Foreshadowing / Persona 5 Strikers

Just like the prequel, Strikers pulls no punches in foreshadowing many of its plot points. Beware of unmarked spoilers!!

The true culprit

• Every time you meet her prior to The Reveal, she just uses all of the Verbal Tics of Takuto Maruki from Royal and she just seems too loud and peppy to be even genuine. In the Japanese version of those scenes, the phrasing she used were also extremely archaic and awkward. Of course, she's faking it and she's just an emotionless "thing" (or so she claims; she's just unnervingly stoic. Ichinose is actually aware of how unnerving her typical stance is, so she fakes a stance to make her look less suspicious).
• She's one of the very few people who knows who the Phantom Thieves are even if she isn't supposed to have met them in the Metaverse before with Ryuji's loud mouth playing a part of it. Before the encounter with her after Konoe's presentation, a hacking attempt on both Alice and Natsume's phones both revealed someone is monitoring the Jails. Well, Ichinose is obviously the one doing it (although she wasn't doing it to look after intruders but to observe EMMA's evolutionary process) and the Phantom Thieves all know that they are dealing with someone dangerous. She doesn't mind until the very end, however.
• After Konoe's conference in her university in Sendai, Ichinose blatantly admits selling the application to Konoe after the Madicce conference so he can improve it and that she was the person who invited him to her university personally. Right after defeating Akane, it was also revealed that Konoe gave her his Madicce keyword in a VIP meeting that she participated in. Considering that Konoe is The Heavy for the incident, this can't be anything more obvious.
• Before The Reveal you will only meet her twice personally. Both times this happens in the Sendai arc, respectively before meeting Natsume and after his confession. You do not meet her personally after this and the other interaction prior to her exposure is via phone calls or SNS. Even after capturing what was supposedly the culprit, Ichinose still never has any major involvement.
• For such a conspicuously minor character, Ichinose has a drawn portrait and a cut-in which is usually reserved for important characters, effectively rendering her instant suspect level especially in an RPG where your goal is to find the culprit.
• During the second and last time you meet Ichinose personally (until the game's final act), she largely acts loud and peppy as usual. However, when the Phantom Thieves introduce her to Sophia, she suddenly became very lukewarm as if she didn't know how to react. It turns out that Ichinose created Sophia before she worked on EMMA to understand why people thought that she was a freak, but Sophia asked her a question that pushed all of her buttons, causing her to ditch her as garbage and work on EMMA instead.
• When the Phantom Thieves ask her for Konoe's keyword after defeating Akane, Joker tells her about Okinawa. She didn't look suprised about it at all and laughs off the testimonies as "another adventure", something that alerted Ryuji. She wouldn't be suprised at all because she sold EMMA to Konoe and was fully on board for the EMMA testrun in Okinawa.
• When Futaba examines Sophia at the start of the game, she comments how the person who programmed her is a genius, and their habits, thought processes and personalities are within her code. As one progresses into the game, this becomes more and more evident as Sophia and EMMA possess a certain type of eccentric thought process, which is outright dubious at best and obvious malice at worst. Sophia (and EMMA's) creator is actually Ichinose, and it's heavily implied that this type of eccentric behavior is actually her mindset incorporated into her AIs because she shut down all of her emotions or empathy a long time ago.
  • When Ann, Joker and Morgana report their encounter with Alice to the rest of the party, Sophia obliviously suggests the Phantom Thieves to kill her Shadow (which will obviously induce a mental shutdown on her). When Ichinose was defeated in the Jail of the Abyss, she asks the Phantom Thieves to kill her out of guilt only for Sophia to persuade her back onto the right path.
  • After Kaburagi's failed operation to arrest the Phantom Thieves, Konoe turns to EMMA for advice, asking her for a way to capture the Phantom Thieves. EMMA suggests brainwashing Akane, an adolescent to do the dirty work for him (although she only tells him the person she was about to brainwash is a "person close to the Phantom Thieves" instead of referring to Akane by name, and she only chose Akane because she was the sole available candidate). During the game's final act, after Ichinose briefly takes control of Sophia to attack the party and fails, Yusuke calls her "a devil" and literally calls her You Monster! in english, only for her to admit that she never felt anything bad about using (an adolescent) to do horrible things if it's convenient.

