Persona 5 / Tropes A to B

Main Page | A-B | C-F | G-M | N-R | S-Z

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Persona 5 provides examples of the following tropes:

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• 0% Approval Rating: In-Universe:
  • The Phantom Thieves' approval rating, as evaluated through polls on the Phan-Site, is shown during loading screens and increases with each palace cleared. Following the Medjed incident their popularity skyrockets to the mid 90s, but after being framed for killing the principal and Okumura, their ratings spiral down to 3%. The Phan-Site is even littered with death threats during this period as well as Mishima deleting a ton of hateful comments.
  • When the Phantom Thieves are kicked out of Mementos by the Holy Grail, the merging of the Metaverse and reality causes humanity to believe the Phantom Thieves never existed. The Phan-Site rating crashes to literally 0%, and the Phantom Thieves are erased from the new reality.
• 100% Heroism Rating: By contrast, getting the Phan-Site poll to this number unlocks Satanael, the Protagonist's Rage Against the Heavens ultimate persona, with whom you very stylishly dispatch the final boss. And this comes after months of being public enemy number one in the eyes of the public. Earn Your Happy Ending, indeed.
• 11th-Hour Superpower: Each of the Phantom Thieves have an ultimate Persona that is acquired at the end of their Confidant, but in Royal, they all have an evolved Persona that can be unlocked during the new final arc of the game, and each of them also unlock a unique skill that is usually very powerful, but very heavy on SP cost. This goes doubly so for Akechi and Sumire, as unlike the others, you cannot gain their third tier Personas until the day you give Maruki his calling card and shortly after securing an infiltration route respectively, meaning their abilities are only available for the final boss itself.
  • Joker's ultimate Persona, Satanael, serves as this during the Final Boss fight of the vanilla game. With the help of Mishima and the entire populace of Tokyo choosing to defy authority and believe in the Phantom Thieves, this spurs Joker to break the chains holding down Arsène to reveal his true form. In the final battle he only has one move which headshots the final boss, but like previous games, he can be summoned and used like any other Persona using the maximum amount of fusions in a New Game Plus file.
  • In Royal, Joker's evolved Persona is Raoul, whose unique skill Phantom Show, which has a high chance of inflicting Sleep on all foes. Unlike the other evolved Personas, Raoul is a DLC Persona, and can be purchased and used at any point in the story.
  • Morgana gains Diego and unlocks Miracle Rush, a multi-targetting version of Miracle Punch.
  • Ryuji gains William and unlocks Fighting Spirit, which functions like a party-wide Charge.
  • Ann gains Celestine and unlocks High Energy, which functions like a party-wide Concentrate.
  • Yusuke gains Gorokichi and unlocks Hyakka Ryouran, which functions as a party-wide Heat Riser.
  • Makoto gains Agnes and unlocks Checkmate, which functions as a multi-target Debilitate.
  • Futaba gains Al Azif and unlocks Ultimate Support, which functions as a randomly applying Salvation spell, fully healing the party and curing all standard ailments.
  • Haru gains Lucy and unlocks Life Wall, which functions as a party-wide Tetrakarn and Makarakarn.
  • Akechi gains Hereward and unlocks Rebellion Blade, a single target Almighty spell that causes colossal tier damage and is stronger against enemies that are already downed.
  • Sumire gains Ella and unlocks Masquerade, a physical attack that does Severe tier damage one to two times.

AB - AN

• Absurdly High Level Cap: Despite the level cap of 99 and the (completely overkill) few Personas that require Joker to be all the way to the 90s to fuse, all party members learn their final skills at only level 75 and the Final Boss can be managed by that point, with grinding past that to the actual level cap requiring quite a bit of extra investment. Averted in Royal for the first time in the Persona series — while the party still stops learning skills at 75 (except for Kasumi, who learns a single skill at 80), the extended final act will continue to push up the party's levels and the new final boss will likely be fought in the 90s, with reaching the level cap of 99 fairly easy to achieve in regular gameplay. The second round of the DLC challenge battles against the P3 and P4 heroes are also meant to be fought with a level 99 party.
• Absurdly Powerful Student Council: Averted. The student council itself doesn't seem to have much power, yet Principal Kobayakawa expects its president Makoto to hunt down the ones who caused Kamoshida's confession, and later stop the mafia from preying on students (and even then still urging her to prioritize finding the Phantom Thieves over resolving the students' scam issues until it was too late). These expectations are presented in-story as completely unreasonable, and sure enough, Kobayakawa himself has ulterior motives for doing this.
• Acceptable Breaks from Reality:
  • Money collected from killing enemies or via negotiation with Shadows is still accepted in the real world and never gets Joker arrested for using counterfeit money since, otherwise, money drops in the Metaverse would be useless and money would be much harder to come by.
  • The game prompts the player to use the "Protein" consumables before a workout session at the gym for extra Max HP/SP gain. In real life, this is done after exercising to provide needed amino acids to muscles as they recover, but doing so in the game would confuse the players as the Protein consumables also serve as regular HP recovering items in the Metaverse.
  • In Palaces, the enemies can't be alerted by any of the Phantom Thieves except Joker since he's the Player Character. This means the rest of the Thieves won't increase the security level if they're seen by a security camera, they can't trip laser alarms, Shadows don't react if they're in the Shadow's field of vision, etc. While the rest of the Phantom Thieves are pretty good at sneaking around and avoiding traps, you may catch a few times that the Shadows ought to notice them but don't. It's still acceptable, though; the alternative would be insufferable.
  • You can sign up for multiple part-time jobs and work as little as you want with no penalty, or, in fact, never even show up at all. In real life, you would, of course, be fired.
  • Riding the train in urban Japan can take hours. In the game, though, it merely serves as a cutaway for fast-travel, since the game would be unplayable if traveling from one corner of the city to the next actually spent time.
  • The Framing Device for more than half of the game is Joker telling Sae Niijima How We Got Here over the course of a day (i.e. at most 24 hours), and Sae implied that she had much less time to interrogate Joker than that. However, you can (and probably will) Take Your Time getting to that point in the story.
  • The manga Mementos Mission brings up several scenarios that the Phantom Thieves never have to deal with, to keep the game less frustrating.
    • Homework does not exist in the game; while you can study, it's not mandatory. In MM, Joker has to make room for homework in his busy schedule.
    • The whole team is always available for a Mementos dive, except when Morgana leaves. During one target in MM, half the team is too busy to go (and Yusuke's recovering from malnutrition).
    • Except for some obvious fakes (such as Mishima requesting a famous actor without even a rumor of wrongdoing), all targets posted on the Phansite are guilty. The handwave (in the cases where you don't investigate the request yourself) is that Mishima screens the requests. MM shows that at least some of these accusations are false; Dr. Takemi was accused of poisoning her patients, which Joker knows is slander. The case is closed without entering Mementos at all.
• Accidental Innuendo: Invoked. One Mementos conversation has Yusuke doing this.
  Yusuke: I'm in the zone now; give me more stimulation!
  Ryuji: Dude! Phrasing! I-I know what you mean, but... phrasing!
• Acid Reflux Nightmare: If you spend Christmas Eve at Leblanc, Futaba has an unusual dream about Sojiro turning into something after eating too much turkey.
• Action Bomb: Alice's unique "Die For Me!" Special Attack involves an army of giant Killer Teddy Bears with bombs in their chests rushing the enemy before they explode.
• Actor Allusion:
  • If you linger on Yusuke's turn in a battle, one of his idle lines in the English version is, "How do you want to do this?" This is a Catchphrase of Matthew Mercer, Yusuke’s voice actor, from Critical Role; whenever one of the players depletes the HP of a boss character, Mercer says this to let the player describe how they deal the coup de grâce.
  • When selecting who to tackle the drug smuggling case in Shibuya, Morgana's option says, "Morgana, I choose you." This is in reference to how Morgana's Japanese actress, Ikue Otani, is best known for voicing Pikachu.
• Actually Four Mooks: A single Shadow on the field can transform into 2 to 6 enemies when you engage them in battle.
• Adaptational Badass: Izanagi-no-Okami, full stop. When he was first introduced in Persona 4, he had a terrible moveset and pitiful strength, with Yoshitsune leaving him in the dust. Now, in Royal, with his new exclusive move Myriad Truths, the introduction of Almighty Boost/Amp, and his trait Country Maker (with the ability to passively double his attack power and defense when the Persona compendium reaches 100%), he trounces Yoshitsune in terms of damage output and versatility. A fitting rise for the creator god of Japan.
• Adults Are Useless: One of the big themes of the game is that the Phantom Thieves formed due its members losing faith in adults, most of whom are at worst abusive, greedy and cruel, or at best, just plain apathetic. In the game's setting itself, however, it's downplayed; while there are undoubtedly numerous abusive or cruel adults in the game, there are just as many who are Reasonable Authority Figures that are willing to aid the protagonist and the Phantom Thieves. In fact, 5 has the largest number of Confidants/Social Links who are fully grown adults rather than fellow teenagers or children.
• Advance Notice Crime: The Phantom Thieves of Hearts send their Calling Card to the Palace rulers in the real world before they complete their theft. Justified as sending the calling card allows the Treasure to manifest as a tangible object in the first place, which is how they change hearts.
• Adventure-Friendly World: The Mental World of the Metaverse responds to the hidden desires of evil humans by creating massive dungeons, giving you an excuse for Dungeon Crawling and Boss Battles. Its Clap Your Hands If You Believe properties also makes it so even toy guns and fake melee weapons work like real ones, giving your party a way to obtain weapons to fight the monsters that inhabit the Metaverse, despite the heroes being teenagers in Japan, where real weapons (especially guns) are usually extremely hard to obtain. The monsters in it even drop real money, despite being essentially figments of the imagination.
• Advertised Extra: Kasumi/Sumire Yoshizawa got an especially large amount of focus in advertising for Royal to the point of frequently appearing alongside Joker himself, implying she'll be an important member of the Phantom Thieves. While her storyline does get some focus and development during the Royal-exclusive third semester, she spends most of the game as a plot-irrelevant NPC, and is only directly playable in a handful of battles throughout the story before finally joining the thieves in Maruki's Palace during the True Ending route. If you fail to max out Maruki's confidant in time (locking you into the ending route from the vanilla game), it's possible to go through the entire story without unlocking Kasumi as a playable party member.
• An Aesop:
  • Society can be oppressive and corrupt, but that doesn't mean you have to accept that it has to be this way. You may have to do things that you or other people may not think is completely morally right, but if you do nothing, then you're no better than the villains. Don't just accept injustice, do something about it. After all, if you just hold on, life won't change.
  • The last arc of the game makes the additional point that it doesn't matter if there are a few dedicated reformists taking down an equally few number of corrupt people, lasting change cannot happen as long as the population at large remain Apathetic Citizens too lazy or scared to push for and believe in it. The problem isn't with specific individuals but rather with the system that enables or even encourages said behavior.
  • Building on that, apathy is, in and of itself, very dangerous, and popularity means nothing: many of the villains get away with their crimes because they're popular or otherwise have a good public persona. And they maintain that persona because people are more than willing to accept things at face value. Even the Phantom Thieves suffer from this, when their popularity skyrockets and they start to believe they can do no wrong.
  • And further building on that, the party members' confidants demonstrate that even if you are "free", and are willing to take your life into your own hands, that alone won't make your life better. That responsibility is hard, and people give it up for a reason, but it will still ultimately pay off if you stay strong and work through that adversity.
  • Vigilante justice can be used solve problems when the justice system cannot, but it is still ultimately a problem that it is necessary, and it alone cannot reform society. You need to actually touch the hearts of the populace in some way in order to show them what problems must be corrected because no matter how many corrupt individuals are exposed there will always be more unless something fundamental changes.
  • Seeking approval, validation or love from people who do not care about you is an emotional drain that can lead to ruin. Several Confidants, and the Phantom Thieves as a group, shed the need for such approval and experience great release when doing so.
  • The game is very clear about its message of defying unjust authorities in favor of blindly supporting it for some greater sense of "order", as respect is a thing that needs to be earned instead of forcefully taken or "required" of people. The Thieves all have problems with how their social superiors have tried screwing them over in various ways, which is why all of them have needed to become criminals in order to rectify these wrongs and keeping them from hurting anyone else, with stand out examples being Akechi, who ignores his sense of morality to follow his father simply to be acknowledged and suffers greatly for it, and Caroline and Justine, who need to "betray" Igor when they realize that he's been abusing his powers.
