YMMV / Persona 5

Tropes with their own subpage:

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• Base-Breaking Character
• Broken Base
• Memetic Mutation
• Values Dissonance
• The Woobie

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#-A

• 8.8: Laura Kate Dale of Jimquisition gave the game an 8.5, a very positive score, though lower than the aggregate average of 9.4. Her biggest complaint, which she admitted was a personal one, was that it wasn't available on handheld devices. Immediately, people started criticizing her review, with the main reason being that she shouldn't have docked points for such a subjective complaint.
• Abandon Shipping:
  • Quite a few people jumped ship on Joker/Akechi after it was revealed that Akechi was the traitor, and that in the bad ending, he murders Joker. A lot of people jumped right back on after fully playing the game, with people discovering how he was actually a Tragic Villain with a Trauma Conga Line of a life and in the end managed to redeem himself.
  • Joker/Mishima was very popular around the early Japanese release, but many fans jumped ship when his story arc revealed a far greater number of harder to brush off character flaws than they expected and as a result found him very annoying. While he still has his fans, and his Confidant skills are useful and easy enough to level very few players are likely to reach the end of the game before he finishes his Character Development, you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who wishes he was a Gay Option now.
  • Some players stopped pairing Joker/Futaba romantically when they found out that she's Sojiro's adopted daughter, and instead shipped them as a platonic Like Brother and Sister relationship since Sojiro is Joker's father figure of sorts as well, and now see the former as a type of Squick. This is less of a problem in Japan, where Joker is seen as a caregiver of sorts to Futaba, not a brother figure.
• Acceptable Professional Targets:
  • Police officers are depicted extremely negatively in this game. It's all but expressly stated that a sizable fraction of the Tokyo PD is in The Conspiracy's pocket, and the cops that aren't outright crooked are still exceptionally inept. Perhaps the only cop in the game who is both honest and competent is the one who helps Futaba in her Confidant link.
  • Politicians and socialites. Aside from notable examples like Tora Yoshida, the majority are presented as corrupt and self-serving creeps, while others are elitist snobs who look down on the younger generation.
• Acceptable Targets: Abusers are a frequent target for the Phantom Thieves.
• Accidental Innuendo:
  • At the max rank of the Strength Confidant, the player is shown a fully voiced scene in which Justine starts to remember something and seems to have a headache over it. The problem is, while she seems to be wincing in pain trying to remember, her English voice clips instead sound like she's moaning.
  • If you decide to hang out with Makoto or study with her, she'll often say things that could easily be taken the wrong way, such as "Let's do it in the student council room. I'll leave the back entrance open for you," and "Come to the library. I'll drill it into you."
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • While most agree that Madarame is an utterly terrible person, did he see Yusuke as nothing more than just another artist to exploit, or did he actually care for him to a certain extent? A few characters raise the latter possibility (granted, none of them had the same eye-opening look at Madarame's Palace that Yusuke did), and Yusuke, for all he hates Madarame for what he's done can't help but occasionally look back fondly on his time with his old teacher and see good along with the bad.
    • Even then, Yusuke also admits during Okumura's palace that the emotional/mental abuse Madarame subjected him to made Yusuke desperate to please him and (almost) completely blind to his faults — it's also entirely possible that Yusuke is just too used to trying to see the good in Madarame to really stop. A lot of the genuinely good times that Yusuke (and other people who knew Madarame) can recall, however, happened when Yusuke was still a child — so was it the case that he started out as being a much better person and got a lot worse as Yusuke grew?
  • As detailed within the Values Dissoance page of this game (which plays a significant part in the conclusions one draws) does Kunikazu Okumura really care about Haru in spite of arranging her to marry a terrible person for his personal gain, or was his apology insincere at best?
  • Some theorize that Futaba has Asperger's syndrome due to her personality quirks, poor social skills, and tendency to get wrapped up in something she's obsessed with. Her English voice actor, Erica Lindbeck, also stated in an interview that she interpreted Futaba as possibly being on the spectrum. This is also a common theory for Yusuke, for much the same reasons.
