (+6 to all stats). He wears the Starry Wisdom Vest. He has Raoul’s Picaresque Crown, an accessory which gives Insta-Heal and +3 to all stats.
The Canon Persona
Unlike his predecessors, Ren has a third-tier Persona. Raoul has his unique skill Phantom Show, which has a high chance of putting the entire enemy party to sleep. Given the game’s mechanics, this is pretty strong, since status ailments allow for follow-up Technical damage. Raoul also has Curse skills, which are P5R’s version of Dark skills from past games. Rather than an RNG-based instant kill, the Eiha-line of Curse skills just does damage, which I prefer anyway.
Lore corner: Persona 5 contains background blurbs for all the Personas, so I’ll be putting them in here. For Raoul, it says, “Another alias of Maurice Leblanc’s hero, Arséne Lupin. Infamous as a phantom thief, he was also known to be a man of many friends, lovers, and treasured allies.” Arséne, by the way, is Ren’s first Persona. Leblanc apparently wanted Arséne to have a rivalry with Sherlock Holmes, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author of Sherlock Holmes) complained that Leblanc was using his character without permission, so Leblanc wrote a character named “Herlock Sholmes.” Smooth. Real smooth.
The Aragami
The Canon Persona
Unlike his predecessors, Ren has a third-tier Persona. Raoul has his unique skill Phantom Show, which has a high chance of putting the entire enemy party to sleep. Given the game’s mechanics, this is pretty strong, since status ailments allow for follow-up Technical damage. Raoul also has Curse skills, which are P5R’s version of Dark skills from past games. Rather than an RNG-based instant kill, the Eiha-line of Curse skills just does damage, which I prefer anyway.
Lore corner: Persona 5 contains background blurbs for all the Personas, so I’ll be putting them in here. For Raoul, it says, “Another alias of Maurice Leblanc’s hero, Arséne Lupin. Infamous as a phantom thief, he was also known to be a man of many friends, lovers, and treasured allies.” Arséne, by the way, is Ren’s first Persona. Leblanc apparently wanted Arséne to have a rivalry with Sherlock Holmes, but Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (author of Sherlock Holmes) complained that Leblanc was using his character without permission, so Leblanc wrote a character named “Herlock Sholmes.” Smooth. Real smooth.
The Aragami
Continuing the God Eater reference: in God Eater 2, the Abaddon is an Aragami that will never attack you and will run away if you attack it. In the same way here, Abaddon the Persona has no offensive abilities and is there to show up, impart buffs, and switch to someone appropriate to the encounter. Whenever Abaddon is on the field, he’s difficult to take out, given all non-magic attacks heal him and his passives blunt the effectiveness of most everything else.
Lore corner: According to the game, Abaddon is the “‘Destroyer’ and ‘Angel of the Bottomless Pit,’ as described in ancient scriptures. He controls locusts and uses them to cause massive destruction to villages.” You know, this is the first time I’ve read a description of the original Abaddon rather than some video game creature named after it.
…I like the God Eater version better.
Wind, Flower, Snow, Moon
Lore corner: According to the game, Abaddon is the “‘Destroyer’ and ‘Angel of the Bottomless Pit,’ as described in ancient scriptures. He controls locusts and uses them to cause massive destruction to villages.” You know, this is the first time I’ve read a description of the original Abaddon rather than some video game creature named after it.
…I like the God Eater version better.
Wind, Flower, Snow, Moon
The very first time I encountered the Persona series was, in fact, this video where someone replaced Marianne’s voice lines with Haru’s, since they have the same voice actress. As such, you could say Fire Emblem: Three Houses led me to this series.
Anzu represents the four non-DLC factions in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It has a lion’s head (Blue Lions), an eagle’s wings (Black Eagles), wind skills (Verdant Wind, the part II of the Golden Deer), and ice skills (Silver Snow, the part II if you side with the church). Anzu sports Repel Nuke, because in the backstory of the game, the Agarthans fired a missile at the monastery and Sothis deflected it into Ailell. Anzu also has Ailment Boost, referencing Claude’s penchant for scheming and mild stomach poison.
Lore corner: The game informs me that Anzu is an “evil deity of Mesopotamian folklore with an eagle’s body and lion’s head. While the god Enlil purified himself, Anzu stole the Tablets of Destiny from him.” That is unforgivable! You shouldn’t annoy a girl with an axe!
The Spirit of Vengeance
Anzu represents the four non-DLC factions in Fire Emblem: Three Houses. It has a lion’s head (Blue Lions), an eagle’s wings (Black Eagles), wind skills (Verdant Wind, the part II of the Golden Deer), and ice skills (Silver Snow, the part II if you side with the church). Anzu sports Repel Nuke, because in the backstory of the game, the Agarthans fired a missile at the monastery and Sothis deflected it into Ailell. Anzu also has Ailment Boost, referencing Claude’s penchant for scheming and mild stomach poison.
Lore corner: The game informs me that Anzu is an “evil deity of Mesopotamian folklore with an eagle’s body and lion’s head. While the god Enlil purified himself, Anzu stole the Tablets of Destiny from him.” That is unforgivable! You shouldn’t annoy a girl with an axe!
The Spirit of Vengeance
I’m pretty sure Hell Biker is Ghost Rider from Marvel. I thought it fitting, as Ghost Rider gained powers from the devil to go take souls for him but decided to use his powers for justice instead. In the same way, Ren will eventually summon pretty much Satan to use the Seven Deadly Sins to kill the Big Bad.
Lore corner: I guess the developers intended for this guy to be a “motorcyclist whose violent nature turned him into a demon. His anger with himself and the world causes him to lash out, that everyone else would suffer as well.” I’ve seen exactly no real-world mythology that describes someone like this, so I’m going to stick with my Ghost Rider interpretation.
That in-game blurb sucks anyway. It’s not even grammatically correct.
The United States of ‘Murica
Lore corner: I guess the developers intended for this guy to be a “motorcyclist whose violent nature turned him into a demon. His anger with himself and the world causes him to lash out, that everyone else would suffer as well.” I’ve seen exactly no real-world mythology that describes someone like this, so I’m going to stick with my Ghost Rider interpretation.
That in-game blurb sucks anyway. It’s not even grammatically correct.
The United States of ‘Murica
I can’t be the only one who believes Principality looks like the Statue of Liberty. There’s not a big thematic reason for Ren to field an “America” Persona, but since this game has gun and nuclear skills, I went for it.
Lore corner: Apparently, Principality is the “seventh of the nine orders of angels. They guard cities and nations, and protect various religious figures.” I don’t think that comma should be there. Anyway, God bless America!
The Virgin Mother
Lore corner: Apparently, Principality is the “seventh of the nine orders of angels. They guard cities and nations, and protect various religious figures.” I don’t think that comma should be there. Anyway, God bless America!
The Virgin Mother
Maria represents Ren’s bond with – you’re aware of the spoiler warning, I hope – Sumire, the girl he loves. I actually had a difficult time deciding on whom to romance, but Sumire won out in the end, so here she is. Maria has a slew of unique skills, all having to do with healing. Atlus then proceeded to make her unique trait specific to support skills. Were…were they drunk when they programmed this?
Lore corner: The game says, “The maternal figure of Christianity. Gabriel informed her that she was to be the mother of Jesus. Some sects revere her as the Virgin Mary, but other denominations do not focus on her.” I…have nothing else to add. Well done, game.
The “yes of course Ben would make this Persona” Persona
Lore corner: The game says, “The maternal figure of Christianity. Gabriel informed her that she was to be the mother of Jesus. Some sects revere her as the Virgin Mary, but other denominations do not focus on her.” I…have nothing else to add. Well done, game.
The “yes of course Ben would make this Persona” Persona
If this surprises you, you haven’t been paying attention. And I didn’t field him this time either, so he still doesn’t count against the 6-Persona limit.
Lore corner: Mara is the demon king who tried to distract the Buddha the night before he attained enlightenment. And before you ask, no, nothing at all about the story has Mara being a giant penis on a chariot. He’s more-or-less just a humanoid demon.
November
Yup, we’re starting in November. The Phantom Thieves are in the middle of escaping a casino when a giant police force ambushes them and captures Ren. They tell him that someone in the Phantom Thieves sold him out, then Ren gets thrown into an interrogation room where a bunch of goons beat him up and drug him with…I guess a truth serum that also messes up his memories? I feel like it defeats the purpose of a truth serum if it…you know what, it doesn’t matter.
At that point, the hottest woman in the game appears and identifies herself as Sae Niijima, a prosecutor who is/was overseeing the investigation of the Phantom Thieves. She enters the room to interrogate Ren, expressing disgust at his treatment in the meantime, and so we flash back as Ren tells the story of how he got to this point…
April
One night, Ren Amamiya discovers a bald, drunk asshole menacing a woman. He steps in to defend the woman, and the bald man falls over like an idiot and injures himself. Unfortunately, the bald man is a super high-ranking corrupt politician, and he coerces the woman to testify that Ren walked up to him and attacked him. The courts put Ren on probation for assault and send him to Tokyo so he can attend a school known as Shujin Academy, because Shujin’s the only school that’ll let him enroll due to his now-criminal record, because Principal Wilson Fisk of Shujin wants the school’s reputation to go up “zomg look at how magnanimous we are we take in juvenile criminals and reform them zomg.”
Ren meets his new guardian, a guy known as Sojiro, who has Ren live in the attic of his coffee shop Leblanc. Sojiro takes Ren to enroll in school the following Sunday, which is baffling since school’s closed on Sunday…but anyway. It’s good that Sojiro decides to drive Ren that day, since the conductor of the subway that Ren would normally take suffered a mental shutdown – something that’s been afflicting multiple people, seemingly at random – and crashed the train. This causes people to criticize the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism; he is forced to step down, even though he can hardly be held responsible for one conductor’s medical – okay, am I playing the right game? I thought this was Persona, not political news simulator. Apologies for boring you. Let’s move on.
The next day, Ren goes to school and meets a guy who introduces himself as Ryuji Sakamoto, who also goes to Shujin. They walk to school together, but then some weird app on Ren’s phone appears, activates, and transports them to a castle where the school should be. The king of the castle shows up and Ryuji recognizes him as Suguru Kamoshida, the PE teacher at Shujin. Kamoshitter orders his guards to kill the duo, but then Ren’s Persona Arséne awakens and makes short work of the guards, allowing the two to escape. They return to find the castle had disappeared – the school’s where it should be, and Kamoshitter (the regular PE teacher) doesn’t seem to know anything about what happened in the castle.
The next day, Ryuji wants to go back to the castle to investigate for some reason, even though he’d barely escaped with his life the day before. This time, they meet a talking cat named Morgana, who explains the Metaverse, which is…I’m going to try to summarize, since it can get pretty convoluted. Here’s what you need to know:
Morgana further explains that Shadows are unrecognized/unaccepted parts of a person, so a person in the real world doesn’t know what happens with his Shadow. In this case, Kamoshitter in the real world has no idea what happens with Shadow Kamoshitter in the castle. This explanation kind of flies in the face of its source material, though. Shadows are repressed parts of people, but Kamoshitter the PE teacher is an egocentric sexual predator, so if he were to meet his Shadow, who is…a more overt egocentric sexual predator, he’d have no trouble accepting it as who he is.
Anyway, over the next few days, Ryuji determines from the castle that Kamoshitter is physically and sexually abusing students. He attempts to take pictures of evidence in the castle, but discovers cameras do not work in the Metaverse. He attempts to gather evidence in reality to take Kamoshitter down, but Kamoshitter in reality has too much sway at Shujin and the faculty is actively covering for him (especially Principal Fisk, because Fisk cares about reputation and nothing else). Morgana then explains that the core of a Palace is a Treasure, which is the manifestation of the distorted desire I mentioned. As such, stealing the Treasure would remove the desires from the person, destroying his Palace and leaving him with nothing except his conscience. At that point, he’d become so guilty over his actions he’d confess and ask to be punished for his crimes.
Ryuji and Ren angst over whether it’s morally okay to mess with someone’s subconscious like that, especially since Morgana surmises there’s a chance that removing a person’s desires would cause a mental shutdown, kind of like that train conductor earlier. But then, a girl named Shiho Suzui attempts to kill herself after Kamoshitter rapes her. Her best friend, Ann Takamaki, approaches the two, and they have no more compunction in joining forces to steal Kamoshitter’s Treasure, since there’s no way to stop him in reality and he’s obviously an active threat to the students’ lives.
The four then pull off their first heist, which comprises these steps:
At this particular Treasure, Shadow Kamoshitter attempts to annoy me to death via incessant dialogue, but I persevered and he surrenders pathetically. Ann spares him to ensure he spends the rest of his life groveling under the weight of his crimes because, as Ann says later, she wishes to inflict upon him a fate worse than death. Yeah, never make Ann angry.
…the first arc of this game is dark as hell. It…kind of gets better? Kind of?
Phan-notes: Ryuji Sakamoto/Skull
Lore corner: Mara is the demon king who tried to distract the Buddha the night before he attained enlightenment. And before you ask, no, nothing at all about the story has Mara being a giant penis on a chariot. He’s more-or-less just a humanoid demon.
November
Yup, we’re starting in November. The Phantom Thieves are in the middle of escaping a casino when a giant police force ambushes them and captures Ren. They tell him that someone in the Phantom Thieves sold him out, then Ren gets thrown into an interrogation room where a bunch of goons beat him up and drug him with…I guess a truth serum that also messes up his memories? I feel like it defeats the purpose of a truth serum if it…you know what, it doesn’t matter.
At that point, the hottest woman in the game appears and identifies herself as Sae Niijima, a prosecutor who is/was overseeing the investigation of the Phantom Thieves. She enters the room to interrogate Ren, expressing disgust at his treatment in the meantime, and so we flash back as Ren tells the story of how he got to this point…
April
One night, Ren Amamiya discovers a bald, drunk asshole menacing a woman. He steps in to defend the woman, and the bald man falls over like an idiot and injures himself. Unfortunately, the bald man is a super high-ranking corrupt politician, and he coerces the woman to testify that Ren walked up to him and attacked him. The courts put Ren on probation for assault and send him to Tokyo so he can attend a school known as Shujin Academy, because Shujin’s the only school that’ll let him enroll due to his now-criminal record, because Principal Wilson Fisk of Shujin wants the school’s reputation to go up “zomg look at how magnanimous we are we take in juvenile criminals and reform them zomg.”
Ren meets his new guardian, a guy known as Sojiro, who has Ren live in the attic of his coffee shop Leblanc. Sojiro takes Ren to enroll in school the following Sunday, which is baffling since school’s closed on Sunday…but anyway. It’s good that Sojiro decides to drive Ren that day, since the conductor of the subway that Ren would normally take suffered a mental shutdown – something that’s been afflicting multiple people, seemingly at random – and crashed the train. This causes people to criticize the Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport, and Tourism; he is forced to step down, even though he can hardly be held responsible for one conductor’s medical – okay, am I playing the right game? I thought this was Persona, not political news simulator. Apologies for boring you. Let’s move on.
The next day, Ren goes to school and meets a guy who introduces himself as Ryuji Sakamoto, who also goes to Shujin. They walk to school together, but then some weird app on Ren’s phone appears, activates, and transports them to a castle where the school should be. The king of the castle shows up and Ryuji recognizes him as Suguru Kamoshida, the PE teacher at Shujin. Kamoshitter orders his guards to kill the duo, but then Ren’s Persona Arséne awakens and makes short work of the guards, allowing the two to escape. They return to find the castle had disappeared – the school’s where it should be, and Kamoshitter (the regular PE teacher) doesn’t seem to know anything about what happened in the castle.
The next day, Ryuji wants to go back to the castle to investigate for some reason, even though he’d barely escaped with his life the day before. This time, they meet a talking cat named Morgana, who explains the Metaverse, which is…I’m going to try to summarize, since it can get pretty convoluted. Here’s what you need to know:
- The Metaverse is a formless realm composed of the collective unconsciousness.
- If someone with very distorted desires exists, that person manifests a Palace within the Metaverse. Kamoshitter the PE teacher wants people to worship him – in particular, he wants the female students at school to worship him sexually. As such, he thinks of himself as the king of Shujin; therefore, a location in the Metaverse manifests, centered around a Metaverse Shujin warped into a castle ruled by Shadow Kamoshitter.
- That mysterious app I mentioned earlier is called the MetaNav, which can transport users into the Palace. Since the Metaverse is generally formless, one can only enter it in the specific case of a Palace (where there’s a tangible location to travel to).
- Since the Metaverse is a cognitive world, that’s where people can summon Personas and understand Morgana when he talks. As a side note: once you hear Morgana talk in the Metaverse, you’ll be able to understand him in the real world, since your brain has registered that he can talk from hearing him in the Metaverse. This is an example of cognition changing one’s perception of reality, a key concept in this game and one actually rooted in real life.
- A Palace extends beyond the central, warped location, but usually, only that location looks distorted. Since Kamoshitter only thinks of himself as the king of Shujin and doesn’t really care about anything outside the school, everywhere around the school looks completely normal. So on that first day, Ren’s app transported him and Ryuji into the Metaverse, but they weren’t near Shujin, so everything looked exactly the same. Only once they got to Shujin did they realize something was off, since they saw Kamoshitter’s castle where the school should’ve been.
- To exit the Metaverse, one simply passes the point of entry. The duo returned to the real world after they escaped the castle because they ran past the location where the MetaNav first sent them into the Metaverse.
Morgana further explains that Shadows are unrecognized/unaccepted parts of a person, so a person in the real world doesn’t know what happens with his Shadow. In this case, Kamoshitter in the real world has no idea what happens with Shadow Kamoshitter in the castle. This explanation kind of flies in the face of its source material, though. Shadows are repressed parts of people, but Kamoshitter the PE teacher is an egocentric sexual predator, so if he were to meet his Shadow, who is…a more overt egocentric sexual predator, he’d have no trouble accepting it as who he is.
Anyway, over the next few days, Ryuji determines from the castle that Kamoshitter is physically and sexually abusing students. He attempts to take pictures of evidence in the castle, but discovers cameras do not work in the Metaverse. He attempts to gather evidence in reality to take Kamoshitter down, but Kamoshitter in reality has too much sway at Shujin and the faculty is actively covering for him (especially Principal Fisk, because Fisk cares about reputation and nothing else). Morgana then explains that the core of a Palace is a Treasure, which is the manifestation of the distorted desire I mentioned. As such, stealing the Treasure would remove the desires from the person, destroying his Palace and leaving him with nothing except his conscience. At that point, he’d become so guilty over his actions he’d confess and ask to be punished for his crimes.
Ryuji and Ren angst over whether it’s morally okay to mess with someone’s subconscious like that, especially since Morgana surmises there’s a chance that removing a person’s desires would cause a mental shutdown, kind of like that train conductor earlier. But then, a girl named Shiho Suzui attempts to kill herself after Kamoshitter rapes her. Her best friend, Ann Takamaki, approaches the two, and they have no more compunction in joining forces to steal Kamoshitter’s Treasure, since there’s no way to stop him in reality and he’s obviously an active threat to the students’ lives.
The four then pull off their first heist, which comprises these steps:
- Infiltrate the Palace and locate the Treasure.
- Treasures are desires, and desires don’t usually have a physical form. To make the Treasure take a physical form, the team sends a calling card to the target in reality informing him that (1) his Treasure exists and (2) it’s going to be stolen. The target’s cognition then changes to recognize his desires as having some physical form.
