Persona 5

• 1. Introduction

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  Persona 5 opens in an interrogation room in Tokyo, and it keeps pulling the player back there. The 2016 role-playing game, built by the Atlus development studio P-Studio, is the sixth installment in the Persona series, which grew out of the Megami Tensei franchise. Its hero never speaks. Players name him, and the story knows him by the codename Joker. A public prosecutor named Sae Niijima questions him, and the game unfolds as his account of the past year. He was framed for assaulting a man, and the courts put him on probation for twelve months. That sentence sends him to a new school and into a second life as a masked thief. The game asks some odd questions. How does a calendar of classes, part-time jobs and friendships become the engine of an adventure? Why would a team build heroes who steal from adults? What did the designers, animators and a jazz-loving composer want to say about freedom? And how did a game that kept slipping its release date end up on lists of the greatest ever made?

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• 2. A Year in Tokyo

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  Every day in Persona 5 is spent, and the game keeps track. A day-night cycle and shifting weather decide what Joker can do, in the manner of a social simulation. Outside class he can take part-time jobs, pursue leisure activities, or craft items for dungeons and fights. Each choice feeds his social statistics, and higher numbers open up new activities and options.

  The heart of the calendar is the Confidant system. It is an evolution of the Social Link mechanic from Persona 3 and Persona 4. Joker talks with the people he meets and deepens each bond, and some of those bonds can turn romantic. Raising a party member's rank unlocks new abilities in combat. Raising the rank of someone outside the party brings other rewards, such as better equipment or faster experience gains.

  The other half of the game happens in a realm called the Metaverse. Story dungeons called Palaces are handcrafted for each villain. A randomly generated dungeon called Mementos sits beside them, and the party can complete quests there for Confidants and other characters. Both are filled with Shadows, which are suppressed psyches modeled on mythological and religious figures. Players can sneak past Shadows rather than fight them. Some areas hide puzzles, and Joker's Third Eye ability highlights objects he can use and shows how strong an enemy is. Inside each Palace, Safe Rooms let the player save and travel quickly between them.

  Combat is turn-based, and a surprise ambush gives the party the first move. Striking an enemy's weakness knocks it down and earns the attacker an extra turn. If every enemy is down, a Hold Up begins. The party can then launch an All-Out Attack, demand money or items, or try to talk a Shadow into becoming one of Joker's Personas. Party members fall when their health runs out, but only Joker's defeat ends the game.

  Negotiation is one route to new Personas, and each belongs to an arcana linked to the Confidant bonds. In the Velvet Room, a realm Joker visits throughout the story, Personas can be fused. The child inherits skills and stats from its parents. The more advanced the matching Confidant link, the stronger the result.

  Even this largely solitary adventure had a faint online layer. A feature called the Thieves Guild let players see what others had done on any given day, or lend them a hand in the Metaverse.

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• 3. Stealing Hearts

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  Suguru Kamoshida, a gym teacher and volleyball coach at Shujin Academy, is the first man Joker sets out to change. After arriving in Tokyo to stay with a family friend named Sojiro Sakura, Joker is drawn into the Velvet Room. Its master Igor and his assistants Caroline and Justine warn him that he must be rehabilitated or face ruin, and they give him a supernatural phone app. The app leads him into Kamoshida's Palace, along with a classmate named Ryuji Sakamoto. Ryuji had been branded a troublemaker after Kamoshida provoked him into a violent outburst.

  The two are captured by Kamoshida's Shadow. Joker awakens to his Persona, Arsène, to save Ryuji from execution. Below, they meet Morgana, a small cat-like creature who knows how the Palaces work. He explains that stealing a person's Treasure, the emotional root of their desires, will change their heart. Ryuji awakens to his own Persona after seeing how Kamoshida abused other students. The cruelty reaches Ann Takamaki, who was forced into a relationship with him to protect her friend Shiho Suzui's place on the team. When Ann does not come to his house one afternoon, Kamoshida takes it out on Shiho, who attempts suicide. The group decides to force him to confess, and Ann awakens to her Persona. With Kamoshida's heart changed, Joker, Morgana, Ryuji and Ann become the Phantom Thieves of Hearts.

