How ‘Persona 5: The Royal’ Helped Me Through A Pandemic
I avoided Persona 5 for a few years despite everyone I know recommending it as a masterpiece. I traditionally avoid games that exceed the 30 hour mark, but my fond memories of playing Persona 3: FES when I transitioned between high school to college stirred me to finally give it a try. I played my first Persona game at a point in my life that felt pivotal and useful in a way that my traditional experience with video games hadn’t yet established in my brain. Fast forward to 2020 when Persona 5: The Royal released to universal critical acclaim, outdoing its original reviews with hyperbolic recommendations from critics and fans alike. It completely took over my social media timeline right before the coronavirus pandemic ushered most of society into their homes, and in retrospect, my journey with Persona 5: The Royal couldn’t have arrived at a more poignant time in my personal life given our place in history.
Beneath the Mask
On imagery alone, Persona 5: The Royal feels bizarrely prescient to our contemporary international health crisis, though in an admittedly mundane and muted way. One of the first things that struck me about how perfectly Persona 5 fit this moment in my life was the simple imagery of people wearing face masks in the game. NPCs throughout the game’s explorable environments, as well on its crowded subway, routinely display face masks worn by everyday citizens. Mask-wearing has been a common practice in Asian countries for years, but this imagery became immediately symbolic and resonant in a way that only this contemporary moment could have achieved. In an era where face coverings are debatable as a source of pandemic protection, I couldn’t help but see these in-game mask-wearing characters as reminders of the general apolitical nature of medical science. It also reminded me of the months I spent living abroad in China, where it was a sign of general respect even if you had a cough to cover your face.
As superficial as the mask example’s application to the current pandemic may be, the true value in Persona 5: The Royal arriving at the time it did in my life is the way it helped re-establish a sense of everyday order and routine to my suddenly unstructured life as I shifted from teaching students in a classroom to interacting with them online. In a time where I felt like familiarity and custom had been ripped away from my everyday life like a tablecloth, Persona 5: The Royal sidled in to fill the gap marvelously. Some people have begun referring to the passage of time during this pandemic as “quarantime,” suggesting that time moves incredibly slowly from a psychological standpoint of lacking structure; by its very essence of game design, Persona 5 is the antithesis of that feeling.
Take Your Time
Whereas time in quarantine may feel like a Monday could be reasonably mistaken for a Friday, Persona 5 exists almost purely for the structure of everyday life. As a general framing of how a day in Persona 5 unfolds, there is the general morning through afternoon routine of exchanging updates with friends and confidants, the bustle of classroom life, and the tedium of lectures. Once school ends, you are presented with an array of optional ways to spend your time after school – so many options that it can induce anxiety if you feel like you must do everything at once before time runs out. In the first weeks of being trapped indoors working through a laptop and a webcam instead of a classroom, Persona 5’s semester structure quickly became a source of mental health for me. For each day spent enabled me to chip away at all sorts of things I wanted to do, things that added a sense of productivity to my daily routine in a way that real life hindered me from fully doing, I found myself going out of my way to ensure I never took a day away from Persona 5’s addictive gameplay loop until the credits rolled.
In addition to being stripped away from the physical location of their workplace, one of the most common ways many people have been hit hardest by this pandemic has been the inability to inhabit comfortable public spaces that they priorly found refuge in. For the first several weeks and eventually months of this pandemic, many of my friends and I were not comfortable venturing beyond our homes for anything apart from required activities, and despite some places opening up, many of us don’t yet feel comfortable fully reintegrating into those spaces. Persona 5 transpires in an era and society where none of those concerns exist, and so each day in-game is spent bonding with friends in public locations and familiar spots. Every day is a possible opportunity to try something new and fun within the attractions that the city has to offer. In moments where I could visit a jazz club, a billiards joint, or a bookstore, I had fleeting feelings of escapism from the walls of my home.
The Phantom Thieves, Relationships, and Social Change
This pandemic has also completely undermined many people’s mental well-being by reducing their potential exposure to friends and loved ones. Whereas in our current climate, people must be extremely careful with the people they interact with directly in person, otherwise risking a deadly transmission of a virus, Persona 5 feels utterly devoid of any of that concern. So much of what establishes Persona 5 as a narrative worth remembering is the interaction of its core cast of characters. Many of the funniest and most meaningful moments arise from incidental banter between friends as their friendships deepen through simple acts like group texts and hangouts. By the end of Persona 5: The Royal’s jaw-droppingly long runtime, I felt like I had gotten to know the main cast of the game’s characters so well that you might almost call them friends of my own.