- The team goes in and takes the now physically manifested Treasure.
At this particular Treasure, Shadow Kamoshitter attempts to annoy me to death via incessant dialogue, but I persevered and he surrenders pathetically. Ann spares him to ensure he spends the rest of his life groveling under the weight of his crimes because, as Ann says later, she wishes to inflict upon him a fate worse than death. Yeah, never make Ann angry.
…the first arc of this game is dark as hell. It…kind of gets better? Kind of?
Phan-notes: Ryuji Sakamoto/Skull
Ryuji “For Real” Sakamoto wields the Imprisoned Mjolnir, which is a spiked mace (???) that ups Electric damage; and the Megido Blaster, which inflicts Burn (and does Gun damage, not Almighty damage as its name would suggest – I guess that’d be too overpowered). He wears Lucky Underwear, which gives +50 HP (yes, really). He and everyone else in the party except Ren have the Orichalcum R, an accessory which gives Evade Physical and +7 to all stats. Mr. For Real is what you’d get if you fused Yosuke with Kanji from Persona 4. He’s Ren’s first friend at Shujin and fills the “best bro” trope. Because of Kamoshitter, he’s also a delinquent with classic blond-dyed hair. In battle, he has Electric spells, but actually specializes in Physical attacks given his low Magic stat and SP. Yup. Yosuke and Kanji, full stop.
Ryuji’s heart is in the right place – he’s angry at adults who get away with doing whatever they want, such as Kamoshitter using his position to abuse the students at Shujin. He experienced this first-hand, in fact, since he was the star of the school’s track team before Kamoshitter arrived, and Kamoshitter purposely broke his leg and disbanded the track team so they wouldn’t take away any of the spotlight that he wanted for himself. Ryuji’s also constantly yelling, something that irritates everyone, myself included, since secrecy should be super high on the list for people who’re essentially masked vigilantes. This’ll come up later.
Lore corner: William Kidd was “a world-renowned pirate. For years after his death, songs and legends of his life inspired many to chase rumors of his buried treasure across the seas.” I guess this is where the trope regarding a pirate’s hidden treasure comes from, though from what I can tell, Kidd didn’t do a lot of actual pirating, so…wouldn’t he not have had much treasure to bury?
Phan-notes: Morgana/Mona
Ryuji’s heart is in the right place – he’s angry at adults who get away with doing whatever they want, such as Kamoshitter using his position to abuse the students at Shujin. He experienced this first-hand, in fact, since he was the star of the school’s track team before Kamoshitter arrived, and Kamoshitter purposely broke his leg and disbanded the track team so they wouldn’t take away any of the spotlight that he wanted for himself. Ryuji’s also constantly yelling, something that irritates everyone, myself included, since secrecy should be super high on the list for people who’re essentially masked vigilantes. This’ll come up later.
Lore corner: William Kidd was “a world-renowned pirate. For years after his death, songs and legends of his life inspired many to chase rumors of his buried treasure across the seas.” I guess this is where the trope regarding a pirate’s hidden treasure comes from, though from what I can tell, Kidd didn’t do a lot of actual pirating, so…wouldn’t he not have had much treasure to bury?
Phan-notes: Morgana/Mona
Though Morgana’s this game’s version of Teddie from Persona 4, he’s less annoying here. That said, he constantly demeans Ryuji for little-to-no reason and that got really irritating really fast. This…will come up later. Morgana has the Claiomh Solais R (+50 SP) and the Sudarshana EX (inflicts Dizzy), which is I guess a legendary slingshot? That’s a first. Anyway, he wears the Dragon Scale Scarf, his best armor that reduces Physical damage.
Morgana claims he’s a human, but he transformed into a cat because the Metaverse got distorted. He also has amnesia, so he doesn’t necessarily know this for sure, since he can’t remember his past. Morgana believes he will regain his memories and his true, human form if he explores Mementos, which is a randomly generated multi-floor dungeon beneath Tokyo’s subway system filled with the general public’s Shadows. Mementos itself represents the general public’s unconsciousness – Morgana describes it as “everyone’s Palace.” Accordingly, at times, the group will receive requests to go into Mementos to deal with more minor targets’ Shadows. From a gameplay perspective, it’s like Tartarus from Persona 3, just smaller and underground.
Oh, by the way, Morgana can transform into a car in the Metaverse and does so whenever the group traverses Mementos. Yeah, sure, why not.
Lore corner: Diego de la Vega is the “true name of California’s masked swordsman of justice, who fought corrupt officials during the era of Spanish rule. Despite being marked as a thief, he fought for the weak as a true gentleman.” This is talking about Zorro, Morgana’s first Persona, by the way.
Phan-notes: Ann Takamaki/Panther
Morgana claims he’s a human, but he transformed into a cat because the Metaverse got distorted. He also has amnesia, so he doesn’t necessarily know this for sure, since he can’t remember his past. Morgana believes he will regain his memories and his true, human form if he explores Mementos, which is a randomly generated multi-floor dungeon beneath Tokyo’s subway system filled with the general public’s Shadows. Mementos itself represents the general public’s unconsciousness – Morgana describes it as “everyone’s Palace.” Accordingly, at times, the group will receive requests to go into Mementos to deal with more minor targets’ Shadows. From a gameplay perspective, it’s like Tartarus from Persona 3, just smaller and underground.
Oh, by the way, Morgana can transform into a car in the Metaverse and does so whenever the group traverses Mementos. Yeah, sure, why not.
Lore corner: Diego de la Vega is the “true name of California’s masked swordsman of justice, who fought corrupt officials during the era of Spanish rule. Despite being marked as a thief, he fought for the weak as a true gentleman.” This is talking about Zorro, Morgana’s first Persona, by the way.
Phan-notes: Ann Takamaki/Panther
The beautiful Ann Takamaki uses the Dainaraka Whip, which makes the enemy hard (as ice); and the Gungnir, which is a machine gun (???) that gifts the enemy with despair. She wears the Lovely Witch’s Robe, which increases her Magic.
Ann initially comes across as the popular alpha beautiful girl trope, except she’s exactly the opposite. People avoid her precisely because she’s beautiful with the exception of her best friend Shiho and, unfortunately, Kamoshitter. She may also give off blonde airhead vibes, except she’s exactly the opposite of that too, since she can see through bullshit like a sniper round piercing through flesh.
In battle, she follows the Yukiko Amagi School of Hah You Better Have Burn Heal (hint: the enemies do not, in fact, have Burn Heal). She’s also the first party member to choose her own codename – Panther, at which point Morgana demonstrates his lack of knowledge of slang:
Ann initially comes across as the popular alpha beautiful girl trope, except she’s exactly the opposite. People avoid her precisely because she’s beautiful with the exception of her best friend Shiho and, unfortunately, Kamoshitter. She may also give off blonde airhead vibes, except she’s exactly the opposite of that too, since she can see through bullshit like a sniper round piercing through flesh.
In battle, she follows the Yukiko Amagi School of Hah You Better Have Burn Heal (hint: the enemies do not, in fact, have Burn Heal). She’s also the first party member to choose her own codename – Panther, at which point Morgana demonstrates his lack of knowledge of slang:
Lore corner: Célestine Galli-Marié was a “beautiful actress who performed as Carmen in the opera named for the role. So tempestuous and outspoken was she that it’s said the main role was rewritten to better suit her.” So…Ann’s ultimate Persona’s a prima donna who played the role of a woman who spent her time seducing multiple guys to further her own ends. That doesn’t fit Ann at all. I will say, though: Célestine’s design’s 100% on-point.
May
Kamoshitter in reality gets up on stage at Shujin during an assembly and confesses everything, demonstrating the change of heart worked. From here, the group learns that not killing a person’s Shadow will spare him from a mental shutdown, while taking the Treasure removes the desires as planned. Initially, the group just wants to celebrate a successful heist, but then Ryuji and Ren run into a stuck-up bald asshole and Ryuji determines that the world is full of shitty adults who believe themselves above the law since they’re in positions of power. The four decide to continue being Phantom Thieves – they will find people like Kamoshitter and use their powers to make them confess.
The game asks you to name the group:
May
Kamoshitter in reality gets up on stage at Shujin during an assembly and confesses everything, demonstrating the change of heart worked. From here, the group learns that not killing a person’s Shadow will spare him from a mental shutdown, while taking the Treasure removes the desires as planned. Initially, the group just wants to celebrate a successful heist, but then Ryuji and Ren run into a stuck-up bald asshole and Ryuji determines that the world is full of shitty adults who believe themselves above the law since they’re in positions of power. The four decide to continue being Phantom Thieves – they will find people like Kamoshitter and use their powers to make them confess.
The game asks you to name the group:
Okay, so the canonical name is “the Phantom Thieves of Hearts” and this name is voice-acted throughout the game. But, as readers versed in math will realize, that name is way the hell longer than the 12-character limit the game gives you. You literally cannot enter the canonical name of the group.
…Anyway, DEEZ NUTS get to know one another better and Ann takes her first steps toward a future career as a Pokémon Professor:
…Anyway, DEEZ NUTS get to know one another better and Ann takes her first steps toward a future career as a Pokémon Professor:
The group searches for a second target and eventually learns of a famous artist named Ichiryusai Madarame. He takes in children, steals their artwork to present as his own, and uses his influence to blacklist them when/if they attempt to complain. He’s left with one pupil, a guy named Yusuke Kitagawa, and the group goes to ask him about it. Yusuke decides to protect Madarame instead and begins, as we’ll see, a new tradition: blackmailing the Phantom Thieves!
Yusuke wants to paint Ann nude and says that if she doesn’t agree, he’ll report them to the police for breaking into Madarame’s house. Yusuke does eventually come around when the group inadvertently drags him into the Metaverse, where he sees Madarame’s Palace for himself. Shadow Madarame also reveals his…true colors…
( . _ .)
( . _ .)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
YEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!
Ahem. In particular, his most famous painting, the Sayuri, was actually the work of Yusuke’s mother. Madarame came across her having a seizure and he let her die so he could present the painting as his own, which kickstarted his fame. He also raised Yusuke just to keep him in the dark regarding his mother, but then realized he could steal Yusuke’s work (Yusuke, being a little child, thought this was normal), which gave him the idea of taking in other children to plagiarize with little chance of retaliation. Yusuke awakens to his Persona, now having seen the truth, and joins DEEZ NUTS to defeat Shadow Madarame and to steal his Treasure.
DEEZ NOTES: Yusuke Kitagawa/Fox
Yusuke wants to paint Ann nude and says that if she doesn’t agree, he’ll report them to the police for breaking into Madarame’s house. Yusuke does eventually come around when the group inadvertently drags him into the Metaverse, where he sees Madarame’s Palace for himself. Shadow Madarame also reveals his…true colors…
( . _ .)
( . _ .)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
YEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!
Ahem. In particular, his most famous painting, the Sayuri, was actually the work of Yusuke’s mother. Madarame came across her having a seizure and he let her die so he could present the painting as his own, which kickstarted his fame. He also raised Yusuke just to keep him in the dark regarding his mother, but then realized he could steal Yusuke’s work (Yusuke, being a little child, thought this was normal), which gave him the idea of taking in other children to plagiarize with little chance of retaliation. Yusuke awakens to his Persona, now having seen the truth, and joins DEEZ NUTS to defeat Shadow Madarame and to steal his Treasure.
DEEZ NOTES: Yusuke Kitagawa/Fox
Yusuke wields the Usumidori R, which inflicts Fear; and the Providence, which gives him more Agility. He wears Death’s Black Tights (okay…), which give him more Magic.
Yusuke’s one of those eccentric artist types par excellence. He doesn’t really understand social norms, which is why he doesn’t see anything wrong with asking Ann (a stranger) to model nude for him. He later unilaterally decides he wants to move into Ann’s house and buys sweets as a gift, then proceeds to become absolutely taken aback when she tells him no. Oh, and about those sweets – he constantly spends money to pursue art without saving enough for basic necessities, which gets irritating because the game doesn’t let me give him some of the NINE MILLION YEN I accrued so he can buy food. Seriously, Yusuke, just…take it. I hate hitting caps in games. It hurts my soul.
Anyway, I initially really disliked Yusuke because his first impression was to blackmail Ann into posing nude so he can paint a portrait of her. And well, the group does seem to forget about it, so I guess I can assume he apologized to Ann off-camera. Yusuke kind of grew on me, anyway – there’s a sequence later where a hacker group called Medjed challenges the Phantom Thieves and Yusuke presents some detailed research he did on Medjed, except he’d researched the Egyptian god rather than the hacker group, much to everyone’s dismay. In battle, Yusuke’s…he’s Chie from Persona 4. Look, I don’t really like comparing every character here to someone in Persona 4, but Yusuke has ice spells that he doesn’t use often because he’s way better suited to physical damage, his follow-up attack one-shots any regular enemy, and his special skill, Hyakka Ryouran, does the same thing as does Chie’s Dragon Hustle.
Lore corner: Gorokichi is the “childhood nickname of Goemon Ishikawa. During his youth, he was raised among the Iga-ryu ninjas before he set off on his own to become a rogue ninja.” Goemon’s a folk hero in Japan, kind of like Robin Hood in the West. He also died by being boiled alive after a failed assassination attempt, which led to some form of traditional Japanese bath being named after him. WTF?
June
Madarame holds a press conference in which he confesses, sobbing profusely the entire time (lol). The team begins thinking about a next target, but before they can do so, the team (bar Yusuke, who attends a different school) goes to a TV station as a school field trip. There, they learn incredible secrets of the station’s inner workings, such as how editing is done in a place called the editing room.
Ren and co. discuss where to go after the super-informative presentation and Morgana suggests they visit a pancake-looking place nearby. A guy who introduces himself as Goro Akechi then approaches the team, having overheard Morgana, and asks about pancakes, which I guess he’s a fan of? I mean, I don’t really blame him – I’m in the mood for some pancakes myself right now.
The game actually introduced Akechi earlier – he’s called “pleasant boy,” which I initially misread as “peasant boy,” neither of which are accurate. See, Akechi’s known as the Second Detective Prince – the first being, of course, Naoto Shirogane from Persona 4. Akechi believes those mental shutdown incidents aren’t simply strange medical occurrences and is investigating them, along with psychotic breakdown incidents, where rather than shutting down, the afflicted sort of lose their minds for a bit and commit crimes such as posing nude in the kitchen of a fast-food joint (yes, really). Akechi’s success in these cases earned him his moniker, and he appears on TV frequently as a celebrity.
Akechi expresses his opinion on air that the Phantom Thieves should be tried in court, since they’re breaking the law by changing people’s hearts. I’m no expert on law, Japanese or otherwise, but…what would the team be charged with? Stealing “desires” isn’t a crime and neither is breaking into a metaphysical building. The Phantom Thieves’ actions basically just make someone feel really guilty about his crimes, which…is there a law against rousing someone’s conscience?
Anyway, the people running the talk show poll the audience and happen to pick on Ren, who expresses his opinion on air that the Phantom Thieves are at least doing more compared to the police or other authority figures. Ren’s directness impresses Akechi, and he approaches Ren afterward to strike up a friendship. We’ll come back to Akechi later.
Afterward, Principal Fisk orders Shujin’s Student Council President Makoto Niijima – this is Sae’s younger sister – to investigate the Phantom Thieves, which…honestly makes no sense. With Kamoshitter, an outside observer may assume the Phantom Thieves are in Shujin – he was the PE teacher at Shujin – but then Madarame confesses, and Madarame has literally nothing to do with Shujin, so one would logically deduce the Phantom Thieves operate outside Shujin/on some scale bigger than just Shujin. It so happens that 3/5 of the Phantom Thieves at this point do, in fact, go to Shujin, but there’s no way for Fisk to know that. Why did Fisk ask the Shujin Student Council President to investigate a secret group of vigilantes who, to his knowledge, may have nothing at all to do with Shujin?
Anyway, to Makoto’s credit, she has protagonist-radar and instantly zeroes in on Ren, Ryuji, and Ann. She begins stalking Ren in a hilariously obvious manner – she’ll literally follow him all over the city except when he goes home, since I guess she draws the line at actually stalking his house. The three are hanging out in the courtyard at school when the loud Ryuji loudly declares, in a loud voice, how they’re the Phantom Thieves, and Makoto is there to record him on her phone, because Ryuji is a loud idiot. Makoto then continues the tradition of blackmail that Yusuke began – she will go to the authorities unless the Phantom Thieves change the heart of a target she specifies. That target? A mob boss.
Okay, which mob boss? Makoto has no idea. Why that mob boss? Because his goons have been targeting and blackmailing Shujin students. Why would changing the heart of one mob boss stop the entire mob? Because…Makoto hopes it will, I guess. The game then drags its feet for the longest-ass time while the group fumbles around trying to figure out what exactly the mob’s been doing, who their boss is, and how to get into his Palace – a flying bank – after they finally discover his name (it’s Kaneshiro). Makoto decides to confront Kaneshitto by herself in the real world, but that ends about as well as you’d expect, and the team finds themselves under blackmail unless they pay him ¥3 million. Makoto’s stunt, though idiotic, does make Kaneshitto’s Palace extend a path down to allow Makoto access, since Shadow Kaneshitto now sees her as his “customer,” which allows the Phantom Thieves to enter because they just follow Makoto in. He declares he’ll make Sae his sex slave and advises Makoto to prostitute herself to earn the ¥3 million that he wants. Makoto…doesn’t take this well, and she awakens her Persona in an explosion of terrifying rage. Hot.
DEEZ NOTES: Makoto Niijima/Queen
Yusuke’s one of those eccentric artist types par excellence. He doesn’t really understand social norms, which is why he doesn’t see anything wrong with asking Ann (a stranger) to model nude for him. He later unilaterally decides he wants to move into Ann’s house and buys sweets as a gift, then proceeds to become absolutely taken aback when she tells him no. Oh, and about those sweets – he constantly spends money to pursue art without saving enough for basic necessities, which gets irritating because the game doesn’t let me give him some of the NINE MILLION YEN I accrued so he can buy food. Seriously, Yusuke, just…take it. I hate hitting caps in games. It hurts my soul.
Anyway, I initially really disliked Yusuke because his first impression was to blackmail Ann into posing nude so he can paint a portrait of her. And well, the group does seem to forget about it, so I guess I can assume he apologized to Ann off-camera. Yusuke kind of grew on me, anyway – there’s a sequence later where a hacker group called Medjed challenges the Phantom Thieves and Yusuke presents some detailed research he did on Medjed, except he’d researched the Egyptian god rather than the hacker group, much to everyone’s dismay. In battle, Yusuke’s…he’s Chie from Persona 4. Look, I don’t really like comparing every character here to someone in Persona 4, but Yusuke has ice spells that he doesn’t use often because he’s way better suited to physical damage, his follow-up attack one-shots any regular enemy, and his special skill, Hyakka Ryouran, does the same thing as does Chie’s Dragon Hustle.
Lore corner: Gorokichi is the “childhood nickname of Goemon Ishikawa. During his youth, he was raised among the Iga-ryu ninjas before he set off on his own to become a rogue ninja.” Goemon’s a folk hero in Japan, kind of like Robin Hood in the West. He also died by being boiled alive after a failed assassination attempt, which led to some form of traditional Japanese bath being named after him. WTF?
