Spoilers for the non-story parts of the ending of Persona 5, which I finally finished, and am basically exclusively discussing the final actions of the ending today. (As well as a book about New York City during the pandemic. Two things that make perfect sense together, as you do.)
Persona 5 is an all-timer of a hangout game. Sure, an answer to the question “What is Persona 5 about?” should probably be “a supernatural story about high schoolers who discover a power to go into people’s subconscious minds and, if they play their cards right, steal the source of their target’s distorted sense of reality and make them repent in real life. Then things escalate” (as mentioned previously, although I’m more interested in writing about hyperspecific impressions than overviews of things here, although that may not be the most accessible way to write about an absolute grab bag of things.) But, more importantly, Persona 5 has vibes for days.
The game’s version of Tokyo presents the city, your life as a high schooler, as an economy of opportunity. You pick an activity after school and an activity at night that could build your bonds with your friends, with other characters around the city, or develop your social stats. Spend an afternoon studying in the coffee shop, you’ll build up your knowledge stat. Spend an evening studying in a diner, only ordering coffee? Baby, you’ll build your knowledge stat and your guts stat, because what nerve you got to sit around only ordering coffee! Do this on a day that’s raining? Hell yeah, the diner is so much emptier than usual, you can really focus and get more knowledge. You better carry a book with you at all times, because if you get a seat on the subway on the way to school, you can read some of that book. This might sound tedious, overwhelming, like an unfortunate reduction of social life into the quantified rules of a game, and it is in a good way. You get to run around Tokyo seeing if your friends are free to hang out or study for your exams and someone made this fun? Wild stuff!
Which is why the ending is so effective. And I’m not going into spoilers for the ending of the game’s plot about political turmoil and the metaverse (not the crypto one), but after you beat the final boss, after the police are done investigating you, etc, etc, but for when the game gives you one last day before your character has to move away to run around Tokyo and say goodbye to everyone you met that year.
Everyone, including background characters - the city as a character through such extensions - who you may or may not have ever bothered to pay attention to.
It’s a lovely ending to a game which wasn’t really primarily about its plot. It reminded me of the endgame of Earthbound where your party members go home, all the enemies are gone from the game, but you can still go around the entire world, just talking to people, riding your bike (that you hadn’t been able to use since getting party members), taking in the world you just saved. Video game stories are, largely, garbage. You have to lower your expectations a lot in this medium, and it’s really nice when a story is not only good, but understands how it was special and what beats it needs to hit. Persona 5 knew it was just as much about a fantasy of adolescence in the city, about its romanticized slice of life, and rather than wrapping up with a big cutscene where your friends all say goodbye to you, it lets you step out onto the streets of Tokyo again for one last time to say goodbye to them, to make the rounds before leaving the party.
It’s an impressive appreciation of a place and of how a specific time offers a unique version of that place. Tokyo will always be there, but Tokyo through the eyes of a teenager won’t be. A much weirder, darker version of this place as a time as a place is in a book I read recently, Jeremiah Moss’s Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York, the author’s account of what living in New York City was like in 2020 and 2021, during a New York transformed by the pandemic, transformed by police violence and protests against it, and forcibly transformed “back to normal” and what was lost.
Which is a dicey proposition. The pandemic was, certainly, largely bad [citation needed]. I lived in Brooklyn throughout the pandemic, and most of my memories of those years was constant fear that I was going to get and spread Covid and kill innocent strangers and/or loved ones. And I’ll tell you right now, Feral City spends basically zero time on the deadly reality of how the pandemic has killed over a million Americans, which, odd choice. I imagine this is a tough act because no balance the author strikes will please everyone, in all fairness.
It does have an invaluable account of how, also (even if it doesn’t really do the “also” part), the city got so weird during that time that parts of living here got… weirdly nice. Nice in ways that we all knew were never going to last. The increased sense of comradery and community among those who stayed. The way the monoculture shadow ebbed a bit and this became a place where weirdos hung out in the park, where you could drink outside, where fewer people (specifically the “hypernormals”, as posited in Feral City) were here. Where the temporary shift in the focus of capital made New York felt more like a third space and less like Disney World. And, most importantly, for me, how strange it is to mourn the loss of that as the world inevitably returns to neoliberal business as usual, how rents skyrocketed as people flooded back now that New York Is Back, how a fucking cop got voted mayor despite the Black Lives Matter protests.
It’s a flawed account, to be sure. It does do plenty of Real New York gatekeeping. The author posits a firm binary of the hypernormal neoliberal subjects and the Real New Yorkers+the gays+people of color that feels too limiting. This becomes noticable when the author, for instance, complains that the loud party noise the transplants make in public spaces is bad while celebrating in the next chapter that the loud party noise the og new yorkers make in public spaces is good actually.
What’s nice about fiction, in contrast, is the way it offers you the closure that real life is rarely considerate enough to provide. Persona 5 tells you to take your time and ends its narrative basically ignoring The Plot and smartly focusing on letting you say good bye to a version of Tokyo that’s at its end for you. In real life, we have to read Feral City.
I suppose in real life we also have to play Persona 5.