This article accommodates spoilers for Persona 5.
If you’ve been making an attempt to grapple with the politics of games like Call of Duty and The Division 2, which its developers insist aren’t being political, you then’ve been wanting within the improper place. Sometimes it takes far or an outdoor perspective to actually maintain up a mirror to our actuality. In which case, I recommend we glance to Japan.
Final Fantasy 7’s environmentalist themes are ever more relevant as we face an impending local weather disaster whereas the as soon as baffling batshittery of Metal Gear Solid 2 brings readability to our age of pretend information and social media.
But if there’s one game that speaks to our political zeitgeist greater than every other, it’s Persona 5.
Sure, an anime JRPG the place a bunch of excessive schoolers gown up as thieves to steal treasure from one other dimension doesn’t appear a possible enviornment for political discourse. If something, it’s simpler to get distracted by Persona 5’s type and overlook its substance.
Persona 5 can also be a totally Japanese game with Japanese considerations – even the varsity pop quizzes assume a number of data in Japanese historical past or ideas. According to an interview with game director and producer Katsura Hashino in 4Gamer (translated by Persona Central), it had been the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake that led to a extra inward-looking perspective for the game.
Nonetheless, by the point the game arrived on Western shores in 2017, you hardly wanted any understanding of Japanese present affairs to narrate to any of them. In reality, I discover it not possible to keep away from considering the way it alludes to a number of what we’ve been experiencing within the West.
For instance, fitness center instructor Kamoshida’s bodily abuse of volleyball college students is predicated on the widespread apply of corporal punishment in Japanese faculty sports activities golf equipment uncovered after a high school student’s constant beatings from his basketball coach led him to suicide in 2012. But that’s solely half of the story as his palace additionally reveals his lecherous behaviour in the direction of the feminine college students, together with Ann and her finest buddy Shiho. When Kamoshida’s lastly uncovered for his crimes, it’s the latter that resonates essentially the most, particularly by the tip of 2017 because the #MeToo motion got here to the fore within the wake of the silence lifted over many years of rape and sexual harassment committed by Harvey Weinstein.
A later plot involving a CEO of a quick meals chain exploiting its younger workforce might have been immediately impressed by Japanese ‘black companies’. But actually, in our age of zero-hours contracts or rising deal with crunch tradition, it’s all too relatable in the remainder of the world.
Politics in Persona 5 turns into extra express in the direction of the story’s latter half when it seems one of many massive bads is corrupt senator Shido. The presence of the National Diet constructing needs to be indicative that that is concerning the Japanese political system. Still, there are chilling parallels nearer to dwelling.
Obviously, Shido isn’t primarily based on Trump (he’s competent for starters). Nonetheless, there’s an inverse similarity, so whereas Trump was an outsider who infiltrated the Republican occasion, Shido splits from the incumbent occasion who splits to grab energy all for himself.
Using the powers of the Metaverse to trigger chaos in Tokyo and eradicate his opponents, he’s capable of make the political institution look weak and paint himself because the nation’s saviour, very similar to Trump’s arrogant declaration back in 2016’s Republican Convention that he alone can repair Washington and the nation’s issues.
Shido’s makes an attempt to grab energy by a snap election additionally creepily echoes the UK’s Brexit saga. I’m not saying that Atlus are fortune tellers, however simply weeks after Persona 5’s Western launch in April 2017, the UK bought its personal snap election, with Theresa May’s “strong and stable leadership” wanting like a foregone conclusion to steer the UK into its Brexit iceberg.
It additionally brings to thoughts Boris Johnson’s remark that Britain could make a “titanic success” out of Brexit. What seems like a gaffe of a metaphor out of the blue takes on a distinct that means whenever you uncover Shido’s palace is a cruise ship crusing by the sunken wreckage of Tokyo.
“Even though this country will sink, he alone will survive,” Haru says when your occasion sees the palace for the primary time. It couldn’t be a extra apt description of the wealthy few trying to reap the income of a Brexit that future generations can pay the worth for.
