First off, I want to say that Persona 5 is a great game. I feel I need to say this right away, because I’m going to be saying a lot of negative things about this game, but despite all of that negativity I really loved it. Unfortunately, while Persona 5 is a game that does a great job with its story and characters, it fails on a lot of levels when it comes to actual game design, especially at the start. The end result is a game that’s undeniably great if you stick with it, but also incredibly frustrating as a designer.
I will attempt to write this analysis so that you can learn from the game even if you haven’t played it yourself, and I’ll also be avoiding major spoilers for the game, but I’ll occasionally give away minor plot points in order to illustrate a point.
The King of Zazz
The first thing I noticed about Persona 5 is it has style. Like, a lot of style. Text is displayed with an interesting font that captures the feeling of letters cut out of a magazine and pasted together, which is very appropriate to the characters and story. Cutscenes are made with hand-drawn animations that capture the characters’ charm and personality. Transitions between scenes are always well done, communicate mood and travel, and I found myself smiling at some of the transitions even 50 hours into the game.
It all comes together to form a visual style that is captivating, and immediately endeared me to the game. Unfortunately, over the next couple of hours that goodwill was lost. Looking back over the notes I took while playing Persona is shocking. Who was this man who wrote so many hateful comments about a game I love so much?
The Importance of Meaningful Interaction
What’s so wrong with the start of this game?
The first few hours of Persona 5 look like this: press X as you read dialog (the majority of it is voice acted, but not all of it). Watch some anime cutscenes. Briefly be given control of your character and told to run somewhere and press X to interact (you’re not allowed to do anything except that specific thing, if you try the game will stop you). Read some more dialog. Occasionally, if you’re lucky, you’ll be given the opportunity to make a dialog choice that clearly has no impact on the game at all.
I’ve heard people say that one of the problems with Persona 5 is that its story is very linear, but I don’t think that’s really accurate to the problem. In my mind, linearity in a story only matters when you play a game a second time, and at around 100 hours long, Persona 5 isn’t a game I think I’ll be playing through multiple times. Rather, the problem with the first few hours of Persona 5 is the complete lack of meaningful interaction.
It’s like the designers of the game heard that you need to allow players to interact with the game, so they begrudgingly take time out of presenting the story to you and allow you some interaction, but that interaction means nothing at all, it’s completely superficial. I can only walk where they tell me to go, do what the story needs me to do. I can make dialog choices, but just by looking at them I can tell they’ll make no impact on what happens. I’ve replayed dialog choices over to confirm this, and indeed often what choice you make doesn’t even change what other characters will say next. Frankly, it starts to feel insulting.
Sid Meier, the legendary designer behind the Civilization games, once said that a good game was simply a series of interesting decisions. Persona 5 is a great case study of doing player choice both very wrong and very right. About 6 hours in, Persona does indeed have meaningful interaction. In fact after a while it is overflowing with it, and it’s great. Once the game opens up you have plenty of choices, every choice has interesting consequences, and I’ll be heaping my praises on these systems later on. First though, I need to talk about some other things that really ruin the beginning of this game.
Blank Slate and Silent Protagonists
Ever since I played The Witcher 3, I’ve been completely off the idea of a “blank slate” main character. A blank slate character refers to a main character that has no personality of their own, the idea being that the player then projects themselves into the role of the main character.
The Witcher 3 really opened my eyes as to what’s possible when the main character has a personality of their own. Geralt (the protagonist of The Witcher series) is an amazing character. Players always will want to explore a character they like, and when the main character is somebody they are interested in, any action they take explores that character further and rewards the player. The main plot in The Witcher 3 worked so well for me in that game because I liked Geralt so much, so when he cared about something, I cared too. Love interests had history to them and felt genuine. The entire game hinges on Geralt as a character.
I think when making a story, having the main character purposefully have no definite traits to them is just always going to hamstring a story’s writing.
Of course, blank slate protagonists have their benefits. You can give the player a much wider range of responses to a situation. Geralt can only ever act like Geralt. Commander Shepard from Mass Effect is a (mostly) blank slate character, and so the player can choose from wildly different responses ranging from goody-two-shoes to incredibly evil. This design promotes player choice and that’s a very good thing. There are pros and cons to either approach.
Persona 5 does the worst of both worlds.
The protagonist in Persona 5 has no personality of his own, and yet at the same time you can’t make any choices about what his personality will be. There’s the occasional choice where some are a bit ruder than others, but that’s about the extent of it, and it never really matters.