  • Yusuke's sexuality. Is he gay? Bi? Asexual? Art-sexual? A straight or bi Covert Pervert who pretends to be art-sexual so he can see nude women consequence-free? Fans simply can't agree. This is complicated by the times that he stresses that he's not interested in women, but there are a couple of scenes in-game that imply he's attracted to Ann.
  • Kawakami as a potential romantic interest, given how a Teacher/Student Romance seems to conflict with her Confidant storyline about how she needs to find a healthy balance of her personal responsibilities with what she feels is needed of her professionally for the betterment of her students. Opinions range from remaining the total Woobie she seemed to be before the issue comes up who really could use anyone as a supportive significant other, which is why she's willing to take Joker up on his offer despite her own in-game objections, to yet another high school teacher in this game worryingly (and disgustingly) blasé about the issue of having sexual relations with a young teenager when Joker confesses his interest in her as she only brings up the teacher/student issue when trying to justify turning him down, with the swerve also calling into question how "innocent" all of the maid service calls made up to this point have really been on her side of this.
  • Much has been discussed about Akechi's request to Shido that he not have to kill the Phantom Thieves all at once, his given justification being that the entire group of friends dying mysteriously within days of each other would look way too suspicious. Fans are split as to whether he meant what he said or whether he was trying to protect them from Shido in his own way.
  • Adding to this is the question of how much Yaldabaoth was manipulating him. Was Akechi filled with nothing but hate towards the world and wanted to see it burn, no matter the cost, or a a weak-hearted victim of societal stigma whose loneliness and anger was fostered into hatred by the malevolent entity? Akechi was 14 and living in a likely abusive foster household at the time and would have done anything to break free from such a situation (which in theory mirrors the Thieves' situation, except more hopeless). There's also how easily he ended up actually caring for the Thieves despite having learned his membership was a deception and not being in their company for a great amount of time, nor possessing knowledge that stealing hearts was even possible until it was too late. A valid argument can be made that Akechi didn't have much of an option to be the hero.
  • On the other note, seeing that the victims with on-screen deaths are not entirely innocent, that draws the question of Futaba's mom: Was she really a victim of the Conspiracy, or is it that she is complicit in Shido's plan? Keep in mind that the only things we heard about her is from Futaba and Sojiro, who are on good terms with her. It is likely that Akechi sees her as another member of The Conspiracy and possibly a mastermind who Akechi believes to be responsible for the abuse of cognition. On the other hand, it's also possible that like Sae, she's unwittingly doing The Conspiracy's dirty work without being aware of their existence.
  • Morgana running away. Who was at fault for the situation? Some blame Morgana because he tended to insult Ryuji for every minor mistake he made and coming off as Wangsty, but some blame Ryuji because he would keep egging Morgana on even if he didn't provoke him.
  • Whether Futaba works best as a Love Interest or a surrogate sibling to Joker is a subject of surprising virulence. The argument for the latter, in addition to the reasons given in Abandon Shipping above, is that it's also a valid way to keep their dynamics close in fanworks even if Joker is paired with someone else romantically. Supporters of the former argue that since Sojiro's only been Joker's guardian for less than a year (and even he sees nothing wrong with them being together if you pursue her beyond the fact that you want to date his daughter) claiming the two are siblings through not-actually-adoption is pushing it so it shouldn't be a cause of Squick in the first place. What doesn't help matters is that Futaba does develop an obvious crush on Joker as her Confidant link progresses regardless of how you feel about her, and is one of the most explicit girls about it too, which results in arguments ranging from the former using it as "proof" when accusing the latter of Fanon Discontinuity to the latter claiming it can be a variant of the Flirty Step Siblings trope so it doesn't necessarily disprove their stance. Values Dissonance also comes into play — in Japan, this pairing is more popular because it's way easier to see the protagonist as a caregiver in their dynamic.