What stings essentially the most is that, regardless of all the difficulty you undergo to defeat Shido, culminating in his confession on reside TV, by this level the Metaverse’s distortion turns into too nice that the general public merely gained’t imagine it and proceed supporting the man. It’s an uncomfortable actuality we additionally face when regardless of all of Trump’s wrongdoings or the lies about Brexit that has come to mild over time, the lots simply let it occur anyway.
In 2017, these similarities struck a chord, nevertheless it hits even tougher in 2020 following Trump acquittal and Johnson’s landslide victory that units us additional down a darkish path that feels not possible to come back again from.
Leaving apart Trump and Brexit, the constant thread of Persona 5’s plot encapsulates our polarised generational divide between Gen Z and Boomers, or as Ryuji refers to very early on as “shitty adults”.
Young persons are the more than likely to endure the results of exploitation, debt, the local weather disaster, and gun crime within the US, but their mother and father’ and grandparents’ generations dismiss them as snowflakes, intent on promoting off their youngsters’s futures on the poll field. The youngest in fact aren’t even sufficiently old to have their voice counted (in Japan, it was solely in 2016 that the minimal voting age was lowered to 20 from 18).
These type of injustices are felt by every of the principle characters in Persona 5, whether or not it’s the protagonist being charged by Shido for a criminal offense he didn’t commit, Ryuji getting kicked off the observe workforce for standing as much as Kamoshida, or Haru being handled as a bargaining chip to be married off by her career-climbing father.
That doesn’t simply make the Phantom Thieves essentially the most relatable heroes for downtrodden Gen Z-ers however that is how they awaken to their persona. The technique of awakenings in Persona 5 is vastly cathartic as every character finds the braveness to insurgent in opposition to their oppressor and take revenge. These moments resonate so powerfully as a result of it’s fuelled by a fiery righteous anger, culminating within the characters violently ripping a masks from their face.
For some, anger isn’t at all times an acceptable response, a powder keg that sparks into violence, and might be simply as simply dismissed, as with the ‘angry black woman’ trope. But to cite from a Marie Claire column on the #MeToo movement, “Being angry isn’t just OK – it’s absolutely essential.” That assertion is simply as relevant for different actions calling for pressing motion the place our futures are at stake, be it gun management or the local weather disaster.
More and extra younger persons are changing into politicised and taking to the streets in protest calling for radical change. We can see it within the primarily student-led protests in Hong Kong or in Greta Thunberg, the face of the worldwide local weather strikes, inspiring thousands and thousands extra youngsters to be mad as hell and never take it anymore.
But simply as just like the Phantom Thieves, the protesting youth are additionally dismissed and handled with contempt by the institution. They’re both a nuisance, ridiculed for being too naive and radical of their idealism to grasp the world, or simply outright criminalised.
However, we are able to see the Phantom Thieves are performing justly and luckily some adults do sympathise, together with a previously disgraced politician Toranosuke Yoshida who might be discovered giving soapbox speeches in Shibuya. He could also be washed up and his probability of being elected seems slim however he speaks with honesty and charisma – you possibly can say he’s a bit like Bernie Sanders. While Shido barely hides his contempt for younger folks, Yoshida not solely speaks on behalf of their considerations but additionally understanding he wants the facility of the youth to have an effect on change within the nation.
In sympathising with the younger era, he additionally publicly lends his help to the Phantom Thieves that the remainder of respectable society treats as criminals. Because regardless of their strategies, he understands that they’re in the end on the aspect of justice.
“The reason they’re causing such a stir is because they are addressing the world’s problems,” he says in an impassioned speech late within the story. “Why do the Phantom Thieves continue to change hearts? I believe they do it for the world and its people.”
As Persona 5 Royal arrives later this month, it’s one other probability to relive life in Tokyo as Phantom Thieves, hanging out with outdated buddies for additional new adventures. But what’s going to resonate most are the identical underlying themes that seize all of the fears and anxieties that younger generations have been dealing with these previous few years, and whether or not life will change.