  More members join as the thieves reform more targets. Yusuke Kitagawa is an art student whose corrupt teacher, Ichiryusai Madarame, becomes a target. Makoto Niijima, the student council president and Sae's younger sister, is sent to spy on the group. A mob boss named Junya Kaneshiro blackmails her, and she turns to the thieves, who reform him too. Futaba Sakura, Sojiro's adopted daughter, is a hacker who withdrew from the world after a hidden conspiracy killed her mother and framed her with a forged note. Haru Okumura, a corporate heiress, rebels against her father Kunikazu Okumura, who controls her life and mistreats his employees. All the while the thieves draw the attention of the public and the police, including the celebrated junior detective Goro Akechi.

  The turn comes when a masked assassin frames the thieves for the death of Haru's father. Akechi joins them and urges them to change Sae's heart to prove their innocence. Joker is captured inside Sae's Palace, and the story loops back to the interrogation room. It then emerges that the thieves had always known what Akechi was. He is the assassin, and they played along so that a trap could work. The conspiracy's leader is a politician named Masayoshi Shido, who also framed Joker. Shido has used Akechi's Metaverse power to clear his own path toward becoming prime minister. Akechi turns out to be Shido's illegitimate son, seeking revenge for the abandonment of himself and his late mother. He dies protecting the thieves so that they can defeat Shido. Shido is arrested and confesses, yet public opinion hardly changes.

  The thieves go deeper, into the heart of Mementos, to steal the Treasure of the public itself. There they find a population that has surrendered its free will, believing it will be freed by doing so. The Treasure ejects them in the form of the Holy Grail, and the Metaverse merges with reality. Back in the Velvet Room, Igor orders Caroline and Justine to execute Joker. They refuse, regain their memories and merge into Lavenza. She reveals that the Igor they have known is really Yaldabaoth, the God of Control, who imprisoned the true Igor. Yaldabaoth was born from humanity's wish to be ruled. He offers Joker a bargain: restore the world, at the cost of its freedom. Accepting leads to an alternate ending in which the thieves regain their fame while humanity loses its will. Refusing reunites Joker with his friends, including Morgana, who was created by the real Igor. As Joker's Confidants rally the people, he awakens his ultimate Persona, Satanael, and destroys Yaldabaoth and the Metaverse. Joker then turns himself in so Shido can be prosecuted. His friends gather the evidence that overturns his conviction, and by spring they drive him home.

  The enhanced edition, Persona 5 Royal, adds two characters. Kasumi Yoshizawa is a gymnast who transferred to Shujin Academy at the same time as Joker. Takuto Maruki is a counsellor hired after Kamoshida's exposure. In the new year Joker finds reality bent: Akechi has been released, and every thief has had a deepest wish granted, even bringing some dead back to life. The source is Maruki, whose own Persona can alter cognition. He has used Mementos to push the thieves into accepting a reality he thinks perfect, and they have grown passive in it. Kasumi proves to be her twin Sumire, who has been posing as her late sister under the influence of Maruki's power. Akechi persuades Joker to refuse Maruki's world, saying he would rather vanish as himself than live under control. Maruki is defeated, and later he helps Joker escape government agents as a reformed taxi driver. A final scene appears only if the player reaches Rank 8 of Akechi's Confidant before the 17th of November. A figure who resembles him passes the window of Joker's train.

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• 4. Outlaws and Misfits

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  Katsura Hashino wrote the original story concept, and his two keywords were self-discovery and journey. The first idea framed the game as a backpacking trip around the world. Then came the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, and Hashino turned his attention to Japan. Commentators have suggested that the government's response to the disaster, and the way citizens reacted to it, helped shape the game's themes. He watched people bond in the aftermath. The journey would be made within Japan, through the shifting, dungeon-like Palaces. Hashino named freedom as the central theme and wanted newcomers to the series to find the game approachable. He also hoped it would leave players with a sense of catharsis.

  The story is built like an omnibus, with the villains changing at regular intervals. The team named three sources of inspiration: the Chinese novel Water Margin, the Japanese crime film Hakuchuu no Shikaku, and the Spanish novel Lazarillo de Tormes. They also asked how a character like Lupin III might win admiration in modern society. That picaresque spirit even reached the mechanics. Fusing Personas is called the Guillotine process. Sacrificing a Persona for experience points is called Hanging. Sending one to the Electric Chair produces a high-end item, and Solitary Confinement trains a Persona intensively over several days.

