Nightmare Fuel / Persona 5 Strikers

While Lighter and Softer than its prequel due to the absence of Yaldabaoth, this game is still pretty terrifying, with a big majority of Persona 5's horror aspects remaining.

WARNING: All spoilers ahead are unmarked, as per Nightmare Fuel guidelines!

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• Frankly speaking, the EMMA application is a literal public hazard that defines the very pinnacle of From Nobody to Nightmare. It's the very origin of the Monarchs and Jails of this game, and what actually happens is as much of a Tear Jerker as it is Nightmare Fuel. Unlike Persona 5, where corrupt people automatically manifest a realm of their distortions as soon as they go so corrupt to the point of no return, the Jails and Monarchs in this game form as soon as someone feels resentful and sad enough to actually ask EMMA for salvation. Bully the wrong people in your school, and the next thing is if that person asks EMMA to "save them"... good luck, because you made an Eldritch Abomination that'll mesmerize or affect up to millions, and you will most certainly become the very first victim.
  • Many of the Monarch's worshipers are described to be having blank eyes, morbidly spending their cash on the Monarch's merchandise until they go bankrupt, firing or beating up people as soon as they speak against the Monarch or wear something that was perceived to be offending the Monarch; and in Alice or Natsume's case, one of the people you have to investigate is a hapless victim who just stands completely still praising the Monarch in fervor (Something that looks eerily similar to the cognitive patients seen in the outdoor area of Maruki's Palace). The jarringly visibly crazed behavior of Alice and Natsume's fans (even when compared to people entranced into Masayoshi Shido because of Yaldabaoth!!) is a good indicator of EMMA's true nature. And then we hear the true culprit talk about it much later on in the game...and it turns out that it overwrites the victim's desires with the Monarch's desires. In other words, it's basically mass Mind Rape.
  • There's also the realization of how EMMA actually grants desires to the Monarchs. Again, just like with the worshipers, it's Mind Rape. Basically, what it does is in place of having their desires granted by the Monarch, EMMA locks their Shadow in a "Bird Cage". What does this Bird Cage do? It basically keeps them from getting out and moving past their traumas, and encourages them to indulge in a deranged form of Pay Evil unto Evil which can be incredibly ridiculous depending on the Monarch's trauma.
• Shadow Alice at first looks totally fine...until she transforms. When she does, a pair of human-like carrots manifest followed by a tail that resembles those of a Persona 4 Hablerie. And then when you look at her face...she has her left eye and her mouth stitched shut. Her second form is even worse, since she just turns into a vicious beast that does insane amounts of damage by slashing or running over you.
  • Oh, there's a stripper pole in the fight, and the attack she uses with that thing? "Feast your eyes." The game straight-up references Shadow Rise, and anyone who's played 4 knows just why this is outright saucy they do this.
  • The fact that it's implied that her self-esteem had gone below-abyssal levels enough to render her shadow's One-Winged Angel form like this doesn't help either. (It should be noted that Natsume's and Konoe's shadows look fine and they are gigantic narcissists.)
• It's outright stated that when Alice was still running the Shibuya Jail, people were mesmerized enough to continue buying her franchise until they were bankrupt, and if you dared diss Alice? Get ready to lose your job or beaten on the streets.
• While Alice's real person doesn't seem to be that bad, during your first investigation, she can be seen outright stomping on her manager on the hallway, coercing him while making an incredibly unsettling Kubrick Stare only to be stopped by Ann and Joker. She also explicitly said that she made her previous manager close himself in his house because she did the same to him.
• All of the Lock Keeper introductions are terrifying on their own regard. The oppressor's Shadow suddenly approaches, twitches and spasms in an exceedingly rapid pace then bursts into the Lock Keeper; the only saving grace is that the Lock Keepers don't look terrifying at all. Not to say that the Lock Keeper's human forms all have hollow eyes.