A major reason I’ve come to dislike blank slate protagonists is because, as the protagonist, the majority of character interaction is going to be with them by default. If they have no personality, then it becomes harder for other characters to showcase their personality as well: they have nobody to bounce off of. Persona suffers from this a lot at the start, until you meet more characters and have them join you, all interaction becomes this one-sided affair with a character that isn’t interesting in the least. I think it’s quite telling that later on, when you have more characters in your party (all of which have interesting and different personalities), most of the dialog is between each other and rarely involves the protagonist, and I think the game becomes better for it.
The Turning Point
So yeah, for a long time playing this game I was not enjoying it. I’ve been told that it takes a while for Persona games to “get going”, but it’s more than that. For the first few hours, it was a bad game. I stuck with it though, partly because the story was getting increasingly more interesting and I’d heard so many good things about the game, but mostly because I had paid eighty goddamn dollars for it. Please learn this lesson well if you’re making a game, however: a lot of people won’t get that far. They’ll assume the whole game will be bad, they’ll return it or put it away, never to be seen again. If this series was free-to-play, and players don’t have the same sunk cost investment, I think the series would have never gotten off the ground.
You may say “But Ian, you stuck with it! Doesn’t that prove it’s okay?” No! You know why? Because this isn’t the first time I’ve tried to play a Persona game, but it’s the first one I actually stuck with!
It was around 6 hours in that things reached a turning point. My notes turn from spitting vitriol to praise. Once all the major mechanics had been introduced and the game could let you be free to make choices, once the main premise of the story had been put in place, and once you’ve started to interact with many interesting characters, the game really does redeem itself.
The Real Game at Last
So I didn’t realize this coming into the game, but Persona is basically one half dungeon crawler RPG, and one half dating-sim romance game. And I loved it. The game does a very good job intertwining these two seemingly disparate aspects of the game together, to the point where it’s hard to imagine them apart.
The premise of the game is basically that a group of high school students discover the ability to enter the minds of people with a warped view of the world. For instance, an egotistical teacher who believes he can do whatever he wants at school sees the school as his castle, and when you enter his cognition of the world it is a literal castle, complete with guards and slaves and him ruling as the king. The goal of the heroes is to change the subject’s hearts from within these alternate worlds, and being inside these alternate worlds serves as the dungeon crawling aspect of the game.
However, the heroes are still high school students that have to balance their heroic activities with the mundane world of their high school lives. Outside of the dungeons you do various activities to meet new people, strengthen bonds with other characters and learn more about them, and develop relationships. It’s at these times where the game becomes like a dating sim, as you choose what you do each day, and you only have a set amount of time each day. This half of the game is just as important as the dungeon crawling aspect too, as the relationships that you form in the real world bring essential benefits to completing the dungeons.
There’s a lot of interesting design decisions in both halves that I’d like to talk about.
A New Take On Dungeon Crawling
I want to talk about one of my favorite mechanics in Persona 5: how it handles dungeons and coming back to them. Basically, in no way are you expected to “one-shot” a dungeon. Instead, you go in, explore a bit, and unlock some new areas that you can fast travel to. However, as you fight through the dungeon your combat resources will be drained to the point where you’ll need to return to the real world to recover. It will take many, many visits to a dungeon before you complete it, but you have a deadline in the real world of how many days you have before you finish the dungeon, and each attempt “uses up” one day.
Every action in combat takes up resources of some sort, with the exception of basic weak attacks. All other attacks take up either mana, ammo, or health to use. The result is that every action you take in combat is something you start to consider seriously, even during random encounters. Using special attacks is essential for taking down enemies fast, but you’ll start running out of mana. Getting hit is a big problem, as even when you heal it back up you’ve lost yet more resources. When playing this game I actually cared about “filler” fights and rarely resented them, when I normally highly resent filler combat. This is because every single fight had a stake to it. Even if there was no chance in a fight that the enemy could wipe me out, it was still important to play smart, as a single a bad fight could cut my current journey short.
Also, the simple fact that you end up going to the same dungeon multiple times lends weight to each dungeon as well. Combined with the fact that each dungeon is tied to the personality of a character in the game, and as such is an extension of their personality, I found myself caring about the dungeons in this game a lot more than in most.
