Persona 5 Retrospective Part 11: The Pyramid Job - Futaba

I promise to stop complaining about Kaneshiro. Now it's time for bold new things to complain about.

Just kidding, I really like this arc. I have nitpicks, mostly pertaining to how it fits into the broader game.. But the emotional beats are robust and effective, the atmosphere and music are as good as they get, even the puzzles are passable. This is one of Persona 5's strongest sections.

Really, don't worry about it.

Futaba Sakura

After Kaneshiro goes down, a global hacker collective called Medjed targets the Phantom Thieves. It's never made clear why they're doing this or even what they're threatening to do - I took it to mean that they were threatening to release the Thieves' identities, but this isn't actually stated. 

I like the idea of an Anonymous-esque hacker group as a villain. They could be really menacing as a dark version of the Thieves, stealing secrets and using them however they see fit. But Medjed is vague, silly, and get so little play that nobody cares about them. Later it's revealed that it wasn't all of Medjed after the Thieves, just a single low-level member. Later still we learn that the entire thing was a farce and the Thieves' identity was never actually threatened¹. 

Medjed is only here to give us a time limit, because the game has a time mechanic and we only have X number of in-game days to complete a Palace. They're also an excuse to get the Thieves in touch with Futaba.

Futaba is one of the game's most interesting characters. She's a master hacker and an agoraphobic shut-in who hasn't left her room in months. When she learns Joker is a Phantom Thief she contacts him, asking if he can change her heart.

There's something morbidly hilarious about a tile puzzle to reveal a painting of Futaba crying over her dead mom.

This is an act of desperation. Futaba is interred so deeply in a mausoleum of despair that she's ready to die- and over the course of her Palace we find out why. Futaba's mother Wakaba killed herself by walking into traffic, and her suicide note named her motive as the stress of raising Futaba by herself. Now Futaba lives with Wakaba's friend Sojiro - the same Sojiro that's taking care of Joker.

Futaba's Palace is a Pharaoh's tomb, mixing the classic Egyptian motif with binary patterns and other hacker imagery. The Palace represents Futaba's room, which she sees as her "tomb": to punish herself for killing Wakaba, Futaba has lost the will to live.

Like Makoto and Yusuke in the previous arcs, Futaba gets a lot of screen time and a great little arc. Unlike those two, she doesn't need to muscle  screen time away from an antagonist to do so. She’s the only new character of the arc besides her deceased mother, meaning everything we see inside the Palace reflects on Futaba. This narrow focus lends to a powerful emotional climax, when Futaba realizes that Wakaba was killed and the suicide note was forged. 

The boss is Futaba's cognitive version of her mother: a monstrous sphinx that guards the tomb, preventing escape just as Futaba's guilt over her Wakaba's death prevents her from leaving her room. Futaba manifests her Persona, furious at the adults that used her as a scapegoat to cover up the murder.

Should we, uh, should we look away while you interface with the tentacle saucer? No? You want us to watch? Uh, all right.

The Medjed plotline that makes little sense and goes nowhere, but as the focus shifts away from them and onto Futaba it gets stronger and stronger. Futaba's moment of catharsis atop the pyramid is probably my favorite single moment from the entire game, because it's so well built up to and executed.

With her demons vanquished, Futaba uses her L337 haxx0r skillz to expose Medjed and save the day. She joins the Phantom Thieves in a mission control role.

Good stuff. All it took for Persona 5 to get back on track... was to be more like Persona 4.

This makes the game look really exciting, but don't be fooled. Mostly you'll be going to the beach and shit like that.

Persona 4

This series isn't focused on other SMT games, but I do want to discuss P4 a little because it was P5's predecessor and a lot of P5's features feel like responses to aspects of P4. Both games follow the same basic structure of meeting and fighting people's shadow selves in mindscapes that they created.

The difference is that in Persona 4, the heroes generate Palaces². Instead of stemming from their distorted desires, the Palaces stem from the character's self-loathing. For example, an early Palace in P4 is for your acquaintance Yukiko. She's a polite and charming girl who has been raised with the expectation that she'd eventually take over her family inn. She's begun to feel trapped by this expectation and fantasize about another life, but this makes her feel guilty about betraying her family's wishes.

Yukiko's Palace is a medieval castle, just like Kamoshida - with Yukiko as the princess locked in the top. Shadow Yukiko is helpless and needy, preferring to wait for a prince to come and rescue her than to change her situation herself. 

Shadow Yukiko is defeated not by beating her into submission, but by the real Yukiko accepting that the shadow is an accurate reflection of her failings. She confronts her own weakness, accepts it as part of herself, and spends the rest of the game trying to overcome it.

I don't have a caption, so: Yukiko is best girl from 4. Chie fans die angry.

This is brilliant. Every new party member gets a dramatic arc centered around them as an introduction. We learn all about their life, personality and character arc, climaxing in a boss fight against their Shadow Self. Then they join the party as a fully realized character.

You can probably see the advantage this style has over P5. Each arc of P5 must introduce both a new villain and a new party member. All other things being equal, they'll only receive half as much attention, while in P4 the villain becomes a party member thanks to how Shadows work.

Futaba's Palace, meanwhile, is pretty much a P4 Palace. Futaba isn't an evil person, her distorted desires are self-hatred and extreme social anxiety. The entire arc centers on exploring her as a character. In the arc's climax, she falls into the Metaverse and meets her Shadow Self, the only Palace Ruler to do so. Then she awakens her Persona and joins the Phantom Thieves in an explosive emotional moment.

It's bittersweet. Futaba's Palace invites comparisons to Persona 4, and it makes the failings of arcs like the previous (or succeeding) one even more apparent.

Futaba meets her Shadow self and accepts hard truth, in the process gaining the power of Persona. She also starts wearing skintight spandex, but that's probably unrelated.

Are you saying Persona 5 should have just copied Persona 4's conceit? Maybe! I think P4's concept is an incredibly fertile ground for storytelling. It could be a whole genre of fiction. Persona 5 isn't able to tell as varied or interesting stories. Villains like Madarame, Kaneshiro, Okumura or Shido feel very similar to Kamoshida because there are only so many ways an adult can terrorize a teenager.

But stories like Kamoshida's Palace couldn't be told in Persona 4, either. The themes of rebellion and seeking one's own justice are served by the narrative in a way they wouldn't have been otherwise.

I like that Persona 5 tried to shake up the formula instead of copying its successful predecessor. But "it's the same thing, but bad guys have Palaces instead of good guys" doesn't feel like innovation. Hell, it's not even a new concept: the later Palaces in P4 are for purely antagonistic characters. 

All of this is to say that I like Futaba's Palace, but it's very different from other Palaces. While Kamoshida's Palace would highlight other antagonists as boring, Futaba's Palace would highlight structural flaws inherent to Persona 5. That's a shame.

While I wish that was my only issue related to Futaba, it isn't. Next week we'll talk about what that other issue is.

1. It's... complicated, and honestly not worth getting into. I’ll talk a bit more about it later in the series.

2. Or Castles, in that game's parlance. I'll call them Palaces for simplicity's sake.