  • Relating to this theme is the emphasis on the importance of Japan's younger generation. Several scenes make it apparent that, rather than looking towards the future, most of Japanese high society is looking to comfort the old at the expense of the young. It's heavily visible through Madarame's plagiarism, Yoshida's goal of looking towards the younger generation, and the response that the team gets at the high-end diner where they spend their first victory party that the old guard is all too reluctant to pass the torch.
  • Okumura's dungeon also has a statement against the traditional standard of Japanese work, I.E. being worked to a point of near death (in Japan, deaths caused by working too hard are so common there's even a word for it). The workers being run into the ground is a reflection of the culture of work in Japanese society and many of their own citizenry considering it very unhealthy to be worked as hard as they are without having any time for themselves or their families.
  • The Palace following Okumura's, Sae Niijima's Casino, pretty bluntly points out that Japan's conviction rate is far too high: Despite supposedly being a fair and open exchange, the 'game' is clearly rigged in the house's favor and there's nothing the 'player' can really do to stop it.
  • Royal's Third Term story adds a big one about accepting pain and moving forward. The main antagonist of the campaign, Takuto Maruki, traps all of Tokyo in a Lotus-Eater Machine where everyone's desires and dreams come true, including having deceased relatives brought back to life and free of all corruption. The Phantom Thieves (with the exception of Joker, Akechi and Kasumi/Sumire) have their memories and cognitions altered to believe this new reality, but in the process, forget all their struggles and the true meaning behind their intimate friendships with one another and Joker, destroying their personal development and unknowingly betray their promises of moving forward with their lives. Living a life free of strife sounds ideal, but those struggles, losses and pains are essential to human growth and development, and through those struggles people mature and gain new connections that are irreplaceable. Running away from problems and future pain won't solve anything, as Maruki's reality stagnates growth to the point that no one can truly live for anything anymore, and removing that struggle removes the true love and intimacy shared between the bonds of friends. This Aesop is also evident with Sumire's cognitive overlay; it allowed her more time to get out of her suicidal depression, but she was still running from herself and still had to accept the situation and move forward once it broke away. It's okay to step away from a problem to feel better in the moment, but avoiding a problem won't truly make you happy; only by moving forward and making your own genuine happiness will you find peace.
  • Compared to the ideal-but-false Stay Ending in Royal, the new Return Ending drops the hard truth that sadly, life and society can never be perfect for anybody, and not everything can stay the same. Even though Maruki's reality allowed everyone's wishes to come true, it was only an empty facade that can never be real otherwise, and Phantom Thieves snapping out of the illusion forces them to confront that there are some things they can never get back. The ordeal they faced also made them realize that they'll all have to go their separate ways eventually, since holding onto their subconscious wishes prevented them from fully accepting their new paths to the future. On the other hand, the Return Ending also emphasizes that while you shouldn't be tied down by past regrets or desires, you should still remember them as a form of motivation. Cherish those happier times and use them to fuel your growth and new dreams in a healthier way. Even if the Phantom Thieves are no longer together every day, they'll never forget their time with one another and will meet again someday, and they use that as their strength to push onward. After being defeated, Maruki finally understands that he needs to let go of his regrets, and start his life anew for himself, the ones who saved him, and even for Rumi. Instead of trying to force change to validate himself, he'd use his newfound hope to make the most of his second chance.
• Affably Evil:
  • The bandit leader in Futaba's palace. A perfectly cordial monster who's disinclined to violence and offers to join forces with you to share the plunder; he's perplexed as to why else you'd be there, if not to raid the tomb.
  • Averted with the villains in real world. They're either unrepentant douchebags, Villains With Good Publicity, or only Faux Affably Evil.
  • Played straight with Takuto Maruki in Royal. Even after being revealed as the creator of the third term's altered reality, they're still a friendly and charming person who genuinely wants to save all of humanity from all suffering, and never once taunts or lashes out at the Phantom Thieves for rejecting their ideology.
• After-Combat Recovery:
  • The "Victory Breath" and "Victory Cry" auto skills restore part or all of a party member's HP and SP after battle.
  • The Persona 4 Arena "Evoker" DLC accessory will automatically restore one bullet to your gun's magazine after battle if equipped, although in Royal your entire ammo supply is replenished completely after each battle, with the Evoker now increasing Gun Accuracy.
• A.I. Breaker:
  • As with previous titles in Shin Megami Tensei, using Makarakarn (or an item that does the same) against the Reaper will have him repeatedly use Concentrate and Megidolaon over and over, since Almighty spells can't be blocked by Makarakarn. This would be Artificial Brilliance if not for the fact that by the time you're strong enough to take on the Reaper, this doesn't do nearly as much damage to your party as it should, doing only about 150 damage on each character per turn (assuming they don't just dodge it). Thus, what should be a death sentence becomes a viable strategy to quickly farm The Reaper's massive EXP, over and over.
  • The S-ranked Mementos mission where you fight Mara has it repeatedly cast Tarukaja to buff its attack power. However, it's also programmed to not act without its attack power being buffed, so repeatedly lowering its attack power back down to normal or lower will make it so Mara never attacks.
• AKA47: None of the guns go by their real names, despite clearly being based on specific models. The fake names include riffs on real names (Franchi SPAS-12 to "Bianchi SBAS", M1911A1 Colt Government to "Governance"), well-known nicknames (Colt SAA as "Peacemaker"), and even generic descriptive terms (Ithaca 37 to "Heavy Shotgun"). These are in-universe examples—the party's guns are all airsoft replicas (the enemy only needs to believe it's being shot at with real ammo).
• Alas, Poor Villain:
  • Okumura's brutal death inspires some pity from the thieves, especially since he was their newest member's father.
  • Goro earns some sympathy from the party during his final battle, and they're even willing to bury the hatchet and join forces with him against his Archnemesis Dad.
  • While lacking any noteworthy redeemable traits to speak of, it's not hard to feel bad for Principal Kobayakawa and the SIU Director after the Big Bad discards them like garbage the second they're more useful to him dead than alive.
• Alertness Blink: Blocky white lines will pop from various characters when they first notice you.
• Alice Allusion: Alice returns yet again, this time as the ultimate Persona of the Death Arcana.
• All for Nothing:
  • Haru joins the Phantom Thieves because she wants to atone for her father's actions and redeem him. This ends up for naught as her father is murdered by The Conspiracy and Haru spends the rest of the game having to cope with the guilt. Doing her Confidant also reveals that Haru's fiance is still trying to go through with the Arranged Marriage, but Haru gets out of that with the help of the company's management.
  • Despite everything the Phantom Thieves are unable to move the public through their heists alone, with Shido's change of heart and confessions failing to stop the corrupt system or wake people up. Ultimately, they're forced to steal the Treasure of the entire population at the core of Mementos to have any effect. Justified, since the Treasure is an evil god blatantly rigging the masses to make it not work.
• All in a Row: Party members not only follow around your player character, but will also Take Cover! behind him and help out when you open treasure chests. Walking or running in a straight line long enough will cause party members to move with you in formation.
• All Myths Are True: Downplayed. Shadows and Persona take the form of mythical figures from every religion and culture on the planet, due to being Anthropomorphic Personifications of the collective human psyche.
• All of the Other Reindeer: What drives the Phantom Thieves together is that they were all treated as outcasts by people. In particular, Joker's arrival in Tokyo started with pretty much everyone wanting nothing to do with him due to his "record". In fact, Ryuji only becomes his first friend after they're both nearly killed in the Metaverse.
• Almighty Janitor: The ultimate Superboss and toughest enemy in the game, the Twins and/or Lavenza in Royal, are prison guards in a run down gulag inside your head. One of whom is an admin with nothing but a clipboard on her. Since they're directly related to Elizabeth, Theodore, and Margaret, this is to be expected, as each of them were the most powerful bosses in their respective games as well. Their comments, should you win, include a hint at this.
• Already Done for You: When the Phantom Thieves begin the investigation period of their fourth target, Futaba by trying to get her out of her room, having looked up them earlier for the MetaNav keywords, she removes the guesswork and they enter the Palace soon after.
• Alternate Reality Game: As part of the Tokyo Game Show 2015 marketing, the Japanese fanbase was tasked with tracking down and scanning QR codes at various places throughout the country, presented as finding information for the police force against the thief team. Scanning these unlocked the party's character bios on the official website for everyone to view.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Discussed In-Universe by Sadayo, who believes Princess Kaguya from The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter was a Femme Fatale who asked for fancy, impossible gifts and led men to their doom For the Evulz before running away to the moon. (Of course, her version completely ignores the fact that the reason Kaguya set impossible tasks before her suitors was so she wouldn't form any more attachments, knowing she would have to leave Earth behind.)
• Always a Bigger Fish: Basically describes the character/fraction relations in the entire game. Shido attempts to control the masses to build something close to Imperial Japan but Akechi, his disloyal assassin only murders as many people as possible for him to catch him off guard only to have Shido himself bearing the intent to assassinate him as well and both of them were to be stopped by the Phantom Thieves before their plans can succeed. Aside that the Thieves, Akechi and the conspiracy are all themselves hapless prey for Yaldabaoth's cognition-altering and wiping powers; Without Lavenza interfering, the Thieves wouldn't even be able to make out to resist Yaldabaoth.
• Always in Class One: Averted. Joker's homeroom is 2-D, where Kawakami teaches. The only other students of relevance in the same class are Ann and Mishima. All other teammates and student characters belong to other classes, if not outright other schools.
• Amalgamated Individual: Inverted. The Phantom Thieves, a group comprised of eight individuals, are believed to be the perpetrators behind a series of murders caused by mental shutdowns and psychotic breakdowns. The true culprit is actually one person, Akechi.
• Amen break: Used in "Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There"
• An Ass-Kicking Christmas: The climax of the original game takes place on Christmas Eve. Still applies in Royal where it then becomes the penultimate dungeon you have to clear to get the full story and a new "true" ending.
• Anachronism Stew: Futaba's Palace mixes an ancient Egyptian pyramid with various computer-themed gimmicks and motifs.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes:
  • Played for Laughs, as you'll discover dirty laundry in some of the game's Inexplicable Treasure Chests, leading your party members to question who would bother putting dirty clothes under lock and key.
  • Played straight in Royal, where New Game Plus allows you to change Akechi's outfit between his Black Mask outfit and his Crow outfit during the Niijima's Palace heist and Maruki's Palace.
• Anger Born of Worry: Ryuji gives the Phantom Thieves quite a scare after his apparent death in Shido's Palace.
• Anime Catholicism: The Christian, likely Catholic, church in the game isn't a bad portrayal but isn't great either. On the surface it looks right but one will notice in place of a crucifix behind the altar there are six vaguely Christian paintings, yet in one scene Yusuke and the player discuss and pose in the crucifixion like there's one present in the building. Also the confessional is arguably placed too openly for its purpose.
• The Anime of the Game: Persona 5: The Day Breakers, a 30 minute animated special released shortly before the game that shows the Phantom Thieves of Hearts performing a caper in Mementos. A full anime, Persona 5: The Animation, was released in 2018.
• Animorphism: In the Cruise Ship dungeon, the party occasionally get turned into mice while you're exploring. Yes, even the cat. Before that, the Miniboss Mot/Coffin-Borne God can cast the spell "Cornered Rat" to inflict the transformation on one party member, disabling them for three turns.
• Antepiece: In Madarame's Palace, there are two sections where you must traverse through paintings to advance. The first one is very straightforward, with just two paintings connected in a linear fashion, which prepares you for the second one which is a more complex navigational puzzle.
• Anti-Escapism Aesop:
  • Keeping with its theme about action against injustice instead of complacency, there are multiple times where the game makes explicit its problem with the notion of living in escapism, as in all three instances, choosing the escapist option, that is turning a blind eye to the problems of society in order to maintain a momentary feeling of joy, leads to a bad ending.
  • At the end of the Mementos Depths, Yaldabaoth in the form of Igor offers Joker a chance for him to go on forever being the Phantom Thieves as long as he stops interferring with his plans to enslave mankind.
  • In Royal during the third semester, Maruki offers Joker and the Phantom Thieves a chance at living in the dream world of cognition. Doing so effectively creates a paradise, where everyone gets their deepest desires, but on the other hand the Phantom Thieves lose their powers forever since they have no desire to rebel, Mementos returns with no one to control it, Igor and the Velvet Room are trapped in Limbo from humanity, and Sumire's personality remains repressed.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Once you reach The Very Definitely Final Dungeon of the vanilla game, you can't go back to the real world. Since the player would have no other way to refill their SP once they run out of items, one of the Velvet Room attendants waiting at the entrance of the dungeon will fully restore the party's HP, SP and ammo (or Joker's Down Shot charges in Royal). Also, before you enter the shrine at the core of the Prison, you're able to freely go back to the entrance of Mementos in order to run to the clinic or airsoft shop to buy items or weapons.