Sophia

• In the same cutscene where Futaba examines Sophia's code, there are two:
  • Futaba mentions how if Sophia became widespread, EMMA would be "old hat". EMMA was actually the inferior product because Ichinose programmed her while not being in a right state of mind, resulting in a mechanical monstrosity brainwashing the public in the Tokyo Tower instead of an all-around helper.
  • When Futaba was analyzing Sophia's code, she mentions that Sophia didn't have the signature of her creator inside her coding, which is (according to her) usually included within their work. It's implied what actually happened is Ichinose creating Sophia and dumping her within minutes of interaction out of a fit of rage, so she didn't even bother giving Sophia a signature in her code. Sophia looks noticably depressed upon hearing this, because she did treat Ichinose as a friend, only to be dumped in a few minutes out of nothing but unjustified anger and jealousy.
• She absolutely cannot think of any reason why she's even made, and she has no memories because it's a clean AI that was ditched instantly upon creation.
• If one listens very carefully when Sophia is activated as a digital assistant in the real world, the ping she makes is the same as EMMA's.
• She constantly looks up information, provides different services and acts like a guide and planner for the thieves, which is what the EMMA app is for the general populace.
• Upon reaching the end of Okinawa's Jail, a voice tells her that she is junk because she's indecisive about the reason of her existence. That's from EMMA, and it's because Sophia is ditched by her creator in favor of the EMMA, who does have a distinct purpose because Ichinose worked with her for more than a few minutes.
• Pithos acts as a Persona for gameplay purposes, but the game makes it pretty clear that it isn't really one; Sophia just refers to it as "a weapon", there's no Awakening scene (she just suddenly has it), it has no Arcana, and its skills have question marks (i.e. Dia?) because it's just Sophia emulating the moves she sees from the Phantom Thieves. This leaves open the possibility that she has a real Persona she hasn't awakened yet because she has nothing to repress (being only a few minutes old when she first uses Pithos) and nothing to rebel against. When she rebels against Ichinose brainwashing her to fight her friends, she gains Pandora of the Hope Arcana, a true Persona.