  • While the protagonist is less of a blank slate than the previous two player characters, and often makes decisions without the player's inputs, said decisions can still be subject to interpretation: to what extent is Joker a true believer in the ideals of the Phantom Thieves and to what extent might he be furthering his own ends by leading the group? Points for the former come from the proactively altruistic targets the group takes on, such as Madarame or the Mementos cases, which don't necessarily guarantee a reward and inherently involve some risk of injury or exposure. Points for the latter come from the impetus to continue the Phantom Thieves group after Kamoshida; to whit, the party is willing to consider the brain-washing of complete strangers for the sake of personal views and aspirations rather than out of necessity from an imminent threat. It is worth noting that, as opposed to the Accomplice Ending from Persona 4, which is implied to have come from the MC's naivete rather than deliberate malice, Joker can opt to side with Yaldabaoth and the ending gives no sense of regret on Joker's part whatsoever, instead having him grin snidely at the camera.
    • During the buffet at the Wilton Hotel, Joker thinks to himself that he hadn't considered continuing as a Phantom Thief after dealing with Kamoshida, and later notes that seeing Shido at the hotel helped convince him to continue. Was he initially reluctant because he was unsure whether it was morally right to change people's hearts, because he was afraid of getting into further trouble, or because being betrayed by the woman he helped left him cynical about helping others? And when he did ultimately decide to continue, was it for the sake of changing the world, helping other people, or eventually getting revenge on the one who wronged him?
  • Some have taken umbrage with the Phantom Thieves themselves come certain revelations at the end of the game. Every single one of the hearts they changed throughout the story is discovered to have been put under Yaldabaoth's thrall, indicating that the Thieves' actions were largely responsible for why Yaldabaoth ended up as powerful as he did. None of the Thieves react much to it or let it get to them at all, and when they're nearly wiped from existence and end up in the Velvet Room, they lament more on how dependent they were on society's views of them rather than how they'd indirectly aided the Big Bad through Brainwashing for the Greater Good. All this, compounded with the fact that they then suddenly advocate for putting faith in society's capacity for change without the need of the supernatural, despite using supernatural means anyway to defeat the Final Boss, puts into question their sincerity as to whether or not they genuinely cared about helping the helpless. On the other hand, they set out to Mementos Core knowing that if they succeeded, they'd give up their ability to change people's hearts, and thus entrusted the ability to change the future to the people as a whole.
  • Also the people of Tokyo as a whole. Did they side with the Phantom Thieves in the endgame out of a genuine desire for change, or did they side with them on pain of death from Yaldabaoth?
• Americans Hate Tingle: Goro Akechi is far more of a Base-Breaking Character in the west than he is in Japan; he enjoys far more popularity in the latter country and tends to rank first in popularity polls, as well as being the highest-ranked member of the Phantom Thieves in an official popularity poll covering every playable character in the Persona series from Persona 3 onwards.^Note Specifically, he ranked 5th, which puts him behind Yosuke, P3P's female protagonist, P4's protagonist, and P3's protagonist. The likeliest factor behind the split, heinous acts aside, is the fact that his backstory as a neglected illegitimate child evokes some potent Values Dissonance (see his entry in the game's own page of that trope); while his anger over his past in Japan is viewed with justification, westerners see it more as Wangst.
• Angst? What Angst?:
  • Strangely, it's the Silent Protagonist that has a case of this. Despite being brutally tortured and forcibly injected with drugs by the Dirty Cops under The Conspiracy's pocket, and narrowly avoiding getting killed by Akechi, he comes back to LeBlanc none the worse for wear.
  • Downplayed with the Phantom Thieves regarding the moral ambiguity of changing a Palace ruler's heart. Despite initially hesitating to change Kamoshida's heart due to the potential ramifications, they don't seem to have any problems with future targets. However, this could be a case of It Gets Easier and that Kamoshida didn't die (the worst-case scenario proposed) after having his heart changed. Furthermore, their horrified reactions upon watching Okumura's gruesome death after changing his heart made them consider the possibility that they might have caused his death, though they quickly dismiss that line of thought.