  • If you're having trouble clearing the minigames that allow you to progress on video games, you can read a book that will allow you to input what is essentially a cheat code to make them easier, usually by extending your time limit. Morgana lampshades it by saying that he can understand how you might be frustrated by being unable to beat the game.
  • After winning a random encounter, any other Shadows who were in the immediate area disappear so you don't get spotted through no fault of your own, only reappearing once you've moved quite a ways away from where you fought the battle. This is especially useful in Palaces, where getting caught too many times could result in a Game Over since you're kicked out of the Palace if the security meter reaches 100%.
  • Some Confidants have a time limit that you need to complete them by in order to see certain vents or max them out. These Confidants not only warn you that the time limit is coming in some way, they're usually fairly easy to get through.
    • Haru's Confidant starts really late, only after completing the spaceport Palace. To make up for this, her Confidant is fairly easy to rank up, as a lot of the answers the player chooses will give the most amount of notes. Access to the school is also blocked since Joker needs to remain hidden from the general public, but the one exception is that you can sneak up to the rooftop whenever you want so you can work on her link: There's almost no way you could have managed to complete her confidant by the end of the Casino.
    • Yoshida's Confidant is easy to level up, since every meeting with him is a guaranteed rank-up. That's because he has rather strict availability (usually only Sundays) and a deadline of November 17th in order to focus on his election campaign; he'll send you a text over a week ahead of time to warn you just in case.
    • Maruki's Confidant in Royal must be completed by late November, as that's when his tenure at Shujin ends, and dialogue around school and from Morgana will repeatedly warn as such. His Confidant is also fairly easy to rank up.
  • There's a series of very long cutscenes after the Casino Palace, so it's broken up by two save points, one after the story catches up to the prologue so that you don't have to fight the boss again if you trigger the bad ending. And another one right before the date changes which allows you to save and take a break so you don't have to go through another lengthy Info Dump.
  • If you've unlocked a subway destination, Morgana will note this if you try to read a book that would have unlocked it, and time won't pass. This also counts as having read the book so that a player isn't locked out of the "read every book" trophy.
  • While it's possible to Earn Your Bad Ending by selling out your teammates to Sae when she finishes her interrogation or making a deal with the Big Bad, the game will give you an ominous "are you sure?" warning before going through it.
  • After the Casino Palace, since Joker is faking his death to fool the Conspiracy against the Phantom Thieves, you can't go to school for about a month. However, you can still meet up with any of your Confidants at the Academy, and can still access the rooftop to manage Haru's vegetable harvests.
  • On your second finals, you have three questions that you weren't able to go over because Joker faked his death briefly. The day before during the group study session, you're allowed to ask a question that gives you one of the three answers.
  • If you die during a boss fight, not only do you have the option to restart the fight right away, but you can also reset the time to an in-game week prior just in case you are underleveled or need to get some supplies. In 4, you only had the option to reset to whatever floor you died on, and could only go back an in-game week if you missed the deadline to complete a dungeon, while in 3, you only had the option to reset to a prior save.
  • There's a luck-based ability that every playable Confidant can get to automatically heal negative status ailments on their turn. If this ability is about to trigger but it's not that character's turn yet, the game will stop you from using an item or Persona ability to cure the target, preventing you from wasting resources on something that's about to be fixed for free.
  • Locked chests that require a lockpick to open are marked on the map when you find them. Since there are generally more locked chests in a Palace than you will have lockpicks for (especially for the first palace), this makes finding the chests before finishing the palace much easier.
  • In Palaces, the enemies can't be alerted by any of the Phantom Thieves except Joker since he's the Player Character. This means the rest of the Thieves won't increase the security level if they're seen by a security camera, they can't trip laser alarms, Shadows don't react if they're in the Shadow's field of vision, etc. While the rest of the Phantom Thieves are pretty good at sneaking around and avoiding traps, you may catch a few times that the Shadows ought to notice them but don't. It's still acceptable, though; the alternative would be insufferable.
  • It's common in Palaces to run up against some obstacle that needs something to be done in the real world, with a safe room right nearby to let you quickly leave after finding it. You won't be allowed to go to the safe room until after you investigate the obstacle, so you can't go back and end up having to waste a day returning to the Palace just to trigger an event flag.
  • During challenge battles in Royal, all enemy affinities will be listed when analyzing them, even if the foes in question haven't ever been encountered or fused before this. As the challenge battles are specifically about defeating enemies in certain ways to maximize points earned rather than simply killing them as quickly or efficiently as possible, this is a blessing.
  • Progress in Royal's Thieves Den is autosaved and shared across all save files on a system level, instead of being tied to a specific save file. This means that the player can save scum to unlock all of the rewards. This is especially handy as there are mutually exclusive rewards depending on which ending is taken and depending on whether dateable Confidants were romanced or remained platonic — without save scumming, 100%'ing the Thieves Den takes a minimum of three playthroughs of a game that can easily take over 100 hours to complete.
  • In Royal, during the third semester, upon entering the mysterious palace, you immediately will find a chest to your left with multiple healing items and a charm that lets whoever wears it cast Diarahan. This can be rather useful as Joker will be the only one naturally capable of healing in any capacity, Yoshizawa and Akechi both are raw damage dealers. With the charm, either of them can help pick up the slack.
  • Royal tweaks several elements of the original game to make them more user-friendly:
    • One of the restrictions on doing things at night is changed from the first game. Originally it used to be that if you went into a Palace or Mementos during the day, you weren't allowed to do anything in the night time slot after that until you max out a certain Confidant. Royal relaxed that to "leaving Leblanc", so you can't go out but you can still do whatever you could normally do there at night. Play video games, watch movies, make burglary tools, cook, study... so you're still accomplishing something instead of just wasting time.
    • Ranking up Confidants has been made slightly easier to compensate for the three additional manual Confidants^note two entirely new plus one that was changed from automatic to manual ranking up and other time-consuming content added in Royal — most Confidant scenes now have an extra dialogue choice that adds a chance to gain more rank-up points, Joker can now give gifts to his male friends instead of just the ladies, and playing darts or billiards will give points to all of the Phantom Thieves who show up. Chihaya's Affinity Reading bonus to deepen Joker's bond with any one Confidant is now unlocked at only rank 5 instead of 7, and her new rank 10 bonus will show which responses grant the most rank-up points.
    • Hovering over a unit when in a battle now shows if they have any active buffs or debuffs.
    • Accessories were overhauled to directly grant new skills, and the new skills now show up on the Persona stats menu in a specific accessories slot. Similarly, if a Persona has its resistances changed via skills, those new resistances now appear in the affinity menu at the top of the screen, making it much more cohesive and easier to remember what Persona resists what.
    • Although still difficult, Power Intuition has been made easier if you use the book's cheat option: instead of adding just several seconds to do the difficult inputs, using the cheat puts the timer much higher, clocking in at ninety-nine seconds instead of roughly twelve.
    • The random Mementos conversations are no longer interrupted by opening a door.
    • In the original game, when a Treasure Demon appeared from a breakable object, you had to catch it before it disappeared shortly afterward. Here, whenever one is discovered from such, Joker automatically triggers a battle with it without the player having to react at all. Also, Treasure Demons have a chance to appear during regular battles, giving more chances at successfully finding/gaining one.
    • You can now perform advanced fusions straight from the fusion menu, as long as you've fused each Persona before and have an empty space in your stock for the finished product. You no longer need to have all the required Personas in your current stock; Igor will just charge you the price for summoning the needed Personas instead.
    • Ryuji's insta-kill ability has to now be manually activated by sprinting into foes rather than triggering when ambushing. Whereas in the vanilla game the insta-kill deprived all rewards rather than a free Persona, in Royal it additionally gives some (reduced) money, experience, and items.
    • If you managed to grab all the Will Seeds from the new final palace, then during New Game+ you can create the Ring of Sorrow once you get access to Jose. It grants an attack, usable if you ambush the foe, that does extremely weak Almighty damage to every enemy but also knocks them down, giving you an easy way to trigger Hold Ups and negotiations against foes who are too weak to survive the attacks your endgame Personas are most likely packing. It also comes with Life Aid to refund some of the cost of using it after battle. The Will Seeds themselves (three per palace) are this as well, since they provide SP refills, reducing the likelihood of running out and needing to leave the palace for the day.
    • Additionally, if you were unable to collect all of the Will Seeds in a palace before you defeated its boss, it will appear in Jose's shop, albeit at a very high price.
    • The trophy list have been modified in Royal. Trophies that requires a strict schedule such as maxing all confident in a single playthrough or only obtanaible on a new game plus such as beating the bonus bosses or completing the compedium have been ditched from the list. Instead, partaking in various activities grants you a a trophy, making getting all achievements (or the Platinum trophy for PlayStation players) not only easier, but also doable on your very first playthrough. Royal still have a in game achievements system through the Thieves Den, but as mentionned earlier, it is not tied to a single save file, and most objectives can be cleared with save scumming.
• Anti-Grinding: Joker's Personas gain experience slower than he does, making it easier to fuse new Personas to get new abilities than fighting random Shadows.

AP - AW

• Apathetic Citizens:
  • Discussed. Many of the villains bring up the fact they can do the horrible things they've done because the general public are more interested in being told what to do than doing what's right on their own. The Phantom Thieves also decide to continue their activities after the first dungeon to shake others out of apathy.
  • Made a plot point and zigzagged by the final dungeon. Even after getting Shido to confess everything he's done, the public doesn't listen. The Phantom Thieves ultimately have to steal the Treasure of all of Tokyo to get the people to snap out of it. Even after defeating Yaldabaoth in an epic battle in the Qliphoth World with all of Tokyo cheering them on, the Phantom Thieves return to the real world to find that they can't immediately tell if they succeeded, because people don't really seem to be all that different from before, only for the public now openly speak of Shido's crimes.
• Apologetic Attacker: In Persona 5 Royal, you are given the option to attack a cognitive version of Shiho during Kamoshida's boss fight. Even though they know full well it's not the real Shiho, Ann will wince while Ryuji will apologize when attacking her.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Only four party members can be used in battle at a time, per series standard since Persona 3. For the first time in the series, you can switch out your party members in battle, but you need to begin the Star Confidant in order to do so.
• Arc Symbol: Several:
  • Masks: Personas are referred to ask masks to be worn, providing comfort and/or empowerment when interacting with the world. In Persona 5, Personas are summoned by tearing off one's mask. The Protagonist also collects Personas in the form of masks.
  • Chains, and the breaking of them, are a recurring symbol signifying rebellion against corruption. The Protagonist is always chained in prisoner garb in the Velvet Room, and leveling up Confidants depicts the breaking of chains.
• Arc Villain: The first few months of the game has you finding a series of new corrupt target for the heroes' Heel–Face Brainwashing. And while you begin to learn The Conspiracy has been messing with the Mental World of the Metaverse as well, your targets aren't actual members of the group, and are by design acting on their own personal twisted desires.
• Arc Words:
  • Heinous acts being "unforgivable" comes up a lot. Even a good number of Joker's dialogue options let him say it.
  • "Deal" and "contract" are brought up a lot, the latter during Persona awakenings and the former during Confidant links and important plot points.
  • "Stolen future", and variations of, are frequently mentioned when villains are doing things to screw over the younger generation.
  • The villains who make a public confession after having their heart stolen usually start their announcement with "I have committed acts unbecoming of a [profession]."
  • "Game" comes up a ton. It's usually used by Igor to refer to events going on in the story - even some song lyrics get it on it - and things that are working against the heroes are called a "rigged" or "unjust" game. It's almost always used in villainous contexts, and its true meaning is revealed in the ending: Yaldabaoth's wager against Igor, because the struggle of our heroes and humanity was all just a game to him.
  • Igor and his assistants always find a way to mention "ruin" and "rehabilitation". When Shido mentions "ruin" in a cutscene, you know things are getting serious.
  • The word "justice" gets brought up a ton throughout the game. A central theme of the game is exactly what justice means to different people and whether or not the Phantom Thieves' vigilantism falls under that category.
  • The phrase "I'm counting on you" (or variations thereof, like "counting on someone") is uttered at least once by every member in the team, and a few other major characters.
