First: Thinking about how all three of the Persona games I've played and/or watched someone play have gone, I've figured out that they're set in a universe that obeys the same basic laws as the Warhammer 40,000 setting. Tartarus/the TV World/the Metaverse is the Warp. The bosses are Chaos gods. The fabric of reality is too malleable by the unconscious minds of sapient beings for the universe to ever be stable or safe. There will always be another Nyx, or Izanami-no-Okami, or Yaldabaoth, or whoever the actual final boss of P5R turns out to be, no matter how many times Igor (... who I guess is the God-Emperor of Man disguised as a well-dressed garden gnome? Weird flex but OK) sends some poor high school student to punch the latest one in the face.

The parallels are there, is all that I'm saying. In the grim darkness of parallel realities lying close alongside early-21st-century Japan, there is only war. (I hear the Megami Tensei games this series spun off from do much less bothering to disguise that they're cosmic horror.)

Second: Also, is it just me, or has anyone else who's played both games noticed now much more both overt and implied sexual misconduct there is in P5 than P4? There's Kamoshida, obviously, but there's also that flesh-crawling subplot about Haru's arranged marriage, the mafia guy trying to force Makoto and Ann into his already-extensive sex slave racket, that whole thing with Makoto's friend's skeevy boyfriend who was part of a different sex slave racket... some of the Mementos Request mini-missions are overtly about taking down various sorts of sexual predator (and of course the most egregious of them takes the form of that one Shadow that's unmistakably a giant green penis on a chariot, what the fuck, Atlus?)... there's just a heckuva lot of rapey shit going down in this game.

Meanwhile, in P4, there was... Adachi, except he fucked it up both times and ended up murdering his intended victims instead, because he's the most pathetic no-hoper in a game universe that's not exactly understaffed with pathetic no-hopers. They didn't even go there with the backstory of Rise's show-business career. Heck, if anything, her Shadow seemed to be kinda disappointed about that.

It's, uh, quite a tonal shift, anyhow. Not sure I like what it suggests about where the writers' heads were at...

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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