Let’s Talk About Turn Based Combat
So, Persona 5 has turn-based combat. I think that turn-based combat has gotten a bad rap lately, like it’s become some sort of accepted truth that turn-based combat is inferior to real-time combat. I disagree with that notion.
While turn-based combat is certainly less “kinetic” than real-time combat, it still offers a lot of valuable advantages: it allows us as designers to encourage strategic thinking over mechanical ability, it allows for a broader player base, as some players just can’t handle the speed of real-time combat. A big advantage of turn-based combat that I want to talk about is how well it communicates choices.
What do I mean by communicating choices? Well, some games communicate choices very well, and others very poorly. Let me give you some examples in games:
In World of Warcraft, if I’m playing a mage I will cast Arcane Blast, because it deals a great deal of damage and each successive Arcane Blast deals more damage than the last. However, each successive Arcane Blast also uses exponentially more mana than the last, and I realize that if I continue like this I’ll run out of mana, so I break the chain intentionally. This is good communication of choices, I understand what I’m doing here and the consequences of my actions.
In Black Desert, I have a bunch of abilities that hit enemies for varying amounts. Sometimes they knock people up into the air, but sometimes they don’t. I don’t really understand what’s going on and mostly vary up my abilities so I don’t get bored rather than any specific strategy. It doesn’t seem to matter anyway. This is bad communication of choices. I’m sure there’s plenty of interesting choices to be made, and I could learn and understand the system, but by simply playing the game I don’t understand what they are.
In most single player RPGs I’ve played with real-time combat, I tend to just hit the main attack button and hope it works out. I have some vague ideas of what’s going on, but things are usually moving too quickly for me to really figure it out. You can’t really throw too many choices at once to a player in a real-time game, they’ll be overwhelmed. In a game like League of Legends or Dark Souls, where players are playing the game to attain some level of mastery of it, you can expect them to take the time to learn these systems. In a story-based game though, they’re there to experience the story, and often not going to take the time to learn.
In Persona, when I use an ability it is always a very deliberate choice. I know a certain ability will deal lightning damage, and I’m using that ability because this character can use a lightning attack or a physical attack, but the current enemy is resistant to physical attacks. I chose not to use my gun because I want to conserve ammo, etc. I’m making my choices very deliberately and knowing the full range of options available to me.
Of course, there’s a reason real-time has become the norm for combat in games. There are a lot of strengths to it, but I think people overlook the advantages of turn-based combat too often. Make sure to choose the system that makes sense for your game. Turn-based combat makes sense for Persona, it’s a game that’s fundamentally about taking your time making choices (even though the game takes about six hours to realize it.)
The Ultimate Romance and Procrastination Simulator
The other half of the game, like I said, is basically a dating-sim. Each day you go about your normal life, texting your friends, hanging out with them, going to school, etc. The mechanics of it are that you can fit two major events into each day, a major event being something like hanging out with a friend, or undertaking some sort of activity such as going to a public bath. Interactions with other characters (referred to as Confidants) unlocks special abilities and perks that have huge benefits when in combat. However, the main character also has various social stats (such as Charm) that must be increased by activities in order to unlock further Confidant levels.
If you’ve ever played a dating-sim game, you’ll recognize the same mechanics. Furthermore, pretty much every female character in the game is a possible romance option, even your cute teacher, so it becomes quite literally a dating-sim. In Persona, however, you need to manage developing these relationships against a looming deadline to complete the current dungeon. It’s because of this decision context that all these decisions become so much more interesting than they would be in a straightforward dating-sim. (Someday I’m going to talk more about decision context, but I think I’ll leave it for a multiplayer PvP game.)
All these systems tie together quite well. I spend time building relationships with other characters so that I gain their bonuses in the dungeons. Inside the dungeons I take every fight serious, because taking too much damage can force me out of the dungeon early, meaning I’ll have less time to spend romancing my cute teacher, and that’s just goddamn unacceptable.
The Importance of Characters
In any story, the characters within that story are the heart of it. A story lives and dies based on how much the audience likes the characters in it. Somebody once told me: “a plot affecting characters is a story, a plot affecting no characters is just the news”.
To this end, I strongly believe any story based game should have mechanics that allow players to further explore their favorite characters.
