#pyre.writes

At the recent xbox showcase, Atlus announced their worst kept secret, the rumored Persona 4 remake, Persona 4 Revival. This was to be expected as the previous title, Persona 3 Reload sold absolute gangbusters, so greenlighting a remake for 4 could turn into a lot of money! But when you take money out of it for a second, what is the purpose, creatively, for rereleasing this game? Persona 4 is the 2008 sequel to the hit game Persona 3, the second in the series to use its popular social life mechanics. A bunch of teenagers play detective and investigate a couple of murders that appear to involve the use of a supernatural world, all whilst going to school and keeping up appearances.

It was given an updated rerelease as Persona 4 Golden in 2012 on the Playstation Vita, and then later rereleased alongside Persona 3 Portable and Persona 5 Royal on PC, Switch and Xbox in 2023. This is an interesting choice of game to remake. See, a Persona 3 remake had been desperately wanted due to all of it's content being spread amongst so many versions. There was a female protagonist in Persona 3 Portable and a bonus post-game story in Persona 3 FES. People wanted a definitive version that consolidated these into one version. Persona 3 Reload was not that, and I have a lot more words to say about that somewhere else, but people at least were clamouring for a Persona 3 remake. The same doesn’t apply to Persona 4. Persona 4 Golden is the definitive version of the game. There are no alternate versions with additional or removed content, and it’s even the most freely accessible one. However there’s something that really makes this choice even more confusing. Persona 4 has baggage.

Our current era, 2025, is a time that, to be frank- is full of strife. Full of division and social inequality, but I guess at least there are now more people aware of some nuance than before. And we need that nuance now more than ever since they sure were not aware of this when writing Persona 4 in 2007.

If you've seen anything about Persona 4 online, there's a good chance you've seen the discourse in passing.

All of it centred around two of its party members, Naoto Shirogane and Kanji Tatsumi. I’d like to say that Atlus can recognise this, and would be able to address the baggage. After all, in the previous version of Persona 3 there was a joke that used a trans person being a sexual predator as a punchline but they were smart enough to realise how horrid this was and altered it for the release of the remake Persona 3 Reload. However, besides a couple of bonus scenes that added next to nothing, Reload didn’t make any narrative changes or improvements to the overall story. And the story of Persona 4 is, unfortunately, deeply rooted in homophobia, transphobia and misogyny. I want to be nice and say that not all of it is outright malicious, but there’s just so much of it, that the concept of putting in the amount of effort to remake a work like this feels offensive without the work being heavily altered. Changing a couple of sentences here and there isn’t going to fix Persona 4 like they did Persona 3 in this regard, whole swathes need to be changed and there’s no precedent for this to be done before.

In Persona 4, most of your party members are the targets of a serial killer who is attempting to murder people by shoving them into televisions, this sends them to another world full of monsters and your team has to save them before the fog rolls through. The people who are targeted are the talk of the town for one reason or another, and end up on the ‘midnight channel’, a magical tv show. 

Kanji is currently treated as a punk, due to his intimidating disposition and his prior history of beating up an entire biker gang whilst in middle school. He was recently ‘interviewed’ again after getting in another fight, putting him into the spotlight once more. This is the reason he ends up on the midnight channel, but despite that influence, his shadow comes from another source. He thinks a young male detective is hitting on him, he's flustered by it. He doesn't have much in the way of relationships and people are so afraid of him for some reason they run in terror.

His shadow, the reflection of his inner self, is a homophobic stereotype, and his dungeon takes the form of a men’s only bathroom. If this were because he was a gay man who was repressing his true feelings it would make sense, this mirrors the experiences of many real people. But instead he accepts his shadow, granting him his persona powers, by saying it’s not about his sexuality, he’s just worked up about being rejected because of his more feminine hobbies? The feminine hobbies don’t align with the stated motives of the shadow. What exacerbates this is that Kanji will then proceed to be the butt of many homophobic jokes later. The party member, Yosuke, finds the shadow uncomfortable and disgusting and proceeds to bully Kanji, by acting like he’s a sexual predator. Because he’s gay. Which. Didn't the text just say he isn't gay?