• Annoying Video-Game Helper:
  • While Persona 5 improved on the volume of navigation lines and made them significantly less inane/repetitive, Morgana still falls into this category for many players — not in his capacity as Dungeon Navigator (although his favoritism towards / prejudice against certain party members has been noted), but for his ever-present, Jiminy Cricket-style nagging about deadlines and bedtimes. When you're keen to rank up a social link or develop a skill that will allow you to rank up that social link, Morgana's "Hey!" followed by some variation on "you need your rest" as you head for the exit can become the Most Annoying Sound. He also puts pressure on you to complete dungeons as quickly as possible, to the point of literally forcing the gang to meet up and do something about the palace if you do other things for for about four or five days on the trot (which is very easy to do during the summer holidays, when pretty much all of your friends want to hang out with you). It's clearly meant to stop you having to constantly check the calendar, but the countdown is right there in the corner of the screen! For players used to the taciturn Persona 4 protagonist and his ability to keep track of his own calendar, it can be grating. Made even worse when in the sixth Palace, he won't let you send the Calling Card until a few days before as opposed to consistently pestering you to send it in any other Palace.
  • Downplayed with Futaba. Most of her Confidant abilities are amazing and a great help in bad situations, but their completely luck-based activation can be a bad thing as there's one time you don't want her to buff the party: while multiple characters are Brainwashed. "Here come the buffs!" or especially "Ultra Charge" on Brainwashed party members can easily spell a Game Over if they end up attacking Joker.
  • Completely averted with Makoto, who acts as the party's strategist during battle. She'll only make comments while the player is looking at the enemy's status screen, and they're only ever said to help the player; unlike the navigators Makoto will only say what needs to be said, which fits in with her intelligent and methodical nature. However, some people find it mildly annoying that Makoto will only say the one line for mini-boss/boss enemies, and expect to hear it a lot if you need to keep scanning them throughout the battle.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • For someone who the game really goes out of its way to make you want to take down, Kamoshida's boss fight isn't particularly hard, especially for those familiar with the infamous Shadow Yukiko from Persona 4. Unlike there, you have a full party of four for this one, with Ann and Morgana capable of healing by default, and Kamoshida can't hit any party member's weakness. Pacing yourself and grinding up enough can not only net some useful support spells for your party members (At Level 11, Ann gets Tarunda, which lowers an enemy's attack, and Morgana learns the multi-healing spell Media, whose lack of presence is considered a major headache for the aforementioned Shadow Yukiko battle from 4), but the protagonist can potentially fuse two Personas^Note Obariyon and Slime, the latter being a better option due to being stronger and having the Rakunda and Sukunda spells that resist regular physical attacks, allowing him to shrug off most of Kamoshida's attacks. Granted, Kamoshida is only the first major boss battle, but considering how much of a Hate Sink he's made out to be in the story, it's a bit of a letdown.
  • Despite Kaneshiro and his Bank being presented as the heist that truly puts the thieves on the map, both his Palace and his boss fight are unimpressive. The bank's layout is non-complex, with the only major bump in the road being a simple ATM PIN puzzle in the Palace's basement. Shadow Kaneshiro himself isn't that powerful either; the only potential threats he can dole out (Fear Gas, which has a chance of inflicting Fear on the entire party, and Piggytron's rollout attack) can be swiftly dealt with: one of Makoto's healing moves cures Fear, and even without her, you will likely have easy access to most healing items at this point in the game. As for the rollout attack, hitting Shadow Kaneshiro once (he rolls on top of Piggytron for the move) will knock him over and stop the attack. To make all of this even sadder, Kaneshiro's confession after his change of heart is offscreen.