June
Madarame holds a press conference in which he confesses, sobbing profusely the entire time (lol). The team begins thinking about a next target, but before they can do so, the team (bar Yusuke, who attends a different school) goes to a TV station as a school field trip. There, they learn incredible secrets of the station’s inner workings, such as how editing is done in a place called the editing room.
Ren and co. discuss where to go after the super-informative presentation and Morgana suggests they visit a pancake-looking place nearby. A guy who introduces himself as Goro Akechi then approaches the team, having overheard Morgana, and asks about pancakes, which I guess he’s a fan of? I mean, I don’t really blame him – I’m in the mood for some pancakes myself right now.
The game actually introduced Akechi earlier – he’s called “pleasant boy,” which I initially misread as “peasant boy,” neither of which are accurate. See, Akechi’s known as the Second Detective Prince – the first being, of course, Naoto Shirogane from Persona 4. Akechi believes those mental shutdown incidents aren’t simply strange medical occurrences and is investigating them, along with psychotic breakdown incidents, where rather than shutting down, the afflicted sort of lose their minds for a bit and commit crimes such as posing nude in the kitchen of a fast-food joint (yes, really). Akechi’s success in these cases earned him his moniker, and he appears on TV frequently as a celebrity.
Akechi expresses his opinion on air that the Phantom Thieves should be tried in court, since they’re breaking the law by changing people’s hearts. I’m no expert on law, Japanese or otherwise, but…what would the team be charged with? Stealing “desires” isn’t a crime and neither is breaking into a metaphysical building. The Phantom Thieves’ actions basically just make someone feel really guilty about his crimes, which…is there a law against rousing someone’s conscience?
Anyway, the people running the talk show poll the audience and happen to pick on Ren, who expresses his opinion on air that the Phantom Thieves are at least doing more compared to the police or other authority figures. Ren’s directness impresses Akechi, and he approaches Ren afterward to strike up a friendship. We’ll come back to Akechi later.
Afterward, Principal Fisk orders Shujin’s Student Council President Makoto Niijima – this is Sae’s younger sister – to investigate the Phantom Thieves, which…honestly makes no sense. With Kamoshitter, an outside observer may assume the Phantom Thieves are in Shujin – he was the PE teacher at Shujin – but then Madarame confesses, and Madarame has literally nothing to do with Shujin, so one would logically deduce the Phantom Thieves operate outside Shujin/on some scale bigger than just Shujin. It so happens that 3/5 of the Phantom Thieves at this point do, in fact, go to Shujin, but there’s no way for Fisk to know that. Why did Fisk ask the Shujin Student Council President to investigate a secret group of vigilantes who, to his knowledge, may have nothing at all to do with Shujin?
Anyway, to Makoto’s credit, she has protagonist-radar and instantly zeroes in on Ren, Ryuji, and Ann. She begins stalking Ren in a hilariously obvious manner – she’ll literally follow him all over the city except when he goes home, since I guess she draws the line at actually stalking his house. The three are hanging out in the courtyard at school when the loud Ryuji loudly declares, in a loud voice, how they’re the Phantom Thieves, and Makoto is there to record him on her phone, because Ryuji is a loud idiot. Makoto then continues the tradition of blackmail that Yusuke began – she will go to the authorities unless the Phantom Thieves change the heart of a target she specifies. That target? A mob boss.
Okay, which mob boss? Makoto has no idea. Why that mob boss? Because his goons have been targeting and blackmailing Shujin students. Why would changing the heart of one mob boss stop the entire mob? Because…Makoto hopes it will, I guess. The game then drags its feet for the longest-ass time while the group fumbles around trying to figure out what exactly the mob’s been doing, who their boss is, and how to get into his Palace – a flying bank – after they finally discover his name (it’s Kaneshiro). Makoto decides to confront Kaneshitto by herself in the real world, but that ends about as well as you’d expect, and the team finds themselves under blackmail unless they pay him ¥3 million. Makoto’s stunt, though idiotic, does make Kaneshitto’s Palace extend a path down to allow Makoto access, since Shadow Kaneshitto now sees her as his “customer,” which allows the Phantom Thieves to enter because they just follow Makoto in. He declares he’ll make Sae his sex slave and advises Makoto to prostitute herself to earn the ¥3 million that he wants. Makoto…doesn’t take this well, and she awakens her Persona in an explosion of terrifying rage. Hot.
DEEZ NOTES: Makoto Niijima/Queen
Makoto is one of the most powerful members of the team due to her well-rounded moveset and her Judge End, a gun that gives her a whopping +11 to all stats. Her Checkmate is Debilitate on the entire enemy party, which is kind of insane (though, to be fair, the only times I use Debilitate is in boss fights when there’s generally only one target). She fights with martial arts, something she got from her sister, as Sae once kicked a mugger in the face so hard she broke the high heel on her shoe (hot). Makoto’s Gordios knuckles increase her critical rate and she wears the Sinful Bikini (lol), which gives her more SP. On the topic of SP – Makoto can actually learn Atomic Flare, the strongest Nuclear single-target spell, but Atomic Flare’s SP cost is way too high for the modest increase in damage when compared to the next strongest Nuclear single-target spell Freidyne. I kept Blazing Hell on Ann because Ann’s trait can halve SP costs, but it’s just not worth it for Makoto. Nobody in the Phantom Thieves has Yukiko’s SP pool either, so they’re not really equipped to sling around expensive spells.
Makoto also instills the fear in the team with sheer, unbridled dominance. She asks for opinions on a codename and I suggest “Prez”…
Makoto also instills the fear in the team with sheer, unbridled dominance. She asks for opinions on a codename and I suggest “Prez”…
Morgana and Ryuji rapidly decide she’s the Queen of the group and fall in line.
Lore corner: Agnes is “another name for Johanna, the female pope of the Middle Ages. Posing as a man, her wits and ability helped her climb the ranks. Her story shook the Catholic church to its core.” Look, if a female motorbike can fool people into thinking she’s a human male, I think we should listen to what that motorbike has to say. That’s not a feat any regular motorbike can pull off, you know.
July
A bit after the team takes Kaneshitto’s Treasure, Makoto informs the team that Kaneshitto turned himself in and confessed – remember, her sister’s a prosecutor, so she’d hear about this stuff. At this point, the team’s achieved its third consecutive victory, and people around the city begin taking note of the Phantom Thieves’ accomplishments. In fact, DEEZ NUTS begin getting a fan following.
And here’s where the plot becomes somewhat complicated, so bear with me. First of all, remember Medjed? They threaten to perform some nondescript cyberterrorism to destroy Japan’s economy unless the Phantom Thieves unmask themselves and turn themselves in. Since Medjed is (1) anonymous and (2) composed of multiple people, the Phantom Thieves have no way of retaliating, as all their prior exploits involved individuals whose identity and Palace they’d determined.
Someone by the name of Alibaba contacts Ren. Alibaba offers to help the Phantom Thieves with Medjed if they change the heart of someone named Futaba Sakura. Without going into the long-ass, padded-as-all-hell sequence of events that follows, Alibaba is actually Futaba herself. Futaba is Sojiro’s adoptive daughter who suffers from extreme agoraphobia. You see, ~2 years ago, her mother Wakaba was studying the Metaverse when she seemingly committed suicide by jumping into traffic. Some goons appeared and read her mother’s suicide note, which lamented that she was tired of taking care of Futaba and so killed herself. This, as you may imagine, traumatized the complete hell out of her, and she shut herself in her room and refused to talk with anyone other than Sojiro. Futaba believes she caused her mother’s death and thus has a death wish, so she wants the Phantom Thieves to help her.
Now if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll note this means Futaba determined the identities of all of the Phantom Thieves without ever leaving her house. This is because Futaba is cosmically talented with technology and she routinely hacks into the team’s chats to talk with them. Her messages generally revolve around – you guessed it – blackmailing the Phantom Thieves, because she can easily send their chat logs to the police.
After the long, long stretch of the game not letting me do jack except watch meandering cutscenes showing the team struggling to figure out what to do regarding Futaba, the team gets inside Futaba’s house to try to talk to her. Ryuji activates the MetaNav inside, sending the team to a gigantic desert:
Lore corner: Agnes is “another name for Johanna, the female pope of the Middle Ages. Posing as a man, her wits and ability helped her climb the ranks. Her story shook the Catholic church to its core.” Look, if a female motorbike can fool people into thinking she’s a human male, I think we should listen to what that motorbike has to say. That’s not a feat any regular motorbike can pull off, you know.
July
A bit after the team takes Kaneshitto’s Treasure, Makoto informs the team that Kaneshitto turned himself in and confessed – remember, her sister’s a prosecutor, so she’d hear about this stuff. At this point, the team’s achieved its third consecutive victory, and people around the city begin taking note of the Phantom Thieves’ accomplishments. In fact, DEEZ NUTS begin getting a fan following.
And here’s where the plot becomes somewhat complicated, so bear with me. First of all, remember Medjed? They threaten to perform some nondescript cyberterrorism to destroy Japan’s economy unless the Phantom Thieves unmask themselves and turn themselves in. Since Medjed is (1) anonymous and (2) composed of multiple people, the Phantom Thieves have no way of retaliating, as all their prior exploits involved individuals whose identity and Palace they’d determined.
Someone by the name of Alibaba contacts Ren. Alibaba offers to help the Phantom Thieves with Medjed if they change the heart of someone named Futaba Sakura. Without going into the long-ass, padded-as-all-hell sequence of events that follows, Alibaba is actually Futaba herself. Futaba is Sojiro’s adoptive daughter who suffers from extreme agoraphobia. You see, ~2 years ago, her mother Wakaba was studying the Metaverse when she seemingly committed suicide by jumping into traffic. Some goons appeared and read her mother’s suicide note, which lamented that she was tired of taking care of Futaba and so killed herself. This, as you may imagine, traumatized the complete hell out of her, and she shut herself in her room and refused to talk with anyone other than Sojiro. Futaba believes she caused her mother’s death and thus has a death wish, so she wants the Phantom Thieves to help her.
Now if you’ve been paying attention, you’ll note this means Futaba determined the identities of all of the Phantom Thieves without ever leaving her house. This is because Futaba is cosmically talented with technology and she routinely hacks into the team’s chats to talk with them. Her messages generally revolve around – you guessed it – blackmailing the Phantom Thieves, because she can easily send their chat logs to the police.
After the long, long stretch of the game not letting me do jack except watch meandering cutscenes showing the team struggling to figure out what to do regarding Futaba, the team gets inside Futaba’s house to try to talk to her. Ryuji activates the MetaNav inside, sending the team to a gigantic desert:
Yes, nobody has shoes on, because they were inside Futaba’s house and had taken their shoes off at the front door. The group notes how they’re in a desert because, unlike past targets, Futaba has very little knowledge of the outside world, so the area surrounding her Palace proper is an empty, desolate wasteland that bears little resemblance to the real-world city. The group travels by Morgana under the hot desert sun and everyone’s soon soaked with sweat, not that the guys seem to mind…
Ann inflicts some punishment upon the guys and they arrive at the center of Futaba’s Palace, a large Egyptian pyramid. There, they…hold on a second.
How did they get their shoes back?
Anyway, this is my favorite arc in the game. Futaba gains her Persona similar to how the Persona 4 cast do so, by accepting her Shadow. See, her Shadow realized there was something off with Wakaba’s suicide note (spoilers: it was 100% falsified and Wakaba didn’t actually commit suicide), but Futaba’s so traumatized she’s afraid to face the truth. Once she accepts her Shadow and resolves to join the Phantom Thieves to figure out what actually happened to her mother, she gains her Persona, becomes the team’s navigator, and casually leaves the Metaverse while her Palace disintegrates. Like a boss.
I do need to spend some time explaining the boss of Futaba’s Palace, since it’ll become important later. Most bosses in the game are Shadows. Futaba’s Palace is an exception; the team instead fights a cognitive being. As its name suggests, a cognitive being is how the Palace ruler thinks of someone. A great example was Kaneshitto’s Palace, which was full of walking ATMs, because Kaneshitto thought of people as just walking sources of money for him.
Since Futaba spent so long thinking she caused her mother’s death, her guilt created a Cognitive Wakaba that takes the form of a raging Sphinx that wants to kill her. That’s what the team fights at the end; Futaba’s gradual rejection of her guilt is what ultimately eliminates Cognitive Wakaba, since Futaba no longer sees her mother as a monster who hates her and remembers her mother as she truly was – a kind, caring woman who loved her daughter.
August
Immediately after the player clears Futaba’s Palace, likely sometime in late July, Futaba falls asleep until August 21. Yeah, sleeping for almost a month is normal, I guess. Now if you recall, this entire thing began with Medjed declaring war on the Phantom Thieves. On August 21, Futaba wakes up, hacks Medjed to smithereens with her computer, and then goes back to sleep. Like a boss. She’ll later reveal that she’d previously determined the Medjed that threatened the Phantom Thieves was a complete n00b who wouldn’t really have been able to do jack-all, so she was confident this entire time she’d be able to take care of the problem easily.
Okay, so let’s recap Futaba’s arc from Futaba’s perspective.
This entire arc thus boils down to Futaba holding the Phantom Thieves by the balls for a month while they panic over what she figured out long ago to be nothing. I honestly can’t even be mad at her for this…though I’m biased, because Futaba’s my favorite character in this game.
DEEZ NOTES: Futaba Sakura/Oracle
Anyway, this is my favorite arc in the game. Futaba gains her Persona similar to how the Persona 4 cast do so, by accepting her Shadow. See, her Shadow realized there was something off with Wakaba’s suicide note (spoilers: it was 100% falsified and Wakaba didn’t actually commit suicide), but Futaba’s so traumatized she’s afraid to face the truth. Once she accepts her Shadow and resolves to join the Phantom Thieves to figure out what actually happened to her mother, she gains her Persona, becomes the team’s navigator, and casually leaves the Metaverse while her Palace disintegrates. Like a boss.
I do need to spend some time explaining the boss of Futaba’s Palace, since it’ll become important later. Most bosses in the game are Shadows. Futaba’s Palace is an exception; the team instead fights a cognitive being. As its name suggests, a cognitive being is how the Palace ruler thinks of someone. A great example was Kaneshitto’s Palace, which was full of walking ATMs, because Kaneshitto thought of people as just walking sources of money for him.
Since Futaba spent so long thinking she caused her mother’s death, her guilt created a Cognitive Wakaba that takes the form of a raging Sphinx that wants to kill her. That’s what the team fights at the end; Futaba’s gradual rejection of her guilt is what ultimately eliminates Cognitive Wakaba, since Futaba no longer sees her mother as a monster who hates her and remembers her mother as she truly was – a kind, caring woman who loved her daughter.
August
Immediately after the player clears Futaba’s Palace, likely sometime in late July, Futaba falls asleep until August 21. Yeah, sleeping for almost a month is normal, I guess. Now if you recall, this entire thing began with Medjed declaring war on the Phantom Thieves. On August 21, Futaba wakes up, hacks Medjed to smithereens with her computer, and then goes back to sleep. Like a boss. She’ll later reveal that she’d previously determined the Medjed that threatened the Phantom Thieves was a complete n00b who wouldn’t really have been able to do jack-all, so she was confident this entire time she’d be able to take care of the problem easily.
Okay, so let’s recap Futaba’s arc from Futaba’s perspective.
- Medjed makes a public declaration that the Phantom Thieves must turn themselves in or they’ll cyber-bone Japan on August 21. Futaba looks into it and realizes Medjed is actually no threat.
- Futaba notes that the Phantom Thieves are stressing over Medjed, since they don’t know that, so she contacts Ren as Alibaba and offers to help take care of Medjed if the team helps Futaba. Oh, if they refuse, she’ll send their chat logs to the police.
- The team infiltrates Futaba’s Palace, where Shadow Futaba helps them but also trolls them with traps, such as giant rolling boulders, quicksand, and spike pits.
- Futaba gains the MetaNav, enters her Palace, accepts her Shadow, helps the Phantom Thieves defeat Cognitive Wakaba, and leaves while they frantically flee the collapsing Palace.
- Futaba goes to sleep for ~1 month while the Phantom Thieves panic, since the only person who could help them against Medjed is sleeping and they don’t know when she’ll wake up.
- On August 21, Futaba wakes up and, in the course of around five hours, hacks Medjed’s website, deletes all of their code, leaks information on the guy behind it, and replaces the website with the logo of DEEZ NUTS.
This entire arc thus boils down to Futaba holding the Phantom Thieves by the balls for a month while they panic over what she figured out long ago to be nothing. I honestly can’t even be mad at her for this…though I’m biased, because Futaba’s my favorite character in this game.
DEEZ NOTES: Futaba Sakura/Oracle
Like Fuuka and Rise before her, Futaba doesn’t fight but instead performs mission control. Accordingly, none of these three need stats, but they all have stats anyway for no reason and Futaba can actually equip items that boost her stats for equally no reason. Notably, Futaba has the highest Luck in the game bar Ren, a fact she’s somehow aware of:
Futaba also possesses skill in Pokémon training, as she apparently did not struggle with the first gym:
…though to be fair, given Futaba was born circa 2001, her first Pokémon game was probably Black/White, which came out in 2010. The first gym leader in Black/White is one of three – the game will choose the gym leader with the Pokémon that has a type advantage over your starter. But, you can also get one of the elemental monkeys Pansage, Pansear, or Panpour right before the gym, where the elemental monkey you get has a type advantage over whichever gym leader you’ll fight, meaning that battle will never be hard. Contrast this to people who chose Charmander and fought Brock, or who chose Chikorita and fought Falkner, or who chose Torchic and fought Roxanne, or…you get the idea. I…just realized I did literally all three of those.
Hold on – what was I talking about? Oh, right.
I went into the game intending to romance Futaba. But, well…Futaba reminds me of someone I know in real life to an uncanny degree. The constant sleepiness, the fact that she likes to take her shoes off, the loss of a mother, the nerdiness, the quirky upbeat energy, the awe-inspiring intelligence…they’re all traits this girl has. I also have intensely painful memories of her that still hurt immensely to this day. So…I didn’t romance Futaba, but she’s still my favorite character.
By the way, Futaba, like Makoto, asks for suggestions regarding her codename. The team suggests “Hacker,” “Mech,” “PC,” and “Goggles,” all of which she summarily vetoes. She apparently disapproved of my suggestion of “Pharaoh” in particular:
Hold on – what was I talking about? Oh, right.
I went into the game intending to romance Futaba. But, well…Futaba reminds me of someone I know in real life to an uncanny degree. The constant sleepiness, the fact that she likes to take her shoes off, the loss of a mother, the nerdiness, the quirky upbeat energy, the awe-inspiring intelligence…they’re all traits this girl has. I also have intensely painful memories of her that still hurt immensely to this day. So…I didn’t romance Futaba, but she’s still my favorite character.
By the way, Futaba, like Makoto, asks for suggestions regarding her codename. The team suggests “Hacker,” “Mech,” “PC,” and “Goggles,” all of which she summarily vetoes. She apparently disapproved of my suggestion of “Pharaoh” in particular:
Lore corner: Al Azif is the “original name of the Necronomicon, a tome full of the Cthulhu Mythos’s mysteries. Said to have been authored by Abdul Alhazred, a poet and devotee of Cthulhu known as the ‘mad Arab.’” That’s…strangely fitting for Futaba to pilot a spaceship fitted with bombs and named after a book of evil spells.