  The heroes' Personas are outlaws and rebels from fiction and legend. The opening set includes Arsène, Captain Kidd, Carmen, Zorro, Goemon, Johanna, Necronomicon, Milady, Robin Hood and Cendrillon. Joker's first Persona was going to be the German demon Mephistopheles, but Arsène fit the themes better. The ultimate Personas, among them Satanael, Seiten Taisei, Hecate and Loki, come from mythical tricksters and rebels. Joker himself draws on Arsène Lupin, The Fiend with Twenty Faces and the Japanese outlaw hero Ishikawa Goemon. Two names carry puns and nods. The school name Shujin sounds like the Japanese word for prisoner. The Velvet Room assistants take their names from characters in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

  The cast shares a feeling, according to Hashino, that society has no place left for them. In earlier games, the heroes chased the culprits. Here the culprits and the consequences of their actions pursue the heroes, who chose their path willingly. The villains are adults, echoing a theme from Persona 4, and several writers have linked them to real incidents and figures in Japanese politics, business and academia. The heroes and villains were built as mirrors, both groups of misfits trying to remake a world they found flawed. That was meant to make players doubt their own sense of justice. A vocal minority online can swing public opinion on a scandal, and that real-world pattern inspired the thieves' ambiguous standing.

  The cast could have been larger. Hifumi Togo was once planned as a Phantom Thief, but the story was already so large that she became an optional Confidant instead.

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• 5. Red, Black, and White

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  Masayoshi Suto, the art director, had made his name on earlier Persona games with their user interface. Shigenori Soejima, who designed characters for the last two main entries, returned for this one. The first character sketches reached the team in 2012. The team saw itself picking up where Persona 4 left off. The announcement teaser showed the heroes chained by the rules of modern life. Soejima designed the logo to suggest a fast-moving young cast, and gave Joker's Persona Arsène an old-fashioned look by contrast.

  Joker proved the hardest design of Soejima's recent career. He had to show the game's style, stand in for the player, and fit the crime-and-vigilante theme whatever dialogue choices the player made. Soejima first drew the cast like shōnen manga heroes, since the phantom thief is a common figure in fiction. The look clashed with the series' realistic tone, and the designs were scrapped. Because Joker never speaks, Soejima imagined him as someone who makes plans and keeps them secret. The students share school uniforms, so their individuality comes through their thief costumes.

  The interface carries the game's color story. Persona 3 was themed blue and Persona 4 yellow, while Persona 5 chose a harsh red. Suto tried many font colors and settled on black and white, which stood out best against the red. Early menu animations were so aggressive that they hid the action, so the team toned them down. The menus show a moving 3D model of Joker that changes pose with each selection. Hashino wanted the interface to show how a shift in perspective could turn a dull life into an exciting one. The team also felt that earlier Persona games were fun but poorly marketed, so they aimed the interface at a broader, mainstream audience.

  The animated cutscenes were made by Production I.G and Domerica under director Toshiyuki Kono. Hashino contacted Kono three and a half years before the game was finished, and Kono felt heavy pressure. It was Production I.G's first time on the series, though many of its staff were fans. Their main concern was getting the expressions right, especially on a protagonist who never speaks. Sayo Yamamoto directed the opening sequence, in which the characters figure skate through the scenery. It symbolizes breaking free of an oppressive force, and echoes her work on Yuri on Ice. Atlus asked for the scene where Joker first summons a Persona to feel wild. The animators drew the blue flames around the Persona by hand rather than using computer graphics.

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• 6. Acid Jazz Rebellion

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  Shoji Meguro, the series sound director, composed, performed and produced the score with complete creative freedom. Over roughly three years he wrote about 80 percent of the tracks. Colleagues including Toshiki Konishi, Kenichi Tsuchiya, Atsushi Kitajoh and Ryota Kozuka contributed further music and sound design, and all of them had worked on the series before.

  Meguro chose strong acid jazz to match the mood, and wanted the music to feel more realistic than in earlier entries to suit the visuals. He also rethought its flow. In the last two Persona games, the opening and ending themes were mixtures of the wider score. This time he regarded the whole soundtrack as a single continuous work. A recurring thread runs through it, a syllable pattern described as do-la. The opening theme's hook of so, la, re, mi on strings leads into that pattern in other tracks, including the standard battle theme. Hashino praised the early tracks that Meguro produced for an internal demo.