  • The fight with the boss of the Casino Palace is very straightforward and not very difficult, in spite of being a Disc-One Final Boss. One factor that goes into this is that you aren't allowed to send out a Calling Card and fight the boss until a set date right before the deadline. If you secured a route in the Palace early enough, you have a lot of time to max out Confidants, and grind in Mementos^note Flu season is during this time, so you can take advantage of the Reaper for EXP. Even then, the fight on its own isn't anything that'll have you pulling your hair out. The game outright tells you how to deal with the boss's gimmicks, and none of the attacks are all that dangerous. The worst the boss can do is use stat buffs, but they are easily countered with Dekaja, and in addition to any buffs you can use, Futaba will most likely give your party a buff during this fight. At the end of the fight, the boss does permanently buff itself, but by that point their HP is low enough that you'll be able to take them out before they can do anything, especially if you guessed correctly on the gamble that increases your attack.
  • The battle with The Traitor isn't particularly difficult for all of the buildup to it. The first phase is just two Shadows with Desperation cast on them that only use physical attacks, so if Joker has a Null/Repel Physical persona equipped, the enemies can't even damage him. When the Traitor joins the fray, their moves are laughably predictable, since the Traitor targets Joker with Kougaon and Eigaon even if he has Null Bless or Null Curse equipped. The Traitor's second phase is a little harder, but they don't deal much damage without Desperation, which only gets used if they knock down a party member. And out of all the skills to use, the Traitor's ultimate form has Maragion and Maeiga, which deal pitiful damage. They do have a powerful Almighty move, but they use it at extremely low health and it takes a turn to charge, so it's easy to just guard against it, assuming you don't kill the Traitor before they use it in the first place. This is partially justified since the battle with The Traitor takes place immediately after a damage-heavy miniboss fight, which leaves you with very little breathing time.
  • The final Mementos request seems like it's going to be a real tough one, being the only S-Rank mission and at the very bottom of the 66-floor randomly generated dungeon. Too bad any sort of Attack debuff completely ruins him as he'll spend every turn trying to rebuff his Attack stat. Cue jokes about Mara not being able to raise itself up.
• Anvilicious:
  • In Kaneshiro's palace, people are literally represented by walking ATMs, which is already hugely unsubtle. The game still points this out, and explains what this means.
  • When party members were being recruited, it nearly always involves a confrontation with the leader of the palace insulting and berating said party member, talking about how weak they were, or how they were doomed to be trapped by society. Party member gets angry, rants about how they won't conform to society anymore and how they will rebel, and they get their Persona.
• Applicability: While the game deals primarily with Japanese issues, many people around the world have found they can relate to the game's themes of systemic corruption, older generations not taking the problems of younger generations seriously, and frustration with the fact that anyone sufficiently powerful or famous is essentially above the law.
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • After ages of western fans pestering Atlus for a dual audio option and eventually getting a hard "no", Atlus softened the blow of the April 2017 delay by announcing the Japanese voice track as free day-one DLC.
  • After the Persona 4 Arena debacle (where the game took nearly ten months to be released in Europe), Atlus confirmed that the European version of the game would be released on the exact same day as the US version. Of course, that's negated by the fact that the game took seven months to get localized.
  • Probably an unintentional one, but Persona 3 and Persona 4 were often criticized for the Mission Control characters being too annoying. In this game, the battle sounds and voices tend to drown out what Morgana or Futuba have to say, keeping them from getting too annoying like Fuuka or Teddie.
  • Atlus personally apologized for their harsh streaming conditions, and requested players not to stream the game past the in-game date of November 19th. They also said they never intended to issue copyright strikes against streamers, and anything that sounded like a ban on streaming was just poorly worded.^note There were no cases of a streamer being issued a copyright strike for streaming past the in-game date of July 7th back when it was the restriction.
  • A zig-zagged example. Another thing Persona 4 was criticized for were the downtime scenes being superfluous and long-winded. While this game has a few downtime scenes of its own, most of them actually progressed the plot, and the ones that didn't add to the story don't drag on. However, some fans did not like how the downtime episodes were poorly rushed and does not give sufficient breathing time from the plot.