  • The series-wide "I am thou, thou art I" gets a lot more mileage in this game. Not just the protagonist, but each party member gets their own Persona awakening cutscene, and it's mentioned by narration whenever the protagonist begins and finishes a Confidant. Even Shadows get in on it when you recruit them, as they remember their true selves in the process. This is also repeated by Maruki's Persona, just before they go on to become the Arc Villain.
  • "Reality" for Royal, and specifically the Third Semester Arc, in which the central theme is whether Maruki's Lotus-Eater Machine where everyone has a Happy Ending at the cost at Modern Stasis, or living in harshness of the real world, are considered "the true reality." Also deals with Sumire, who wishes not to deal with the reality of seeing herself as Kasumi's killer and wish to escape it by becoming her thanks to Maruki's actualization.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: At the cleanup event in Royal, Kasumi notes that Kamoshida's rumor mill has accused Joker of (among other things) burglary, murder, and elephant tusk trafficking. Joker can play along by adding that he drives without a license.
• Art Course: Madarame's Palace, as befitting of the Mental World of a famous artist. There's even sections where you have to traverse through various paintings in order to advance.
• Art Evolution:
  • Compared to the previous games, the art direction uses comic book-esque thick lines, bright colors, complex shading, Speech Bubbles and Speed Stripes to accentuate the Phantom Thief motif.
  • The Royal rerelease touches up the character artwork a little bit. It's most noticeable with Makoto's portrait, as she now has more angular eyes. Several characters also get entirely new◊ facial expressions◊; previously, only Akechi had such a difference, with all other such differences being restricted to villains and their Shadows.
  • Royal also touches up some of the textures and models compared to the original game, which was constrained by the PlayStation 3 hardware.
  • The Phantom Thieves's calling card gets this treatment In-Universe. The first one, which was created by Ryuji, is a crude drawing of a top hat with cartoon angry eyes and a comical Slasher Smile with the text directed at Kamoshida in a Cut-and-Paste Note format on the back. The subsequent ones sent out by Yusuke become more elaborate which uses the iconic top hat with a flaming Domino Mask on the front and retains the text format on the back.
• The Artifact: A few changes from the vanilla game create this effect in Royal:
  • "Life Will Change," the Triumphant Reprise of the vanilla game's opening theme "Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There," loses a bit of impact, because Royal replaced "Wake Up" entirely with a new opening in "Colors Flying High." In Royal, the original opening can only be found in the Thieves Den.
  • The piano remix of the vanilla game's credits theme, "Hoshi To Bokura To," still plays in the anime cutscene near the end of the game where Morgana seemingly vanishes. It's entirely possible the player won't ever actually hear the full version of "Hoshi To Bokura To," because Royal has an entirely new credits theme for the new ending.
  • The explanation of how the roulette wheel works in Sae's bossfight in Royal is essentially this as you only actually bet two times, and both times have a guaranteed result (failure the first time, success the second time). In Royal,once Sae switches to her true boss form after losing the second roulette, the roulette wheel changes to a new form that has zero input from the player.
  • Satanael, still Purposefully Overpowered as ever, is still restricted to being fused in New Game Plus, despite Royal adding an entirely new arc that takes place after the original ending wherein Satanael was summoned. No explanation is ever given for why Joker can't use Satanael during this period of the game, though it can be inferred that it was just a one time surge of power created by the public's belief.
  • Royal's new ending still eventually leads to Joker being locked away in juvie, and his Confidants bounding together to save him, just as in the vanilla game. In both endings, Joker is freed in mid-February. While in the original game it, rather realistically, takes months of campaigning to free him, because Royal extends the game's playable calendar to early February, it takes barely over a week.
  • If you visit the DVD rental shop and have a DVD you still haven't finished, Morgana will warn you and you'll be asked if you want to return it anyway. If you choose not to, then the clerk will tell you to make sure to return it by the due date, even though the due date system was eliminated and you can keep DVDs as long as you want.
• Artifact Title: The mini-boss theme's name, "Keeper of Lust", makes sense at first since the first Palace is based on Lust. Not so much later on, as the later Palaces focus on the other Deadly Sins.
• Artificial Stupidity: Sometimes a palace shadow will look around confused but not see you, when you're walking right next to them but not directly in the path of their linear line of sight
• Artistic License – Geography:
  • Apparently in the Persona universe, a terrible storm in Los Angeles will redirect a plane back to Hawaii. Hawaii is a five-hour flight from Los Angeles, and a plane flying from Japan to Los Angeles would not have an additional five hours worth of fuel aboard. Meanwhile there are a significant number of airports in California that not only have runways long enough for a typical wide-body jet used for a NRT-LAX route, they're also well within the extra 2 hours flight time for which aircrafts for international flights carry reserve fuel.
  • The modern Egyptian town in Futaba's Palace has signs that are clearly written using the Devanagari alphabet, which is used for Indian languages, not Arabic. Somewhat justified in that it's just a Mental World, limited to what Futaba knows.
  • The beach trip at the end of summer break ends in Futaba and the rest of the group watching the sunset from Miura Beach, which faces east into the rising sun.
  • In-Universe, Ryuji believes that Los Angeles is "the capital of America" and is thus located in the middle of the country. Los Angeles isn't the capital of the U.S. and is located on the west coast.
• Artistic License – Law: At the end of the interrogation, Sae warns the protagonist that he's facing the death penalty. The protagonist is 17 years old during the events of the game, and Japan is a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child which forbids capital punishment for offenders under the age of 18. Justified to emphasize the sheer wrongness of the law enforcement and people in-general who will follow any order from a superior no matter how illogical it is.
• Artistic License – Religion: Despite employing demonic avatars of the Seven Deadly Sins as a central motif, the story only uses a few of the standard demons associated with a given sin as popularized by Peter Binsfeld: Asmodeus (Lust), Leviathan (Envy) and Mammon (Greed). Meanwhile, Beelzebub (Gluttony) uses the name of the Semitic god he was a demonized form of, Bael. Belphegor (Sloth), Satan (Wrath) and Lucifer (Pride) are completely replaced by Mementos, the Sphinx and Samael. This is likely because Beelzebub, Belphegor, Satan, and Lucifer are all available as Personas.
• Artistic License – Sports: During the first hang out with Akechi in Royal, the two of you go play pool. After the game cuts ahead to the end of their match, Akechi is seen putting the last ball on the table into a pocket, claiming victory afterwards. This is despite the fact that since it was the last ball on the table (and not the 8 ball, which was apparently already put in a pocket), Joker should have already won since all his balls (and the 8 ball) were gone. During a later game with Akechi, he states that Joker wins after he puts the last striped ball into a pocket. However, the 8 ball is clearly still on the table.
• Art Shift:
  • In-game, after winning a battle with an All-Out Attack, the party member who knocked down the last enemy gets a special Victory Pose which ends with their 3D model suddenly turning into a stylized 2D image, giving it more oomph.
  • The massive Info Dump later on in the story of how Joker faked suicide and escaped prison uses cute, stylized versions of several characters to provide visual reference to go along with the explanations.
• Ascended Fridge Horror:
  • In Persona 4, the party members' Shadows came from repressed teenage anxieties and were Obliviously Evil over a desire to be accepted. This game, however, shows what the Shadow of a truly evil person looks like... and it isn't pretty. The Starter Villain's Shadow alone is a sadistic, hedonistic tyrant who takes great pleasure in torturing and killing anyone who wanders into his mental world.
  • In the original game, Akechi mentioned that he was born out of wedlock and his mother committed suicide after being shamed, but doesn't elaborate any further. Considering that Akechi's father is Shido, the same man who ruined Joker's life for stopping him from sexually harassing a woman, it makes you really wonder what did he do to father Akechi that he was willing to terrorize Tokyo with Mental Shutdowns and Psychotic Breakdowns for the sake of bringing him down. Come Royal, and he confides to Joker in a bathouse that his mom would go to the red light district everyday and send him to the bathouse, implying that Shido fathered Akechi through a one-night stand with a call-girl. It actually makes Akechi sound a lot more sympathetic and solidifies Shido as being entirely monstrous.
  • Before sending the calling card to Okumura, Haru asks Morgana why she hasn't saw her cognition in her father's palace yet, and Morgana told her that he could imagine a few reasons why there's none, but they are unpleasant. Cue Royal, and Okumura's cognitive Haru is an android robotic assistant that he is willing to use as a suicide bomber as a last ditch attempt to defeat the Thieves, symbolizing that his ambitions had gone so far that he is willing to pawn off his daughter if it benefits him.
• Ascended Meme:
  • At some point in the game, it's possible to catch "I've been waiting for this!" among the Phan-site comments, referencing Akihiko's infamous All-Out Attack line.
  • Yusuke Kitagawa says this when Morgana turns into the Morgana car in the desert surrounding Futaba's palace.
  • In Royal, Akechi can sometimes be found near cafes serving pancakes, referencing the infamous meme where he overhearing Morgana talking about pancakes exposed him as Black Mask. He'll also mention pancakes during one of his Mementos skits after he rejoins in his Black Mask outfit, still holding a grudge that his mentioning of pancakes foiled him. In his Dynamic PS4 theme, he can be seen sitting on a table while eating pancakes.
  • In the Italian localisation of Royal, one of the Phan-Site user comments that may pop up during loading screens is "ai uant ciu nò", the Italian phonetical spelling of "I want to know". It's a reference to this parody video spoofing the infamous series Adrian, where the protagonist, Adrian aka "La Volpe" ("The Fox"), is recast as a Phantom Thief. "I Want to Know" is the title of a song Adrian sings in the series, as well as his Bond One-Liner in the video's version of the All-Out Attack.
• Asshole Victim:
  • The Phantom thieves specifically target adults who have abused their position and taken advantage of others, as well as teenagers and non-famous adults who have let their desires become twisted. Examples include an S&M relationship gone wrong, a college student animal abuser, and... a serial video game cheater.
  • The Conspiracy has its own members killed when they're no longer useful to them, such as Principal Kobayakawa and the SIU director, but considering the victims were responsible for petty acts that ruin lives for the sake of themselves, it's difficult to feel sorry for these plebs.
• As the Good Book Says...: The title of the boss theme "Rivers in the Desert" is a reference to Isaiah 43:19, tying into the Abrahamic Seven Deadly Sins theme present throughout the game.
• Astroturfing: An In-Universe example. The Phantom Thieves are partially (with the other part being a case of It's Personal after befriending Haru) inspired to steal Okumura's heart by a flood of comments on the Phan-site demanding they do so, along with the fact that Okumura has a Palace in the first place. Of course, this is a setup, as The Conspiracy kills Okumura shortly after the Thieves change his heart in order to frame them for murder. The group then begins to express their doubts about the sincerity of the comments against Okurmura, and Futaba suggests that the Phan-site was hacked to make them appear in such great numbers.
• As You Know: Thanks to the fact that the bad guys' actions occur out of sight of the Thieves, there's a lot of exposition to get through. This results in two characters, Goro and Shido, telling each other about their schemes, objectives and methods, going so far as to tell each other their own shared history, despite the fact that both of them should clearly know this already. However, they aren't telling each other everything...
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever:
  • Asmodeus isn't quite on the scale of some of the others, but he still towers over the Thieves.
  • Bael's second boss form is a giant vault shaped like a Piggy Bank.
  • Sphinx is about the size of the Pyramid itself.
  • Samael's first boss form is a giant golden lion made up of human bodies.
  • The final form of the Greater-Scope Villain is a 20 story tall giant robotic god covered in gold and crystal armor.
  • The protagonist's Ultimate Persona, Satanael, who appears to finish the final boss, is even taller than him.
  • The final boss of the Third Semester is a giant, golden-armored humanoid roughly the same height as the previous final boss.
• At the Crossroads:
  • Metaphorically; the bar in Shinjuku is named Crossroads in the English translation, and it's where you make a deal with Ichiko Ohya, the Devil Confidant.
  • Also played straight with the actual crossroads in Shinjuku, where the Fortune confidant Chihaya Mifune hangs out.
• Aura Vision: The "Third Eye" ability lets you see the danger level of enemies, which receptacles are hiding treasure, and the identities of potential Confidants by displaying various color-coded auras around the person or item in question.
• Author Appeal: The game's opening, which was directed and storyboarded by Sayo Yamamoto, has several moments where the characters do spins and glide around as though they're figure skating; Yamamoto is a huge fan of the sport, as evidenced by one of her best known directorial roles.
