I'm a bit slow compared to other people, so I'm still winding my way through Persona 5, and this weekend I finally caught up to where the story starts.
When the game begins, it's in media res. The Phantom Thieves are in the middle of a heist gone wrong and the protagonist, code-named Joker, is captured by the police. He's told that there was a traitor among his teammates and he's been sold out. That's not a spoiler. That all happens before the player even gets to enter his name.
As he's being interrogated by the prosecutor in charge of his case, the game flashes back to the chronological start of his story, when he first arrives in Tokyo, and then proceeds forward from there, in the day by day fashion of the Persona series since the third entry.
Spoilers from here on!
The real reason I wanted to write this post is because of Goro Akechi. He is the last party member to join the team and the one I was looking forward to the most, because I knew from early promotional material that he was a teen detective and I liked the idea of hauling a detective around with my band of phantom thieves after he became convinced that what we were doing was actually for the greater good.
I knew he had a Persona, so it seemed like a done deal that he would be part of the party. And he was portrayed on my lovely Steelbook disc case, just like all the other thieves. He's also shown with the gang on the title screen, towards the back of the line-up along with other late comers. His Persona, once we see it, is Robin Hood, and considering that the Persona is a manifestation of what's in one's heart, it's easy to read him as an honorable sort of thief. One's outfit in the Metaverse is supposed to be a sign of how a person rebels against society, and his a white, princely set of attire. Akechi sees himself as a good person.
Which is really weird, because of the plot revelations that happen at the end of the sixth Palace.
Mind, I haven't played past those plot revelations yet, so there are possibly good explanations of everything. I'm only going to cover my thoughts up until the day after Joker's arrest, because I have thoughts on the handling of Akechi's betrayal.
We first meet him as a high school detective who's a bit of a media celebratory due to his age and capability, and he's one of the first to speak out against the Phantom Thieves, not because he thinks they are bad people so much as they are taking the law into their own hands. He's the Confidant representing the Justice arcana, so it makes sense that he would take such a stance.
He continues to appear throughout the story, gradually befriending Joker despite their opposing views on the Phantom Thieves. Though Akechi is against them, it never comes off as malicious, and when the Phantom Thieves are framed, he defends them because the crime doesn't fit their usual MO.
This culminates in the Phantom Thieves reaching out to Akechi to help clear their name at the same time that Akechi reaches out to them to bring the real criminal to justice. However, unlike my hope of Akechi joining the team because he has been persuaded, he actually blackmails the team into working with him. They help him with this job and he won't reveal their true identities to the police. Also, they will have to disband afterwards.
It's a pretty crappy deal, but I could see where he was coming from. The Phantom Thieves, despite their good intentions, are vigilantes and working outside the law.
Now, ever since Akechi was introduced, some odd things happened, some of which the player is likely to remember, others which might slip by unnoticed or forgotten (especially the early ones).
The first one that happens in the story is that Akechi unknowingly hears Morgana without knowing that it was a cat talking. Only people who have been to the Metaverse can hear Morgana's real voice instead of a cat meowing. So when Akechi comes around the corner he remarks on Morgana's suggestion to get pancakes, thinking it had been another member of the group speaking, but if he had been an ordinary person, he shouldn't have heard that at all.
He reacts a second time to hearing Morgana ahead of going into the Metaverse with the Phantom Thieves when they arrange a meeting with him at their school, though by this time the Phantom Thieves are aware of his prior screw-up.
Also, just from the player's perspective, when the president of Okumura Foods is killed, there is a silhouette who walks in after he is shot. The silhouette matches Akechi's distinctive mask when in his Phantom Thief outfit.
Finally, getting one's Persona in a Persona game is a big deal and generally involves overcoming a personal obstacle. We never see or hear from Akechi about how he awakened his.
So even though I was happy that he had finally joined my team and I used him throughout the sixth Palace, I had some suspicions about him, even before he figuratively stabbed the Phantom Thieves in the back. Knowing what I did, it felt incredibly obvious that Akechi would be the traitor in the opening segment of the game, and I was hoping for a twist where I would discover it was someone else.
But Akechi was the traitor, and when he walked into my protagonist's holding cell and "killed" him (not realizing that he'd actually off-ed a dummy), that pretty much ruined any chance of him having an alternate agenda.
So what bothered me about this, is that there was a plan underway, and I didn't know it was happening.
I knew that Akechi was likely the traitor, and most of the game up until now has been Joker telling the prosecutor his side of the story. But the problem was that Joker was now caught and there's a traitor on the loose. And just how was Joker going to avoid getting killed?
After a lot of story scenes, it comes out that the the Phantom Thieves have been planning this operation for the better part of the past month, though the player has been left in the dark. We see some of the scenes, but not all of them, so the characters have context, though we do not.
Considering that Akechi's betrayal was not entirely unexpected, I felt a little disappointed being left out of the planning process.
I assume this decision was made so the player would end up at the opening scene of the game with a feeling of dread, knowing that they were about to get caught, rather than an "All right! It's time to put this plan in action!"
It worked, but I can't help feeling a bit cheated. Joker is supposed to be the player surrogate so everything he knows I should know, and while the game waves it off as part of the drugs he got injected with at the start of his imprisonment, it still bothers me that a lot of other memories are crystal clear.
If the injection was messing with his memories, there should been other things that Joker ended up forgetting aside from details related to the plan to expose Akechi and his boss. Just a little blurring or not entirely remembering things in the days leading up to the heist would have gone a long way. Not only would it have tipped off the player, but it would probably do so in a way that increased the amount of dread because the player would know something was being lost.
And while Akechi being the traitor is a thing, I'm still puzzled by him. I assume the answers will come later, since I'm not done with his Confidant storyline. He has a Persona, and the representation of his inner self in the Metaverse is one of good, so even though he appears to have the capability of a cold-hearted killer, there's got to be more to his character than being a teenage assassin.
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