After Persona 5, the director of the Persona series decided to come up with a new IP: Persona but high fantasy. It’s a lot better on women, but hoo boy is it worse on just about everything else. This is the first thing you see when you start a new game:

Oh yeah, they are deep up their own buttholes.

I’ll save you the 50 hours of jRPG: The answer is, “Fantasy is good because it can inspire people to higher ideals, but it’s bad to use it as escapism to hide from reality.” I’m sure that’s deeply profound if you’re a teenager dipping your toe into Baby’s First Literary Analysis, but, uh, most of us don’t need a 50-hour jRPG to understand how fiction works. This is explained, incidentally, through an utterly bizarre cutscene where a character claims that Earth is reality and the game world is fiction, but actually he’s wrong and Earth is the fantasy. Yes, they saw the “What if elves thought OUR world was the crazy fantasy?” joke and thought it was actually profound. Like I said: deep up their own buttholes.

Not that the writers actually want to inspire people, as evidenced by their new legal disclaimer:

Notice something new here? “We want to inspire you to change the world for the better! BUT NOT THAT WAY.”

(By the way, I think it’s worth noting that this game was released in 2024, while Persona 5 Royal, which didn’t have this additional rider in its disclaimer despite featuring violence against a politician, was released in 2020. What happened in between? Why, the most successful political assassination in history. I don’t know that’s what prompted this updated disclaimer, but the timing is suspicious.)

Oh, and about that “any similarities depicted are purely coincidental” rider…

LOL. LMAO, even. Even when they do high fantasy Atlus can’t stop talking about Christianity. (And yes, the church is evil, do you even have to ask?) At this point I’m honestly a little surprised the Catholic church hasn’t sued them for blatantly lying every single time they use this disclaimer. If you want to do political commentary, own it, Atlus.

The other moral of the story is “Racism is bad, but race science is real.” Golly, never heard that one before.

The player character is a human, which is the most oppressed racial group. Ooh, reverse racism! Makes ya think!

This is such a privileged viewpoint. Real “I don’t have an accent” energy. Everyone thinks they’re the default and everyone different is the freak. Describing a human as having “no distinguishing features” only makes sense from an Earthian perspective. (It’s objectively right, of course. The setting is actually a far future post-apocalyptic Earth — that’s not a spoiler, come on, it’s an Atlus game — and the tribes are all descended from humans, but elda are the ones who mutated the least. So the most oppressed race is actually the purest and most specialest. Boy, never heard that one before!)

I’m honestly just so tired of this, in large part because it’s so disappointing. I genuinely love fantasy races… but from a speculative/alien biology standpoint, and a what-if on how different physical abilities could impact life and culture. You could even, I think, use that as a gateway into talking about ableism issues, and the politics of accommodating a diverse populace. But instead we just get endless hamfisted racism allegories, or worse, racism allegories that get muddled up with ableism allegories to the detriment of both. Black people have been telling you to stop doing this for decades, fantasy authors. Stop doing it.

Nonwhite skintones do exist in this setting, at least, though most of them are technicolor and/or paired with light hair. I think the brown skintone looks alright, but the black skintones are this weird ashy black that looks painted on. Do the artists not know what black people look like…?

I will give the plot credit for one thing, at least: You’re not fighting a spooky demon man this time. Instead you’re fighting a spooky meritocrat man.

Grius: About fifteen years ago, a child enlisted in the army. But it wasn’t his age that had people talking… It was his ruthless military genius. Hero to some, monster to others. Louis Guiabern. A prodigal tactician, and a master of magla arts. Some said it was only a matter of time before he made general — the youngest in the nation’s land. That night… when the prince’s quarters were breached… it was no ordinary mage who cast that fatal curse. It was Louis Guiabern himself. But the son’s death wasn’t enough for him. Now he’s got the father’s blood on his hands. And if that kingslaying fiend ends up on the throne, we’re all doomed.

Gallica: But when we were exploring the Royal Capital, there were a lot more Louis supporters than I expected. How can they still trust him after all that?

Grius: Louis is cunning. He left no evidence. Accuse him as you will, the allegations wouldn’t stick. All they could do was send him as far away as possible, a post in the middle of nowhere. Plenty of soldiers never believed the charges in the first place. When they look at him, they see a capable veteran unjustly made into the nobles’ scapegoat. […] Damn the man, but he’s earned his titles. He’s mastered the blade, magic… and he’s clearly intelligent. To the masses who want change, he seems the savior they need.

[…]

Louis: Your fool of a king is dead! Disillusioned by vain aristocrats and simpering clergy, he withered and died under his own weakness!

Crowd: Lord Louis speaks true! The nobles are to blame! Name the guilty!

(Farla: “I want to vote for him.”)

And this is wrong, because kings are always good and killing them is always bad. The commoners are so on board with him their only response to him openly insulting the dead king is “Tell us who to lynch!” and this is wrong, because…? The writers don’t have an actual answer, because as usual the only way they can think to discredit him is to have him suddenly act Stupid Evil and murder tons of his own followers for no reason. Later on there are some attempts to paint him as a social Darwinist, but the writers don’t understand what social Darwinism actually is so in practice he’s just a lunatic with no relation to any real political ideology.

By the way, it turns out he was in fact scapegoated for the prince’s assassination, but he never gets an apology for that. Not only that, he also turns out to be a genocide victim and his worldview was shaped by that trauma. The heroes’ response to this?

Boy I’m so convinced these guys will do a better job of running the country!

The whole thing eerily reminds me of Last Scenario, actually, right down to Louis having a speech about how it’s folly to trust or rely on anyone else. The difference is that Last Scenario recognized this was a trauma response that deserved sympathy and that leaving such a person to their fate would be monstrous. Here, they murder the trauma victim while laughing at him.

People who have played the game are probably wondering why I haven’t mentioned the magic-enforced democracy yet, and that’s because it doesn’t actually result in democracy. You don’t win by swaying the people to your side, you win by murdering the opposing candidate because this is a fighting game. That’s not democracy, that’s military dictatorship. A game where we really did have to defeat our enemy nonviolently in the court of public opinion would be really interesting, but it’s not what we got. Oh, and the player character turns out to secretly be the prince because of course, of course we can’t actually end the story with a non-royal on the throne.

There are some more plot points I could nitpick, but honestly, does anything else really need to be said? This is just more of the same from the Persona team: A bunch of pretentious Dunning-Kruger twits pretend to Take On The Issues while cowering behind safe centrism and conservatism every time. They act like they’re geniuses laying bare the hidden truths of the genres they wield, when in reality they can’t scratch deeper than the most superficial analyses.

This game honestly turned me off to fantasy more than anything else. I am just so sick of the normalized monarchism and classism. I’m so sick of writers lionizing autocracy and demonizing republicanism, then acting like this is an inoffensive, apolitical stance and not a deeply fascistic one. Kings are bad. Feudalism is bad. Blood superiority is bad. You can write about magic and monsters and fairies without obscuring those truths, but so few fantasy authors seem willing to even entertain the possibility. This game wails on every game over that “Fantasy is dead,” but it can’t provide any good argument for why fantasy should be kept alive.