While recognizing these immediate and often superficial parallels with how Persona 5 and the current pandemic shared overlapping qualities, I began to realize ways in which subtler themes in the game were manifesting alongside this concurrent reality. The most egregious example of this parallel extends beyond the pandemic itself to issues of racism and brutality – complete abuses of institutions and power structures within society. This parallel became clear to me when American police officers murdered George Floyd on May 25th, 2020 – mere days before I finished the game – and all I could see was red, this world needed justice. George Floyd’s murder was a horrifying example of the callous exploitation exhibited by American police officers, a corrupt and seemingly untouchable power that millions of individuals felt (and feel) powerless to effect change upon. Though Persona 5 could never adequately convey the unforgivably heinous acts committed by the police officers involved with George Floyd’s death, its use of the Phantom Thieves – however stylized – attempts to spearhead a similarly indignant indictment of unchecked authority figures. In a world where those responsible for justice are the ones most commonly perpetrating evil in society, I couldn’t help but vainly wish for a real life incarnation of Persona 5’s Phantom Thieves to change peoples’ hearts in this historical moment.
And that’s maybe the area Persona 5 fails at the most: turning complex moral dilemmas and genuine ethical concerns into cartoonish oversimplifications. It goes as far as to call obvious evil acts evil, enabling its protagonists to overthrow the individuals atop these hierarchies, but fails to contend with the nuance of systemic injustice that enables deeply embedded societal issues like racism to persist from structures themselves. Persona 5 starts off by establishing its protagonists as a defender of women against sexual harassment and assault, before accusing an abusive, predatory, and paedophilic teacher of his exploitative crimes – easily two of the most hateable antagonists that can be imagined. But eventually the search for justice in Persona 5 devolves into a quest to undermine the CEO of a fast food chain, for example. The tone of the game struggles to adapt between mature and adolescent when it comes to the game’s primary antagonist, and never quite lives up to its aforementioned potential. I needed this game to go an inch further, a tad deeper, a bit darker, just enough to get under the surface of these issues that games so often fail to address with their explicit narrative. Despite that lack of depth, when I was playing Persona 5 along these contemporary atrocities, I couldn’t help but feel yet another instance of connection with the themes that the game – however successfully – tries to address.
Establishing a Sense of Normalcy
When many people think of games to play during this pandemic – as many lists have sprouted up across the internet in the past few months – most recommendations are centered around the idea of going outside, exploring outdoor environments, and immersing yourself in nature. Persona 5 is not that sort of game in any way. You will spend most of your time indoors, cramped in a classroom or Cafe Leblanc, a hole-in-the-wall coffee and curry joint. On days where it isn’t raining, you might venture out into the city or out into some quiet parks, but these ventures will only last for a few brief moments. Persona 5 is decidedly not the kind of game for someone stuck inside craving the outdoors, but I still insist that this game established a kind of “normalcy” that played a crucial role in mental health management for my duration working at home.
As for the way in which Persona 5 aided my mental health management in a time which has completely disheveled all of my habits, routines, and structures that previously helped keep me in check, the game does something with its design that precious few games effectively pull off: imbricating its mechanics in such a way that mutually reinforces every single activity to support something else. For instance, hanging out with your friends in Persona 5 increases your abilities in battle. Spending time slacking off while watching a film or reading a book, or even eating an overly large burger, will increase your personality stats that will in turn open up additional opportunities to deepen your relationship with your friends and confidants. Every single activity in Persona 5, no matter how seemingly insignificant, carries a consequence and therefore significance and meaning. I felt like my 160 hours with this game had essentially no moments wasted. Each aspect of gameplay was an important layer that, without it, would have cheapened the overall rich experience.
Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There
In addition to making every activity feel meaningful in Persona 5, being bound to a finite calendar and series of timeslots caused me a sense of urgency (initially manifest as choice anxiety) to spend each day as effectively as possible. As someone with depression who can often write off many days in a row as excuses to do nothing productive, Persona 5 was a shot in the arm to, as it were, “Wake up, get up, get out there.” The feeling of needing to be precise and productive with how I spent my time in Persona 5 wasn’t a source of dread and sacrifice, as though I was never accomplishing all the things I wanted to. But rather, instead of feeling the opportunity cost, I began to notice this urgency leak into my personal life when the console wasn’t turned on. I started making my bed, I started reading in the mornings again, I started planning my day around making time for Persona 5. This meant that I had to have my exercise done, dinner prepped, and work complete before I sat down to dive into more gameplay. And it was a tether that I would not have found otherwise.
My journey from April 15th to June 2nd won’t be reflective of everyone’s personal reaction to Persona 5, but this game arrived at the perfect time for me. Bereft of my workplace, my immediate friends, my routines, and my social structures, Persona 5: The Royal covered all of those fronts. It surprisingly reminded me of the need for social change – and arguably upheaval – in these times of corruption and abuses of power. It kept me accountable to myself and reminded me that there may be a sense of normal at the end of this pandemic. Persona 5: The Royal is one of the best video games I have ever played, and I would especially recommend it to anyone struggling through this hellish timeline.
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