Anyway, the team spends some time helping Futaba out of her shell in scenes I really enjoyed, since they show the team just hanging out and being friends. Futaba reveals a bit more about her mother and her research – in particular, her mother wrote that killing a Shadow self will inflict a mental shutdown upon the person. Futaba realized that Wakaba had suffered a mental shutdown prior to her death – she’d basically collapsed into traffic (rather than jumped in, as the goons claimed). When Futaba tried to find more information concerning her mother’s work, she found it’d been completely deleted. From these revelations, the team deduces there’s some sort of conspiracy going on. Some organization used the Metaverse to kill Wakaba’s Shadow so they could take her research for themselves. That organization sent the goons with the fake suicide note. That organization continued to inflict mental shutdowns, such as with that train conductor at the beginning.
In an effort to gain more information, Futaba gives Makoto a USB stick that can copy data from a computer so she can steal data from Sae’s laptop, as Sae may have notes on the cases given her job.
September
Soon after summer ends, Shujin’s students take a school trip to Hawaii. Damn…how many high schools do you know take school trips to a well-known resort spot in a foreign country? It’s not just Shujin, since Yusuke’s school is taking a school trip to Los Angeles. The team chats about this…
Anyway, the team spends some time helping Futaba out of her shell in scenes I really enjoyed, since they show the team just hanging out and being friends. Futaba reveals a bit more about her mother and her research – in particular, her mother wrote that killing a Shadow self will inflict a mental shutdown upon the person. Futaba realized that Wakaba had suffered a mental shutdown prior to her death – she’d basically collapsed into traffic (rather than jumped in, as the goons claimed). When Futaba tried to find more information concerning her mother’s work, she found it’d been completely deleted. From these revelations, the team deduces there’s some sort of conspiracy going on. Some organization used the Metaverse to kill Wakaba’s Shadow so they could take her research for themselves. That organization sent the goons with the fake suicide note. That organization continued to inflict mental shutdowns, such as with that train conductor at the beginning.
In an effort to gain more information, Futaba gives Makoto a USB stick that can copy data from a computer so she can steal data from Sae’s laptop, as Sae may have notes on the cases given her job.
September
Soon after summer ends, Shujin’s students take a school trip to Hawaii. Damn…how many high schools do you know take school trips to a well-known resort spot in a foreign country? It’s not just Shujin, since Yusuke’s school is taking a school trip to Los Angeles. The team chats about this…
Impressive, Ryuji. Every word in that sentence was wrong.
I’m going to be honest here – I don’t understand the point of the Hawaii trip. I originally thought it was going to have scenes showing the characters bond and hang out, but…no, they just sort of walk around Hawaii and comment on how they’re just doing what they’d normally be doing back home:
I’m going to be honest here – I don’t understand the point of the Hawaii trip. I originally thought it was going to have scenes showing the characters bond and hang out, but…no, they just sort of walk around Hawaii and comment on how they’re just doing what they’d normally be doing back home:
Moreover, Yusuke ends up in Hawaii too, since a typhoon landed in LA and they just turned around and decided to go to Hawaii (is that how school trips even work?). They then discuss their next target. What was the point of traveling halfway across the biggest ocean on the planet just to show scenes like this?
So after that rather pointless trip, the team’s on the plane to go home when Principal Fisk (who’d stayed in Japan) decides to go to the police station. He’s crossing the street when he suffers a mental shutdown and gets run over by a truck, killing him instantly. Man, I kind of feel sorry for the guy. I mean he was a complete ass, but I don’t know that he deserved to die.
It’s around this time that the Phantom Thieves really gain a fan-following, mostly due to news of how Futaba wtfpwned Medjed. Scam artists even begin trying to capitalize on their success:
So after that rather pointless trip, the team’s on the plane to go home when Principal Fisk (who’d stayed in Japan) decides to go to the police station. He’s crossing the street when he suffers a mental shutdown and gets run over by a truck, killing him instantly. Man, I kind of feel sorry for the guy. I mean he was a complete ass, but I don’t know that he deserved to die.
It’s around this time that the Phantom Thieves really gain a fan-following, mostly due to news of how Futaba wtfpwned Medjed. Scam artists even begin trying to capitalize on their success:
Their fansite shows their support at ~80% and rising. It also opens a poll asking the public for a next target. In a strange turn of events, the public solidly votes up one person – Kunikazu Okumura, President of Okumura Foods, which operates a fast food chain. He’s under suspicion of underpaying and overworking his employees to death. From Sae’s data they jacked from her laptop, the team realizes that a lot of the psychotic breakdowns ended up helping Okumura. For instance, remember that guy who posed nude in a kitchen? That caused a scandal that discredited the fast food chain that guy worked at, which helped Okumura Foods crush another competitor. So not only is Okumura guilty of exploiting workers, but also he may be in that conspiracy behind the mental shutdowns.
Despite this, most of the team expresses hesitation, since the amount of public clamor seems unnaturally high. The hype surrounding the Phantom Thieves went from lukewarm to obsessive over the course of ~1 month and, well, since when does an online poll have such near-unanimous results? I would’ve expected a slight majority in favor of “Targety McTargetFace” rather than a landslide vote in favor of one rich corporation guy surrounded by rumors.
And here’s where the plot screeches to a halt so Morgana can have a temper tantrum. Ever since Futaba joined, Morgana’s struggled with feelings of inadequacy, since Futaba’s a far better navigator. I don’t get what his deal is, honestly – Morgana’s the only navigator in the series to do mission control while also fighting on the front lines. Mitsuru in Persona 3 doesn’t join the active party until Fuuka becomes the navigator and Teddie from Persona 4 doesn’t gain a Persona until Rise becomes the navigator, so Morgana already contributes beyond the role Futaba took over.
At any rate, Morgana’s so gung-ho about proving how useful he is that he wants to take down Okumura immediately. So, he leaves the team because they’re too hesitant. He also gets into a fight with Ryuji, who got fed up with Morgana constantly insulting him and fired back. It’s…irritatingly melodramatic and it absolutely derails the plot for a few days while the team tries to find Morgana. For all my complaining about Teddie in Persona 4, the arc where Teddie leaves the team temporarily has pathos and character development. This thing with Morgana is just…dumb.
Anyway, Morgana tries to assault Okumura’s Palace himself, but he soon gets wtfpwned by some robots, and a mysterious fluffy-haired girl saves him. The game pads out the mystery of who this is, except it’s rather obvious this girl is Haru Okumura, who is President Okumura’s daughter. The team meets up with Haru and Morgana in Mementos to try to get them to join/rejoin, but Morgana’s adamant and has Haru drive away in his car form. The team corners them after Haru drives into a dead end, but Haru responds by trying to run them over. Yeah, Haru never blackmails the Phantom Thieves, but makes up for it with attempted murder. Cool, I guess.
Haru and Morgana escape Mementos…and Haru’s fiancé shows up. Her father had previously arranged this marriage because he wants to go into politics and wants to marry his daughter off to benefit himself. Haru’s fiancé is a slimy piece of shit rapey guy, and wanting to get out of the marriage is Haru’s main reason for opposing her father. Here, the guy abuses Morgana (who’s just a regular cat outside the Metaverse) and calls Haru a slut before the rest of the team shows up to drive him off.
Back at Leblanc, the team finally makes up and they agree to take on Okumura’s Palace, if only for Haru’s sake. After a notoriously annoying boss fight, in which Shadow Okumura talks incessantly and summons adds while a real-time countdown ticks in the background, the team takes his Treasure and walks away as per usual.
Immediately after the team leaves, some guy shows up and kills Shadow Okumura with a silenced gun.
DEEZ NOTES: Haru Okumura/Noir
Despite this, most of the team expresses hesitation, since the amount of public clamor seems unnaturally high. The hype surrounding the Phantom Thieves went from lukewarm to obsessive over the course of ~1 month and, well, since when does an online poll have such near-unanimous results? I would’ve expected a slight majority in favor of “Targety McTargetFace” rather than a landslide vote in favor of one rich corporation guy surrounded by rumors.
And here’s where the plot screeches to a halt so Morgana can have a temper tantrum. Ever since Futaba joined, Morgana’s struggled with feelings of inadequacy, since Futaba’s a far better navigator. I don’t get what his deal is, honestly – Morgana’s the only navigator in the series to do mission control while also fighting on the front lines. Mitsuru in Persona 3 doesn’t join the active party until Fuuka becomes the navigator and Teddie from Persona 4 doesn’t gain a Persona until Rise becomes the navigator, so Morgana already contributes beyond the role Futaba took over.
At any rate, Morgana’s so gung-ho about proving how useful he is that he wants to take down Okumura immediately. So, he leaves the team because they’re too hesitant. He also gets into a fight with Ryuji, who got fed up with Morgana constantly insulting him and fired back. It’s…irritatingly melodramatic and it absolutely derails the plot for a few days while the team tries to find Morgana. For all my complaining about Teddie in Persona 4, the arc where Teddie leaves the team temporarily has pathos and character development. This thing with Morgana is just…dumb.
Anyway, Morgana tries to assault Okumura’s Palace himself, but he soon gets wtfpwned by some robots, and a mysterious fluffy-haired girl saves him. The game pads out the mystery of who this is, except it’s rather obvious this girl is Haru Okumura, who is President Okumura’s daughter. The team meets up with Haru and Morgana in Mementos to try to get them to join/rejoin, but Morgana’s adamant and has Haru drive away in his car form. The team corners them after Haru drives into a dead end, but Haru responds by trying to run them over. Yeah, Haru never blackmails the Phantom Thieves, but makes up for it with attempted murder. Cool, I guess.
Haru and Morgana escape Mementos…and Haru’s fiancé shows up. Her father had previously arranged this marriage because he wants to go into politics and wants to marry his daughter off to benefit himself. Haru’s fiancé is a slimy piece of shit rapey guy, and wanting to get out of the marriage is Haru’s main reason for opposing her father. Here, the guy abuses Morgana (who’s just a regular cat outside the Metaverse) and calls Haru a slut before the rest of the team shows up to drive him off.
Back at Leblanc, the team finally makes up and they agree to take on Okumura’s Palace, if only for Haru’s sake. After a notoriously annoying boss fight, in which Shadow Okumura talks incessantly and summons adds while a real-time countdown ticks in the background, the team takes his Treasure and walks away as per usual.
Immediately after the team leaves, some guy shows up and kills Shadow Okumura with a silenced gun.
DEEZ NOTES: Haru Okumura/Noir
Haru is one of my favorite characters in the game. She’s kind to a fault – as you can probably deduce from what I wrote directly above this section, Haru’s father dies, but she constantly asks the rest of the team how they’re holding up despite the fact that she’s the one grieving the loss of a family member. Haru also has hilariously sadistic tendencies and says she gets excited when her enemies beg for their lives. The fact that the dainty rich girl wields a giant axe (specifically, the Fleurs du Mal R, which translates to the Flowers of Evil R) and a grenade launcher (the Yagrush EX) really drives the point home. Haru wears the Golden Dress to beef up her Agility.
Haru specializes in Psy and Gun skills, making her a solid addition to any team composition. Most status ailments allow for Technical damage if hit with Psy skills, and Gun resistances are rarer compared to other damage types. Finally, Haru’s Life Wall is a reflective barrier on the entire party, which is insane.
Oh, by the way: the character pictures I’m showing usually come up after a party member initiates an All-Out Attack that finishes a fight. Most of them just pose stylishly, but Haru somehow spawns a table, chair, and tea to sip while her enemies die behind her. A++.
Lore corner: Lucy Hay was the “Countess of Carlisle, and the historical basis for Alexandre Dumas’s femme fatale, Milady de Winter. Known for her beauty and cunning, she was a courtier much favored by the Queen.” Unlike Milady de Winter, who’s a full-on villain in The Three Musketeers, Lucy Hay was a real person who was involved with lots of politics on many sides, so I’m…not sure what her deal was.
October
Early in the month, we see a scene of Sumi Yoshizawa stumbling into an unknown Palace. She then meets up with Ren and Morgana, who go in to save her and she awakens her Persona. I…hate the way the game handles Sumi. We meet her in May and her Social Link/Confidant opens, but then it locks halfway until mid-January when she joins the party. Note that the final playable day in the game is February 3. You only get to spend like half a month with this character. Just…why?
Sumi’s like Marie from Persona 4 Golden in that she’s the new character introduced in Royal. While Marie’s Social Link sees her meet and bond with the entire Investigation Team and then her story ties into the overarching plot, Sumi interacts with the team a grand total of one time before she joins. She’s thus a very minor presence until then, at which point the game crams her character arc into ~2 weeks.
…Anyway. Sumi’s a first-year at Shujin on an honors scholarship for gymnastics. Unfortunately, she’s been having somewhat of a slump and her body isn’t moving like it’s supposed to. The Vice Principal, who’s now Principal due to Fisk’s death, threatens to revoke her scholarship because third place isn’t good enough to bolster his image. Sumi’s at a construction site feeling depressed when the MetaNav appears on her phone and drags her into the Palace. A discerning player will realize the Palace belongs to Takuto Maruki, the school’s temporary guidance counselor, but the characters in-game decide to ignore the Palace after saving Sumi and the game forgets this entire sequence happened until January. We’ll get back to this in January, I guess.
Back to the main plot: President Okumura holds a press conference in which he confesses the terrible working conditions in his company, but halfway through the press conference, he dies violently from mental shutdown, an image broadcast live throughout Japan. People begin to assume the Phantom Thieves had actually killed him rather than just changed his heart. Moreover, they blame the Phantom Thieves for all the mental shutdowns that’ve been happening in the previous two years. And, well, as the team realizes too late, this was all on purpose. That Medjed thing from July was a guy in the conspiracy I alluded to; he co-opted the Medjed name and publicly threatened the Phantom Thieves so that when “Medjed lost,” the Phantom Thieves would gain massive popularity. This is why when Futaba looked into the matter in July, she realized the Medjed they were dealing with was actually no real threat. The conspiracy then hacked the fansite poll to push President Okumura as a target; this explains why the poll had such an unrealistically solid outcome. When the Phantom Thieves sent him a calling card, they sent their hitman to kill Shadow Okumura so he’d die from mental shutdown on live TV.
Now while this sounds smart, it opens up a plot hole. So consider: we know from Wakaba’s research that killing someone’s Shadow inflicts a mental shutdown. I would assume that the effect is instantaneous, which means when mysterious assassin guy killed Shadow Okumura, President Okumura in reality would’ve suffered the mental shutdown right away. Given the timeframe the game gives the player to complete Okumura’s Palace, this would’ve happened September 21 at the earliest and October 10 at the latest. The press conference happens 8:00 pm October 11, well after Shadow Okumura dies.
Let’s say I’m wrong and there’s some time lag between a Shadow dying and the person shutting down…except this doesn’t add up either. The conspiracy is using mental shutdowns to kill people. To do so, they need to time the mental shutdown very, very precisely. They needed to ensure Wakaba’s mental shutdown occurred right as she was standing near traffic. They needed to ensure Principal Fisk would shut down halfway across a street he was crossing when the traffic light changed. Here, they needed to ensure President Okumura died on-camera mid-sentence in an impromptu press conference he didn’t call until the morning of. There’s no way anyone could predict the timing of these events with such precision as to be able to count backwards some specific time in order to kill the Shadow.
Even beyond this, the conspiracy got really lucky that their stunt actually worked. They used the fansite poll to push President Okumura as the next target, but they’re not the ones running the site – one of Ren’s classmates, Mishima, runs it, and Mishima didn’t implement that poll until September. Had he not done so, the conspiracy would’ve had no way of pointing the team toward President Okumura. Unlike with Medjed, he’s far from an anonymous entity they could impersonate/commandeer.
Moreover, the vast majority of the team was smart enough to see that something was off about how solidly the public wanted them to target President Okumura. If Morgana hadn’t pulled his temper tantrum, the team might not have gone after him at all per an abundance of caution. When the team did end up infiltrating Okumura Palace, they did so to help Haru more than anything, and Haru’s arranged marriage wasn’t something the conspiracy set up. This all means the conspiracy’s plan only succeeded due to a bunch of events they had nothing to do with.
Anyway. Haru’s in shock and the Phantom Thieves struggle with how their latest mission went so wrong. To clear their name, they decide they need to find out who’s really behind the mental shutdowns. As they’re trying to figure out how to go about that, Shujin holds a Culture Festival and invites Akechi (remember him?) as a guest speaker. Akechi calls the group into an office and tells them he has photo/video evidence of them as the Phantom Thieves and he’ll arrest/expose them unless they cooperate with him, thereby reviving the tradition of blackmail that Haru broke.
Akechi informs the team that in the previous month, he got dragged into the Metaverse and encountered the masked killer who’d killed Shadow Okumura. But, as the killer prepared to kill him, he awakened to his Persona and it saved him. Akechi offers the team a deal – they’ll help him with a target, then disband. In turn, he’ll delete his evidence and catch/expose the killer.
Let’s stop here and think about this for a minute. Akechi shows photo evidence of the team materializing out of thin air outside Okumura Foods HQ (so, the team returning from the Metaverse). One might imagine the video evidence is the same. Note that, as Ryuji demonstrated back in Kamoshitter’s castle, cameras do not work in the Metaverse, so the best Akechi can do is take pictures or video in the real world. For the sake of argument, let’s ignore the rather obvious fact that people’re more likely to chalk up a video of some kids appearing out of thin air to video editing software rather than to supernatural phenomena. Instead, let’s return to Kaneshitto’s Palace.
It was a flying bank above Shibuya, and the team routinely entered and exited the Metaverse in the middle of Shibuya Crossing, one of the busiest, most packed streets in the world. When they cleared the Palace, they drove Morgana out of it, but it’s flying, so they ended up falling into the real world from the sky. Exactly none of the many, many people in Shibuya ever comments on or notices that a few kids and a cat appeared out of thin air several meters above the ground and crashed into the street. People only started to notice when they began yelling about cracked asses, at which point they were solidly on the ground in reality complaining about the impact.
How? More likely than not, regular people can’t see entry into and exit from the Metaverse, kind of like how they can’t understand Morgana unless they’ve been there. From the perspective of the many bystanders in Shibuya, the team was always there; they just didn’t notice them until they started yelling. That wouldn’t register as strange – if you were walking down a street in a crowded city, you wouldn’t take note of each and every person around you unless someone called attention to himself.
This means that if someone who’d never been to the Metaverse were to watch Akechi’s footage, he’d probably see nothing out of the ordinary. Either the team would never show up or the team would be in the footage throughout its length. In the latter case, note that the Phantom Thieves at this point include Haru, whose father owns Okumura Foods, meaning this evidence would amount to a high school girl standing outside her father’s company with a few of her friends, the majority of which go to her school. Yeah, totally incriminating evidence that’ll hold up in court. Bravo.
They go along with Akechi anyway. As we’ll see, this isn’t as dumb as it sounds.
Akechi names his target – none other than Sae Niijima. After the thing with President Okumura, the government mobilizes law enforcement to capture the Phantom Thieves, with Sae the head of the investigation. Akechi says that Sae’s become so obsessed with winning that she’ll capture some random saps and accuse/convict them of being the Phantom Thieves, just so she’d have a victory. Regardless of what you might think of Akechi, he’s absolutely correct in this, as Makoto confirms. Makoto reveals that her father was a policeman who was killed in the line of duty a few years back, forcing Sae to become the breadwinner for herself and Makoto. To exacerbate matters, as a female prosecutor, she struggled with sexism at work. All this made her cynical and bitter and obsessed with winning at all costs to maintain her career. Makoto detected this long ago – it was why she wanted to join the Phantom Thieves, in case the day came when she had to change her sister’s heart.