  The vocals came from Lyn Inaizumi, a jazz and soul singer who performed seven tracks in English. It was her first video game work. She said the hardest part was the rap in the opening theme, Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There. Benjamin Franklin wrote those lyrics. The ending song, Hoshi To Bokura To, has Japanese lyrics by Shigeo Komori.

  Mastard Records released a three-disc soundtrack in Japan on the 17th of January 2017. It reached fifth place on the Oricon charts, with sales above 29,000, and holds 110 tracks along with commentary from the sound team. Soejima designed the cover and the liner notes. A separate 19-track disc, Persona 5: Sounds of the Rebellion, came in the collector's edition for North America and Europe. The full soundtrack reached iTunes in English on the 18th of April 2017, and iam8bit later pressed it on vinyl. The music kept going after the game. In 2024 a cover of Last Surprise by The 8-Bit Big Band earned a Grammy nomination for Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals.

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• 7. Five Years of Work

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  Preparatory work on Persona 5 began in 2008, after Persona 4 was released. Full development started after Catherine came out in 2011, and the whole effort lasted five years. P-Studio, an internal Atlus team dedicated to the series, built the game. Hashino later called Catherine a test run for the next Persona game. This was his last game in the series as head of P-Studio, since he went on to form a separate internal team called Studio Zero. At the start, about 40 people worked on it. In full production the team grew to 70, including 15 planners, 15 programmers and between 30 and 45 designers. Naoya Maeda, who had previously modeled for the Trauma Center series, served as lead designer. More powerful hardware forced the team to rebuild how they worked.

  Several early ideas changed the design. One draft used an action-based battle system with real-time elements new to the series. It was dropped, but real-time commands were added to the turn-based system. Hashino brought back Negotiation, which fans saw as a key part of the franchise and which had been missing from the previous two mainline games. The designers tied it to the idea that Shadows are suppressed psyches in the Collective Unconscious. The Hold Up feature came from film scenes where a villain holds people at gunpoint and makes demands. Another change was dungeons with fixed layouts, instead of mostly random ones, which better suited the themes and gave veterans something different. Some stretches take control away from the player, apart from limited dialogue choices, to reflect the controlled lives of Japanese high schoolers.

  Catherine ran on the third-party Gamebryo engine, but Persona 5 got an engine of its own. Hashino expected it to make rendering ideas easier, even though fans would wait longer. Atlus also built the event scene software internally, and the final game holds an estimated 1,160 scenes. The first character models in a realistic style, like those in Catherine, felt wrong for the series, so the team tried again until a custom cel-shader gave them the look they wanted. Persona 4 had a deformed look because of PlayStation 2 limits, but now every important character could have a unique body shape. The cast used two models each, one detailed for real-time cutscenes and one for general use. Rendering many Personas in high definition for the first time was a grueling challenge.

  The public first heard of the game in November 2013, when a teaser appeared alongside the announcements of Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth, Persona 4: Dancing All Night and a PlayStation 3 port of Persona 4 Arena Ultimax. It was meant for late 2014 on PlayStation 3 only. At a Sony press conference in September 2014, Atlus said it would also come to PlayStation 4 and would slip into 2015. The first gameplay trailer aired on a livestream on the 5th of February 2015. At the 2015 Tokyo Game Show, the date moved again, to late 2016, and Hashino apologized in a staff interview. In April 2016 Atlus began a countdown to the 5th of May, and the Take Tokyo Tower livestream used that date to reveal the final release date. Persona 5 reached Japan on the 15th of September 2016. A 20th Anniversary Edition bundled DLC based on Persona 3 and Persona 4, a five-CD best-of set and an artbook by Soejima.

  The West waited longer. A the 14th of February 2017 date was announced just before E3 2016, but in November 2016 Atlus pushed it back to the 4th of April for quality reasons. Atlus USA published it in North America, and Deep Silver handled Europe and Australia. Yu Namba led the English localization, which had the largest staff yet assigned to the series and began from a blank slate for the voice cast. The Shin Megami Tensei label was dropped from the English title, and the Japanese voices came as free DLC. At launch Atlus issued livestreaming rules warning of content ID claims or channel strikes. Many in the games press and streaming community found them threatening. About three weeks later, Atlus apologized for the tone and loosened the policy considerably.