• Autobots, Rock Out!: Most of the Boss Battle themes are techno rock tunes with plenty of electric guitar.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Severe-strength elemental skills are present in the game... and they cost 48 SP — 4 times the SP needed to cast a -dyne equivalent. They have mass-hitting versions that are slightly better, only costing 54 SP — a little over double their Ma-dyne equivalent. If not supported by Spell Master which halves their costs, or backed up by Amp and Boost skills to make the most of them, these skills are incredibly draining and not good for protracted fights. Royal makes things a bit easier by adding Traits to your Personas that automatically reduce the SP cost of certain spells- Black Frost, for example, has Frozen Bloodline, which reduces the cost of all Ice spells by half, while most Ultimate level Personas have traits that reduce the SP cost of their dominant element (or in the case of Lucifer below, all magic skills) by a whopping 75%!
  • Lucifer, the ultimate Persona of the Star Confidant, first requires you to max Hifumi's Confidant to unlock. Then, you see that his base level is a whopping 93, requiring extensive grinding or a load of cash (with the Velvet Twins' Confidant maxed) to fuse him. He also requires six Personas to fuse, three of which also have fixed fusion recipes that each involve at least three component Personas, increasing the amount of effort (and money) to make him.^note And one of those ingredients, Metatron, requires two other Confidants maxed out — one for the fusion and another for an ingredient — and also has an ingredient that requires a fusion of three high-level Personas. Your end result is a Persona which can learn really powerful skills, not already counting what's already been inherited from its components... but also one without any innate resistances and a single weakness. The only justification for making Lucifer is either for Compendium completion, or to use him as a fusion ingredient for Satanael. Subverted in Royal, which buffs him considerably by giving him actual resistances: namely, immunities to Physical and Gun attacks, resistances to Fire, Ice, Electric and Wind, and the ability to absorb Curse attacks, and he naturally picks up Repel Bless to cover his Bless weakness.
  • In general many of the very late game Personas can fall here. They usually have great skills, good starting stats, and can also be very sturdy. However, their base stats are often a bit too well-rounded for a player's liking, as stat points allocated to unused stats are wasted points, leaving less room for Min-Maxing. By contrast, weaker Personas can be made much better stat wise by using the sacrifice feature to bump up the Persona's stats to your liking, making more specialized Personas. This is no longer an issue in Royal thanks to the new Fusion Alarm mechanic. First, any Persona created during a Fusion Alarm gets an extra boost to some of its stats. Second, during a Fusion Alarm you can reliably trigger a Gallows Error that gives a boost to stats instead of XP to the target Persona ^note Either by using the Gallows twice during a Fusion Alarm, or by using a Persona that was created during that Fusion Alarm as either the target or the sacrifice. By repeatedly doing this, you can reliably pump any Persona's stats as high as you want them.
  • Reading the book Speed Reading makes it so you read two chapters instead of one in one sitting. Sounds like a great time-saving tool, until you realize that to unlock Speed Reading, you have to read three 3-chapter books before it (totaling 5 full days of reading), which are only available in a shop that gets unlocked either by advancing a Charm-blocked Confidant far enough along, or waiting for another book to become available for purchase half-way through the story. By the time you can reasonably make use of this passive, there won't be many books left to benefit from it. Royal makes it a lot more useful by making it easier to obtain: it's now found in the school library and gets automatically unlocked earlier in the game.
  • The Eternal Lockpick/Perma-pick. The ingredients needed to craft it ensures that you won't be able to get it until quite late in the game unless you really grind, at which point you should be able to craft plenty of normal lockpicks. This gets even worse in Royal, which adds a book and a set of tools that Joker can buy, each one of which giving a substantial boost to the number of infiltration tools he can craft at one time, though Royal also makes the Perma-pick easier to get by increasing the amount of crafting item drops in Mementos, and lets it carry over to a New Game Plus.
  • The skills that your teammates learn upon their second persona awakening in the third semester in Royal. They are largely very powerful abilities, but they also have a very steep cost to them, making them much less useful than they could be.
    • Yusuke's skill "Hyakka Ryouran" is a party-wide Heat Riser (aka, it raises everybody's strength, defense, and accuracy/dodge). However, it costs 90 SP to use (when Yusuke will likely have roughly 260, meaning it costs over 1/3rd of his SP). And to make matters worse, Joker can get an equivalent skill, Thermopylae, that costs only 30 SP. And while normally Thermopylae would fall under Awesome, but Impractical due to it normally being only usable when ambushed, Attis both learns the skill and has a trait that allows it to be used whenever, and the trait can be passed to anything it fuses into. It's even worse if you take Female Orpheus into consideration, as her unique skill Neo Cadenza gives the party-wide Heat Riser effect, heals everyone for half of their health, doesn't require Attis' trait to be useful, and only costs 24 SP. Its only downside is that in the original PS4 release, it's paid DLC.
    • Makoto's Checkmate skill is a full enemy party Debilitate. Debilitate is an amazing debuff ability that drops the target's attack, defense and agility, but it's meant to be used on bosses, which almost always appear solo. So Checkmate is using three times as much SP as Debilitate but has almost no more functional value except that it frees up Joker's turn.
  • The Izanagi-no-Okami DLC. While it is undeniably a juggernaut of a Persona that can pretty much reduce anything in the first couple Palaces into smoldering piles of nothing thanks to the (un)holy combination of Myriad Truths and Victory Cry, and is on par with Satanael in terms of level and stats, there is no Confidant for its Arcana, The World. This means that it's essentially taking up a spot for a more helpful Persona in that regard, nor can it be fused with anything else. Although it can be itemized, hanged, and put into solitary like every other Persona.
  • In-Universe regarding the experimental vegetables being developed by Okumura Foods. Sojiro deems them very unsuitable for commercial use like being sold at a market due to their flavour and unappealing appearance, but comments that they seem somewhat refreshing after eating one, being a facet of their healing abilities.

BA - BL

• Background Music Override:
  • "Tokyo Daylight" or "Tokyo Emergency" normally plays during the overworld during the day, both upbeat tunes, with the former playing during more relaxed times and the latter playing while there's still a major target to take down. Late in the game, the background music changes to the foreboding "Restlessness", matching the tone at that point in the game. In Royal, the background music changes to the serene "So Happy World" in January. On the last playable day of the game, when Joker is saying his goodbyes to everyone, the music changes to the solemn, bittersweet blues tune of "Sunset Bridge".
  • "Beneath the Mask" normally plays during the overworld at night, and if it's raining, a more relaxed version that lacks percussion will play instead. If it's torrential rain however, no background music will play, with the sounds of heavy pouring rain being played instead.
  • "Life Will Change" plays on any day you go to challenge the boss of a dungeon, overriding the regular dungeon, safe room, and battle themes. In fact, it only turns off when you challenge bosses or mini-bosses. For the last few dungeons, it upgrades from instrumentals to the vocal version. In Royal, "I Believe" plays during the last day of the new final dungeon.
• Bad Boss: Several targets are important business owners or politicians who are abusing their power. Perhaps the most notable example is Shido, who is so meticulous in tying up his loose ends that he plots the murder of every single person with any insight into his bloody rise to power, even if they happily helped him get there. His personal assassin, his own son, is the final name on his list. Ironically, he won a competition for who people would most like to have as a boss.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • Kaneshiro’s palace has an initial time limit set by Makoto, even appearing on the U.I. The player will never meet the consequences of this date due to Makoto joining and Kaneshiro giving a new time limit with arguably worse consequences.
  • Another Palace with an initial time limit is the final Palace of Royal, set by its owner, Maruki. Just like the example above, the deadline appears on the U.I. as 7 days, but the player will never meet the consequences of this deadline since there is no way to spend time other than bringing your party members back to their senses, which spends exactly that amount of days available. Furthermore, you were given a new time limit by Maruki again to change his heart due to worse consequences ahead.
  • Futaba having a Palace heavily implies that your party has to face her Shadow like the others. However, due to Futaba actually desiring a change of heart (the obstacles presented by the Palace are noted to be manifestations of Futaba's guardedness), her Shadow is not evil—the boss ends up being Futaba's mistaken, demonic cognition of her dead mother instead. Futaba's Shadow, meanwhile, forces Futaba to face her past and distorted memories and becomes her Persona, much like how Personas are acquired in the previous game.
  • The new character Kasumi Yoshizawa in Royal is not, in fact, Kasumi at all, but instead Sumire Yoshizawa, Kasumi's depressed and Survivor Guilt-ridden sister. In fact, Sumire is only going around calling herself Kasumi because she told Maruki to turn her into Kasumi and it pushed his button of using his cognition-warping powers, so that she wouldn't have to face the fact the real Kasumi died saving Sumire from a jealousy-induced fit that almost got her run over by traffic.
• Balance Buff
  • In Royal, guns were rebalanced. Though they have lower max ammo and are generally weaker than they were in the original release, to compensate, ammo is now a per battle resource rather than a per dungeon resource, encouraging the player to use them much more often than they might have before, particularly on enemies weak to bullets.
  • There are a few skills that only work or work much better if the player is ambushed. However, being ambushed sucks and is pretty much never worth it, so skills like Thermopylae were pretty unpopular in the base game. However, Royal added the trait Vitality of the Tree that makes said skills function even if you aren't actually surrounded, meaning said skills actually do have a use in the late game when Personas with said trait unlock. Most notably, Thermopylae functions as a full party Heat Riser for a slightly steep but definitely worth it 30 SP.
  • On the topic of ambushes, being ambushed now starts everyone Guarded, which severely reduces damage and limits the amount of weakness chaining an enemy can do before you get a chance to strike back.
• Batman Gambit: The period from Okumura's defeat up until the end of the Casino is one big gambit by the Thieves to reveal the true traitor, Akechi, and foil his plot. The plan only works based on their prediction of what the traitor and the Palace Ruler will do in said situation. The latter is, ironically, a particularly big gamble because there is absolutely no guarantee they will cooperate: The Phantom Thieves have only tried once tried to change a person through pure conversation rather than stealing a Treasure, and that's only if you've gotten far enough in the Moon confidant. Even assuming it works, it requires them to accurately predict that Sae will steal critical evidence and put it in the hands of someone she suspects to be a Phantom Thief without the slightest idea as to why she's being asked to do so.
• Battle Couple: If you romance Ann, Makoto, Haru, or Kasumi^note Royal only, Joker and his lover can participate in battles together, and gain all the Level-Up at Intimacy 5 bonuses pursuing a romance nets you. In a bit of Gameplay and Story Integration, the four of them learn "Protect" at the same time their Confidant turns romantic, which is a passive skill where they shield Joker and withstand an otherwise fatal attack in his place. Notably, Kasumi has one of the only Showtime abilities that Joker can participate in.
• Battle Theme Music:
  • "Last Surprise" for regular battles, which has the thieves giving Badass Boasts about how their enemies are already finished.

    Better think about your game
    Are you sure the next move's the right one for you?
    Are you sure you won't get out-maneuvered again and again, my friend?

  • Royal adds "Take Over", which replaces "Last Surprise" if the Phantom Thieves get a jump on any Shadows.
  • "Blooming Villain" for most Palace bosses. While it doesn't have lyrics, it start off dark and pounding, gradually mellowing out into bass before swelling to a triumphant guitar solo, representing the growing confidence of the Phantom Thieves to take down their target.
  • "Life Will Change" for the lead up to the first seven palace boss battles. Instrumental at first, lyrical later, and always badass. The lyrics describe how the villain is powerless to stop the thieves from bringing change to their comfortable microcosms.
  • "Rivers in the Desert" for some of the endgame Boss Battles, which has dueling verses by the heroes and villains about their Well-Intentioned Extremist desires to change the world.
  • Certain costumes will change the music that plays during normal battles. For example, the St. Hermelin High costume will play "A Lone Prayer", the regular battle theme from the PSP version of Persona.
  • The battles against the P3 and P4 protagonists in the Velvet Room always play "Mass Destruction" and "Reach Out to the Truth". Other battles inside the Velvet Room play "Prison Labor", a song that only plays there.