So, the team infiltrates Sae’s Palace, a casino in which she’s the manager and has rigged all the games so the house would win. The casino is my favorite Palace in the game, what with its cool design, interesting mechanics, and amazing soundtrack. Most of the infiltration consists of the team needing casino coins to progress, but since all the games/machines are rigged, they need change the odds to their favor.
The Palace has a few plot holes, though. For one, in a few Palace infiltrations, the team needs to return to the real world and change the target’s cognition to continue. For Madarame, there was a big locked door in his Palace that corresponded to a locked door in his house. The team opened it in front of him, thus changing his cognition that the door was locked, which opened the Metaverse door. Futaba had something similar occur – because she didn’t let anyone into her room, her Palace had an impassable door. When the group convinced her to let them in, the Metaverse door opened.
In Sae’s Palace, the team runs into a blockade with a guy requesting a reservation. Akechi surmises the area past the blockade is the courtroom; thus, they must return to the real world and change Sae’s cognition so she sees the group as being allowed into the courtroom. They do so by attending one of Sae’s trials as observers.
This shouldn’t have worked. Keep in mind Sae does not know the identities of the Phantom Thieves. She saw the group in reality watch her trial, but she didn’t recognize them as the Phantom Thieves, meaning her cognition wouldn’t have changed to allow the Phantom Thieves access to the restricted area in her Palace. This wasn’t an issue with Futaba (who knew the team’s identities) and Madarame (who just needed to see the door open – the people accessing it weren’t the issue).
Later on, there’re these giant scales that would form a bridge to the manager’s suite if someone pays 100,000 coins. After a pathetically easy gauntlet, Ren wins the coins, and they approach the bridge to pay. But then Shadow Sae changes the price on the spot to 1,000,000 coins, because she got tired of surreptitiously rigging games and decided to drop any charades. Akechi then reveals he’d, through various bets and loans in accordance with the rules of the casino, managed to get 1,000,000 coins, which allows them passage. The team expresses awe at Akechi’s sharp wit, but…why did this work?
I’m not talking about exactly how Akechi pulled it off – that part’s legit. I’m asking why Shadow Sae allowed this to happen. She can and did arbitrarily raise the price for the bridge by an order of magnitude, so why didn’t she just do it again? Hell, just refuse to activate the bridge completely – it’s her casino and she flaunts the rules as she pleases anyway, which is kind of the point of her character. I was expecting the team to use the grappling hook to cross over – they’d pulled off more impressive stunts with the grappling hook before this, so this shouldn’t have been an issue at all.
Anyway, the team locates Sae’s Treasure, but Akechi suggests waiting until a specific date (November 19) to steal it, because reasons. The team readily agrees…
November
…and the battle with Shadow Sae happens on the 19th. Makoto stays to talk with Shadow Sae while Yusuke and Ryuji go off to grab the Treasure. They come back with a briefcase and the team prepares to leave…and we’ve reached the present day, with Ren captured by a police ambush that somehow knew where they were and had access to the Metaverse.
The interrogation thus ends and Sae asks Ren a key question: she lists the names of the Phantom Thieves and asks for confirmation. If the player confirms, the bad ending commences.
…which is stupid. Very much so. Okay, so let’s first assume that Ren, despite fighting off a drug-induced stupor, knew enough to hide the names of all the Phantom Thieves. It doesn’t matter:
So after the player tells Sae that the names Ren had already revealed to her over this entire interrogation were in fact wrong somehow, Sae decides to trust Ren. She realizes that yes, there must be a conspiracy involved, since it’s unlikely the Phantom Thieves were behind the mental shutdowns. Just to give an example that the game doesn’t actually go into: her people found a calling card in Principal Fisk’s office after his mental shutdown, but the Phantom Thieves couldn’t possibly have been behind that, given they were ~10,000 m above the ground in a plane over the Pacific Ocean at the time.
Ren tells Sae that the guy who’d sold him out to the police is the same guy behind the mental shutdowns. He asks Sae to show his phone to this culprit, so Sae picks up the phone and leaves the room to do so, despite not quite understanding what’s going on. She runs into Akechi coming down the hall and shows him Ren’s phone. Akechi doesn’t have much to say, so Sae walks off…allowing Akechi to enter the interrogation room and assassinate Ren.
Yeah, in case you didn’t figure it out before, Akechi’s the actual villain behind the mental shutdowns. He gave himself away in June, when he commented on pancakes. Morgana was the only one who’d mentioned pancakes, and only someone who’d heard him talk in the Metaverse could understand him, proving that Akechi’d been to the Metaverse already by that point, meaning his story about how he awoke to his Persona during Okumura’s arc must’ve been a total lie.
The team had, in fact, figured this out already. This is why they went along with Akechi in November. They hatched a plan that…kind of stretches the bounds of disbelief given how many things outside the team’s control needed to go perfectly for it to work, but honestly? The plan’s not bad and the game explains it pretty well, so I give it a thumbs-up.
First off, the team gets together to discuss pancakes after Akechi’s event at the Culture Festival, whereupon Futaba codes a bug that she sneaks onto Akechi’s phone so she can spy on his phone conversations. Akechi calls his boss at some point and outlines his plan of bringing a police force into Sae’s Palace to capture Ren on November 19, the day he’ll convince the group to steal Sae’s Treasure. With full knowledge of the enemy’s plan, the group pulls this off:
Meanwhile, Akechi calls his boss on his bugged phone and reports a job complete, which reveals his identity: Masayoshi Shido, a legislator who is running for Prime Minister.
December
The public quickly forgets about the Phantom Thieves and begins mindlessly supporting Masayoshi Shithole for Prime Minister. This works to the group’s favor as they work to infiltrate Shithole’s Palace. This Palace is…kind of annoying. There’re these statues of Shithole that emit fields that turn the party members into mice?
Haru specializes in Psy and Gun skills, making her a solid addition to any team composition. Most status ailments allow for Technical damage if hit with Psy skills, and Gun resistances are rarer compared to other damage types. Finally, Haru’s Life Wall is a reflective barrier on the entire party, which is insane.
Oh, by the way: the character pictures I’m showing usually come up after a party member initiates an All-Out Attack that finishes a fight. Most of them just pose stylishly, but Haru somehow spawns a table, chair, and tea to sip while her enemies die behind her. A++.
Lore corner: Lucy Hay was the “Countess of Carlisle, and the historical basis for Alexandre Dumas’s femme fatale, Milady de Winter. Known for her beauty and cunning, she was a courtier much favored by the Queen.” Unlike Milady de Winter, who’s a full-on villain in The Three Musketeers, Lucy Hay was a real person who was involved with lots of politics on many sides, so I’m…not sure what her deal was.
October
Early in the month, we see a scene of Sumi Yoshizawa stumbling into an unknown Palace. She then meets up with Ren and Morgana, who go in to save her and she awakens her Persona. I…hate the way the game handles Sumi. We meet her in May and her Social Link/Confidant opens, but then it locks halfway until mid-January when she joins the party. Note that the final playable day in the game is February 3. You only get to spend like half a month with this character. Just…why?
Sumi’s like Marie from Persona 4 Golden in that she’s the new character introduced in Royal. While Marie’s Social Link sees her meet and bond with the entire Investigation Team and then her story ties into the overarching plot, Sumi interacts with the team a grand total of one time before she joins. She’s thus a very minor presence until then, at which point the game crams her character arc into ~2 weeks.
…Anyway. Sumi’s a first-year at Shujin on an honors scholarship for gymnastics. Unfortunately, she’s been having somewhat of a slump and her body isn’t moving like it’s supposed to. The Vice Principal, who’s now Principal due to Fisk’s death, threatens to revoke her scholarship because third place isn’t good enough to bolster his image. Sumi’s at a construction site feeling depressed when the MetaNav appears on her phone and drags her into the Palace. A discerning player will realize the Palace belongs to Takuto Maruki, the school’s temporary guidance counselor, but the characters in-game decide to ignore the Palace after saving Sumi and the game forgets this entire sequence happened until January. We’ll get back to this in January, I guess.
Back to the main plot: President Okumura holds a press conference in which he confesses the terrible working conditions in his company, but halfway through the press conference, he dies violently from mental shutdown, an image broadcast live throughout Japan. People begin to assume the Phantom Thieves had actually killed him rather than just changed his heart. Moreover, they blame the Phantom Thieves for all the mental shutdowns that’ve been happening in the previous two years. And, well, as the team realizes too late, this was all on purpose. That Medjed thing from July was a guy in the conspiracy I alluded to; he co-opted the Medjed name and publicly threatened the Phantom Thieves so that when “Medjed lost,” the Phantom Thieves would gain massive popularity. This is why when Futaba looked into the matter in July, she realized the Medjed they were dealing with was actually no real threat. The conspiracy then hacked the fansite poll to push President Okumura as a target; this explains why the poll had such an unrealistically solid outcome. When the Phantom Thieves sent him a calling card, they sent their hitman to kill Shadow Okumura so he’d die from mental shutdown on live TV.
Now while this sounds smart, it opens up a plot hole. So consider: we know from Wakaba’s research that killing someone’s Shadow inflicts a mental shutdown. I would assume that the effect is instantaneous, which means when mysterious assassin guy killed Shadow Okumura, President Okumura in reality would’ve suffered the mental shutdown right away. Given the timeframe the game gives the player to complete Okumura’s Palace, this would’ve happened September 21 at the earliest and October 10 at the latest. The press conference happens 8:00 pm October 11, well after Shadow Okumura dies.
Let’s say I’m wrong and there’s some time lag between a Shadow dying and the person shutting down…except this doesn’t add up either. The conspiracy is using mental shutdowns to kill people. To do so, they need to time the mental shutdown very, very precisely. They needed to ensure Wakaba’s mental shutdown occurred right as she was standing near traffic. They needed to ensure Principal Fisk would shut down halfway across a street he was crossing when the traffic light changed. Here, they needed to ensure President Okumura died on-camera mid-sentence in an impromptu press conference he didn’t call until the morning of. There’s no way anyone could predict the timing of these events with such precision as to be able to count backwards some specific time in order to kill the Shadow.
Even beyond this, the conspiracy got really lucky that their stunt actually worked. They used the fansite poll to push President Okumura as the next target, but they’re not the ones running the site – one of Ren’s classmates, Mishima, runs it, and Mishima didn’t implement that poll until September. Had he not done so, the conspiracy would’ve had no way of pointing the team toward President Okumura. Unlike with Medjed, he’s far from an anonymous entity they could impersonate/commandeer.
Moreover, the vast majority of the team was smart enough to see that something was off about how solidly the public wanted them to target President Okumura. If Morgana hadn’t pulled his temper tantrum, the team might not have gone after him at all per an abundance of caution. When the team did end up infiltrating Okumura Palace, they did so to help Haru more than anything, and Haru’s arranged marriage wasn’t something the conspiracy set up. This all means the conspiracy’s plan only succeeded due to a bunch of events they had nothing to do with.
Anyway. Haru’s in shock and the Phantom Thieves struggle with how their latest mission went so wrong. To clear their name, they decide they need to find out who’s really behind the mental shutdowns. As they’re trying to figure out how to go about that, Shujin holds a Culture Festival and invites Akechi (remember him?) as a guest speaker. Akechi calls the group into an office and tells them he has photo/video evidence of them as the Phantom Thieves and he’ll arrest/expose them unless they cooperate with him, thereby reviving the tradition of blackmail that Haru broke.
Akechi informs the team that in the previous month, he got dragged into the Metaverse and encountered the masked killer who’d killed Shadow Okumura. But, as the killer prepared to kill him, he awakened to his Persona and it saved him. Akechi offers the team a deal – they’ll help him with a target, then disband. In turn, he’ll delete his evidence and catch/expose the killer.
Let’s stop here and think about this for a minute. Akechi shows photo evidence of the team materializing out of thin air outside Okumura Foods HQ (so, the team returning from the Metaverse). One might imagine the video evidence is the same. Note that, as Ryuji demonstrated back in Kamoshitter’s castle, cameras do not work in the Metaverse, so the best Akechi can do is take pictures or video in the real world. For the sake of argument, let’s ignore the rather obvious fact that people’re more likely to chalk up a video of some kids appearing out of thin air to video editing software rather than to supernatural phenomena. Instead, let’s return to Kaneshitto’s Palace.
It was a flying bank above Shibuya, and the team routinely entered and exited the Metaverse in the middle of Shibuya Crossing, one of the busiest, most packed streets in the world. When they cleared the Palace, they drove Morgana out of it, but it’s flying, so they ended up falling into the real world from the sky. Exactly none of the many, many people in Shibuya ever comments on or notices that a few kids and a cat appeared out of thin air several meters above the ground and crashed into the street. People only started to notice when they began yelling about cracked asses, at which point they were solidly on the ground in reality complaining about the impact.
How? More likely than not, regular people can’t see entry into and exit from the Metaverse, kind of like how they can’t understand Morgana unless they’ve been there. From the perspective of the many bystanders in Shibuya, the team was always there; they just didn’t notice them until they started yelling. That wouldn’t register as strange – if you were walking down a street in a crowded city, you wouldn’t take note of each and every person around you unless someone called attention to himself.
This means that if someone who’d never been to the Metaverse were to watch Akechi’s footage, he’d probably see nothing out of the ordinary. Either the team would never show up or the team would be in the footage throughout its length. In the latter case, note that the Phantom Thieves at this point include Haru, whose father owns Okumura Foods, meaning this evidence would amount to a high school girl standing outside her father’s company with a few of her friends, the majority of which go to her school. Yeah, totally incriminating evidence that’ll hold up in court. Bravo.
They go along with Akechi anyway. As we’ll see, this isn’t as dumb as it sounds.
Akechi names his target – none other than Sae Niijima. After the thing with President Okumura, the government mobilizes law enforcement to capture the Phantom Thieves, with Sae the head of the investigation. Akechi says that Sae’s become so obsessed with winning that she’ll capture some random saps and accuse/convict them of being the Phantom Thieves, just so she’d have a victory. Regardless of what you might think of Akechi, he’s absolutely correct in this, as Makoto confirms. Makoto reveals that her father was a policeman who was killed in the line of duty a few years back, forcing Sae to become the breadwinner for herself and Makoto. To exacerbate matters, as a female prosecutor, she struggled with sexism at work. All this made her cynical and bitter and obsessed with winning at all costs to maintain her career. Makoto detected this long ago – it was why she wanted to join the Phantom Thieves, in case the day came when she had to change her sister’s heart.
So, the team infiltrates Sae’s Palace, a casino in which she’s the manager and has rigged all the games so the house would win. The casino is my favorite Palace in the game, what with its cool design, interesting mechanics, and amazing soundtrack. Most of the infiltration consists of the team needing casino coins to progress, but since all the games/machines are rigged, they need change the odds to their favor.
The Palace has a few plot holes, though. For one, in a few Palace infiltrations, the team needs to return to the real world and change the target’s cognition to continue. For Madarame, there was a big locked door in his Palace that corresponded to a locked door in his house. The team opened it in front of him, thus changing his cognition that the door was locked, which opened the Metaverse door. Futaba had something similar occur – because she didn’t let anyone into her room, her Palace had an impassable door. When the group convinced her to let them in, the Metaverse door opened.
In Sae’s Palace, the team runs into a blockade with a guy requesting a reservation. Akechi surmises the area past the blockade is the courtroom; thus, they must return to the real world and change Sae’s cognition so she sees the group as being allowed into the courtroom. They do so by attending one of Sae’s trials as observers.
This shouldn’t have worked. Keep in mind Sae does not know the identities of the Phantom Thieves. She saw the group in reality watch her trial, but she didn’t recognize them as the Phantom Thieves, meaning her cognition wouldn’t have changed to allow the Phantom Thieves access to the restricted area in her Palace. This wasn’t an issue with Futaba (who knew the team’s identities) and Madarame (who just needed to see the door open – the people accessing it weren’t the issue).
Later on, there’re these giant scales that would form a bridge to the manager’s suite if someone pays 100,000 coins. After a pathetically easy gauntlet, Ren wins the coins, and they approach the bridge to pay. But then Shadow Sae changes the price on the spot to 1,000,000 coins, because she got tired of surreptitiously rigging games and decided to drop any charades. Akechi then reveals he’d, through various bets and loans in accordance with the rules of the casino, managed to get 1,000,000 coins, which allows them passage. The team expresses awe at Akechi’s sharp wit, but…why did this work?
I’m not talking about exactly how Akechi pulled it off – that part’s legit. I’m asking why Shadow Sae allowed this to happen. She can and did arbitrarily raise the price for the bridge by an order of magnitude, so why didn’t she just do it again? Hell, just refuse to activate the bridge completely – it’s her casino and she flaunts the rules as she pleases anyway, which is kind of the point of her character. I was expecting the team to use the grappling hook to cross over – they’d pulled off more impressive stunts with the grappling hook before this, so this shouldn’t have been an issue at all.
Anyway, the team locates Sae’s Treasure, but Akechi suggests waiting until a specific date (November 19) to steal it, because reasons. The team readily agrees…
November
…and the battle with Shadow Sae happens on the 19th. Makoto stays to talk with Shadow Sae while Yusuke and Ryuji go off to grab the Treasure. They come back with a briefcase and the team prepares to leave…and we’ve reached the present day, with Ren captured by a police ambush that somehow knew where they were and had access to the Metaverse.
The interrogation thus ends and Sae asks Ren a key question: she lists the names of the Phantom Thieves and asks for confirmation. If the player confirms, the bad ending commences.
…which is stupid. Very much so. Okay, so let’s first assume that Ren, despite fighting off a drug-induced stupor, knew enough to hide the names of all the Phantom Thieves. It doesn’t matter:
- Ryuji: probably the only one Ren could hide the identity of, assuming there are multiple delinquents with dyed-blond hair on Shujin’s former track team who had beef with Kamoshitter.
- Ann: Kamoshitter lusted after her in particular due to her very unique appearance. She’s one-quarter American and models for magazines as a hobby. Her best friend Shiho attempted suicide after Kamoshitter raped her. All of this would be in Kamoshitter’s confession, making Shiho’s and Ann’s names very well-known to a prosecutor like Sae, meaning she would have trivially little issue identifying Ann.
- Yusuke: Madarame had literally one student at the time, which was Yusuke.
- Makoto: Sae mentions Makoto by name during the interrogation, which makes total sense given (1) Makoto’s her sister and (2) Shujin has exactly one Student Council President.
- Futaba: Sae also mentions Futaba by name, which also makes sense because Sae had once pressured Sojiro for information regarding Wakaba’s research, as she’d deduced that research had something to do with the mental shutdowns.
- Haru: yeah, how many daughters did the famous president of a multi-national corporation have? That’s right. One.
So after the player tells Sae that the names Ren had already revealed to her over this entire interrogation were in fact wrong somehow, Sae decides to trust Ren. She realizes that yes, there must be a conspiracy involved, since it’s unlikely the Phantom Thieves were behind the mental shutdowns. Just to give an example that the game doesn’t actually go into: her people found a calling card in Principal Fisk’s office after his mental shutdown, but the Phantom Thieves couldn’t possibly have been behind that, given they were ~10,000 m above the ground in a plane over the Pacific Ocean at the time.
