glimpse of a memory

on paper, the premise of the third semester story seems fairly straightforward. maruki, with good intentions, wants to use his power of actualization to make the world a better place by effectively rewriting the state of reality itself to undo the world’s wrongs and bring everyone happiness. but the phantom thieves reject this. it’s not real, they say. it’s just running from the problem. it’s the easy way out. unfortunately, there’s a giant glaring fucking problem with this approach.

there are many, many ways you could write this story to make a coherent argument against maruki. after all, letting one man decide the fate of humanity does indeed go against persona 5′s core themes of the corrupting influence of power. you could show how maruki himself is flawed and may not always make the right decisions, or how it’s inevitably impossible to satisfy everyone when people will always have competing and incompatible desires. you could take an angle of how ultimately, making humanity dependent on maruki for solutions to their problems is in many ways no different than yaldabaoth and shido’s fascist ideals of keeping the masses oppressed and indolent so as to let those in power control everything.

but persona 5 royal fails to do any of that. the best we get, instead, is the thieves arguing repeatedly that “it’s not real!” and “that’s not what happened!”. except that, for all intents and purposes, it’s absolutely fucking real.

maruki’s reality is explicitly stated not to merely be a dream world. he can actually change the state of reality. futaba is not imagining her mother being back - she is literally there. there is absolutely nothing “not real” about her. she is, in every way that matters, alive. once maruki is done, his reality will entirely subsume the prior reality.

persona 5 royal literally shows us a world where shiho was never raped and never attempted suicide. it shows us how happy she and ann are together, unburdened by the trauma of what they went through. and then it shows joker lying in bed, wondering if this is really how things should be.

and then it expects us to say “no.”

later on, in ann’s third awakening scene, she does ponder whether she’s making the right decision. the game knows it is dealing with a major moral conundrum, even as it utterly lacks the thoughtfulness required to tackle it in any meaningful way. once again, her core argument about why maruki’s world is wrong remains: “it’s not real. it’s taking the easy way out!”

it is, quite frankly, difficult for me to express how insultingly stupid this scene is to me in words. imagine ann going to shiho, and explaining that a man existed with the power to completely undo her sexual assault and let her live a happy life. but don’t worry, ann assures her. ann stopped him.

i’m sure shiho would be very proud of her.

but beyond that, there’s another line in ann’s third awakening scene that gnaws at me, only shown with a specific dialogue option:

“is it right for someone to unilaterally change the state of reality, even if it’s for the better?” is certainly an interesting moral question to ask. one could even, for instance, write an entire 100 hour jrpg centered around this question.

ah, right. that’s exactly what atlus did. the game was called “persona 5″, and the answer it provided was a resounding “yes”.

forcibly changing reality for the better, even against others’ wishes, even if other’s questioned the justice of it, because they wholeheartedly believed it was the right thing to do, is literally the entire fucking premise of persona 5. from the beginning, the thieves ask themselves if forcibly changing the hearts of people like kamoshida or madarame is morally correct. and they all agree that, yes, ultimately, it’s for the best. it has to be done to stop their abuses because the system we have can’t be trusted to do it, and they stand by this no matter who disagrees.

and it fucking owned. vanilla persona 5 was a game about how the world’s power structures have collectively failed us. it was a game about how those in power abuse it, and happily eat us alive for their own benefit. it was a game that told us to stand up for ourselves, to fight back, to change the world for the better no matter what stands against us.

most damningly, vanilla persona 5′s ending included a crucial and important final speech from morgana:

The whole world is a product of cognition... not just the Metaverse. It can be freely re-made... the same goes for you, and everyone else. Remember... There’s no such thing as the “real” world. What each person sees and feels - Those are what shape reality. This is what gives the world infinite potential.

(unless you’re takuto maruki. then the ways that you change reality aren’t real lol fuck you)

it’s such an obvious contradiction in messaging that it makes my head spin. it makes me feel like the writers on p5r did not understand what made persona 5 good at all, or even what it was fundamentally fucking about. persona 5 is a game that tells you to use all means necessary to change the world for the better no matter who thinks it’s unjust, and then p5r turns the phantom thieves into the defenders of the status quo who side with a serial killer (who literally murdered two of the thieves’ parents!!!!) against the man who wants to save people from rape and murder.

and yet somehow, repeatedly, i see people praise how much better p5r’s writing is than the base game. how much more interesting and compelling the new story is. and i feel like i’m going insane, like everyone else experienced a completely different story from me. it’s utterly baffling to me.

and this is just, like, the tip of the fucking iceberg when it comes to garbage writing in p5r’s new content. i could go on for ages about how much sticking kasumi into the game’s opening sequence sucks, hurts the pacing, makes no narrative sense and serves no purpose other than to show off New Girl. how the entire story of maruki using his powers to make sumire think she’s kasumi immediately makes no fucking sense once the man literally acquires the power to raise the dead. how absurd it is that futaba and haru just go along with working with akechi with no real issues, the guy who literally murdered their parents.