  Persona 5 Royal followed in the same spirit as Persona 4 Golden. Atlus teased it as Persona 5 R in December 2018 and revealed it fully in April 2019. It adds a new Palace, the Kichijōji area of Tokyo, new music, and a playable third semester. It also brings subtitles in French, German, Italian and Spanish, a first for the series. MAPPA produced a new opening directed by Yuichiro Hayashi. Royal reached PlayStation 4 in Japan on the 31st of October 2019 and worldwide on the 31st of March 2020. Sega, the parent company of Atlus, ported it to Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Windows, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S on the 21st of October 2022.

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• 8. Reception and Reach

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  Metacritic reported universal acclaim for Persona 5, and Famitsu gave it a near-perfect score. PlayStation Official Magazine UK called it an unabashed masterpiece. Andrew Goldfarb of IGN described it as an extraordinary, memorable experience and easily one of the deepest JRPGs of the decade. Critics also praised the art direction. Complaints were few. Polygon called the English localization aggravatingly mediocre. Kenneth Shepard of Paste found the treatment of LGBTQ characters heteronormative and noted a gay couple played as a joke. The Western release of Royal altered those scenes at the localization team's urging, and Shepard and Polygon's Laura Dale judged that a small improvement. Writers at The Verge and Wired also noted that the game may run too long for some players.

  Sales began strongly. After Final Fantasy XV was delayed out of its original month, Persona 5 pre-orders on Amazon Japan jumped by 450 percent. In its first week in Japan the PlayStation 4 version sold 264,793 units and the PlayStation 3 version sold 72,974, for a total of 337,767. That made it the fastest-selling title in the series, ahead of Revelations: Persona. Hashino reported over 550,000 sold by September 2016, and within three weeks it was Atlus' best-selling game in Japan. Overseas, its debut sales were five times those of Persona 4 in packaged form, and Atlus announced 1.5 million units shipped worldwide. By November 2017 that passed two million, the series' best. The success helped lift annual revenue for Sega in 2017, and in 2018 the game earned a PlayStation Awards Platinum Prize for passing a million sales in Asia.

  Royal pushed the total higher. It shipped over 400,000 units in Japan by December 2019, and it was the third-highest-rated PlayStation 4 game on Metacritic, tied with The Last of Us Remastered. Michael Higham of GameSpot felt that the added third semester fixed the original's abrupt ending. IGN's Leana Hafer called it a living master class in improving an already amazing game. Royal sold 1.4 million units by July 2020, and the combined total for both passed 5 million by June 2021. The October 2022 ports brought Royal to 4 million by April 2023. By March 2025 Royal had sold 7.25 million copies, bringing all versions of Persona 5 to 10.45 million.

  Awards followed. At The Game Awards 2017 it was nominated for Game of the Year, Best Art Direction, Best Score/Music and Best Role Playing Game, and it won the last of those. It earned the Award for Excellence at the Japan Game Awards 2017, and GameSpot ranked it second for 2017, behind The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. IGN named it Best RPG of 2017, and Game Informer gave it Best Role-Playing Game, Best Narrative and Best Cast. The Tin Pan Alley Award for Best Music in a Game came at the New York Game Awards 2018. Royal won Best Music at the Famitsu Dengeki Game Awards 2019 but lost two later role-playing awards to Final Fantasy VII Remake.

  Critics keep returning to it. Edwin Garcia of Nerdist wrote in 2017 that it belongs among the greatest of all time, and Alex Donaldson of VG247 compared it to Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII. In 2023 Willa Rowe of Inverse called it the best heist game, praising dungeon design built around planning and executing a heist. IGN placed it at number 78 on its 2019 top 100 list, and a 2017 Famitsu reader poll ranked it the greatest game of all time. Journalists have traced its influence to Metaphor: ReFantazio in 2024 and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in 2025. Guillaume Broche, lead director at Sandfall Interactive, and Masahiro Sakurai both named its interface among their favorites.

  The cast spread across other media. The anime special Persona 5: the Animation -The Day Breakers- aired on the 3rd of September 2016, and Hisato Murasaki's manga began online on the 15th of September 2016. CloverWorks made a television anime that began in April 2018, and stage plays have been performed in Japan. Spin-offs include the rhythm game Persona 5: Dancing in Starlight, Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth, Persona 5 Strikers with Omega Force, and Persona 5 Tactica. Strikers reached Japan on the 20th of February 2020. Joker became a playable fighter in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate in 2018. Sakurai, a fan of the series, said Joker captured the approach he wanted for the game's downloadable characters: unique and fun to play.

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