• Just like the previous game, there's a secret person monitoring the Jails, confirmed by Futaba when Zenkichi hands her Alice and Natsume's phone. Unlike the previous one, this one pops out right after the line is said because they knew Morgana can talk even if they've previously not encountered the Phantom Thieves in the Metaverse. Again, this is the true culprit - of all things - who has been secretly counting on your downfall since Sendai.
• The justification for the Road Trip Plot counts as major Paranoia Fuel. Zenkichi informs the team that, now that their crusade against the Monarchs is public knowledge, crazed Monarch followers all over the country will be on the lookout for them, and they could be literally anyone, such as the captain of a plane or the engineer of a bullet train, who could crash their vehicles and kill everyone on board if they knew the Thieves were on board. What's more, we see that Akira Konoe has several high-ranking police and politicians mesmerized, and he could just as easily do the same to critical transportation officials assuming he hasn't already; all he'd need to do then is learn which train or plane the Thieves were on and orchestrate an "accident", not unlike the train crash from the original game which got the Minister of Transport fired so that he would no longer be in Shido's way. Making matters worse, there's at least four times throughout the story where the Thieves have to get on boats (going either way between Honshu and Hokkaido, and then again from Kobe to Okinawa and then back to Kyushu), whose captains could have sunk the vessel had their desires been taken by a Monarch.
  • Okinawa's Jail proves this point, where the maddened Okinawans try to kill the Phantom Thieves in their sleep.
• Mariko Hyodo's real-world self looks fine, but her Shadow is outright terrifying. Unlike Alice before her, not even her humanoid form looks like a person. She's morbidly obese, outright ugly, and is constantly eating on her dinner table with pieces of oversized food. Her One-Winged Angel form is even worse, as it just turns her body into a bloated, tentacled blobfish that can swallow your party members whole and you are not getting them back unless you stun her. What also doesn't help is that, just like Alice, there are implications that she felt so resentful and wronged that it caused her Shadow to look so hideous.
  • Shadow Hyodo's in-game portrait. Unlike any other character so far, it's constantly front facing, and it seems like as if she's staring at you. (Yes, you across the screen.)
• The whole of Okinawa is now a feverish group of savages that pray for the return of their god because they were being used as human guinea pigs by Konoe; and their Monarch, the chief researcher of the real world lab, even committed suicide because Konoe simulated a Calling Card on him. Think about that.
  • On that note, the Okinawa jail itself. The jail itself takes the research lab and twists it into an abandoned human experimentation facility, with melted shadows appearing out of nowhere to ambush you by exploding. Throughout the jail you can find journal entries that highlight just how horrifying various people found the experiments, records someone being experimented on for leaking intel, tapes that highlight the Monarch's mental state as he's driven to suicide as well as an optional tape recorder with SOMETHING screaming. Futaba responds the same way the player probably did.
    Futaba: What the crap was that!?
  • Zenkichi finds Shuzo Ubukata's body, the Monarch of the Okinawa Jail, at the base of some cliffs. He casually mentions that he was dead for months, a fact which unsettles the P-Thieves. Even as a PubSec Inspector, his casual banter at finding a corpse is unnerving.
    • You heard that right. The Okinawans are driven into a frenzy, the Jail is still there, Desires are still being taken, when there isn't even a Monarch to give them to.
• Shadow Akane is another very disturbing Shadow in this game. While she doesn't turn into a grotesque form, she's capable of baiting and trapping the Phantom Thieves... all 8 fully combat-capable members all by herself with only Zenkichi and Futaba standing on her way, with Futaba only getting away because she's too weak to run fast. Not to say that unlike Shadow Futaba, she's outright hostile and makes the same psychotic expressions like the other Shadows. Last but not least, don't forget that she's obviously younger than any of the people she trapped.