Of all the Mass Effect games to date, I would have to say that the strongest one by far was Mass Effect 2. There’s a strange fact about Mass Effect 2 though: it barely has any main storyline plot in it at all. There’s some at the start, a bit at the middle, and a bit at the end, and that’s it. In my opinion, these were also the weakest points of the game too. Instead, the majority of the game consists of meeting new characters, and then later exploring more about those characters. The other games in the Mass Effect series focus on the main plotline of the galaxy being under threat, and suffer for it.
The thing is, the entire galaxy being destroyed is actually not interesting to humans. It should be the most interesting thing ever, but instead we get much more invested in a plotline where a crew member is ostracized by her people for supporting our actions. We, as humans, care none whatsoever for humans we don’t know, but care incredibly deeply for humans that we do know. (Or aliens, or anthropomorphic cats, as the case may be, as long as they have human qualities.)
Persona 5’s mechanics knock this concept completely out of the park. The Confidant system provides a constant source of new character exploration, complete with challenges to overcome and rewards for doing so. Character exploration is baked into the very heart of the story, every dungeon is an exploration of a character. There’s even mechanics for generic enemies to plea for their lives in combat or be talked out of fighting. Character development is absolutely everywhere and I think this incredible focus on character interaction is the core of why the Persona series is so beloved.
Tradition is Complacency in Noble Disguise
Why can a game be so good and yet so flawed? I think that a lot of it comes down to Persona 5 blindly following the traditions set by its predecessors and other JRPGs, and not looking enough to what modern games have been innovating. Unfortunately, this is something that seems to be baked into the very culture of Japan. Persona 5 may be the 5th Persona game, but it’s actually also the latest in the very long line of games from the Shin Megami Tensei series. Persona 5 feels like a game that never looked outside its immediate contemporaries to see what the rest of the industry was doing, but rather always looked inwards and completely focused on perfecting what it was already doing.
I’ve gone on at length about the problems this game has with telling its story in a completely non-interactive manner. Half Life showed the world the power of storytelling while retaining player control, a lesson that other games have taken to heart and built upon ever since. Why hasn’t this one?
One of the most painful examples of this philosophy in action is the save system. You can only save in certain spots in this game, and I am not exaggerating whatsoever when I say that you can go over an hour without any opportunity to save your game. The idea of “save points” was fine back in the 90’s, when cartridges didn’t have much storage space and it was an important optimization tool. This game was released in the year 2016, there’s no excuse anymore. It’s ridiculous that I could be playing such a modern game and yet have to tell friends and family I can’t stop playing yet, I need to wait until I reach the next save point.
In the past, I tried to play Persona 4. At one point while playing that game, my power cut out, and I hadn’t seen a save point in about 45 minutes. I decided to stop playing the game right then and there. Like Persona 5, 4 also had no meaningful interaction at the start, I was getting the same frustrations with it, and the idea of sitting through 45 minutes of the same cutscenes and dialog killed my fledgling interest in the game. I was very disappointed to see an identical save system in 5.
Modern games have moved onto new save systems, where you don’t lose significant progress if the game unexpected exits, and doesn’t constantly interrupt the flow of the game. Why hasn’t this one?
Some people may think I’m being too harsh on the game designers of Persona 5 over a lot of things, but as a game designers this is their job. On a development team, animators, modellers, and software engineers are expected to be keeping up with the advances in their field. Game designers should be learning from the advances other games have made too. I’m trying to, (that’s why I made this website), so I’m not going to give the designers at Persona 5 that slack.
The Importance of a Story with Meaning
I’ve had some good things to say about Persona 5, but I’ve also had a lot of bad things to say about the game… so why am I such a fan about this game? It’s all because of the story this game tells.
What draws me in about Persona is that it tells a story that seems to mean something to the author, and I can see their personality, their hopes and their fears come through. Honestly, this is rare in games, and it’s refreshing to see.
Whether I’m right or not, I feel like I know something about the author of Persona’s story. They felt like an outcast from society. They were a bit of a shut-in and had no place they felt they belonged. They had fantasies about romances with their teachers, but were also afraid of them. They’re frustrated that the world is so big that no one person can change it for the better, and they’re frustrated with the general apathy that the world has towards its problems. The personality of the author shines through the screen.
I recently played Horizon: Zero Dawn, and for all that game’s strengths, I never came away loving it like I did Persona 5. If you were to ask me about the personality of the author of Horizon, I’d never be able to say. As a result, while I was awed by Horizon’s technical achievements, and it was certainly a very good game, it never evoked the same kind of emotion in me that Persona 5 did.