If the game was to explore this in any detail, have a character apologise or make it clear their behaviour was wrong, it could be some sort of development for these characters. But that never occurs. Gay people are weird and gross is the game's statement and the not-actually-gay Kanji is the punching bag for it.

There are famously cut romance lines for Yosuke with the male lead, we don't know how far these lines went into the finished script, but they were dubbed. This could have been a whole event, where Yosuke sees his own repressed self in Kanji. But alas, then in Kanji's own character episodes, party member Rise gives him weird looks at the end for making dolls. Nothing changes. Is it supposed to be funny?

With all that said, If you get rid of the homophobic jokes, you're still left with a bunch of intentionally queer imagery that doesn't align with the rejection attitude the text claims is the real cause.

The only way for this to be consistent is to make Kanji textually gay, repressing his inner self and coming to understand it, or change the dungeon and shadow entirely.

Naoto is, according to the game’s text, a crossdressing detective, and also the detective Kanji thought was hitting on him earlier.

According to the way Shadow Naoto is accepted, Naoto dresses masculine because according to them it was the only way to be seen as someone competent in the workforce and not looked down on. In order to fix this, Shadow Naoto is going to make Naoto a man through mad scientist-like experiments.

The extremely generous and good faith reading of Naoto’s arc is that Naoto wants to be seen as a well respected female detective, and that gender won’t detract from how they are perceived. 

And to do that we still have to just casually ignore the fact that our only reference to Naoto being looked down on in the workforce, does so because of the fact Naoto is a high schooler and they hate being shown up by a kid.

Then you also have to ignore the whole ‘exaggerated but true’ Shadow Naoto wanting to make Naoto undergo gender reassignment surgery, to cross the bounds of sex. And to ignore the extremely depressing and resigned line where Naoto says they could never be a man, in which, the author is also saying that transgender people aren’t real, and in which for Naoto, that the whole thing is just a fantasy to escape a separate problem. Let's ignore how offensive and insulting that is. Let’s pretend that Naoto really fears being looked down on for being a woman, being seen as less capable, and that they can be just as capable as a man whilst being a woman. Let's pretend that this is what they meant to push with the arc. Well, very soon after, Yosuke thinks that it's a good idea to criticise Naoto for failing to simply catch the culprit. Naoto only got more information than anyone else so far. To which Yukiko replies, ‘Don’t forget, Naoto is younger than us, and she's a girl.'.

Tossing gender immediately back into the mix, implying that ‘if Naoto was born cis male, they would have been able to handle and solve it', undercuts even that argument. With a line like that you might even think Persona 4 hates women or something.

That's because Persona 4 hates women. I’m using the word hate for vitriolic emphasis but the game is quite rampant with misogyny. Persona 4 treats women as inferior, and tells them to be subservient. This is a recurring trend across the game. Whoops! 

Yukiko's narrative arc is about her wanting to leave home, she'd be willing to be whisked away by a prince on a white horse in order to get the space to decide her own future, her shadow was all about that- she doesn't want to be forced to inherit and take over her family's inn. But at the end of her episodes, actually she does want to. It’s fine enough by itself, but when you take it within the context of Kanji and Naoto’s shadows pushing a particular line before the character says ‘well, actually’ it starts to get a bit egregious.

Rise's arc has her feeling a disconnect between herself and her stage persona. Given the opening gravure water advert and her dour attitude, this may be an arc about escaping from exploitation in the idol industry, and finding her true self. This results in the high school girl's shadow self being a stripper. Rise accepts by saying both Rise's current self and the Idol persona are all part of her. Besides the part where we put the high schooler as a stripper and had no reason to besides sexualisation, this is totally fine. Except, from here on her dour attitude is completely gone from the main story. She’s just the party's idol, all smiles and fawning over the player at every turn.

Ok, but at least her character episodes can be about trying to find her true self, right? No, because she spends the time being guilt tripped by her manager to have her come back to the child exploitation mines (read: idol industry) until she eventually complies. Happy End! The game still tries to tell you that Rise came to this conclusion herself but it’s far less believable than Yukiko because the arc is missing anything of substance, and really just helps make Yukiko’s retroactively less believable.