Monarchs and Jails

• When you enter a Jail, in addition to familiar read-and-black ripples you can also see digital glitches. This is a hint that the Jails are articial constructs by EMMA and not naturally occuring results of distortions.
• After investigating Alice personally once, Sophia talks about that there might not be a treasure inside Jails and she suggests killing Shadow Alice instead. Unbeknownst to Sophia, this wouldn't work as it would instead cause a mental shutdown, and the Thieves immediately reject it, but there are really no treasures inside the Jails (the desire diamonds don't count as they're the treasures of other people, not the Monarch, and stealing them just un-brainwashes followers), and the party instead has to convince the Shadow to voluntarily give up their Monarch status.
• During the first time Joker, Ann and Morgana meet Alice personally to confirm if she's really distorted and she starts to display psychotic and violent behavior in earnest, she doesn't really act that conceivable, unlike Kamoshida or Madarame who at least still bother to give themselves a public image. It starts out as if she was outright bricked upon the TV host mentioning her crush, then she attacks her manager physically by stepping on him. (Bear in mind, this is basically a 20-year old woman physically attacking a grown man in a public area and not even bothering to check if there are other people around the hallway.) Later on in Sapporo, in a similar vein as Alice, Hyodo also acts like a very comical Neat Freak only to soften up and reassume her usual demeanor when there are no civil wards nearby. These aren't normal behavior coming from a naturally distorted person, and EMMA was artificially brainwashing the Monarchs to act in such way upon certain triggers by reminding them the reason why they use her for "salvation".
• Pay attention to the trash laying around the dump area Shadow Alice has Joker, Skull, and Mona thrown into at the start of the game, right before meeting Sophia. There are broken school chairs, an unpinned blackboard, and a discarded blue door with a very distinctive square peek window cut at an askew angle. They are all features seen in Shujin Academy during Persona 5, hinting both at Alice's connection with the school and the fact she doesn't want to think about them, hence why they are in that particular place of her Jail.
• At Sendai, there's a cardboard standee of Date Masamune and his wife near the vending machines. After defeating Shadow Natsume, it turns out the Devil King outfit he is wearing is actually a cardboard cutout and his true form is only wearing his underwear.
• If you paid attention to Shadow Natsume's "Demon King Garb", it remains completely still. That was because it's just a wooden board, and he's actually half-naked behind it.
• The EMMA application can decide the correct option for everything its user asks it about, and it's absolutely accurate in that regard. It's pretty obvious that it will evolve to the level where it thinks that humanity's desire is having an AI goddess to do all the thinking for them while everyone knows that it isn't.
• As soon as you reach Sapporo, you will see a mother mourning for her child. This is actually Hyodo's Start of Darkness; she was blamed for the accident that killed the girl by a corrupt staffer and decided to use EMMA to completely and utterly root out corruption in her city. The mother also shows up at the end of the Sapporo arc to give Hyodo a pep talk when she intends to retire from politics out of shame for what she did as a Monarch.
• The Monarch's despicable behavior have a very clear reason for them, unlike the Palace Ruler's despicable behaviors.
  • Alice forcefully breaks up couples by changing hearts of men, and causes binge spending and violent incidents via the men who were feverently obsessed on her. If anyone dares talk against her she stomps on them, she will follow-up by harassing them verbally and filming the humiliation. Her previous manager became a shut-in due to this behavior. That's actually how she's being treated at Shujin by bullies prior to using EMMA's "salvation" service. She used to very introverted but somehow a popular boy confessed his love to her. The Alpha Bitches in her school didn't appreciate this and she was bullied and humiliated by being stomped upon while having it recorded, and that boy left her afterwards for the other girls. This caused her to basically distance herself from Shujin so hard that she deleted every single record that she even existed in that school. When she finally got an upstart job as a fashion designer, the bullies in her former high school spread that incident on the net. This enraged her enough to use EMMA to create her Jail, and EMMA sets up a Berserk Button for her where if she saw men being happily married she will force them to go after her instead.
  • Ango can be clearly seen selling plagiarized work at top-grossing levels. Just like Alice before, binge spending, hyper-obsessiveness and violent incidents occur. He actually had a superior grandfather whom he simply cannot follow his footsteps to and simply plagiarized a novel of his own, and he kept trying to get his work recognized to no avail, only getting a consolation award at best. However, instead of just throwing him away, his publishers instead generated a scheme on fleecing him using his grandfather's name and using his poorly-written work to scam unsuspecting readers, so he used EMMA to draw the cash to him instead.
  • Hyodo can be seen berating civil wards mercilessly twice, with one even looking really exhausted. She's also rallying ridiculous mass cleaning campaigns where not even a speck of dust could remain in Sapporo. She was simply a comical Neat Freak, because when she was still mayor, a Corrupt Politician took advantage of an ice statue collapsing scandal that she had minor involvement with by scapegoating her so he can eject himself into power. When she tries to use EMMA to spring herself back to her rightful position so nobody can end up like the last mayor, she became so obsessive in the cleanliness of the city that not even a speck of dust can remain on the streets.
  • Akane Hasegawa is a Phantom Thief fan, but when the word comes that they are cooperating with Zenkichi, she ruthlessly attacks and traps them like most other Jail or Palace rulers encountered. It turns out that she's so blinded by her anger of Zenkichi failing to investigate the death of her mother and considering her as a burden, to the point she thinks that anyone who cooperates with the police is out to get her. In reality, she's being brainwashed by EMMA to become Konoe's sentinel and those most probably aren't even her usual behavior or thoughts.
  • Konoe is enforcing justice using incredibly despicable and manipulative ways, namely fabricating cases that can be easily traced to him and supporting the Premiership campaign of a Shido crony via mass brainwashings against his political opponents. The other Monarchs encountered in game also had a very obvious shared behavior where they act exactly like the people who oppressed them before. Yet, for all of this, when he is trying to enforce justice, it wasn't lying. It turns out that his dad hated him so much that he attempted to murder him 20 years ago, only for Konoe to murder him instead and disguise the deed as a burglary. Since this was the only way Konoe managed to survive, he wanted to enforce this Laser-Guided Karma to everyone once Ichinose sold EMMA to him so he can put an end to all injustice.
• There's one regarding Konoe's real relationship with Owada. When EMMA manipulates Akane into capturing the Phantom Thieves for Konoe and Zenkichi barges into the Jail to save the Phantom Thieves, Akane tells Zenkichi that she will catch her mother's killer on her own once she has changed the Phantom Thieves' hearts. Later on, we got to know that Konoe isn't friendly to Owada at all and is merely using him for his political influence in a similar vein as what Akechi tried to do against Shido a year ago. He considers Owada a disgusting vermin that he will dispose of once Akane and EMMA neutralize the Thieves.
• When Akane became a Jail Monarch, unlike the rest she goes completely out of character and more like a copy of Konoe's mindset fused with her own misplaced anger, because EMMA, with Konoe's unwitting sanction, brainwashed her to run Operation Oraculi for them.
• Before Zenkichi awakens, Akane asked him an Armor-Piercing Question about how he couldn't protect the reputation of Owada's secretary, despite she forgives him for failing to investigate her mother's death. This is actually from Konoe, who has a rather twisted perceptive of justice that nobody should be suffering from injustice in general, and his shadow asked a similar question before being fought that the Phantom Thieves couldn't even answer.
  • The same question also indicates that Makoto's advice for Akane back when the Thieves meet her in the real world actually got through her, the rigidness is largely because of Konoe's brainwashing.
• Midway during the Osaka Arc, Konoe attends a talk show where he talks about "an incident where his parents died when he was young" sparking his obsessive crusade for justice. While he's telling the truth, he's failing to mention a few very important details about how his parents died and why it influenced him; Konoe's abusive father killed his mother for the sake of money and threatened to dispose of him when he was a child, Konoe killed him and made it look like a violent burglary.
• A class session in Persona 5 Royal discusses the different values of justice in Eastern and Western cultures, explaining that Western cultures value obeying law and order, while Eastern ones value thinking and acting ethically. The former explains Konoe's motifs as a western superhero and his strict enforcement of his own version of order where no crimes can happen, while the latter turns into the main reason the Phantom Thieves are determined to stop him, since Konoe's methods of enforcing Justice deprive freedom and cause unnecessary suffering.
• Konoe appears to be built up as straight up Obviously Evil before reaching his Jail (the Phantom Thieves also compare him to Shido), but some clues throughout the story point that this wasn't the case. Firstly, the first three Jails were all held by Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds with legitimate Freudian Excuses, which means the Jail system was most likely intended to prevent people from suffering in a rather twisted way instead of causing more suffering. Secondly, despite most cases of Villain with Good Publicity in Persona 5 / Strikers end up as results of brainwashing or signs of other cognition-tampering methods, this was not present in the case of Konoe and his massive fanbase appears to be entirely genuine. After investigating his Jail for the first time and having dinner in the camping van, the Thieves also came to a conclusion that he did genuinely believe that he was doing the right thing, something that was made clear at a first glance of his Jail. All of this outright contradict with the Phantom Thieves' initial assumption of him, and as it turns out, Konoe really thought he was saving the world through granting the Public the ability to systematically Change the Hearts of the masses.
• Even aside from the whole Metaverse thing, EMMA seems to be more than a simple digital assistant; notably, she is able to suggest a course of action to deal with the Phantom Thieves to Konoe, determine Akane as a potential target, and brainwash her, without Konoe knowing exactly what is going on, which is definitely beyond what a normal Siri analogue should do. It turns out that, much like Sophia, she's a learning AI deliberately programmed to become more complex as time went on and eventually become sentient in her own right.
• In the final Palace of Royal, there was an "examination room" where a quiz determines if a person is truly "happy" or not mentally sound and requires treatment according to its owner's ideology. The last question is: "You've gained power to steal people's hearts! Thoughts, emotions, information...you can steal all of it from anyone in the world! Not only that, you can use this power without fear of getting caught! In this scenario, which sounds closest to what you would do?" and the available responses are: "A: Steal something valuable," "B. Never steal anything," "C. Steal my own heart to heal," "D. Steal evil hearts to fix society," and "E. Steal the one I love's heart." The correct answer is "D. Steal evil hearts to fix society." This is actually a preview of what kind of targets you will be facing this game, because they are respectively what Alice, Natsume, Hyodo, Ichinose using Sophia, and Konoe/Ichinose using EMMA were trying to do. According to EMMA or Konoe, none of them save for D. worked because they will "only bring unhappiness".

