#overall ann and yusuke both seem to view akechi as someone they could actually get along with | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

stardewpastel · 5 years

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I’ve decided I’m taking the direction of this project into my own hands and analyze the main cast of Persona 5. I’ve decided to do this as Persona 5 has a track record of being extremely hit or miss with it’s characters. While this is a problem with the entire series, never has it been this even with well written and poorly written characters. So without further ado, let’s get started!

Akira Kurusu/Ren Amamiya/Joker

So, this isn’t the best lead we could have, honestly. It’s inherently difficult to discuss Akira’s character, because, well…

He’s not.

As true as he is to his fellow Persona protagonists, he doesn’t actually have a personality to discuss and dissect. We could go off the dialogue choices the player is given, yeah, but there’s just too many variables to be able to settle with one defining personality.

On the other hand, Akira’s personas are actually a nice little nugget of fridge brilliance. Considering that Akira has what the game calls the ability of the wild card, he can wield multiple personas, ranging to about 210 in total. In a way, this is genius. Because of the inherently customizable format of the personas through fusion, no two personas made by different players would be the exact same, reflecting how no two Joker’s will be the same.

I mean unless you’re the type to make an invincible Satanael but c’mon, you’re better than that. Ryuji Sakamoto

Ryuji establishes a trend present with a lot of characters in the early game seem to suffer from, which is backpedaling on their characters arcs not long after they’re established. Although, Ryuji himself works with said trend… strangely. He doesn’t exactly do said backpedaling because there wasn’t actually anything to backpedal from. He storms in, yells about how much he hates the first boss of the game and storms back out until he becomes a party member. The only actual ‘development’ he gets is to learn to stop giving a shit if the outside world views him as a delinquent.

Which just…Isn’t good enough?

That’s not to say Ryuji isn’t a good character, save for one arc, he serves as a good way to lighten the mood when necessary and serves well as the protagonists best friend, but other than that, there isn’t much to him. Ann Takamaki

Ann falls the worst for the pitfall I was talking about when going over Ryuji. The entire first arc of the game is about her and her detestment for just being seen as a sexual object, which would be a really good direction for her character to go, especially since the rejection on an older man’s advances resulted in the sexual assault and suicide attempt of her best friend, so clearly it’s not something she’d tolerate... but at the end of the day she serves as the game’s main source of fanservice, which….

Well, it sends mixed messages, no?

Not to mention, Ann’s Persona Carmen is often depicted as a femme fatale who would seduce men and then scrap them to the side when she had been bored with them. Again, mixed messages are all abound with Ann.

Yusuke Kitagawa

Oh, good, finally, someone I can say good things about. The best word that could be used to describe Yusuke is… Interesting. I feel like the best way to describe him as a person would always being about five steps out of step. Still, no matter how strange his outward behaviour is, he dedicates himself to his craft of art pretty much no matter what.

His entire in-game confidant is about his art being criticized by a professional critic and his journey to find out what exactly he needs for inspiration to improve it. This consists of mistaking a brother and sister for a romantic couple and demanding to draw them, and ordering the protagonist to strip in church, among other things. Of course, this isn’t even mentioning his place in the actual story of the game.

Y’know, like, the required stuff.

You encounter Yusuke when investigating the rumors of an artist who uses his artist’s work for his own gain, however he chooses to deny this whenever it’s brought up during the arc due to said artist raising him like his own son since his mother died when he was a baby, however his trust in his mentor and father figure becomes crushed when it’s revealed he simply stood by and watched Yusuke’s mother die due to a seizure. This has lead to many people speculating why Yusuke was taken in in the first place, considering he couldn’t validate his artistic talents to warrant staying around, but I personally feel better off not knowing. After all, the point was to make it so that Yusuke would have no reason to believe in the Phantom Thieves ideals until his psyche had pushed to form his Persona and join them himself. Makoto Niijima

To put things lightly, Makoto is… Complicated, and not in a good way. The biggest problem Makoto has is that it feels like they wanted to write like, two different characters, but the director couldn’t decide which one they wanted to do and just said ‘ehhhh… do ‘em both?’.

She’s either a stuffy mom friend Student Council President, to badass biker chick strategist, but they didn’t blend it together in the way they wanted (at the very least, I hope it didn’t). On the other hand, people seem to deem her as Best Girl because she’s kinda smart and it’s implied she has an abusive homelife with her older sister; something that is touched on once and never again.

Of course, they could’ve fixed this with her confidant, maybe give more insight into her hobbies, or maybe her relationship with her sister, but uhh….But no, though.

Her confidant starts with her talking about her father who worked in the police force and then proceeded to die, because we needed less fathers in this game, clearly. But she also talked about how much of an inspiration her father was to her, which, is honestly really cool.