Ren tells Sae that the guy who’d sold him out to the police is the same guy behind the mental shutdowns. He asks Sae to show his phone to this culprit, so Sae picks up the phone and leaves the room to do so, despite not quite understanding what’s going on. She runs into Akechi coming down the hall and shows him Ren’s phone. Akechi doesn’t have much to say, so Sae walks off…allowing Akechi to enter the interrogation room and assassinate Ren.
Yeah, in case you didn’t figure it out before, Akechi’s the actual villain behind the mental shutdowns. He gave himself away in June, when he commented on pancakes. Morgana was the only one who’d mentioned pancakes, and only someone who’d heard him talk in the Metaverse could understand him, proving that Akechi’d been to the Metaverse already by that point, meaning his story about how he awoke to his Persona during Okumura’s arc must’ve been a total lie.
The team had, in fact, figured this out already. This is why they went along with Akechi in November. They hatched a plan that…kind of stretches the bounds of disbelief given how many things outside the team’s control needed to go perfectly for it to work, but honestly? The plan’s not bad and the game explains it pretty well, so I give it a thumbs-up.
First off, the team gets together to discuss pancakes after Akechi’s event at the Culture Festival, whereupon Futaba codes a bug that she sneaks onto Akechi’s phone so she can spy on his phone conversations. Akechi calls his boss at some point and outlines his plan of bringing a police force into Sae’s Palace to capture Ren on November 19, the day he’ll convince the group to steal Sae’s Treasure. With full knowledge of the enemy’s plan, the group pulls this off:
- Futaba codes an app onto Ren’s phone that can remotely activate the MetaNav on someone else’s phone, provided the phones are in close proximity. She also codes an app that she can remotely turn on to make Ren’s phone show pre-recorded messages some set time later.
- After defeating Shadow Sae, Yusuke and Ryuji go off to put the Treasure into that briefcase I mentioned, except they don’t, so they come back with an empty briefcase. This means Sae’s Palace does not disappear, as the group never actually takes her Treasure.
- Since Sae has knowledge of the city but doesn’t really care about it outside of the courthouse that becomes her casino, everywhere outside the casino looks exactly the same as it does in reality. This includes the police station and the interrogation room.
- When Sae meets Akechi in the hall and shows him Ren’s phone, the apps activate. The first one sends both of them into the Metaverse. The surroundings don’t change at all, so neither of them notice. Akechi enters the interrogation room in the Metaverse, where there is a Cognitive Ren who looks just like the real one, since Sae’s cognition of him mirrors the one in reality. Akechi, none the wiser, shoots Cognitive Ren and exits the room. As he walks back through the hall, he passes the point of entry, sending him into the real world.
- Meanwhile, Sae moved down the hall in the opposite direction. Sae still has Ren’s phone at this point. The activation of the second app kicks in, showing messages that stall Sae a bit, then instruct Sae to turn around and walk back through the hall. This sends her back into reality (past the point of entry).
- At this point, she would go into the interrogation room in reality and break Ren out. Nobody notices, since the conspiracy isolated that room specifically so they could assassinate Ren. This step here, converting Sae to their side, is one of the most unbelievable parts of the plan, but to the game’s credit, Makoto does explicitly say the team recognized this as a huge gamble for this exact reason – they had no reason to believe Sae would ever help them.
Meanwhile, Akechi calls his boss on his bugged phone and reports a job complete, which reveals his identity: Masayoshi Shido, a legislator who is running for Prime Minister.
December
The public quickly forgets about the Phantom Thieves and begins mindlessly supporting Masayoshi Shithole for Prime Minister. This works to the group’s favor as they work to infiltrate Shithole’s Palace. This Palace is…kind of annoying. There’re these statues of Shithole that emit fields that turn the party members into mice?
( . _ .)
( . _ .)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
YEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!
In mouse form, the team can’t fight or use cover, so evading enemies is suddenly necessary but more difficult for no real reason. Hey, Yusuke, what should we do about this?
( . _ .)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
YEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!
In mouse form, the team can’t fight or use cover, so evading enemies is suddenly necessary but more difficult for no real reason. Hey, Yusuke, what should we do about this?
( . _ .)
( . _ .)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
YEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!
Sure. As for Akechi…I guess he forgets the rest of the team exists or something, since he takes literally no action against them in the real world. This is the main issue I personally had with the team’s plan, since at no point do they address the fact that Akechi could send people to arrest them all even after capturing Ren – remember that at this point, he has actual chat logs from Sae’s arc.
Anyway, let’s talk more about Shithole. Besides wanting to make Japan a dictatorship with himself at the top, he somehow manages to antagonize almost every one of the Phantom Thieves on a personal level:
I’m kind of impressed, but we’re not done. He also manages to be the arch-villain of Akechi’s backstory. Akechi was born from a sleazebag hooking up with a prostitute; that sleazebag was, of course, Mr. Shithole himself. He abandoned Akechi’s mother and Akechi thus had an absolutely horrible childhood with a mother trying to support them by making money selling her body and the heavy stigma of being a bastard child. His mother then committed suicide under the weight of all this.
Roughly two years before the beginning of the game, Akechi obtained the MetaNav and his Persona. His Persona has a special ability to drive Shadows berserk, which he used to induce psychotic breakdowns. In the real world, he then “solved” these cases, thus earning him his moniker as the Second Detective Prince. He used his fame to approach Shithole and offer his services with the intent of propping him up until, right as Shithole attains his long-awaited goal, Akechi reveals everything, thus bringing both of them down and publicly destroying Shithole’s career on a national stage.
From Akechi’s perspective, his plan was on-track: Shithole was crushing all the polls for the December election and he’d killed the leader of the Phantom Thieves. As the group is infiltrating Shithole’s Palace, however, Shithole calls Akechi and instructs him to eliminate any high-ranking members of the conspiracy so he wouldn’t have any loose ends when he ascends to power. Akechi finds this suspicious and thinks that his paranoia might be coming from the Phantom Thieves attacking his Palace, so he goes in himself, whereupon he finds the group and fights them.
…which is pretty contrived, since Akechi’s suspicions arose from Shithole acting uncharacteristically paranoid, except paranoia is very, very in-character for Shithole. He stringently screens people who join his inner circle to ensure only people with absolute, mindless loyalty to him would pass. The cognitive beings in his Palace all wear masks because he sees everyone around him as always hiding their true selves. He routinely went out of his way to eliminate anything he considered a potential threat, up to and including sending goons to traumatize a 13-year-old after he had her mother killed. Moreover, people don’t change when the Phantom Thieves are in the midst of an infiltration; people only change after they take the Treasure. Akechi happened to be right, of course, but his logic shouldn’t have gotten him there. It’s kind of like how he only succeeded in Sae’s Palace because the plot says he does.
The group kicks Akechi’s ass, but then Cognitive Akechi shows up. Cognitive Akechi reveals that Shithole knows Akechi is his son and was planning on having him killed after his rise to power, which drives home how rock-stupid Shithole is, since literally 100% of his clout comes from Akechi. People fear/are loyal to him solely because he can order Akechi to kill someone’s Shadow and cause a mental shutdown. Without Akechi, he’s just some dick who doesn’t know when to stop drinking.
Cognitive Akechi holds the real Akechi at gunpoint and summons a few Shadows, at which point the real Akechi shoots a bulkhead, which seals himself, Cognitive Akechi, and the Shadows in while separating them from the team. He yells through the door for the team to take down Shithole for him, essentially sacrificing himself to save them.
I have mixed feelings about this scene. On one hand, Akechi had exactly zero need to sacrifice himself. Remember how cognitive beings work? Cognitive Akechi is how Shithole sees Akechi. Shithole has very little understanding of Akechi’s abilities and, in fact, Shithole thinks he can have Akechi killed after he wins the election, just like any other crony. Accordingly, Cognitive Akechi wouldn’t have any extraordinary abilities minus being able to fire a gun (he is, after all, a hitman). Given the team just got done handing the real Akechi his ass, Cognitive Akechi would’ve been a cakewalk.
Oh, but he summoned some Shadows, right? Yeah, Ren could probably solo those guys without a problem. Hell, I think anyone in the group sans Futaba could solo those guys without a problem, and that’s only because Futaba can’t actually fight.
On the other hand, this decision to sacrifice himself was probably the first free decision Akechi’s ever made in his life. His childhood was terrible through no fault of his own. The circumstances of his birth would shackle him forever – the more famous he got, the more people would look into his past, and the bigger chance someone would find out he’s the bastard child of a stripper who’d killed herself (something I’m told carries a big stigma in Japan). This, coupled with Akechi’s lifelong hate for Shithole, put his life on rails – he would either fall ignominiously or fall ignominiously while dragging Shithole down with him.
Akechi sacrificing himself meant he took a third option and trusted in others to help him fulfill his goal – something he didn’t believe in before. So while his sacrifice was unnecessary, it symbolizes a powerful turning point for him. And while I condemn Akechi – I mean, he’s a murderer – I sympathize with his past, so I say this is a nice way to end his arc. The writers didn’t do too badly when writing Akechi. Props.
With Akechi gone, the team locates the Treasure and goes back to send the calling card. And by calling card, I mean Futaba hacks every last television in Japan to broadcast DEEZ NUTS:
( . _ .)>⌐■-■
(⌐■_■)
YEAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!
Sure. As for Akechi…I guess he forgets the rest of the team exists or something, since he takes literally no action against them in the real world. This is the main issue I personally had with the team’s plan, since at no point do they address the fact that Akechi could send people to arrest them all even after capturing Ren – remember that at this point, he has actual chat logs from Sae’s arc.
Anyway, let’s talk more about Shithole. Besides wanting to make Japan a dictatorship with himself at the top, he somehow manages to antagonize almost every one of the Phantom Thieves on a personal level:
- He was, in fact, that bald asshole who’d gotten Ren on probation. Yes, the first time we see one of the main villains of the game, it’s him falling on his face due to heavy inebriation.
- He was also the bald asshole who pissed off Ryuji at the group’s first celebration after Kamoshitter. So far, he’s inadvertently started the Phantom Thieves – he put Ren in Tokyo at Shujin and he inspired Ryuji to convince Ren, Ann, and Morgana to continue changing hearts.
- Principal Fisk was part of his conspiracy. Fisk’s coverup of Kamoshitter facilitated the rampant abuse at Shujin, which included Kamoshitter raping Shiho, which inspired Ann to join the Phantom Thieves.
- Shithole ordered Fisk to investigate DEEZ NUTS. Fisk, in turn, pressured/blackmailed Makoto into doing the work for him, which eventually led to Makoto joining the Phantom Thieves.
- Madarame and Kaneshitto were also part of the conspiracy. They funded the operation with money gained by exploiting child artists and Shujin students. Their funding thus gave Yusuke and Makoto personal reasons for joining the Phantom Thieves to go after them.
- Due to his role as leader of the conspiracy, he was ultimately responsible for murdering Futaba’s mother and Haru’s father, not to mention the fake suicide note that wrecked Futaba’s mental health for ~2 years.
I’m kind of impressed, but we’re not done. He also manages to be the arch-villain of Akechi’s backstory. Akechi was born from a sleazebag hooking up with a prostitute; that sleazebag was, of course, Mr. Shithole himself. He abandoned Akechi’s mother and Akechi thus had an absolutely horrible childhood with a mother trying to support them by making money selling her body and the heavy stigma of being a bastard child. His mother then committed suicide under the weight of all this.
Roughly two years before the beginning of the game, Akechi obtained the MetaNav and his Persona. His Persona has a special ability to drive Shadows berserk, which he used to induce psychotic breakdowns. In the real world, he then “solved” these cases, thus earning him his moniker as the Second Detective Prince. He used his fame to approach Shithole and offer his services with the intent of propping him up until, right as Shithole attains his long-awaited goal, Akechi reveals everything, thus bringing both of them down and publicly destroying Shithole’s career on a national stage.
From Akechi’s perspective, his plan was on-track: Shithole was crushing all the polls for the December election and he’d killed the leader of the Phantom Thieves. As the group is infiltrating Shithole’s Palace, however, Shithole calls Akechi and instructs him to eliminate any high-ranking members of the conspiracy so he wouldn’t have any loose ends when he ascends to power. Akechi finds this suspicious and thinks that his paranoia might be coming from the Phantom Thieves attacking his Palace, so he goes in himself, whereupon he finds the group and fights them.
…which is pretty contrived, since Akechi’s suspicions arose from Shithole acting uncharacteristically paranoid, except paranoia is very, very in-character for Shithole. He stringently screens people who join his inner circle to ensure only people with absolute, mindless loyalty to him would pass. The cognitive beings in his Palace all wear masks because he sees everyone around him as always hiding their true selves. He routinely went out of his way to eliminate anything he considered a potential threat, up to and including sending goons to traumatize a 13-year-old after he had her mother killed. Moreover, people don’t change when the Phantom Thieves are in the midst of an infiltration; people only change after they take the Treasure. Akechi happened to be right, of course, but his logic shouldn’t have gotten him there. It’s kind of like how he only succeeded in Sae’s Palace because the plot says he does.
The group kicks Akechi’s ass, but then Cognitive Akechi shows up. Cognitive Akechi reveals that Shithole knows Akechi is his son and was planning on having him killed after his rise to power, which drives home how rock-stupid Shithole is, since literally 100% of his clout comes from Akechi. People fear/are loyal to him solely because he can order Akechi to kill someone’s Shadow and cause a mental shutdown. Without Akechi, he’s just some dick who doesn’t know when to stop drinking.
Cognitive Akechi holds the real Akechi at gunpoint and summons a few Shadows, at which point the real Akechi shoots a bulkhead, which seals himself, Cognitive Akechi, and the Shadows in while separating them from the team. He yells through the door for the team to take down Shithole for him, essentially sacrificing himself to save them.
I have mixed feelings about this scene. On one hand, Akechi had exactly zero need to sacrifice himself. Remember how cognitive beings work? Cognitive Akechi is how Shithole sees Akechi. Shithole has very little understanding of Akechi’s abilities and, in fact, Shithole thinks he can have Akechi killed after he wins the election, just like any other crony. Accordingly, Cognitive Akechi wouldn’t have any extraordinary abilities minus being able to fire a gun (he is, after all, a hitman). Given the team just got done handing the real Akechi his ass, Cognitive Akechi would’ve been a cakewalk.
Oh, but he summoned some Shadows, right? Yeah, Ren could probably solo those guys without a problem. Hell, I think anyone in the group sans Futaba could solo those guys without a problem, and that’s only because Futaba can’t actually fight.
On the other hand, this decision to sacrifice himself was probably the first free decision Akechi’s ever made in his life. His childhood was terrible through no fault of his own. The circumstances of his birth would shackle him forever – the more famous he got, the more people would look into his past, and the bigger chance someone would find out he’s the bastard child of a stripper who’d killed herself (something I’m told carries a big stigma in Japan). This, coupled with Akechi’s lifelong hate for Shithole, put his life on rails – he would either fall ignominiously or fall ignominiously while dragging Shithole down with him.
Akechi sacrificing himself meant he took a third option and trusted in others to help him fulfill his goal – something he didn’t believe in before. So while his sacrifice was unnecessary, it symbolizes a powerful turning point for him. And while I condemn Akechi – I mean, he’s a murderer – I sympathize with his past, so I say this is a nice way to end his arc. The writers didn’t do too badly when writing Akechi. Props.
With Akechi gone, the team locates the Treasure and goes back to send the calling card. And by calling card, I mean Futaba hacks every last television in Japan to broadcast DEEZ NUTS:
While cool, this is a pretty dumb stunt, as it’s not too difficult to narrow down the group’s identities by that image alone, even with the obscuring effect. In addition, I didn’t really go into this in detail before because it never really mattered, but the team’s thief costumes (e.g. Ann’s catsuit) only appear in the Metaverse – they’re each character’s vision of rebellion. So…did they like…make replicas of their costumes to wear in the real world when making this video?
Right after the broadcast, the team enters Shithole’s Palace to steal the Treasure. Shadow Shithole dons a military dictator outfit and summons a bunch of cognitive legislators to merge into a golden lion that he rides into battle against the team, then the lion grows wings and starts flying, then it transforms into…a pyramid? After beating down the pyramid, Shithole rips off his clothes to reveal that he’s Bane from Batman. Beat him down and he goes “that wasn’t even my final form” and turns into…the Red Hulk, I guess. Shithole’s fight, though long, isn’t necessarily hard except for my no-KO rule, because Shithole has a few instant-KO attacks that he’ll use on anyone except Ren. Even thus, high Social Link/Confidant ranks plus Futaba’s Final Guard still gave me some wiggle room if Shithole got lucky.
After final form Shithole hits 25% health, he executes his master plan. His trump card. The action that will turn the tables and secure his victory. He isolates himself and Ren to fight him one-on-one. Now he can’t instantly win the fight because he has no party members to cheap shot and Ren one-shots the rest of his health!
…wait, what?
Right after the broadcast, the team enters Shithole’s Palace to steal the Treasure. Shadow Shithole dons a military dictator outfit and summons a bunch of cognitive legislators to merge into a golden lion that he rides into battle against the team, then the lion grows wings and starts flying, then it transforms into…a pyramid? After beating down the pyramid, Shithole rips off his clothes to reveal that he’s Bane from Batman. Beat him down and he goes “that wasn’t even my final form” and turns into…the Red Hulk, I guess. Shithole’s fight, though long, isn’t necessarily hard except for my no-KO rule, because Shithole has a few instant-KO attacks that he’ll use on anyone except Ren. Even thus, high Social Link/Confidant ranks plus Futaba’s Final Guard still gave me some wiggle room if Shithole got lucky.
After final form Shithole hits 25% health, he executes his master plan. His trump card. The action that will turn the tables and secure his victory. He isolates himself and Ren to fight him one-on-one. Now he can’t instantly win the fight because he has no party members to cheap shot and Ren one-shots the rest of his health!
…wait, what?
LMAO get fucked you waste of space.
After a few pointless cutscenes with shoehorned drama and Ryuji getting beat up for no reason, Shithole in the real world wins the election and uses his speech to confess all his many, many heinous crimes on national television. The people of Japan…don’t care. Yes, they seem to support him anyway.
The group determines there’s some supernatural brainwashing going on. Unfortunately, in real life, this sort of thing happens, no supernatural phenomena required, but the team is right in this case, and they go into Mementos to fix the public’s unconsciousness. At the bottom, they find an entity calling itself the Holy Grail, Yaldabaoth, God of Control, who reveals that the brainwashing was his doing. He’s been doing this the entire game, actually – remember the wild swings in public opinion for and against the Phantom Thieves, followed by mindless support for Shithole while everyone just suddenly forgot about the Phantom Thieves? That was the God of Control exerting his control.
Yaldabaoth’s puppet master role extends quite far back. Like Izanami from the previous game, he set up a contest between chosen ones – in this case, he gave Akechi and Ren access to the Metaverse and watched them compete. One wanted to tear down society for his hate, while the other wanted to reform society despite his hardships.
Unlike Izanami, who rigged the contest and tried to lay low when Yu won anyway, Yaldabaoth had zero interest in the outcome. Regardless of the winner, Yaldabaoth planned to take control of the public, have them support Shithole despite how much of a shithole he is, then point to the people’s stupidity and blindness as evidence for why they need a god to control them. Imagine if I hard-coded a computer to display an error message saying it needs a reformat, then I pointed to that error message to justify reformatting it. That’s his plan. It’s convoluted, but that’s part of his character – he likes to play games.