• Beach Episode: Your party goes to the beach with Futaba at the end of August, which involves the members of your party hanging out on the beach in swimsuits, Yusuke buying a pair of lobsters to paint, and other hijinks, including the return of Operation Babe Hunt. Your Class Trip also has you traveling to Hawaii, with a couple days involving the members of your party hanging out on the beach in swimsuits, and an evening spent with an available Confidant of your choosing.^note By default, you're stuck hanging out with Ryuji, Mishima and Yusuke. However, opting to pursue a romantic relationship with Ann or Kawakami opens them up for a date instead. Additionally, if the player has progressed to Rank 5 with Makoto and Hifumi's Confidants, they can be chosen as well, although their dates are more platonic in nature.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: Lampshaded in a Yonkoma from the Dengeki Manga Anthology. Shortly after Shadow Kaneshiro is defeated, he laments that it's difficult for someone like him, labeled as poor, ugly, and stupid, to live an honest life, whereupon Skull remarks that the Phantom Thieves are fighting labels themselves. From Shadow Kaneshiro's point of view, they're better-looking than he could ever hope to be, causing him to take this remark as a mortal offense.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • One lesson in school covers who has the right to print money in Japan and Morgana ends up commenting that he would like to visit a palace that lets you get as much money as you like whenever you want to. The next palace is Kaneshiro's, a mob boss who exploits young teens to make money for himself while putting them in a position to be unable to fight back, letting him get as much money as he wants at any time to the detriment of those living in Shibuya. Additionally, the money in his Palace are all fake money with his bust printed on them.
  • The Phantom Thieves spend much of the game wanting to become well known from their exploits. When it happens after the Medjed incident, they begin becoming rather concerned at HOW popular they've become. Their nervousness ends up being justified as their popularity, and the popularity of their next target on the Phan-Site's polls are due to manipulations by the conspiracy. When said target is murdered after they steal his heart, they are blamed by the public at large and their popularity comes crashing down.
  • Played straight in Royal, where the Phantom Thieves' greatest desires are granted by Takuto Maruki, a Well-Intentioned Extremist who was the byproduct of Yaldabaoth's Plan who uses Mementos to control the public's cognition so he can grant them their deepest wishes. It seems happy, but remember that if you let him do it, not only will the end result be nearly the same as Nyx bringing forth The Fall or Yaldabaoth stagnating humanity in his oppression, Mementos will be revived and become impossible to remove.
• Beneath the Mask: Shadows and Persona reflect the true feelings of their other selves. For the villains, they generally show the characters' true sociopathic, twisted desires. For the heroes meanwhile, they generally expose their Revenge Before Reason, Well-Intentioned Extremist desires to change the society and adults that've wronged them. And, taking the trope to its logical conclusion, Futaba's Shadow is the positive side of her personality that's been repressed beneath the crushing weight of her guilt and depression.
• Beyond Redemption: "I'm not going to forgive you!" and variants thereof are said quite a bit throughout the game.
  • The first target, Suguru Kamoshida, had a variation of this. Kamoshida is meant to be as unlikable as possible, with several characters openly hating his guts. However, when they learn that stealing Kamoshida's heart may kill him if done incorrectly, Ryuji and Ann are hesitant. After Kamoshida makes Ann's best friend Shiho attempt suicide by jump off of the schools roof to escape his abuse, Ryuji and Ann decide they don't care if Kamoshida dies anymore; they just want him gone.
  • Yusuke was long in denial about Madarame exploiting him and his fellow students by stealing the credit for their work, despite having seen some evidence of it. After facing Madarame's Shadow and seeing Madarame's true character, Yusuke summons his Persona for the first time and resolves to change his former mentor by force. Then, after learning that Madarame let Yusuke's mother die when she had a stroke by not calling for help, Yusuke declares that he has no more reason to forgive Madarame.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: In spite of the constant switching between who plays the role of main antagonist, the main game's story happens because of the evil machinations of the Black Mask assassin who is actually Goro Akechi, and Corrupt Politican Masayoshi Shido, with the two of them cooperating. Black Mask is a Dragon with an Agenda who actually intends to betray Shido, downplaying the "Duumvirate" part.
• The Big Bad Shuffle: Each Arc Villain (barring Kamoshida) was being pressured into The Conspiracy by someone in a "Black Mask". Black Mask was in turn working for politician Masayoshi Shido. Then later we learn that the villains and the heroes were being manipulated by the Man Behind the Man, Yaldabaoth, God of Order. Then, in Royal, defeating that villain leads to Takuto Maruki filling in the power vacuum left in its wake and becoming the Final Boss.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • To an extent, Joker and co. can be this to any of his Confidants that require changing a target's heart in Mementos. Kawakami's and Futaba's requests qualify somewhat.
  • In the revised prologue in Royal, just when Joker thinks he's surrounded, along comes a mysterious and classy young girl to lend him a helping hand - who is later revealed to be Violet, or rather newcomer Kasumi Yoshizawa.
  • When Joker and Black Mask are fighting against a berserk Cendrillon, it seems like a Hopeless Boss Battle and that our heroes are about to meet their end. And then out comes Ryuji tanking a Vorpal Blade for the two as the other Phantom Thieves come in full force, ready to back up their leader after having lived out their ideal dreams courtesy of Maruki.
• Bishie Sparkle: When you gain charm points, three small diamond sparkles form next to Joker's eyes.
• Bittersweet Ending:
  • Played straight with the outcome of the second Palace. Madarame's Treasure has been stolen and Yusuke joins the Thieves, but he feels outright dejected after learning from Shadow Madarame that he was responsible for the death of his mother just to get his hands on her last painting which he painted over and ruined for the sake of money. The Treasure itself, a duplicate of the original finished painting, isn't sold and is instead hung up at Café Leblanc.
  • Played for Laughs with the outcome of the third Palace. Kaneshiro's Treasure has been stolen and the mission was a success. When the Phantom Thieves open the golden briefcase, they discover that it's stuffed with 30 million yen^note Roughly $300,000.. Everyone is elated at the prospect of owning 5 million yen^note $50,000. apiece... until Yusuke points out that all the money is actually fake. Ryuji is understandably upset with this, but they can still sell the gold-plated briefcase.
  • The Good Ending. Masayoshi Shido and his allies have been thwarted, Yaldabaoth has been vanquished, and the Protagonist finally gets to clear his name. However, he still has to head back home at the end of the year, leaving behind all the friends he made in Tokyo, and with the Metaverse gone, no longer will the Phantom Thieves be able to change hearts to stop corruption since a Palace can still be erected. Morgana manages to survive the collapse of Mementos, but as a cat, not a human. The situation in government is left unaddressed - it's unclear what exactly is going on with Japan's current prime minister. Finally, it's ultimately left ambiguous just how much the destruction of Mementos affected the public consciousness - while the ordinary citizens' apologism for Shido seems to have gone away, they still express frustration and apathy at the state of society, and the authorities appear just as corrupt as ever and are eager to send Joker to jail to save their own reputations. To drive the point home, the last poll on the Phansite, still asking if the Phantom Thieves really exist, comes back at an even 50%.
  • The Golden Ending in Royal is also bittersweet. After Maruki's battle, in March, all of the Phantom Thieves decide to think more about their future and go their separate ways — the most shocking are Ryuji, who decides to move to a different town to receive treatment for his knee; and Ann, who decides to study abroad. The final part plays out the same as the Good Ending in the original game, only with some minor changes — except this time Maruki, who is now reformed, drives Joker to the train station while the other Phantom Thieves distract the police, leaving their goodbyes a bit brief.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Discussed. The protagonists' Heel–Face Brainwashing methods would come off as crossing a line if it weren't for the fact their targets are various kinds of serial abusers of power who would otherwise never pay for their crimes. The lone exception is Futaba, who actually wants the Phantom Thieves to do it to her. The Phantom Thieves are in fact completely aware of the implications of their methods, and refuse to use it at all during their first mission until a student tried to commit suicide because of being abused by their first target. Even later, the Thieves openly discuss if what they're doing is the right thing.
• Black Comedy Animal Cruelty: In one scene on 5/16, the Phantom Thieves claim that Morgana is a toy animal that meows when you press on its head. To demonstrate, two of your options are “I should press gently” and "I'll press forcefully". The third? “Time to button mash”.
• Black Helicopter: In the prologue, you can see some Black Hawks fly near the casino.
• Blackout Basement: In Royal, some areas of Mementos can randomly be pitch-black. The maze walls in these are invisible on the mini-map and R1 map.
• Blaming the Victim:
  • Futaba's mother was killed by Akechi via mental shutdown and Futaba was blamed for her death after Shido forged a suicide note. This resulted in Futaba being treated terribly by her guardians and developing intense agoraphobia along with auditory hallucinations. Things get better after she joins the Phantom Thieves, however.
  • Kamoshida humiliates Ryuji by telling everyone about his home life in a bid to make his volleyball team the only frontline sports team in the school. This causes Ryuji to attack him, and Kamoshida retaliates by breaking Ryuji's leg in 'self defense', then disbands the track team, causing his teammates to view him as a traitor.
  • Akechi is the bastard son of Shido and a prostitute. Eventually, his mother couldn't bear the shame of having a child out of wedlock anymore and killed herself, leaving Akechi in foster care where he was alienated for his heritage. He refers to himself as a cursed child and cites himself as the reason his mother died, though he also has a massive grudge against Shido.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • The party can be seen eating a bag of Calbee Potato Chips and drinking bottles of Coca-Cola and Sprite at some points, only with the nondescript labels "Potato", "Nice Cola" and "Lemon" printed on them. Similarly, an ad can be seen for a tablet computer called the "Next P.A.D." that bears a striking resemblance to the Apple iPad. Coca-Cola, Boss, and Kirin vending machines become Cracker Energy, Oyabun (Japanese for "boss"), and Kitten. The retro game console that can be purchased is called the "Famidrive", a mash of the Famicom and Mega Drive. The only legitimate Product Placement in the game is for Calbee's Jagariko snacks.
  • The buffet where the Phantom Thieves celebrate their first victory over Kamoshida is at the Wilton Hotel, as opposed to the real-life Hilton Hotel.
  • This also extends to stores themselves, with popular Japanese convenience store chain "Don Quixote" being renamed "Rocinante" after Quixote's horse, or The Body Shop being renamed "The Body Chop." And the convenience store chain 7-11 has been rebranded to Triple-Seven (spelled 777).
  • Most of the neighborhoods, all being real places spread throughout the Greater Tokyo Area, share their name with their real-life counterparts. The sole exception is the very neighborhood that Joker lives in, Yongen-jaya; its real-life counterpart is named Sangen-jaya (the latter in Japanese uses the kanji for the number three (三) in its name; the game's version of the neighborhood uses four (四) instead). There's also Destinyland in place of Disneyland, although the park has popped up in other Shin Megami Tensei installments and is located in its proper neighborhood, Maihama.
  • Played with regarding the Sky Tree Tower; while it's meant to be a stand-in for Tokyo Tower, there is a real building in Tokyo's Sumida ward called the Tokyo Skytree, whose construction was completed in 2011. The creators of the game also obtained Tokyo Tower's permission to use its name in the game, but they ultimately didn't. However, they were able to use the proper "Skytree" name for the anime adaptation in Episode 17.
  • Many of the series staple vending machine drinks return, with names like "Mad Bull," "Nastea," "Dr. Salt," "Starvicks," and "Manta" (standing in for Red Bull, Nestea, Dr. Pepper, Starbucks, and Fanta).
  • The movies and DVDs you can watch to increase social stats are Bland Name versions of actual movies and TV shows, such as "Guy Mcver" or "Love, Possibly". There is however, one exception, and that is "Like A Dragon".
  • Averted in Royal, where the darts game in Kikochi is clearly branded "Dartslive" (which is also owned by Sega) and in the anime with the thieves' phones, which are all labeled "Sony".
• Blank White Eyes:
  • Humans whose Shadows are destroyed end up with pupil-less white eyes and dark blood bleeding out of their mouths. This includes the subway conductor who crashes a train near the beginning of the game, Principal Kobayakawa around the time of the Hawaii trip, and Haru's dad after the Phantom Thieves steal his Treasure.
  • Played for Laughs with Morgana sometimes when something suitably unbelievable and comedic happens.
• Blessed with Suck: The player themselves on Merciless difficulty. 2.5 times damage when you strike weaknesses and get critical hits sounds good, right? Have fun downing Shadows so you can negotiate with them instead of accidentally killing them outright. You do eventually find a workaround through the Tower Confidant, but that doesn't come until September at the earliest, about halfway through the game.
• Bloodier and Gorier: Unquestionably the most violent game in the series. Coincidentally or not, the primary color motif is a vivid blood red.
  • Joker is beaten by police at the beginning of the story and spends the rest of the interrogation sequences with numerous bruises, including his wrists being rubbed raw from handcuffs.
  • Characters bleed from their faces when summoning Personas, showcased at its best during their first awakening. Special mention goes to the horrific flood of red that erupts from Joker's face when first calling Arsène, and Yusuke, who grips the floor so hard his fingers bleed.