  • Akane herself is also nothing short of nightmare fuel, and one of the very reasons that the EMMA app is actually an incredibly dangerous public hazard. Her mother got killed by Jyun Owada, one of Shido's cronies, and the incident was conveniently covered up with a patsy. Zenkichi tried to go into it, only to be sent death threats that Akane would die as well if he continued to investigate. Based on how Shido was still an untouchable god during that time, investigating Owada meant the whole police force would automatically be crossing Shido's path, and so the one writing the death threats absolutely meant it. Small wonder why she's so resentful about the Police that she basically prays for the Phantom Thieves to dissect them, and the fact that they are now cooperating with Police alone puts her into a heavy desperation that is enough to ask someone to save her... then the first thing that reached out to her is nothing other than the EMMA app without her consent. Konoe proceeds to turn her into the Monarch of Kyoto because EMMA said so. In fact, the app doesn't even let Konoe know that he's manipulating Zenkichi's daughter! And then it all goes downhill from here, since the Phantom Thieves, Zenkichi, and Akane herself were put into danger without anyone's knowledge.
  • While this is only noticeable via Rewatch Bonus, Shadow Akane also repeats Konoe's "Operation Oracle"... word by word. She claims that she will change the Phantom Thieves' hearts (and later on, kill them), and then she will target "her mother's killer," the same man Konoe was going after, before moving onto all the villains in the world, because she thinks she's the only one who cares. The fact that she passes this off as herself when we know ALL OF IT is Konoe displays how terrifying the extent of EMMA's Mind Rape can actually reach.
• While Konoe isn't that terrifying by himself and is just merely an overzealous and delusional person, his story is another prime nightmare fuel. His father hated him so much that he tried to kill him, and since he's the former CEO of Madicce, he's basically untouchable...until young Akira accidentally killed him instead. Sounds like Konoe is horrid, taking a life and covering it up at childhood and then using a Mind Rape app to establish a One World Order as an adult, but it is very chilling at the same time to know that Akira's only choices were to fight back and put his own father to rest, or die at the hands of the man who betrayed and killed his mother for money. Small wonder that he didn't want anyone to end up like him once he got his hands on EMMA. Think about why he modified EMMA to what it became and kickstarted the events of the game.
• Last but not least, once Konoe takes down EMMA, it fires itself up.... and it turns out that it became a Physical God. It draws people to Tokyo Tower and mesmerizes them so they go to the promised land. Everyone just starts making deranged moanings, similar to the inmates within the Holy Grail shrine.
• This is followed by the true culprit rearing their ugly head. Just who is this culprit? Well, it's none other than Ichinose. All of her friendly mannerisms are fake, she's actually an "emotionless thing" (or so she claims, she's fully human) and she's going to wipe you out, first by commanding Sophia to become berserk.
  • Berserk Sophia is fairly unsettling to see, with blood red eyes, being totally invincible, hits like a truck and complete with incredible speed. She's even able to make Joker bleed heavily under his mask. Thankfully, she snaps out quite quickly, but she runs out of energy and collapses, leaving Ichinose to blast you off a cliff.
  • Unlike a majority of the targets you see who aren't hiding their aggression, Ichinose is eerily calm and seemingly affable while she clearly isn't the latter, much like a radical, female counterpart of Maruki, the last target you fight in Persona 5 Royal. Unlike Maruki, however, she's trying to wipe you out from the get-go.
  • Just like Adachi and Akechi before, Ichinose is human, but she's been described to absolutely not look right in the slightest. Adachi and Akechi are literally nothing compared to this, since at least they bothered with genuinely acting an Affably Evil persona despite being Faux Affably Evil. Ichinose, on the other hand was just faking it and even then, the woman couldn't bring herself to make it look realistic. People around her already saw her as if she were... a freak as soon as they see her, and they describe her as something like a puppet, she doesn't respond to any questions from them and she's just described as outright wrong. She's researching the answer to ultimate happiness, and while she ultimately works for the benefit of humanity, she's in no qualms of creating an AI god to enforce it or disposing of poor Sophia because she simply doesn't have any empathy to begin with while Sophia has.
  • All of these concludes to the realization of who the Greater-Scope Villain who kick-started the entire catastrophe actually is. It's not a malevolent god of control, it's not the Blind Idiot God and the Primordial man, it's not even a thing that originates from the collective unconscious or a Persona user. It's nothing but a torn woman going all out of her way to understand if her abnormal behavior was right to begin with.