Miscellaneous

• The Men in Black near the end of Persona 5 are actually police who attempt to capture the Phantom Thieves as a desperate attempt to save their public image, and the Thieves quickly find themselves confronting a police investigator at the very beginning of this game.
• At the Police meeting at the start of the game, the meeting facilitator speaks of three Change of Heart incidents where three councilmen from Sapporo confessed to bribery and resigned, a famous author announcing retirement and the returning of his awards while deeming his books as garbage, and a newscaster announcing love for his co-anchor live. These were all allusions of (or presumably incidents orchestrated by) the first three targets in reversed order: Hyodo, Natsume and Alice.
• When discussing what to do about the mastermind with Zenkichi, he says "they need something a bit more uncanny." You can reply "You want us to torture him?" Zenkichi's response is "Come on, I can do that on my own- Wait, like hell I can! That's Illegal!" The person they suspected is the mastermind was Owada, the same man who ran over Zenkichi's wife, then whose people caused the strife between him and his daughter by threatening her life and halting his pursuit of justice. Knowing all of this, Zenkichi would most likely want to do that.
• The EMMA app's icon is in the same place the Meta-Nav was, and both are used to enter the Metaverse.
• During the investigation in Okinawa, it is possible to talk with a young woman who is going on a journey of self-discovery. She reveals that EMMA suggested her the location, as the woman is almost unable to make any decision without consulting the app first. This is a foreshadowing of EMMA becoming a god at the end of the game: it is common for the adherent of a particular religion to go to self-discovery pilgrimages in places that hold some importance for the religious figures they follow, and which place would be more significant to EMMA than the island where she obtained the power that allowed her eventual ascension to godhood?
  • If you talk to the woman again before leaving Okinawa, she is desperately asking EMMA what she should do with her life. This foreshadows that the addiction to EMMA was running deep among the general public even before the app was temporarily put offline as part of Konoe's plan to blame the Phantom Thieves for the Change of Hearts epidemics.

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