Persona(l) Attachment
One of the primary things I have explored is the idea of trust between two people and within a group. I initially explored this when playing The Evolution of Trust, by Nicky Case. The game concludes that the most basic way to build trust with another individual is to have repeated, positive interactions with them, in addition to a possible win-win scenario and a very low level of miscommunication. Repeated interactions allow you to see the patterns in others’ behaviors, as well as to better understand their goals and motives, while win-win scenarios and very little miscommunication provide continuous motivation to continue interactions, before trust has been established. After these repeated interactions, and under the conditions stated above you eventually develop an understanding of each other, and you begin to get closer. Persona 5, a game by Japanese developer ATLUS, exemplifies this principle in one of the most emotional and significant ways I have seen in a video game. In Persona 5, the narrative choices the player makes create bonds between their character and those portrayed in the story, which eventually become bonds the player feels themselves. This concept of community and friendship is present throughout the story, becoming a central point of the narrative soon after the game begins.
Persona 5 follows a group of high school students in Shibuya, Tokyo. You play as a young man who is living with a legal guardian after being expelled from his previous school due to a false accusation of assault. You, and the many friends you make over the course of the game, then discover an alternate world called the “metaverse.” In the metaverse, creatures form from the twisted desires of people, and become monsters called shadows. Some of these shadows, due to the extremely twisted desires of their human counter parts, gather enough power to form dungeons, known as palaces. The protagonist and his team use pacified shadows, personas, to fight the shadows, relying on one another and team-based tactics to get through their many battles. They use this cooperation to overcome the rulers of palaces and maintain some level of justice and safety in the world around them.
Mechanically, the game is split into two very distinct parts, school life, and exploring the metaverse. For the purpose of this essay, the primary focus of discussion will be school life, however exploring the metaverse will be mentioned when applicable. In school life, you are given a large amount of agency with actions. There are two types of action, those that take time, and those that do not. Any number of non-time taking actions can be done in a single in game day, but only two time taking actions can be done per day; one in daytime and one during the evening. Both can be beneficial, however, time taking actions provide the most benefit to the player. Of these, there are more than a dozen options, from working part time, to eating out, and, most importantly, spending time with your friends.
Friendship, in Persona 5, takes the form of a mechanic known as “Social Links,” which, as one would imagine, are the links between the player character and the characters you have met and befriended in the story. Social Links each have their own unique type, or Arcana, based on Tarot Cards. Each also has ten levels, which provide benefits to the player and the team, varying on the person that Social Link is attached to. The most important of these links are those of your fellow metaverse explorers, or your fellow Phantom Thieves. This action is heavily encouraged by the game narratively, as your mentor suggests having many close friends will help you along your journey, establishing the Social Links and having a healthy circle of friends as one of the game’s core mechanics and identifying it as an important part of the story the game is attempting to tell. However, there are also several, very helpful, mechanical benefits to spending time with your Social Links over the course of in game time.
Social Links reward the player in multiple manners. The first of these is to imbue your teammates with an impressive array of abilities. Roughly every second time you rank up your Social Link with a member of the Phantom Thieves, they develop a new skill, these range from relatively innocuous, such as the ability to pass off a bonus action to another party member, to the lifesaving, such as the final skill, which allows them to take an attack for the protagonist that would have otherwise been deadly. These abilities deepen the strategy of exploration and allow for much more robust tactics and cooperation during a fight, which, later in the game, become indispensable.
The second, and more game altering, mechanical benefit of the Social Link system is the additional experience points personas are given. Just like each individual Social Link, all personas within Persona 5 fall under an Arcana, each Arcana having 5-10 personas categorized under it. The Arcana each persona is labeled under is connected directly to the corresponding Social Link. This connection means, when the Link is stronger, the additional experience given to personas under that Arcana will also be greater. While this could be taken as a minor ploy to encourage a player to spend time with their Social Links, this is, in fact, one of the most central mechanics of the game. The amount of experience given to a newly formed persona when the Social Link is maxed-out is immense. I, personally, have seen personas jump up ten levels from simply being fused under a maxed-out Link. This type of power increase can take a minorly helpful persona and make it useful or take a good persona and make it legendary. Later in the game, under some of the conditions you are forced to fight under, both the ability and experience benefits quickly switch from being interesting little additions to the game and mechanics to essential parts of both the narrative and strategy of completing a game of Persona 5.