  • While censored via silhouette, the All-Out Attacks are brutal, concluding with the victim erupting into a shower of blood.
  • The Cognitive Joker is killed via gunshot to the head, causing blood to pour out of the wound before their head collapses with a sickening thud, spraying more blood.
  • In Royal, the cutscene depicting Kasumi's death has her laying on the ground with blood over the floor on a rainy road after she rescued Sumire from almost being run over by a car.

BO - BY

• Body Horror:
  • Human-shaped Shadows bloodily erupt into demons when you start a battle with them. In a number of Palaces, human-shaped Shadows will also transform into Humanoid Abominations.
  • A person's first transformation into a Phantom Thief involves manifesting the mask they show to the world, and then ripping it off, taking all the attached skin with it. Fortunately, the resulting wound appears to heal instantly.
• Body Motifs: The Heart. For all intents and purposes, the Phantom Thieves and Mementos make Mind Control possible, but it is always referred to as "stealing hearts." As the heroes venture deeper into Mementos, its imagery steadily transitions from subway tunnels to pulsating blood vessels. Finally, the True Final Boss is the Holy Grail, symbolized in playing cards as a Heart, as pointed out by Kawakami.
• Bonus Feature Failure: Certain DLC give the player new Personas to summon. However, their existence is taken into account during Fusion, making certain other Personas harder to acquire; for example, if you have Messiah Picaro, Satan can be fused only by using it (or Maria in Royal). However, this involves fusing Messiah Picaro with Treasure Demons, which are particularly finicky about the Persona levels, meaning getting Satan (and by consequence, Lucifer) is made incredibly annoying just because the player owns DLC.
• Book Ends:
  • "Wake Up, Get Up, Get Out There" plays at both the intro and post-credits sequences of Persona 5.
    • Likewise in Royal, "Colors Flying High" plays at both the intro and post-credits sequences.
  • Early on in the game, Sojiro drives the main character home from meeting with the school, complaining about having to be saddled with the burden of looking after him. Near the end of the game, Sojiro picks up the protagonist after his release from juvenile hall and goes home with him on friendlier terms. He even lampshades how this moment reminds him of the first time they met.
  • The first and last forum question on the Phan-Site is "Do you believe in the Phantom Thieves?" The context has changed though, with the first question meaning "Do you think they exist?" and the last being "Do you support them in what they do?"
  • On both Joker's first few and last few days in town, the rumor dialogue that can be overheard consists of citizens expressing frustration, annoyance, and apathy towards the state of modern society.
  • The first and last bosses both have a chalice of sorts that is a part of how they regain health, and their connection between them and the people they hope to abuse as an energy source that needs to be severed in order to beat them. Kamoshida's is the cup based trophy he eats his female victims out of when using "Libido Boost", while Yaldabaoth's "Holy Grail" form is where he can get healed by the parts of humanity who want the "order" he'd give them by making them his slaves. This is fitting, as in Tarot, the Suit of Cups is not only based on the Holy Grail but over time it became the hearts suit of modern playing card decks; on top of both cups acting as a "heart," you need to take from them in the fight to finish it, so the "Phantom Thieves of Hearts" begin and end doing just that on more than just one level. While the final boss of Royal doesn't use a Chalice to heal himself, much like Kamoshida or the Holy Grail, he does have another way to do it consistently unlike Kamoshida or the Grail.
  • A blue butterfly is seen near the beginning and ending of the Protagonist's journey.
  • The first and last major story targets have their names marked with a '?' at certain points. Specifically, Kamoshida's when you first meet his Shadow, the false Igor's after Lavenza has exposed him as such in Vanilla, and Maruki in Royal, whose involvement is veiled in mystery until Joker, Kasumi, and Akechi personally meet him face-to-face.
  • The first and last targets in Vanilla are revealed when they threaten to execute Joker.
  • The first and last bosses in Royal are, or at least used to be, faculty of Shujin. Similarly, Joker is offered a lift by the first and last bosses, though Joker only accepted the lift from Maruki.
  • The first calling card sent out by the Phantom Thieves causes a stir throughout the whole of Shujin Academy because Ryuji pasted several copies of it all over the school's bulletin boards just to make sure Kamoshida knew about it. The final calling card in Vanilla causes a stir throughout the whole of Japan because Futaba pasted it all over the country's airwaves just to make sure Shido knows they're coming for him and to tell him that his assassination attempt on Joker failed.
  • In Royal, the first and last Targets attempt suicide after they're defeated.
• Boom, Headshot!: In the Bad Ending, Joker gets shot in the head. In the Good Ending, Joker shoots the false god behind this whole mess in the head.
  • The True Final Boss of Royal is dispatched in the same way. Joker zips up to Adam Kadmon's head and shoots him point-blank in the face, narrowly avoiding Maruki's own head but destroying his mask.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Some of the bosses encountered will willingly waste turns reacting to stat buffs and debuffs. This means that having someone constantly ready to reapply buffs or vice versa may allow the player to bring on the damage with (near) impunity.
  • Life Stones restore 30% of the target's max HP, which means its healing strength will always be relevant regardless of level. If the player's been asking for items from Shadows on a regular basis, there's a good chance that they've got plenty of them in stock by the middle of the game, so Life Stones become great for topping off stray chunks of lost HP in between fights without expending SP.
  • An easy way to restore SP without leaving the Palace is to purchase an "SP Adhesive" accessory from Dr. Takemi. Then you just find a weak enemy and block every turn until you have all of your SP back, and then use a small amount of the SP to heal whatever HP the weak enemy took from you. However this could take awhile.
  • The best way to get money is to find a boss that's not immune to the "Confusion" ailment, make a Persona with a high Luck stat, and spam the ability "Pulinpa". Every turn the enemy is confused they have a chance to drop money. You can do this to get to ‎¥9,999,999 but it will take a very long time. You'll also need Invigorate 3 or SP Adhesive 3 so you regenerate enough SP to keep spamming Pulinpa.
  • Mishima's Confidant abilities. Gaining bonus XP is not nearly as exciting a power as many of the other Confidant's bonuses, but once you max it out your backup characters will be earning just as much XP as the ones you're using in the party, and not needing to swap people out in order to prevent them from falling behind in levels is huge when it comes to customizing your playstyle.
  • Hifumi's Confidant abilities provide numerous minor but very helpful abilities for battle. These abilities include conveniences such as the ability to swap out party members mid-battle, being able to escape from ambushes (and later all battles) instantly, or earning more money from winning ambushes in your first turn.
  • By hunting down the rare Crystal Skull treasure demon in Mementos near the end of the game, the player can capture them and itemize them into an accessory. Said accessory's effects? Increased evasion against magic and +5 to all stats, not a game-changer but effectively makes whoever uses slightly better at everything they do.
• Borrowed Catchphrase: Ryuji calls Yusuke Inari in the prologue, which is Futaba's line.
• Boss-Altering Consequence:
  • You can give orders to party members to perform special actions unique to each boss battle. During Kamoshida's battle, you can send someone to steal his crown, significantly weakening him. During Kaneshiro's battle, you can order a party member to throw a rare item to distract him. Most of these are optional, but certain bosses require them to be beaten.
  • In the Royal version of the battle, the cognitive version of Wakaba Ishiki will make disparaging remarks towards Futaba, giving the player two dialogue choices. If you agree with the fake Wakaba, and you would be a major jerk for doing so, then Futaba will be too discouraged to act, delaying the speed at which she summons ballistas, and the fake Wakaba will unleash a powerful attack on the party, but if you're protective of Futaba, then she will repel the attack back at the fake Wakaba.
  • If you visit Mementos during Flu Season, there's a chance that the Reaper, normally a powerful Superboss, will be inflicted with Despair, a status effect that will cause it to die in three turns if you encounter it. This only works in the vanilla version, though, as the Reaper will be immune to Despair in the Royal version.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • Similar to Persona 3 in Tartarus, you can end up in a random encounter with the insanely powerful Reaper any time you sit around a floor in Mementos for more than 5 minutes.
  • In Royal, red Shadows are upgraded to this status, which your teammates will even warn you about in the field. Each palace has one, they pack significantly more health and higher stats than surrounding shadows (even those higher in level), and they refuse to be negotiated with unless their health is low. Special mention goes to the red shadows in Maruki's Palace, which burst out into Fafnir, an extremely powerful Shadow with very high stats, no weaknesses, repels physical and gun and extremely powerful attacks such as Gigantomachia or Atomic Flare. If you've been neglecting to improve your Technical damage ability by playing billiards, you're in trouble.
  • In Royal, after you finish the final section of Mementos in the third semester, special level 99 shadow encounters will start to spawn throughout Mementos, comprised of demons that you've already likely fought in specific combinations (Cerberus and Orthrus, the Jack brothers, etc.) As they are max level, they will never flee from you while roaming, they cannot be persuaded to join your party, and they don't have a red glow like normal "strong" shadows do, so if you are just mowing down weak shadows for money and experience, you gotta be careful around these ones as they'll initally seem just like the rest.
• Bottomless Bladder: As in previous games, there are bathrooms in the game, but you never need to use them - in fact, there's even a toilet in Joker's cell in the Velvet Room, and he can sit on it, but it's used for pondering instead of its intended purpose...
• Bottomless Magazines:
  • Averted in the original. All guns hold a finite amount of ammunition in their magazines, which in gameplay terms translates to the maximum amount of shots that can be fired by the wielder in a single turn, with reloads automatically happening when their turn comes up again. Each party member also carries a very limited amount of ammo on their person, no more than two to four mags' worth, and cannot be replenished during a Palace/Mementos run aside from using craft-able ammo boxes.
  • Played straight with the Bullet Hail confidant ability, which gives a chance to trigger a gun based All-Out-Attack at the beginning of battles. It doesn't consume your ammo pool and is limited only by time.
  • Played straight with any persona which wields a gun, who can shoot with impunity.
  • Played straight again in Royal, where ammunition is restored at the start of every encounter. Morgna explains this is part of the Your Mind Makes It Real effect of the Metaverse. As the guns are all toy models made real due to enemy shadows assuming they're real, those same beliefs now fill it with ammo at the start of battle as they'll assume the gun is fully loaded. However, as a balancing measure, no spare ammunition is carried. However many rounds of ammunition that a character's firearm holds is the ammo they'll have for any given fight.
• Bowdlerize:
  • Unlike previous Megami Tensei games, Yaksini no longer has any artwork depicting her as topless with a visible nipple, leaving only her Godiva Hair-censoring 3D model.
  • In the Chinese and Korean versions of the game, references to the original and controversial Rising Sun flag are removed. This includes removing it from Ryuji's shoes, and changing the icon for the Almighty element due to the original resembling the flag. The Raidou Kuzunoha costume DLC is also absent from these versions, similar to Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne HD Remaster. These changes would later be present in all versions of the 2022 Multi-Platform release.
• Bragging Rights Reward:
  • As per series tradition, the Omnipotent Orb, an accessory which blocks all damage other than almighty.^note In Royal, it was nerfed to block only magical attacks and their associated status effects. However, you have to have already finished the story once and won the toughest fight in the game against Justine and Caroline to even get it.
  • Also as per series tradition, the protagonist's ultimate Persona, Satanael, can actually be fused - if you've reached New Game Plus and can manage a Level 95 fusion. If you're at that point, most of the game's difficulty is already moot unless you're fighting the aforementioned Superboss, which it ironically seems tailor-made for. Think of it as fusing Orpheus Telos to fight Elizabeth with.
  • The Eternal Lockpick/Perma-pick is Exactly What It Says on the Tin; a lockpick that won't break after use. By the time you can craft it however, it's trivially easy to have at least a dozen spare lockpicks on hand. Making one isn't really necessary beyond getting the trophy for crafting all infiltration tools. This is alleviated in Royal, as once you make it, it carries over to a New Game Plus. However, Royal also lets Joker buy a book and a tool set that both give massive boosts to the number of infiltration tools he can make at once, so this still isn't a huge asset.
  • Valentine's Day Chocolate restores all SP to 1 ally, but to get it you have to defeat the Final Boss. Even on New Game Plus there's never a real reason to use it, considering you most likely have better management of your time or SP restoring equipment from the last playthrough to use. At best, these items then are really only useful as a means to track the romantic relationships you've taken over the course of repeated playthroughs until you have one chocolate from every possible option, provided you didn't use them. And then Royal muddles this some, as every single girl who you've platonically finished the Confidant of will ALSO give you chocolate (though with a slightly different name), meaning your inventory will quickly be filled with various chocolates.