• While an awesome moment, Sophia's Persona awakening might be one of the most disturbing yet, even with the lack of blood. In both the English and Japanese versions, her screams are disturbingly realistic, and make her sound like she's in complete agony. Where Megan Taylor Harvey's screams and moans in the English version sounds more raw and guttural, like something is clawing at her from within, Misaki Kuno's yelping and accelerated breathing in the Japanese version sounds more like she's being violated. Regardless of which version, keep in mind that all of those painful and unsettling screams are coming from what is basically a robotic child... Let that sink in.
• At the start of the game, Sophia told the Phantom Thieves to kill Alice's Shadow to induce a mental shutdown - and midway into the game, EMMA was proposing Konoe to manipulate Akane by using her Jail as bait to capture the Phantom Thieves. While this might seem like nothing other than an innocently cruel decision on Sophie's end and an outright one on EMMA's end, both Sophie and EMMA are artificial intelligences who share the same creator. Based on the circumstances surrounding Ichinose about how she shut down her emotions and people just saw her as a "thing" for her mannerisms, it's not surprising that these are just her mindset integrated into her creations.
  • And as the Okinawa Jail proves, even if they had killed Alice, the Jail still would be there, even without a Monarch.
• Now to the final dungeon, a place clearly based on the Garden of Eden. From this point on, the game seems more like a sci-fi terror than a Persona game. When EMMA awakens and begins to save humanity, the first thing you see is a line of people being absorbed to an elevator door into "the promised land". And then you don't even get to find out what happened to these people. They just get sucked into the elevator, and you don't hear about them again.
  • There's an animated scene before this happens in earnest, and it closes up to the mesmerized public. They literally stare at their phone's EMMA app with dead blank eyes, none the less. Even Ichinose can tell that this looks completely and totally wrong.
  • The landscape of this area alone is terrifying, unlike the previous Eden-themed dungeon. It's just Tokyo Tower... but tree roots are infesting all over it and destroying the building, in addition to being infested by Shadows.
  • The last mid-boss you fight before reaching EMMA is Metatron. Yes, that one. Not to say that this is the first time Metatron acts as an enemy in any Persona game, bar the Royal Challenge Quests.
  • And then we get to see EMMA herself... and she's disturbingly calm and affable, unlike Yaldabaoth. She's so eerily calm and speaks in the same flat, monotonous, and softly feminine tone even in incredibly tense situations such as her pre-confrontation. It's even worse when the thing is announcing to exterminate you; she never raises her volume, and just speaks in the same monotonous, soft voice.
  • When EMMA traps Joker in an illusion to "prove" the world's pain, the objective indicator on the HUD changes to simply read "Obey".
  • Her second form also sends out two sets of Sefirot orbs that you must destroy to render her vulnerable. If you look closer at them, numerous human faces can be seen forming them.
  • This is also a true-to-the-bone portrayal of the hypothetical AI takeover, where AIs become so smart that they effectively rule over humanity and becoming its new overlord. And as EMMA proves, the AIs don't even need to be particularly malevolent to do this, which make it even more terrifying to think about.
• Outside of the Jail function, EMMA's purpose is to make decisions for people's daily lives... with chilling accuracy. Tell it something that you are puzzled with, and it will always give you the correct option. An AI like that would most obviously go smart enough to evolve and take over humanity in general, and in this case, its creator might have been deliberately and ignorantly made it to do so.
• The Reaper is back, and he's terrifying this time around. You unlock him as the ultimate boss of this game by clearing all quests, and once you reach him... there's no music, he doesn't even have any dialogue to begin with, and the only voices you actually hear during the introductory scene are some ominous moaning voices - followed by a blank shot from the Reaper. There's nothing else, and the fight just starts after this. In a game filled with talkative enemies of all sorts, he's also one of the very few enemies that do not talk at all, and he's totally mute during the fight.
  • It also doesn't help that when Futaba senses him, she understandably freaks out because she's all too familiar with his power: "This power reading... could it be HIM?!"

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