However, despite their indisputable importance to the game mechanically, Social Links also serve as the primary method of character development in Persona 5. As discussed earlier, the basic method of developing trust and, by extension, affection for someone is to have multiple interactions with them where there is a possible win-win situation and a low level of miscommunication. The game uses the mechanical benefits of Social Links to encourage this behavior, as the more you interact with a member of the Phantom Thieves, the more powerful that Link becomes. This benefits the player with the above discussed bonuses, but also, narratively, benefits the character the player is interacting with, as Social Links usually revolve around the internal struggles each of your friends faces. Due to their narrative heavy nature, spending time with Social Links is not just a simple button press and time skip. You must spend time with them in order to get to know who they are and why you care about them. Spending time with and leveling up a Social Link involves many scenes in which the protagonist and character interact. In these scenes, the player can make choices which influence the tone of the scene and reaction of the character you are interacting with. These decisions can spur on the Link to develop more quickly or stall it to make progression incredibly slow. This gives the scenes more weight than a simple cutscene, where the outcome is already largely decided by the designers of the game. While, yes, in almost every case the Social Link will continue to grow, if the protagonist acts cold or says something hurtful to another character, in other words, if there is a miscommunication, it can cause a stall in the relationship, as the characters are, naturally, slower to trust a cruel person than a kind one. Together, the repeated interactions and player choice create an environment in which the player will often find themselves emotionally attached as the Social Link develops. Your repeated interactions develop a feeling of closeness and friendship that cannot be created through less demanding means.
The emotional attachment the player feels for the characters they build Social Links with arises for several reasons. The simplest, and perhaps most ubiquitous among fiction fans, is the fact that you end up spending an incredible amount of time with these characters. By the credits of Persona 5, you have likely spent over one hundred hours with these characters and involved in this story. That amount of time and effort almost requires that you be passionate and invested in what is happening within the world. Secondly, the characters are all fleshed out in the Social Links, adding depth and conflict to their characters that simply would not be addressed in the game, should you not explore their Link. Their development into robust and often relatable characters encourages engagement and interest, which is the primary reason, outside of mechanical benefit, one would want to spend more time with them. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, your protagonist is an analog for you. He is built in such a way that he can play any type of role, both in the metaverse and among the Phantom Thieves. You, as the player, are meant to put yourself in his shoes, and go about his life as you would want to or think necessary. Due to this relatively small amount of separation between player and protagonist, any emotional bonds he forms, you find yourself forming as well.
I was no exception to this emotional attachment. In fact, most of my analysis above is based on my experiences playing Persona 5. I had played several Persona games before this, but I had never finished one. As the story propelled forward, involving increasingly complicated and immense obstacles for the Phantom Thieves to face, I found myself further and further immersed. I became incredibly attached to each of the characters I spent time with, even if I didn’t max-out their Social Link. As I spent more time with the game and with the Phantom Thieves, the story and its happenings meant more and more to me. The more I knew them, the more I cared. I wanted things to end well for them, and I shared the emotions with them whenever an incredibly relieving or worrying event took place. Eventually, subconsciously, I felt like I was the protagonist, in an odd way. At a certain level of investment, the characters seemed less like abstract pieces of code on a screen, and more like genuine friends and people I cared for. It was because of this emotional attachment the most bittersweet moment in the game hit me as hard as it did.
At the end of the game, you have to leave your friends. Your probation is completed, and you are to return home to your family and your old school. The game takes its time by letting you say goodbye to all the Social Links you maxed-out before leaving for home. While playing through this scene, I found myself on the verge of tears. Finally, when you are offered one last moment of happiness in the form of a surprise road trip with your friends before taking you home, the credits roll. That was when it hit me. I wasn’t sad for the protagonist; I was sad for myself. I was upset because it wasn’t just the protagonist who had to leave his friends, I did too. I had to let go, and to move on with my life. My time, at least for now, with the Phantom Thieves was over. Similar to how the protagonist feels his time was too short with his friends, I felt as if I had become blinded. Near the end of the game, I was so determined to finish. It was all I could think about. How will I beat the next boss? Will this next fight be the last? I was so consumed with the goal of finishing the story, I forget to consider what finishing it meant. It turns out that finishing it meant having to leave the Phantom Thieves behind. It meant that I had to move on to something else that didn’t involve them at all. As odd as it sounds, it felt like leaving friends behind, and the mere fact that I missed the characters, and not the game, speaks volumes about how well the game functions as a tribute to the importance and power of friendship and trust among people.
Persona 5 is a game that uses mechanics and narrative to encourage player interaction with the characters the game provides. The protagonist begins the game alone, abandoned by everyone, and hated even by his guardian. Throughout the story of the Phantom Thieves, he and his team must learn to work together, even with their vastly different personalities, abilities, and backgrounds. No one on the team, not even the mighty protagonist, could do it all alone. Due to this, as well as the mechanical benefits it brings, the game is centered around the concept of friendship and community, and how important they are to everyone, no matter how strong or weak you may be alone. The Social Link mechanic and its many benefits make the team dynamic and community building almost essential to gameplay, with their cooperation and teamwork becoming more in-depth and robust as the relationships between the characters grow and become deeper. This is also mirrored in the narrative, where the only way most of the obstacles facing the Phantom Thieves can be overcome is by working together with those you care about. These mechanics and narrative elements working together weaves a story about friendship and the importance of others in our lives that I have not seen rivaled in a video game.