  • The Business Card, given to you by Sae, should you talk to her during the epilogue is this, given that the Confidant is mandatory and it provides no bonuses whatsoever on NG+ unlike all other Confidant items of its kind. Since the player is near-guaranteed to get it at the end of the game and it carries over to NG+, it at least can be used to mark how many playthroughs of the game the player has gone through.
  • Royal introduces the Invisible Veil (which prevents shadows from detecting you) and Letter of Royalty (which allows you to summon any registered Persona for free). However, to get these items, you need to collect every single award in the Thieves Den (which includes registering every Persona in the compendium and defeating all the Superbosses), meaning there's essentially nothing to use them on by the time you finally collect them.
• Brainwashing for the Greater Good: The philosophy behind the Phantom Thieves' actions is that if a person is corrupt enough to be making the world around them significantly worse, then rewriting their morals through the "stealing" of their Hearts and forcing them to see their deeds the way others see them is a justified action.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • This is the first game in the series ever since the Persona 3 soft reboot to have singular characters represent the Fool and Judgement Arcana instead of the player party in general.
  • In the prior 2 games, the first male friend that the protagonist meets after the start of the game represents the Magician arcana. In this game, he belongs to the Chariot arcana instead.
  • This is the first game in the series to have a playable character represent the Hermit Arcana.
  • This is also the first Persona game not to be set in a fictional location, taking instead place in Tokyo like the main Shin Megami Tensei series.
  • This is the first time in the series where somewhere outside of Japan is visited. Specifically, the Phantom Thieves briefly go to Honolulu, Hawaii for their school trip. Yusuke was also meant to visit Los Angeles, but ended up in Hawaii as well.
  • It's also the first time in the series that the protagonist and their party don't fight in school uniforms. Every Persona game up to that point had some degree of justification why the protagonists are fighting gods and demons in their school uniforms.
  • In 3 and 4, the Dark Hour and the aptly-named Midnight Channel occur at midnight. In this game, nothing significant happens at midnight.
  • In 3 and the English dub of 4, the actor who voices the protagonist also voices another major character who initially seems to be a friend but is ultimately a major antagonist. Joker does not share his VA with anyone else in the game.
  • Persona 5 marks the first time the cast of the English dub are credited alongside their Japanese counterparts.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Atlus published an ad in an actual Japanese newspaper, appearing as a Cut-and-Paste Note, that proclaimed "The Phantom" (Joker) would appear at the February 2015 event that revealed new Persona 5 footage. Sure enough, he ended up appearing as his Calling Card announced, "shot out" the lights, and proceeded to reveal the very first gameplay trailer for Persona 5.
  • The game also does this fairly directly in its interface. The pause menu shows Joker shielding himself from your gaze, as if he is a real person and you are a fake staring at him.
  • Loading screens also semi-frequently show the tagline "Take Your Time". This isn't "take your time" in the sense of "be thorough and cautious" - it's "Take Your Time" in the same way that the Phantom Thieves "Take Your Heart" i.e. the game is acknowledging that it's stealing your time by making you look at a loading screen.
• Break Up Demand: While helping out Chihaya, the protagonist meets a man who's being pressured to break off his engagement to the woman he loves because his boss wants him to marry the boss's daughter. It's not clear whether an actual ultimatum was issued, but it's clear that his career is in danger if he marries the woman he loves although Joker inspires him to follow his heart anyway.
• Breather Episode:
  • Downplayed with the Kaneshiro arc. While there are high stakes involved and critical story events do happen like the Thieves catching wind of the mental shutdowns being connected to the Metaverse, the fight against Kaneshiro's Shadow has him turning into a fly man (that's just him in his regular form with fly eyes and wings) throwing out slangs comically and piloting a cartoonishly designed Humongous Mecha shaped like a piggy bank named Piggytron.
  • The Hawaii school trip plays this straight, since any story-critical events related to it happen offscreen. You can even partake in another Operation: Babe-Hunt.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • The game's paid Downloadable Content include accessories that boost your EXP or cash after battles, and overpowered Personas with end game stats and elemental protections that you can summon once for free, even in the very first dungeon. Royal makes this DLC available for free, but adds more paid DLC with more overpowered Personas.
  • This is done in-universe in Royal with Kaneshiro's Palace. There's a few golden doors that Kaneshiro makes his men pay to open if they want to pass through, with the Phantom Thieves noting what a Bad Boss this makes him. You can also have Joker play twenty thousand yen to open each of these doors to skip an enemy gauntlet if you want to.
  • Also in universe, once you unlock the Affinity Reading from the fortune teller you can simply pay her 5000 yen to boost your affinity with a confidant so that your next interaction with them will rank up their confidant rating instead of spending time hanging out with them.
• Brick Joke:
  • In Madarame's Palace, once the group reaches the Treasure spot, Ryuji thinks the treasure is a self-portrait of Madarame. Later, when the group takes the treasure outside the palace, they find it really is a self-portrait, except it's not the treasure, because Madarame switched it with the real treasure.
  • Morgana has the ability to shapeshift himself into a black Citroën H Van for the Phantom Thieves to travel around in the Metaverse. Come the Good Ending when the Protagonist meets the other Phantom Thieves as he's about to leave Tokyo, not only have they somehow managed to find a Citroën H Van (a car that as of the game's release date had been out of production for over 30 years) for them to use to drive Joker back to his hometown, Morgana is the one who ended up fixing the van when it broke down. Morgana lampshades the situation.
    Morgana: (while holding a sparkplug on his mouth, a wrench on his right hand, and a screwdriver wrapped on his tail) Why the heck am I in charge of the car again?
  • One that is completely optional. Talking to Ryuji about the library early in the game has him angry that the student council doesn't allow manga in the library. In Futaba's confidant with Makoto, the latter says the library now has manga thanks to some vocal students.
  • At the end of the final (in Vanilla) Palace, Makoto and Ryuji fit in at a restaurant by Makoto ordering Sautéd Foie Gras and lamb. After beating the Palace ruler the Thieves ask where they want to eat. Futaba says she wants Sautéd Foie Gras.
  • Ryuji complains about Morgana's inability to transform into a helicopter in Kaneshiro's Palace. Near the end of Royal, Morgana manages to transform into one to have the team escape Maruki's Palace.
• Broken Aesop: Invoked.
  • Right up to the end, Persona 5's message is quite clear, though it's not a happy message: "Everyday society largely doesn't give a flying curlywhirly about injustice; they keep their heads down, even if the world is falling apart around them because they don't want to make life harder for themselves. Consequently, they allow corrupt people to get away with anything. Kids can't trust adults, especially the ones they depend on; self-centered adults are just trying to exploit them or worse." The Phantom Thieves all experience something like this themselves to various degrees, and even note how people don't really seem to care about the good they're doing. In reality, what happens in this case is actually society's corruption is deliberately rigged, set up and dismantled by the machinations of a false god to justify his absolute despotic rule over humanity. One of the Bad Endings takes this message to the logical conclusion, with the protagonist letting his misanthropy and dissatisfaction with society get the better of him and thus he discards all of his comrades, gets his lot in with Yaldabaoth so that he can rule as a despot through the fear of forced heart-changing.
  • In order to get the Good Ending, you have to break this rapidly-decaying Aesop and pull a Decon-Recon Switch. If this option is taken, the message changes to "You have to stand up to corrupt people in power, because everyday society has become apathetic, but since they're overall good people, they can be inspired to do the right thing if given the proper nudge. You can't just give up on the world and do whatever you please without regard for others, because then you're no better than the corrupt people you claim to be above. While many adults are corrupt, there are genuinely good ones, so don't write them off at large." It's pretty telling that this is the game's true intent since you can have just as many if not more adult Confidants (Ex.: Sojiro, Iwai, Kawakami) as you do teenage Confidants (Ex.: Haru, Ryuji, Hifumi).
• Build Like an Egyptian: The fourth Palace has the Phantom Thieves trying to infiltrate a pyramid in the middle of a desert. The ruler of the Palace is also dressed like an ancient Egyptian ruler.
• The Bus Came Back:
  • Makoto Yuki and Yu Narukami reappear in Royal as DLC bosses. Though the former is dead due to being The Great Seal in order to prevent The End of the World as We Know It, both protagonists' appearances are explained as being "cognitive echoes" of their original selves.
  • Several demons return as Shadows for Maruki's Palace, such as Hastur and Byakhee who have only appeared in Persona 2 prior to their comeback. Fitting as Maruki's Palace is themed after Lovecraftian mythos.
• Busman's Holiday: While the Phantom Thieves don't go after any targets in Hawaii, their school trip there is pretty much a carbon copy of an average day in Japan except there's a beach. Poor planning meant there were no activities available for the students who can't even plan them for themselves due to lack of funding and there's even a Big Bang Burger. The group is also mostly together, as Yusuke ends up in Hawaii after a storm stopped his plane from landing in Los Angeles, while Futaba and Morgana are still in Japan, but take the form of spyware planted on Joker's phone. Even Kasumi gets added at the tail end of the trip in Royal, as she's conveniently there for a training camp.
  Makoto: ...Hey, we're on our phones and chatting. This is no different from when we're in Japan.
• But Now I Must Go: At the end of the game, the protagonist completes his year-long probation, and leaves Tokyo to return to his hometown.
• Butterfly of Death and Rebirth: A glowing blue butterfly appears each time the protagonist is about to die in the story, urging him to overcome his impending doom. This includes when he's about to be executed in Kamoshida's Palace and when he's brought into the interrogation room where the conspiracy intends to assassinate him. Similarly, glowing butterflies surround a fallen character when you use revive items or magic on them.
• But Thou Must!:
  • If you refuse to accept the opening This Is a Work of Fiction disclaimer, Igor proceeds to say "Well, then you can't play this game" and returns you to the Start Screen.
  • Quite a few dialogue options, particularly to IM conversations, have two or three responses that are essentially the same thing. Also, even if Joker says things that seem counter-intuitive, like arguing against taking down a target, either he'll be countermanded by the other party members, or later plot revelations will establish the target as clearly and unambiguously evil and force the party to act against them anyway.
  • This actually becomes a plot point during the Casino palace. When Goro suggests that the party steal her heart on a specific date, you can't go against him, as the other party members will shout you down if you try. Of course, since the party knows that Goro plans to betray them on that date, they can't have you messing things up by taking care of business prematurely.
  • Before The Reveal, Sae asks if Goro Akechi is one of the Phantom Thieves, and your options are "No", "Not Akechi", and "That's impossible". Guess who The Mole turns out to be?
  • In Royal, Morgana will not let you fight Madarame on May 30. This is because there's a plot-related event where Kasumi's Confidant is established.
  • In Royal, on October 3, the entire day is taken up by the mandatory awakening of Yoshizawa's Persona, and the brief trip to the laboratory palace. However, this is during the period where Okumura's Palace is available, so if you end up sending the calling card on Oct 2nd and clear the palace on the 3rd, this event will take place on the 4th instead.
  • At one point in Royal, Kasumi offers to join the Phantom Thieves on their excursion through Shido's Palace. Even if the player wants to recruit her, Morgana declines due to her being "inexperienced" and the player's dialogue options actively railroad Joker into turning her down.
  • In Royal, Samael now has a phase where he fights Joker one on one, but should the player enter the fight with Joker on his own, Ryuji, Morgana, and Ann will automatically join at the start of the fight to heighten the impact of the one on one scene. Similarly, during the new final boss of the game, the player can fight solo with just Joker for the first phase, but Ryuji, Morgana, and Ann automatically join at the start of the second phase.
  • If you try to express dissatisfaction to Igor about waking up inside a prison cell when visiting the Velvet Room early in the game, you'll be told you lack the Courage to do so and be forced to go along with him. This serves to introduce you to social stat checks in dialogue by giving you one that is impossible to pass on a first game. It's only on a NG+ that you can actually take this dialogue option which also means you know the twist about Igor at this point.
  • During Ryuji and Morgana's fight, the latter runs away into Mementos at one point and refuses to talk to you. He tells you to leave, but you're forced to chase him down so he can try to run you over first. And then you have to leave without him anyway.
• Bystander Syndrome: A major theme of the game is examining this trope. The people of Tokyo would rather let horrible people get away with doing horrible things than stopping them because that's easier than being good. Not to mention, the idea of "It Can't Be Helped" is a huge cornerstone of Japanese society, and as such, the only way for the Phantom Thieves to gain any ground is to break the law and take matters into their own hands. That notwithstanding, however, the game also says that people as a whole are basically good, and that they can be inspired to stand up and act if given the chance.

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