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I don’t usually play pure JRPGs. Not enough going on in battle, without the unit positioning in Fire Emblem, or the action game stuff in Neir or whathaveyou. But when Persona 5 Royal came out on the switch, everyone was insisting it was great, so when I saw it on sale for like 30 Bucks at Gamestop, I said ehh fuck it 30 dollars might as well not even exist and I picked it up. It ate me alive. The battle system is complex and nuanced, the character management stuff rewards the way my brain lapses into odd detail orientedness, the dungeons are really great little three dimensional puzzle boxes, the best of their kind this size of Zelda.
But the thing that yanked me through fast was the story and the milieu. Explaining what Persona 5 is about in print is kind of a waste of time, because you can’t really GET it unless you’re in it, watching it try to string madness together in real time. More or less, though: you are a Japanese teenager. One day, you get into mondo trouble for saving a woman from a man who is getting creepy with her in a dark alley somewhere. The police say hey dickhead you’re a real shitboy you’re gonna get expelled from your provincial school, kicked out of your parents house, slapped with a criminal record and sent to Tokyo, where you will attend a different school and live with an aging fuckboy hipster coffee artisan in the attic of his single origin coffee shop.
But, duh, Jung’s conception of the collective unconscious is actually a real physical space that you can access with an app an old man who lives in a blue velvet paneled room surreptitiously put on your phone, and it turns out that, when someone is a big enough freak, their mind develops these wild mind palaces that become populated by the perverse desires of everyone else’s unconsciousness. So you, duh, no shit, use the app to enter these palaces and steal the metaphorical/not metaphorical treasure of these palaces and cause them to collapse, which, in real life, makes them break down and say noooo im horrriiibbbllleee and repent from their terrible crimes. It’s a little like Inception, but it makes more sense. Sort of. It FEELS like it makes more sense.
It manages to FEEL that way because the game’s pacing is languid and slow. You don’t spend most of your time fighting JungianMindDevils in palaces and subway tunnels. You instead spend most of your time going to school, hanging out with your friends, working side jobs, learning to make coffee, playing shogi, vibing. Time passes, new stories and allies emerge, you wander around and see the story of the world and the game’s intricate evocation of postmodern society, a world driven by money and deference to the rich and powerful that discourages friendship and charity and kindness.
The first time you and your dirtbag friend Ryuji go into the Jungian collective sideworld, you meet Morgana, a weird creature who looks like a cat but INSISTS they are actually a human being who lost their true form while perusing the Jungian world for… something. Morgana lost his memory. He is pretty sure he is a human, anyway, he just looks like a cat right now. What Morgana actually is is a spoiler, one that is both confusing if you haven’t played the game AND kind of dull, so I won’t get into it here.
Morgana knows more about the Jungiverse than you do, so he becomes your guide to the psycopersuit of the world’s dirtbags and their perverse core desires. Whenever he leaves the collective unconscious world, he presents to OUR reality as a cat, since everyone IN the universe thinks he looks like a cat. He doesn’t have anywhere to live, and the playboy coffee artist who is storing you in his attic has a soft spot for cats, so he lives with you as your “Pet cat.”
For most of the rest of the game, Morgana hangs out with you all the time. At school, he naps in your desk and helps you out with your schoolwork. When you’re walking around town, he sits in your handbag and provides a running commentary on all the shit you see. If you’re watching a movie, he watches it with you in the seat next to you.
…and then lounges back in the chair afterwards and has a convo with you about the movie or TV show you just watched.
Of all the strange fantasies I have indulged as a video game player, none has ever appealed to me more than having a cat friend who can talk to you, hang out, watch a movie, talk shit to your dumb friend, trade gossip, and go with you everywhere in a little bag you carry everywhere. As I played this game, I wanted to be the man with the bag cat who talks to him more than I have wanted anything in my entire life. It is the ultimate vibe, the dream, the greatest friendship you could possibly have. A cat who likes you, TALKS to you and BROS OUT WITH YOU, that’s it, that’s all I would need from this life if it were given to me.
Of course, it’s impossible. Real cats don’t even like you and they can’t talk. But that’s the magic of video games, helping you LIVE the impossible. Thank you, Persona 5, for the blessing of spending time with my friend Morgana, a talking cat who hangs out with me on the subway. It was the ultimate luxury.
Morgana, you are correct. I did.