To go further, Yaldabaoth hijacked the Velvet Room prior to the game’s events. The Igor the player’s been dealing with this entire time wasn’t actually Igor – it was Yaldabaoth in disguise. Yaldabaoth split the Velvet Room assistant, Lavenza, into two amnesiac halves – these are Caroline and Justine, the twin children who serve as the assistants in the game up to now.
This twist is where I started laughing at the game’s plot, since the concept of a sentient cup defeating a Velvet Room assistant is hilariously stupid. We’ll talk more about Lavenza later. For now, the twins regain some of their memories after Yaldabaoth’s reveal and direct Ren to use the Velvet Room equipment to re-fuse them into Lavenza. Lavenza then ejects Yaldabaoth from the Velvet Room and restores the real Igor. Igor reveals when he realized Yaldabaoth’s takeover was happening, he created a guide to find Ren and, well, guide him to thwart Yaldabaoth’s plan. This guide was Morgana, meaning Morgana was never human. He…takes it well, I suppose.
Anyway, a lot happens, but I’m going to simplify to prevent this exposition dump from getting more exposition dumpy. Yaldabaoth merges the Metaverse with the real world to allow himself to manifest in the real world, but then DEEZ NUTS confront Yaldabaoth. He uses the Seven Deadly Sins to attack, which includes lust, which makes the afflicted party member so horny he loses a turn. I am not kidding.
But in the end, Yaldabaoth realizes that he only adopted the sin. In contrast, DEEZ NUTS were born in it. Molded by it. DEEZ NUTS didn’t see virtue until the end of the game, and when they did, virtue turned out to be a sentient cup with arms throwing ink at people and making them horny. The sins betray Yaldabaoth because they belong to DEEZ NUTS. Ren summons Satanael to shoot a bullet made of the Seven Deadly Sins through Yaldabaoth’s head, killing him and saving the world.
…with the exception of the last sentence, the game doesn’t actually say any of the previous paragraph.
Anyway, in the vanilla game or if the player neglected Maruki, the ending commences. Sae begins building a case against Shithole, but needs Ren to testify, meaning Ren needs to go to jail because…the game says so, I guess. Maybe Futaba hacking every TV in Japan counts as a crime Ren committed under probation. As I pointed out before, Ren stealing desires and breaking into Palaces in a metaphysical world shouldn’t count as crimes given I doubt there are actual laws against them.
Otherwise, the Royal plot begins with Akechi appearing out of nowhere. He agrees to testify, meaning Ren doesn’t need to go to jail, but then the police free Akechi anyway as the year ends…
January
Fair warning – the game’s quality plummets dramatically starting now. We enter the third trimester with Ren noting a few sudden oddities in the world around him:
Oh, and before I continue, yes, the correct term here is “trimester.” There’s no such thing as a third semester because, by definition, there are two semesters in a school year on the semester system – no more, no less. A school year split into three parts is on the trimester system. The reason people in America don’t know this is because the vast majority of schools in America are on the semester system, meaning if people in America use the word trimester, they’re more likely than not referring to a pregnancy. End rant, moving on.
…Umm…anyway…so yeah, things aren’t right. Nobody seems to notice things aren’t right except for Ren and Akechi, who like I said before, appears out of nowhere and does so again now, which is itself abnormal, as he should’ve died in Shithole’s Palace. Akechi himself says he has a hole in his memory between shooting the bulkhead in the ship and reappearing after Yaldabaoth’s defeat. He and Ren team up to investigate when Sumi calls Ren and tells him that Palace she saw in October appeared again. The trio enter the Palace to investigate and, as I mentioned earlier, that Palace belongs to Takuto Maruki, the greatest example of a very well-written character hamstrung by an idiotic plot.
Ready for another exposition dump?
DEEZ NOTES: Sumire Yoshizawa/Violet
After a few pointless cutscenes with shoehorned drama and Ryuji getting beat up for no reason, Shithole in the real world wins the election and uses his speech to confess all his many, many heinous crimes on national television. The people of Japan…don’t care. Yes, they seem to support him anyway.
The group determines there’s some supernatural brainwashing going on. Unfortunately, in real life, this sort of thing happens, no supernatural phenomena required, but the team is right in this case, and they go into Mementos to fix the public’s unconsciousness. At the bottom, they find an entity calling itself the Holy Grail, Yaldabaoth, God of Control, who reveals that the brainwashing was his doing. He’s been doing this the entire game, actually – remember the wild swings in public opinion for and against the Phantom Thieves, followed by mindless support for Shithole while everyone just suddenly forgot about the Phantom Thieves? That was the God of Control exerting his control.
Yaldabaoth’s puppet master role extends quite far back. Like Izanami from the previous game, he set up a contest between chosen ones – in this case, he gave Akechi and Ren access to the Metaverse and watched them compete. One wanted to tear down society for his hate, while the other wanted to reform society despite his hardships.
Unlike Izanami, who rigged the contest and tried to lay low when Yu won anyway, Yaldabaoth had zero interest in the outcome. Regardless of the winner, Yaldabaoth planned to take control of the public, have them support Shithole despite how much of a shithole he is, then point to the people’s stupidity and blindness as evidence for why they need a god to control them. Imagine if I hard-coded a computer to display an error message saying it needs a reformat, then I pointed to that error message to justify reformatting it. That’s his plan. It’s convoluted, but that’s part of his character – he likes to play games.
To go further, Yaldabaoth hijacked the Velvet Room prior to the game’s events. The Igor the player’s been dealing with this entire time wasn’t actually Igor – it was Yaldabaoth in disguise. Yaldabaoth split the Velvet Room assistant, Lavenza, into two amnesiac halves – these are Caroline and Justine, the twin children who serve as the assistants in the game up to now.
This twist is where I started laughing at the game’s plot, since the concept of a sentient cup defeating a Velvet Room assistant is hilariously stupid. We’ll talk more about Lavenza later. For now, the twins regain some of their memories after Yaldabaoth’s reveal and direct Ren to use the Velvet Room equipment to re-fuse them into Lavenza. Lavenza then ejects Yaldabaoth from the Velvet Room and restores the real Igor. Igor reveals when he realized Yaldabaoth’s takeover was happening, he created a guide to find Ren and, well, guide him to thwart Yaldabaoth’s plan. This guide was Morgana, meaning Morgana was never human. He…takes it well, I suppose.
Anyway, a lot happens, but I’m going to simplify to prevent this exposition dump from getting more exposition dumpy. Yaldabaoth merges the Metaverse with the real world to allow himself to manifest in the real world, but then DEEZ NUTS confront Yaldabaoth. He uses the Seven Deadly Sins to attack, which includes lust, which makes the afflicted party member so horny he loses a turn. I am not kidding.
But in the end, Yaldabaoth realizes that he only adopted the sin. In contrast, DEEZ NUTS were born in it. Molded by it. DEEZ NUTS didn’t see virtue until the end of the game, and when they did, virtue turned out to be a sentient cup with arms throwing ink at people and making them horny. The sins betray Yaldabaoth because they belong to DEEZ NUTS. Ren summons Satanael to shoot a bullet made of the Seven Deadly Sins through Yaldabaoth’s head, killing him and saving the world.
…with the exception of the last sentence, the game doesn’t actually say any of the previous paragraph.
Anyway, in the vanilla game or if the player neglected Maruki, the ending commences. Sae begins building a case against Shithole, but needs Ren to testify, meaning Ren needs to go to jail because…the game says so, I guess. Maybe Futaba hacking every TV in Japan counts as a crime Ren committed under probation. As I pointed out before, Ren stealing desires and breaking into Palaces in a metaphysical world shouldn’t count as crimes given I doubt there are actual laws against them.
Otherwise, the Royal plot begins with Akechi appearing out of nowhere. He agrees to testify, meaning Ren doesn’t need to go to jail, but then the police free Akechi anyway as the year ends…
January
Fair warning – the game’s quality plummets dramatically starting now. We enter the third trimester with Ren noting a few sudden oddities in the world around him:
- Morgana’s a human.
- Kamoshitter apparently never existed or something, meaning Shujin’s track team is thriving with Ryuji as the star runner and Shiho returns to Shujin to be with Ann.
- Madarame is an upstanding, nurturing teacher to Yusuke.
- Makoto’s father is alive and she, her father, and Sae live together happily.
- Wakaba is alive and close to Sojiro, Futaba, and human Morgana.
- President Okumura is not only alive, but also is a much better person and father to Haru.
Oh, and before I continue, yes, the correct term here is “trimester.” There’s no such thing as a third semester because, by definition, there are two semesters in a school year on the semester system – no more, no less. A school year split into three parts is on the trimester system. The reason people in America don’t know this is because the vast majority of schools in America are on the semester system, meaning if people in America use the word trimester, they’re more likely than not referring to a pregnancy. End rant, moving on.
…Umm…anyway…so yeah, things aren’t right. Nobody seems to notice things aren’t right except for Ren and Akechi, who like I said before, appears out of nowhere and does so again now, which is itself abnormal, as he should’ve died in Shithole’s Palace. Akechi himself says he has a hole in his memory between shooting the bulkhead in the ship and reappearing after Yaldabaoth’s defeat. He and Ren team up to investigate when Sumi calls Ren and tells him that Palace she saw in October appeared again. The trio enter the Palace to investigate and, as I mentioned earlier, that Palace belongs to Takuto Maruki, the greatest example of a very well-written character hamstrung by an idiotic plot.
Ready for another exposition dump?
DEEZ NOTES: Sumire Yoshizawa/Violet
I called her Sumi for a reason. The game introduces her as Kasumi Yoshizawa in May and, as Ren gets to know her, he learns that Kasumi once had a sister named Sumire, but Sumire was tragically killed in a car accident. In Maruki’s Palace, Maruki reveals that, no, Kasumi was the one who was killed, and the Kasumi we’ve seen thus far is actually Sumire. So by calling her Sumi, I can talk about her without giving away her true identity while also avoiding the incorrect name, as one could interpret “Sumi” as a shortened version of either sister’s name.
This accident happened about a month before the game began. Sumire fell into a deep depression as she blames herself for her sister’s death. See, Kasumi was a very talented gymnast and Sumire always struggled to match her success. While Kasumi was nothing but supportive of Sumire – in fact, Kasumi’s dream was to become a great gymnast specifically with her sister, not by herself – Sumire suffered a deep inferiority complex that worsened into depression. At one point, Kasumi tried to comfort her, but Sumire ran away, into traffic, and Kasumi died when she pushed Sumire out of the way of a car.
Sumire’s dad sent her to Dr. Maruki for therapy. Maruki then used his Persona power to change her cognition, making her think she was Kasumi, thereby technically giving Sumire what she wanted – one, for Kasumi to be alive; and two, to be Kasumi, the perfect girl everyone looked up to. This right here illustrates Maruki’s philosophy – he genuinely wanted to help heal Sumire, but he went about it in a…less than ideal manner.
After the reveal, Sumire sort of loses it and the game forces Ren to fight her as she frantically resists facing the truth. It’s a pretty heartbreaking scene and illustrates that, despite what one may think of Maruki, he really is trying to heal a deep, traumatic psychological wound.
Eventually, Sumire comes around, decides to move forward facing the truth, and joins the team in full. Sumi’s unique ability is raising the entire team’s critical chance with Brave Step, which will become very, very important a bit later. While Sumi has access to Bless attacks, she really excels in physical damage, so I bolstered her bulk with the Decisive Rapier (more Endurance), the Sahasrara EX (+6 to all stats), and the High Archangel Bra (highest Defense female armor in the game). As for her character arc, Sumire realizes that part of the reason she struggled to match Kasumi (and the reason she felt her body wasn’t moving properly prior to this) was that she was focused on imitating Kasumi. Kasumi’s personality and style was bold and up-front, whereas Sumire’s nature was full of finesse and grace – a complementary, but opposing, style. Once Sumire embraced being herself for herself, her performance and self-esteem began growing unfettered.
Lore corner: Ella is the “true name of Cinderella’s heroine. ‘Cinder Ella’ was a derisive nickname, born from her hard work always leaving her dusty and sooty. After marrying her prince, she became ‘Princess Ella.’” After I wrote this, I got that “Umbrella” song stuck in my head. -_-
So that’s Sumi. What about Maruki? Maruki’s a researcher similar to Wakaba. His fiancée Rumi’s parents were murdered and she went catatonic from the shock. From researching the Metaverse, Maruki thought he could use it to heal people’s mental/emotional trauma directly such that nobody would ever need to go through such pain. To solidify his hypothesis, at one point while visiting Rumi, Maruki’s Persona partially awakened and used its power on Rumi, which healed all her mental trauma…by wiping her memory and replacing it with one that didn’t involve the attack.
I want to ensure I’m being clear – Maruki can’t and didn’t change Rumi’s past. He changed Rumi’s cognition. In the same way, Maruki didn’t revive Kasumi and kill Sumire – Kasumi’s still dead and Sumire’s still alive, but Maruki changed Sumire’s cognition to make her see herself as her sister.
Though pained that his fiancée now didn’t know him, Maruki let her go and resolved to pursue his research. Unfortunately, wait for it…Masayoshi Shithole discovered Maruki’s work and had his connections pull his funding. Yes, Shithole is also the main villain of Maruki’s backstory. I think this fucker’s set a record for how many people he’s personally pissed off by now. Maruki didn’t give up and decided to become a counselor, which is how he met and treated Sumi. When Sumi started going to Shujin, Maruki visited to keep an eye on her. Principal Fisk saw a golden opportunity to bolster his and the school’s image despite the Kamoshitter incident going on at the time, by inviting Maruki to stay as the school’s guidance counselor, showing just how much he cared about the students’ mental health.
A sharp-eyed player will have noticed Maruki before the game introduced him formally:
This accident happened about a month before the game began. Sumire fell into a deep depression as she blames herself for her sister’s death. See, Kasumi was a very talented gymnast and Sumire always struggled to match her success. While Kasumi was nothing but supportive of Sumire – in fact, Kasumi’s dream was to become a great gymnast specifically with her sister, not by herself – Sumire suffered a deep inferiority complex that worsened into depression. At one point, Kasumi tried to comfort her, but Sumire ran away, into traffic, and Kasumi died when she pushed Sumire out of the way of a car.
Sumire’s dad sent her to Dr. Maruki for therapy. Maruki then used his Persona power to change her cognition, making her think she was Kasumi, thereby technically giving Sumire what she wanted – one, for Kasumi to be alive; and two, to be Kasumi, the perfect girl everyone looked up to. This right here illustrates Maruki’s philosophy – he genuinely wanted to help heal Sumire, but he went about it in a…less than ideal manner.
After the reveal, Sumire sort of loses it and the game forces Ren to fight her as she frantically resists facing the truth. It’s a pretty heartbreaking scene and illustrates that, despite what one may think of Maruki, he really is trying to heal a deep, traumatic psychological wound.
Eventually, Sumire comes around, decides to move forward facing the truth, and joins the team in full. Sumi’s unique ability is raising the entire team’s critical chance with Brave Step, which will become very, very important a bit later. While Sumi has access to Bless attacks, she really excels in physical damage, so I bolstered her bulk with the Decisive Rapier (more Endurance), the Sahasrara EX (+6 to all stats), and the High Archangel Bra (highest Defense female armor in the game). As for her character arc, Sumire realizes that part of the reason she struggled to match Kasumi (and the reason she felt her body wasn’t moving properly prior to this) was that she was focused on imitating Kasumi. Kasumi’s personality and style was bold and up-front, whereas Sumire’s nature was full of finesse and grace – a complementary, but opposing, style. Once Sumire embraced being herself for herself, her performance and self-esteem began growing unfettered.
Lore corner: Ella is the “true name of Cinderella’s heroine. ‘Cinder Ella’ was a derisive nickname, born from her hard work always leaving her dusty and sooty. After marrying her prince, she became ‘Princess Ella.’” After I wrote this, I got that “Umbrella” song stuck in my head. -_-
So that’s Sumi. What about Maruki? Maruki’s a researcher similar to Wakaba. His fiancée Rumi’s parents were murdered and she went catatonic from the shock. From researching the Metaverse, Maruki thought he could use it to heal people’s mental/emotional trauma directly such that nobody would ever need to go through such pain. To solidify his hypothesis, at one point while visiting Rumi, Maruki’s Persona partially awakened and used its power on Rumi, which healed all her mental trauma…by wiping her memory and replacing it with one that didn’t involve the attack.
I want to ensure I’m being clear – Maruki can’t and didn’t change Rumi’s past. He changed Rumi’s cognition. In the same way, Maruki didn’t revive Kasumi and kill Sumire – Kasumi’s still dead and Sumire’s still alive, but Maruki changed Sumire’s cognition to make her see herself as her sister.
Though pained that his fiancée now didn’t know him, Maruki let her go and resolved to pursue his research. Unfortunately, wait for it…Masayoshi Shithole discovered Maruki’s work and had his connections pull his funding. Yes, Shithole is also the main villain of Maruki’s backstory. I think this fucker’s set a record for how many people he’s personally pissed off by now. Maruki didn’t give up and decided to become a counselor, which is how he met and treated Sumi. When Sumi started going to Shujin, Maruki visited to keep an eye on her. Principal Fisk saw a golden opportunity to bolster his and the school’s image despite the Kamoshitter incident going on at the time, by inviting Maruki to stay as the school’s guidance counselor, showing just how much he cared about the students’ mental health.
A sharp-eyed player will have noticed Maruki before the game introduced him formally:
See that guy with the blue tie in the back? That’s him. He, in fact, saw them as they exited the Metaverse in this scene and, in conjunction with his own prior experiences, saw an opportunity to learn more about the Metaverse by talking to Ren. Besides this, he fills his role as a guidance counselor excellently. Look, I know a good therapist when I see one and whoever wrote Maruki’s character must know as well, because this guy is nurturing, welcoming, kind – all essential hallmarks of a great therapist. He’s not using his Persona at school, either – the only time we see him use a Persona in therapy is with Sumi. The counseling scenes we see in-game just involve Maruki as a regular person who gains the trust of every member of the Phantom Thieves, sans Morgana, simply by being a great listener and a sympathetic, kind human being. As you can probably tell by the fact that Maruki has a Palace, he’s the final boss of the game, but he’s not a villain. He genuinely wants to help people. No ulterior motives, no secret evil master plan – he’s a good guy, full stop. Keep this in mind.
Anyway, from talking with Ren, Maruki gains a deeper understanding of how the Metaverse works; specifically, by entering the Metaverse, one can directly manipulate the subconscious and thus change cognition. In particular, since Mementos contains the general public’s Shadows, one can change a person’s cognition by going there to interact with his/her Shadow. Further, one can change everyone’s cognition by manipulating Mementos itself.
When Yaldabaoth revealed himself, he inadvertently allowed Maruki’s Persona to awaken fully when the Metaverse merged with reality. With his fully awakened power, Maruki established a network that siphoned information from Mementos to him, at which point he used his power to fix things as he saw fit. For example, there’s a guy who struggled as an artist, so Maruki changed his and everyone else’s cognition such that the guy never wanted to be an artist – he instead pursues archery. And, of course, all the weird stuff at the beginning was Maruki’s doing.