Except then it delays itself after rank one with Makoto’s first ever actual friend, because screw the Phantom Thieves, I guess, and it goes on about how she, who is genuinely just unpleasant, is dating a man from a host club, which Makoto believes is super shady, it is, but that isn’t the point, the point is this goes on for seven whole ranks. I can’t fathom why they thought this was a good idea, but ranks 1, 9 and 10 are the only ones where Makoto is the actual focus. She had the opportunity to be really good, but they just did not care. There’s more I could say about her incorporation into the plot, but I think I’ll detail it more in Akechi’s section. Futaba Sakura

Futaba actually gets to hold the position of the best written Phantom Thief we got, which is probably mostly because we get a good look inside her head. Unlike most dungeons, or rather, palaces, where you’re attempting to change the heart of some foul scum of society, you’re changing the heart of a girl so she won’t kill herself.

It’s established that for the past two years or so, Futaba had been struck deep to her core with guilt and regret after her mother had thrown herself into traffic, presumably in an act of suicide. She had been blamed from every adult that she was the reason that her mother, Wakaba, did what she did, so ever since she had locked herself up in her adoptive father’s basement, that is, until she learns that the suicide note she had been presented with way back when was a simple forgery, and her death was, as it turns out, a murder. This is what persuades her to join the Phantom Thieves, to find out about the people responsible for her mother’s death and get the revenge she deserves.

Not to mention, Futaba’s confidant is primarily about her trying to get her shit together, which is honestly far beyond her fellow Phantom Thieves. Her goal within her confidant is to try to get better about the outside world again, using a method that she used to do with her mother, promise lists. While she isn’t able to complete it, as part of her still feels uncomfortable out and about when Joker isn’t around, she still makes an honest effort to do everything else, even helping out an old friend of hers from an unhealthy situation with her family.

Overall, Futaba is just, real damn good. Haru Okumura

Haru can also be described as complicated, but not in the same way as Makoto was. The main problem that Haru has in the main story is that, well, she’s barely in it. She’s only introduced in September-October, and the last playable month in the game is December, so as a result, she barely has any required screentime with the player. The most we get is her desire to be seen as more as an object to be married off by her father, but other than that, not much.

In exchange, however, Haru has one of the best confidants in the game. After her father dies, she’s left in charge of an entire company, an entire company worth millions of dollars, so as is expected, many other higher ups attempt to be in good graces just to be able to essentially run the place themselves. Haru mentions repeatedly to the player that she doesn’t really want either outcome the situation could have, simply preferring to look after her own garden and open up a small cafe, not unlike her grandfather before her.

It’s nothing super deep or complicated, but it knows what it wants to do, it has focus. Not to mention Haru herself has a rather calming vibe about her.

Goro Akechi

Oh boy.

I could keep this short and brief by simply saying ‘Goro can’t Akechi a break’ but, we aren’t here for short and brief, are we?

While Goro only joins the party for one dungeon near the end of the game, he’s present most of the way through, behaving mostly as an opposing force to the Phantom Thieves, believing they should be imprisoned for their crimes, or, as it turns out, ‘killing’ their leader works too.

Although, as it turns out, Goro needed to shuffle his way into the trauma conga line somehow, and boy oh boy, does he take the crown for it. Being a bastard child in Japan is a big no-no, but however, this is what he just so happened to be, which is already a setback. This was only to be followed up with his mother killing herself when he was young, which resulted in him being passed around from foster home to foster home for just about the rest of his life until he could live on his own, eventually culminating in discovering the powers of his Persona far earlier than the rest of the cast. This leads to him being taken in by his scumbag of a biological father to serve as a pawn for his plans to become a political power, using his power to assassinate any… problematic people in the way, including but not limited to the previously mentioned Wakaba Isshiki. All the while, Goro simply doing his best to be the best he can be, impressing and surpassing all of his peers, until he is killed and presumably forgotten, considering that he’s never brought up again afterward.

To bring up what I was going to talk about in question of Makoto and Goro’s writing is that many people come to the consensus that they should have switched when they joined the party, as not only would the target at the time make more sense for either to be involved in, (An Ace Detective going after a mafia boss, a student council president worried about the state of her sister,) but it’s eventually revealed that Goro is, in fact, a traitor amongst your party. Having him join in the third dungeon, rather than the sixth, not only would this make the player less suspicious of him, but also make his claims of having a Persona for ‘a couple of months’ more believable.

Simply put, Goro Akechi is rather well written, but the fact that he has blood on his hands results in the fandom discarding him to the wayside so hard that even Akechi cosplayers had to suffer verbal abuse and harassment at conventions due to their cosplay choice.

While people can claim what they want, overall, Goro was dealt a shitty lot in life, and he even lampshades this himself, by saying that if he and Joker had met just a few years earlier, things would have been different.

#I don't have a good way of justifying this #Uh #Atlus is my favourite company #Atlus made Persona 5 #bam #perfect

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