At home, the main character is staying with his uncle Dojima and 6 year old cousin Nanako. The both of them have their own social link character episodes but they focus primarily on Dojima leaving the 6yr old girl alone so often, ignoring the sheer level of responsibilities she has. She’s been doing the laundry, dishes and cooking since her mum died. But hey, one might expect that character development might mean the uncle will start to take more time away from work to focus on his daughter, he has a well paying job as head detective after all. Nothing changes. They infodump his excuse to you, that he’s hunting a criminal that killed his wife in a vehicle collision. But he continues doing it and there’s no sign of him taking more time off work, that’s the end of that. You can’t help her out unless it’s part of a specific scene and Nanako is just supposed to accept that he loves her anyway and the status quo of her doing everything continues.

Yosuke is a core offender in this, with a dense track record of infamous moments such as where he buys swimsuits for the girls and has been looking for a moment all camping trip to find a moment to get the girls to wear them, the previously mentioned comment with Naoto, hr takes the protagonist out to hit on girls as if entitled for the to flock over him, he's the major outlet of the previously mentioned homophobia to Kanji, he signs the girls up to the school’s beauty pageant against their will, it goes on. After he signs the girls up to that pageant, they turn around and sign the guys up to the cross-dressing pageant. (Apparently you’re allowed to sign up other people to pageants and they aren’t allowed to back out? The logic is tenuous at best. Wait, why is there only a beauty pageant and a crossdressing pageant anyway?) Yosuke reacts with pure disdain and about how unfair that is. Dressing as a girl is beneath him after all. The game is very forward about how this is a humiliating ordeal towards the guys, with NPCs remarking repeatedly about how disturbing and horrifying it is for someone perceived as a guy to want to dress as a girl willingly. And that’s before the girls end up being forced to wear swimsuits to their pageant, which is treated as just something they have to do, and be leered at. Being a woman is worse than being a man, it's gross to cross any gender divide, and girls are supposed to just deal with it. It’s a whole big dose of both misogyny and transmisogyny in one awful event.

I’m going to have to talk about some especially major spoilers here, so skip this paragraph if you want to avoid more. Yosuke could be an intentional foil to the main villain, Adachi, as they are both people who recently transferred from big cities and are uncomfortable being stuck out in the boonies. Where Yosuke is responsible for a bunch of misogynistic scenes throughout the game, Adachi is responsible for the deaths of two women because he’s a raging misogynist who murdered them for not reciprocating his sexual advances. The flashbacks to the murders are displayed in such a way that would make allegorical for rape attempts. One of his victims was a high school student.

But the game doesn’t actually draw attention to any of that, he calls them ‘bitches’ and ‘gold diggers’, and they just move on. When Naoto summises his crimes, this aspect is entirely skipped. Whilst a work doesn't necessarily need to condemn negative behaviour, the absence of condemnation stacks up considerably. Yosuke could easily have foiled Adachi here, learning to get over these behaviours himself, but the spotlight never shines on those aspects either of them, so you’re left to grasp at figures in the mist.

The core reason that the game can be filled with so much of this, and the discourse can break out so often is that because for each example, you need to spend a paragraph explaining the context. It’s a death of a thousand cuts scenario, where trying to bring up a couple of small details turns into a whole rant, because each example you’ve just written out a paragraph of context for, is linked to another example of something else, and I’ve had to cut out a bunch to try and write about this whilst narrowing down on the three core topics. I didn’t talk about all sorts of things in here, like the minor character Hanako, the girl who shows up in multiple comedy scenes, who serves the joke of ‘she’s fat, ugly and inconveniences everyone’, or how Naoto has player centric scenes where they find themselves acting more feminine uncomfortably to woo the protagonist because that’s ‘their place as a woman and romantic partner’.

So much more context is required for each section of flaws and they can all interlink but this isn't supposed to be an overview of the whole game. I’m also getting close to 3000 words deep here and I wanted to keep this piece somewhat succinct. 

It really is death by one thousand cuts. I didn't even talk about the game's stated themes here.