Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5's Window-Dressing

I love the level of stylization of the technical, moving parts of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5.  There’s a good number of RPGs which make an effort to give themselves a look and feel of their own by customizing their basic components (menu screens, text boxes, loading/transition effects, etc), to be sure, and a few have even managed to achieve a look and feel that’s iconic to them.  You always know, for example, when you’re playing a game that’s been heavily influenced by the Mother series (such as Undertale or Omori) by its mimicry of Earthbound’s simple positioning, overall structure, and appearance of the game’s menus, text boxes, and combat narration.*  

I don’t know if any game has quite so appealingly and thoroughly stylized its operations as SMTP5, though.  The game endeavors to always keep a sense of fluid action to itself, to keep its themes of the master thief in motion and the endless activity of the urban sprawl impressed upon you at all times, and it does it well.  Transitioning from point to point in an RPG’s menus usually necessarily represents a sudden hitting of the brakes to its action, but sections of Persona 5’s menus move swiftly, come at you, skew themselves at angles, with dynamic background images of Ren at work.  There’s even some transitions in the game in which Ren brings in the new section through a fast, energetic animation.  Battle menus are visually interesting as they center in on the characters and explode outward, victory screens depict the team already running to their next destination, menu color schemes put the SMT series’s stark, solid contrasts of colors to work to catch the eye but never become garish...Atlus’s developers make every effort to keep you engaged and entertained with the dashing thief motif of the game, and the result is an extremely cool, singular twist on even the most mundane elements of the RPG experience.

Equally neat are the transition screens when traveling around the city.  Whenever you go to a new section of Tokyo, the wipe from 1 area to the next is a snapshot of a subway car and its passengers, making the experience of Ren’s commute your own.  And rather than this simply being a static thing (which still would have been fun and stylized, mind you), the visuals of this transition change according to time of day and year--the lighting changes depending on whether Ren is traveling at day or evening, and his fellow riders’ clothing likewise is appropriate for the season (there’s even costumes for Halloween, and decorations for Christmas!).  When Ren’s moving about school, the transition screen is that of several student silhouettes as they pass by in the hall (sometimes you can see some of Ren’s classmates, too).  When transitioning between places within a specific area of the city, the screen changes according to the weather.

I really love the one for rain--the geometric pattern formed by the umbrellas is so pleasing to watch that I found myself having Ren exit his home on rainy days even if I didn’t actually have business out in the neighborhood, just for the chance to see the umbrella transition.  When you’ve made such an appealing loading screen that the player is actually seeking it out, you know you’ve done something right.  The stylistic bells and whistles of Ren’s day-to-day are engaging and dynamic, this time in a comforting and familiar way, selling the natural rhythm and community of city life in a way that not only keeps it an ever-present thematic setting, but also one that possesses a nostalgic feeling of home.

It’s the big things that make an RPG good or bad--story, purpose, characters, creativity, pacing, that sort of thing.  But nothing quite sells just how much a creative team cares for what it’s created, how much the creators had a sincere vision for the game from top to bottom, like great little details and window-dressing like this.  Atlus didn’t just do what it had to for the game and call it a day, it put effort into Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 from top to bottom, and I appreciate that a heck of a lot.










* Mind you, such little touches and details are not always beneficial--I, personally, actually don’t like the slightly choppy, never-quite-fluid input and timing of the Mother style, for example.  And I’ll be damned if I know what Saint Bomber was thinking when he made the menu cancel sound effect a woman saying “No” in the newly-released A Dragon’s ReQuest.