That about wraps up the backstory exposition. Ren and Akechi retreat from the Palace on January 2 after Maruki’s reveal and Ren goes to check on the other team members, who are immersed in Maruki’s illusion. This means he spends one day on each party member for six days total. For example, he takes the train to Shibuya, sees Makoto and Sae, asks Makoto in a ~5-minute conversation whether she feels everything’s alright, then goes home for the day. This sequence is forced, by the way. You can’t check on multiple people in one day. You need to spend six days on six people, after which some more plot days occur where the party members wake up from the illusion and the game further explains Maruki (establishing, among other things, that the final fight against him will occur on February 3). Royal adds a month to the game calendar but pads the plot like this until January 12, meaning the player only gets about half a month of actual extra playtime. And while this padding isn’t new – similar things happened prior to the other Palaces in the vanilla game – there’s no reason the final boss fight needs to happen at the beginning of February. The writers could’ve put it at the beginning of March and given the player an extra month, perhaps with one or two days showing the team getting to know Sumi and vice versa. I guess that would’ve made too much sense for Royal’s writing team.
On the topic of the writing for this expansion, let’s talk about Maruki’s power some more. Generally, he changes cognition as he sees fit based on what he gleans from Shadows. But, Persona-users do not have Shadows, as Persona-users need to accept their Shadows, meaning Personas and Shadow selves cannot exist simultaneously. Maruki instead knew what to do with the team members through the counseling sessions. Haru spoke to him about her father, for example, so he made it so that everyone’s cognition, including Haru’s, saw her father as alive and a much better person/father. This then begs the question of how the hell he knew to make people see Morgana as human, given he never once talks to Morgana. Or, the question of what the hell happened with Akechi, whom Maruki knows nothing about. Maruki couldn’t possibly have known what happened in Shithole’s Palace, either. Remember, Maruki cannot rewrite history or revive the dead – Haru’s father, for example, isn’t actually alive, but is instead a cognitive illusion Maruki placed on everyone (that illusion, by the way, must center on Haru somehow, since after Haru wakes up from the illusion, her father disappears and everyone goes back to knowing that he’s dead). Akechi, on the other hand, isn’t a cognitive illusion – Akechi is the real deal. He talks about the hole in his memory and becomes a playable character. Akechi’s presence is a giant plot hole.
The writing gets worse.
February
I mentioned Maruki is a genuinely good guy. All the stuff I just went over was him genuinely trying to make the world a better place – a world without pain. He’s just going about it in a heavy-handed and flawed manner. I’m not going to go into detail as to why his plan wouldn’t work long-term, as this shrine sort of devolved into a rant and it’s getting long as it is, but I think we can agree Maruki’s not a villain.
The team sends him a calling card and kicks his ass on February 3. They steal his Treasure, the Palace collapses, and Maruki changes careers to become a taxi driver. Roll credits. No, really.
Let’s compare Maruki to Sae. Sae starts out unequivocally opposed to the team and, due to her distorted obsession with winning, was a full-on villain. The team puts their faith in Sae that she’d regain her sense of justice if Ren talked to her; thus, the team doesn’t take her Treasure and trusts she’ll have a change of heart on her own. And she does.
Maruki is nowhere near the villain Sae started out as, yet the team never tries to talk to him or find some sort of middle ground – maybe Maruki talks to Shadows rather than imposes an alternative personality on everyone wholesale or Maruki uses the Metaverse to gain insight on individuals while treating them as a counselor (with consent, of course). No, they just fight him like all the other Palace bosses. The game sets up this interesting dilemma of Maruki’s painless reality versus the real, cruel world. The game establishes a three-dimensional, altruistic man haunted by his fiancée’s past who wants desperately to end human suffering. Then the game abandons it all; the climax treats him like any other villain the team needs to take down.
Remember how great Maruki was at being a counselor? Let’s chuck all that into a trash bin. We’re going to make him abandon his motivation for helping others overcome mental and emotional trauma, because it’s either let him exert magical mind-wiping on the planet or bust.
One might argue that Maruki wouldn’t listen, but the point is the team doesn’t try. And even thus – the way Maruki’s plot ends is up to the writing team. They could’ve written an ending where he does hear the team out, and they talk him down. For instance, they could’ve had Sumi get through to him. In-game, Sumi says she’s genuinely grateful to Maruki, though she ultimately chose to face the truth. Sumi’s thus the best, most natural character to show Maruki that she acknowledges and is grateful for his kindness, but that it’s still possible to move forward without a permanent, all-or-nothing overwrite. If Maruki then backed down, undergoing a change of heart himself like Sae did, this would have cemented Sumi as a critical character to the plot rather than what we got – a giant, crammed exposition dump followed by nothing.
…Anyway, after beating Maruki, the game locks into a solid hour+ of back-to-back cutscenes. Reality goes back to normal, meaning Akechi didn’t return and thus Ren ended up in jail in December. Eventually, the police free Ren from prison when the team tracks down that woman he saved from Shithole and convinces her to retract her false testimony – this means the conviction that put him on probation in the first place gets overturned, clearing Ren’s record. He then says good-bye to everyone and goes home…that is, everyone except Sumi, who appears for a few seconds in a cutscene at the end and that’s it. Fuck all of this entirely.
So, as you may be expecting, it’s time to talk about the superbosses.
Character spotlight: Jose
Anyway, from talking with Ren, Maruki gains a deeper understanding of how the Metaverse works; specifically, by entering the Metaverse, one can directly manipulate the subconscious and thus change cognition. In particular, since Mementos contains the general public’s Shadows, one can change a person’s cognition by going there to interact with his/her Shadow. Further, one can change everyone’s cognition by manipulating Mementos itself.
When Yaldabaoth revealed himself, he inadvertently allowed Maruki’s Persona to awaken fully when the Metaverse merged with reality. With his fully awakened power, Maruki established a network that siphoned information from Mementos to him, at which point he used his power to fix things as he saw fit. For example, there’s a guy who struggled as an artist, so Maruki changed his and everyone else’s cognition such that the guy never wanted to be an artist – he instead pursues archery. And, of course, all the weird stuff at the beginning was Maruki’s doing.
That about wraps up the backstory exposition. Ren and Akechi retreat from the Palace on January 2 after Maruki’s reveal and Ren goes to check on the other team members, who are immersed in Maruki’s illusion. This means he spends one day on each party member for six days total. For example, he takes the train to Shibuya, sees Makoto and Sae, asks Makoto in a ~5-minute conversation whether she feels everything’s alright, then goes home for the day. This sequence is forced, by the way. You can’t check on multiple people in one day. You need to spend six days on six people, after which some more plot days occur where the party members wake up from the illusion and the game further explains Maruki (establishing, among other things, that the final fight against him will occur on February 3). Royal adds a month to the game calendar but pads the plot like this until January 12, meaning the player only gets about half a month of actual extra playtime. And while this padding isn’t new – similar things happened prior to the other Palaces in the vanilla game – there’s no reason the final boss fight needs to happen at the beginning of February. The writers could’ve put it at the beginning of March and given the player an extra month, perhaps with one or two days showing the team getting to know Sumi and vice versa. I guess that would’ve made too much sense for Royal’s writing team.
On the topic of the writing for this expansion, let’s talk about Maruki’s power some more. Generally, he changes cognition as he sees fit based on what he gleans from Shadows. But, Persona-users do not have Shadows, as Persona-users need to accept their Shadows, meaning Personas and Shadow selves cannot exist simultaneously. Maruki instead knew what to do with the team members through the counseling sessions. Haru spoke to him about her father, for example, so he made it so that everyone’s cognition, including Haru’s, saw her father as alive and a much better person/father. This then begs the question of how the hell he knew to make people see Morgana as human, given he never once talks to Morgana. Or, the question of what the hell happened with Akechi, whom Maruki knows nothing about. Maruki couldn’t possibly have known what happened in Shithole’s Palace, either. Remember, Maruki cannot rewrite history or revive the dead – Haru’s father, for example, isn’t actually alive, but is instead a cognitive illusion Maruki placed on everyone (that illusion, by the way, must center on Haru somehow, since after Haru wakes up from the illusion, her father disappears and everyone goes back to knowing that he’s dead). Akechi, on the other hand, isn’t a cognitive illusion – Akechi is the real deal. He talks about the hole in his memory and becomes a playable character. Akechi’s presence is a giant plot hole.
The writing gets worse.
February
I mentioned Maruki is a genuinely good guy. All the stuff I just went over was him genuinely trying to make the world a better place – a world without pain. He’s just going about it in a heavy-handed and flawed manner. I’m not going to go into detail as to why his plan wouldn’t work long-term, as this shrine sort of devolved into a rant and it’s getting long as it is, but I think we can agree Maruki’s not a villain.
The team sends him a calling card and kicks his ass on February 3. They steal his Treasure, the Palace collapses, and Maruki changes careers to become a taxi driver. Roll credits. No, really.
Let’s compare Maruki to Sae. Sae starts out unequivocally opposed to the team and, due to her distorted obsession with winning, was a full-on villain. The team puts their faith in Sae that she’d regain her sense of justice if Ren talked to her; thus, the team doesn’t take her Treasure and trusts she’ll have a change of heart on her own. And she does.
Maruki is nowhere near the villain Sae started out as, yet the team never tries to talk to him or find some sort of middle ground – maybe Maruki talks to Shadows rather than imposes an alternative personality on everyone wholesale or Maruki uses the Metaverse to gain insight on individuals while treating them as a counselor (with consent, of course). No, they just fight him like all the other Palace bosses. The game sets up this interesting dilemma of Maruki’s painless reality versus the real, cruel world. The game establishes a three-dimensional, altruistic man haunted by his fiancée’s past who wants desperately to end human suffering. Then the game abandons it all; the climax treats him like any other villain the team needs to take down.
Remember how great Maruki was at being a counselor? Let’s chuck all that into a trash bin. We’re going to make him abandon his motivation for helping others overcome mental and emotional trauma, because it’s either let him exert magical mind-wiping on the planet or bust.
One might argue that Maruki wouldn’t listen, but the point is the team doesn’t try. And even thus – the way Maruki’s plot ends is up to the writing team. They could’ve written an ending where he does hear the team out, and they talk him down. For instance, they could’ve had Sumi get through to him. In-game, Sumi says she’s genuinely grateful to Maruki, though she ultimately chose to face the truth. Sumi’s thus the best, most natural character to show Maruki that she acknowledges and is grateful for his kindness, but that it’s still possible to move forward without a permanent, all-or-nothing overwrite. If Maruki then backed down, undergoing a change of heart himself like Sae did, this would have cemented Sumi as a critical character to the plot rather than what we got – a giant, crammed exposition dump followed by nothing.
…Anyway, after beating Maruki, the game locks into a solid hour+ of back-to-back cutscenes. Reality goes back to normal, meaning Akechi didn’t return and thus Ren ended up in jail in December. Eventually, the police free Ren from prison when the team tracks down that woman he saved from Shithole and convinces her to retract her false testimony – this means the conviction that put him on probation in the first place gets overturned, clearing Ren’s record. He then says good-bye to everyone and goes home…that is, everyone except Sumi, who appears for a few seconds in a cutscene at the end and that’s it. Fuck all of this entirely.
So, as you may be expecting, it’s time to talk about the superbosses.
Character spotlight: Jose
Jose appears as a little boy who drives a buggy around Mementos looking for flowers to drink so he can learn more about humans on behalf of some “person” he refuses to name. He is also wholly unaware of how little sense the previous sentence makes and routinely leaves the team completely bewildered, much to my amusement. Yes, he’s absolutely adorable and makes Mementos a much better experience compared to Tartarus, its inspiration from Persona 3.
Toward the end of the game, he expresses frustration that the more he studies humans, the less he understands. He proposes that fighting some humans (namely, you) will help him understand humans (something that oddly makes sense…maybe it’s just my Pokémon Trainer instincts talking). Jose begins the fight by drifting his buggy into the team and then follows by throwing balls at them. Later, he launches fireworks that rain down magic stars on the party. All of this does way more damage than I’m making it sound, but it’s a quirky and fun fight.
After defeating him, he says he understands humans even less now, but that’s now good for some reason, and he gives you a water tray. It does nothing.
Toward the end of the game, he expresses frustration that the more he studies humans, the less he understands. He proposes that fighting some humans (namely, you) will help him understand humans (something that oddly makes sense…maybe it’s just my Pokémon Trainer instincts talking). Jose begins the fight by drifting his buggy into the team and then follows by throwing balls at them. Later, he launches fireworks that rain down magic stars on the party. All of this does way more damage than I’m making it sound, but it’s a quirky and fun fight.
After defeating him, he says he understands humans even less now, but that’s now good for some reason, and he gives you a water tray. It does nothing.
He then drives off merrily, leaving the team utterly confused as to what the hell just happened. This guy is awesome.
Character spotlight: Lavenza, part I
Character spotlight: Lavenza, part I
The game introduces Caroline and Justine as the Velvet Room assistants for Persona 5. Unlike the previous assistants, the twins spend most of their time berating Ren for no real reason, though they steadily warm up to him over time, especially if the player completes their Social Link/Confidant. They’ll also ask Ren to show them around town, similar to some of Elizabeth’s requests, complete with the hilarity. I’m particularly fond of the church visit, in which you can tell them the confessional booth is a torture chamber and the priest is a god.
As is tradition for Velvet Room assistants, should the player be on New Game Plus, they will challenge you to a battle. The twins don’t hit nearly as hard as do Elizabeth or Margaret, so the fight isn’t as difficult, though there is a slight quirk. There’s a turn limit and you have to beat both of them in the same round; otherwise, they’ll just revive one another. If you fail to do enough damage by the turn limit, they’ll perform an All-Out Attack (there’s two of them, remember?) and kill you instantly.
Defeat them and they give you their bookmark. It does nothing.
As is tradition for Velvet Room assistants, should the player be on New Game Plus, they will challenge you to a battle. The twins don’t hit nearly as hard as do Elizabeth or Margaret, so the fight isn’t as difficult, though there is a slight quirk. There’s a turn limit and you have to beat both of them in the same round; otherwise, they’ll just revive one another. If you fail to do enough damage by the turn limit, they’ll perform an All-Out Attack (there’s two of them, remember?) and kill you instantly.
Defeat them and they give you their bookmark. It does nothing.
Character spotlight: Lavenza, part II
As I mentioned before, Caroline and Justine eventually reunite into their true form, Lavenza. She is far kinder to Ren, though she still shows her angry side at times, such as when she asks to see Ren’s room. She tries to make some tools using his workbench, but fails, and almost resorts to casting Megidolaon on the workbench out of frustration before Ren stops her.
If you’d previously beaten the twins, Lavenza will challenge you after you secure the infiltration route to Maruki’s Palace, as she has now achieved her true form. Lavenza’s fight is significantly more difficult compared to Caroline’s and Justine’s. While she still doesn’t hit as hard compared to her older siblings (early in the fight, anyway), she makes up for it by fighting more strategically. For one, she’ll begin the fight with Dekaja, thereby eliminating the three Auto-buffs I normally walk into battle with. She’ll liberally do this throughout the fight while removing any debuffs you place on her.
Her fight has four phases. In the first, she’ll use status moves, followed immediately by magic attacks for Technical damage. She’ll change her affinities, necessitating you change attacks to damage her reliably – which you need to do, because like the twins, if you don’t damage her enough within a turn limit, she’ll split into the twins and All-Out Attack you in the face (to be honest, that animation’s pretty sick).
In her second phase, you need to score a Technical hit every round, which isn’t necessarily difficult, but keep in mind this locks down two team members – one to set the status and another to deal the Technical hit. This leaves only two to manage buffs/debuffs, heal, and do as much damage as possible to avoid failing the turn limit.
In her third phase, you need to score a critical hit every round, making this phase completely luck-based, something Lavenza straight-up tells you when the phase begins. Elizabeth’s fight in Persona 3 was heavily RNG, but I kind of gave that a pass because that’s the first Velvet Room assistant superboss and I figured the developers got better with Margaret, Jose, and the twins. Then they pull this BS. If RNG doesn’t favor you and you fail to score a critical in one round? Eat an All-Out Attack and die.
This is where Sumi’s Brave Step becomes important, not to mention Sumi herself is great at scoring critical hits. If you luck through the third phase, Lavenza enters her final phase in which she straight-up stops playing games and begins throwing her strongest spells that specifically target weaknesses at you. She’ll use One Mores from knockdowns to deadly effect. She’ll ignore the time-honored rules of engagement for turn-based RPGs and cut you with her chainsaw even when it’s not her turn. She’ll use Mind Charge/Concentrate + Megidolaon on you, and while this isn’t a 9999 Megidolaon, it’s still more than enough to wipe the team.
Just her fourth phase without gimmicks was enough to make me feel like my back was against the wall, especially with my no-KO rule. The Yaldabaoth fight, on the other hand, was more amusing than anything else. A few Mind Charged/Concentrated Blazing Hells from Ann was enough to ruin his day. There’s no way in hell Yaldabaoth was able to defeat Lavenza and split her into the twins.
At any rate, if you manage to defeat Lavenza, she gives you her true bookmark. It does nothing.
If you’d previously beaten the twins, Lavenza will challenge you after you secure the infiltration route to Maruki’s Palace, as she has now achieved her true form. Lavenza’s fight is significantly more difficult compared to Caroline’s and Justine’s. While she still doesn’t hit as hard compared to her older siblings (early in the fight, anyway), she makes up for it by fighting more strategically. For one, she’ll begin the fight with Dekaja, thereby eliminating the three Auto-buffs I normally walk into battle with. She’ll liberally do this throughout the fight while removing any debuffs you place on her.
Her fight has four phases. In the first, she’ll use status moves, followed immediately by magic attacks for Technical damage. She’ll change her affinities, necessitating you change attacks to damage her reliably – which you need to do, because like the twins, if you don’t damage her enough within a turn limit, she’ll split into the twins and All-Out Attack you in the face (to be honest, that animation’s pretty sick).
In her second phase, you need to score a Technical hit every round, which isn’t necessarily difficult, but keep in mind this locks down two team members – one to set the status and another to deal the Technical hit. This leaves only two to manage buffs/debuffs, heal, and do as much damage as possible to avoid failing the turn limit.
In her third phase, you need to score a critical hit every round, making this phase completely luck-based, something Lavenza straight-up tells you when the phase begins. Elizabeth’s fight in Persona 3 was heavily RNG, but I kind of gave that a pass because that’s the first Velvet Room assistant superboss and I figured the developers got better with Margaret, Jose, and the twins. Then they pull this BS. If RNG doesn’t favor you and you fail to score a critical in one round? Eat an All-Out Attack and die.
This is where Sumi’s Brave Step becomes important, not to mention Sumi herself is great at scoring critical hits. If you luck through the third phase, Lavenza enters her final phase in which she straight-up stops playing games and begins throwing her strongest spells that specifically target weaknesses at you. She’ll use One Mores from knockdowns to deadly effect. She’ll ignore the time-honored rules of engagement for turn-based RPGs and cut you with her chainsaw even when it’s not her turn. She’ll use Mind Charge/Concentrate + Megidolaon on you, and while this isn’t a 9999 Megidolaon, it’s still more than enough to wipe the team.
Just her fourth phase without gimmicks was enough to make me feel like my back was against the wall, especially with my no-KO rule. The Yaldabaoth fight, on the other hand, was more amusing than anything else. A few Mind Charged/Concentrated Blazing Hells from Ann was enough to ruin his day. There’s no way in hell Yaldabaoth was able to defeat Lavenza and split her into the twins.
At any rate, if you manage to defeat Lavenza, she gives you her true bookmark. It does nothing.