Persona 5 succeeds because of its story and characters, and the mechanics that enhance those aspects. For all its faults, I loved this game. I don’t think with any work of art you can simply add up the strengths and subtract the flaws to arrive at a sum of how good it is, and Persona 5 is the best example I’ve ever seen of why.
Some Technical Takeaways
Before I wrap up, there’s a few technical issues I want to mention, because we can learn from them:
Character Responsiveness
For starters, character control is very awkward in this game. Now, I’ve played a lot of video games. Persona 5 ain’t my first rodeo, if ya get what I mean. Yet even after nearly 100 hours playing this game, I found myself walking into walls when trying to go through doorways. If I can regularly fly between hundreds of bullets in Ikaruga with pinpoint accuracy, and yet consistently can’t manage to get my character through a doorway in Persona 5 without walking into the side of the wall instead, something is wrong.
Your character feels like they lurch around, and moves too fast to be comfortable in any sort of confined space. Ideally you want your character to move 1-for-1 with the motion of your thumbstick, with small motions creating appropriately small responses, but the main character rarely feels like they move this way and quickly moves from standstill to full sprint.
Character Proportions
The protagonist of Persona 5 also suffers from I call “lanky character syndrome”.
My theory is that the closer your main character’s width to height ratio (when standing) is to the “golden ratio” (1:1.618), the “nicer” it will feel to move them. I first noticed this phenomenon playing Final Fantasy 8, immediately after playing 7. Both games used identical controls, but 7 felt so much nicer to control because of the proportions of the characters. Notice how classic “feel-good” characters like Mario and Sonic also conform to this ratio.
An average human, however, doesn’t conform to that ratio. Maybe a very bulky one comes close (like Marcus Fenix from Gears of War), but a really skinny guy like the protagonist in Persona 5 certainly does not. As a result, on top of the control issues I mentioned before, controlling him feels extra awkward.
Walk Cycles
I think the engine Persona uses needs some tweaks to how it handles walk cycles. The animations for the walk cycles always seem to play at the same speed, regardless of how fast the character is actually moving. This leads to a lot of amateurish looking animations where characters slide along the ground. I think this also contributes to the control issues: if walk cycle animations can never be slowed down, the developers always want your character to be moving a minimum speed so that it doesn’t look completely ridiculous, leading to that lurching feeling.
Camera Controls
The camera controls for Persona have gotten a lot of criticisms, it can be clunky to control the camera, and often the character ends up running right into the camera and causing it to act really erratically. I think they could have used a different camera system entirely, emulating the one in God of War, where the player doesn’t even control the camera whatsoever and it moves along a rail based on the player’s position. The game mostly takes place in corridors and rarely has large open spaces, so it would have been a perfect fit.
Field of View
Persona 5 also has an oddly low field of view value for the in-game camera. As a result, spaces often feel very cramped, and it is difficult to see your surroundings.
What can we learn from Persona 5
So, that was a lot of talking about Persona 5! After all that, what can we learn from this game?
- Interaction is important. It’s the reason to tell your story in a video game as opposed to another medium. But interaction alone isn’t enough, it needs to be meaningful interaction.
- If you’re going to have a blank slate character, make sure your game has a wide variety of conversation choices conveying different personalities, so the player can roleplay the character they want to play. If you don’t, you’re wasting the purpose of having a blank slate protagonist.
- The opening experience of your game is extremely important. If players are turned off here they’ll never come back. If your game is only fun when all the mechanics are in place, you need to make sure they’re in place quickly.
- Great characters are the basis for a great story. Your plot should be centered on the characters and how the events of the plot affect them. Your game should have mechanics that allow players to explore characters deeper.
- A little bit of style goes a long way in making your game stand out and be memorable.
- Turn-based combat has its own advantages and disadvantages over real-time combat, consider which makes sense for your game, and don’t dismiss turn-based out of hand.
- Create mechanics that make random filler combat have some sort of danger and stakes to them, and those fights will feel a lot more meaningful.
- Interesting transitions that mask loading screens are always welcome.
- Good character and camera control is always important, even in a turn based game. Controlling your game should be an intuitive joy, don’t let it become a frustration.
- Be generous with your camera’s field of view. Higher is generally better, as long as it’s within reason and doesn’t distort the screen, as it lets players see their surroundings better.
- Just because something worked before is no excuse to stop re-examining design choices. Don’t become complacent in your design.