  • Sojiro seems like a response to the criticism Dojima got as a character. One scene in particular was his knee jerk reaction to getting a threatening letter by interrogating the Protagonist and leaving Nanako home alone and open for abduction. A similar scene occurs when he finds the Phantom Thief calling card in Futaba's room. Unlike Dojima, Sojiro's reason for panicking was a bit more justified, but he heard the Protagonist out and was understanding about the situation.
  • Persona 4 was often seen as having an accidental "conform to what society expects of you" message, with many Social Link characters eventually admitting that they never really wanted to subvert the role expected of them and the only people to speak out against society being murderous villains. The message of this game is the exact opposite.
  • It is significantly easier to max-rank every Confidant playing blind than it was in Persona 4 and especially Persona 3, where it was infamously considered nearly impossible without a guide and easy to screw up even then. Unlike previous games, many Confidants can be accessed even during summer vacation or days off (due to less emphasis on school social links) and Confidant abilities helps speed up the process. Chihaya's abilities allows the player to rank-up stats and Confidant points without passing time and Kawakami's rank 10 ability allows the player to go out and do activities despite going to a dungeon.
  • One common criticism of both Persona 3 and Persona 4 is the opening hours of both games border on Slow-Paced Beginning territory. This was especially a prevalent issue in Persona 4, where the first three hours are essentially one gigantic cutscene with the tutorial fights being the only gameplay in that time. Persona 5 is still very cutscene-heavy in the beginning, but it is made less tedious since there are more sequences involving player interaction. Another improvement in the game's opening is that while the openings of the previous two games were mostly focused on setting up the plot, not only does Persona 5 begin In Medias Res, raising questions right away, but the first major plot element is introduced very quickly.
  • Another controversial aspect of Persona 4 was Nanako's death and resurrection, which some players felt was a huge Writer Cop Out. In this game, another character of the Justice Arcana dies, but they seemingly stay dead for the rest of the game. Unlike other points, this example does heavily rely on what Atlus plans to do with Persona 5 after this game, though, since the last time they killed off a very popular teammate, players were given a non-canon means to "save" him in an Updated Re Release and this also has a case of Never Found the Body if they want to put him into a spin off game.
  • Achieving the best ending in this game is much easier than it was in Persona 4. To achieve the true ending in Persona 4, you had to select six specific dialogue options when the party is about to throw Namatame into the TV World. The game also gives you no indication that this scene determines the ending you receive. Even then, once you defeat the killer, you can still miss the best ending, especially since the game tries so hard to force you away from it. Here, there are only two instances where your dialogue options determine which ending you receive and both of them make it clear. In fact, during one of them, the game will outright tell you if you've chose the bad ending option and let you backtrack if you choose to do so.
  • After some backlash from Persona 3 and Persona 4 in regards to what came off as occasional moments of Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male, the relationships between girls and boys of the Phantom Thieves was done up in a more understanding manner. The boys for their part don't get their perv on all that often, and Ann (who gets this treatment the most) only really retaliates once, during the desert drive sequence, even though Ann's storyline could have already justified her being particularly sensitive about this type of behavior. Then when it comes to the actual beatings, the two that are delivered aren't done without a justifiable cause and thankfully have nothing to do with the guys being creepy towards the ladies in question (intentionally or otherwise): Ryuji getting his ass handed to him when he makes fun of the girls for crying at his near-death experience can be considered fair to some players, and of course, the epic beating Joker gets for romancing all the girls at once is considered completely fair to everyone.
  • Just as in Persona 4 there's an achievement for listening to a lot of randomized navigator lines, as seen under the entry for That One Achievement, getting 250 of Futaba's lines can be a painstaking chore (especially with the issue of the temporary teammate). However, to tip the scales just slightly in the player's favor this time around, Futaba has a lot of distinct lines — meaning that so long as you rotate characters relatively often, you may have a chance of stumbling into the achievement just by clearing the game at least once without having to go into a NG+ run. It also helps that the Final Boss can inflict a half-dozen unique status ailments and Futaba has two voice lines for each of them.
  • After two main line entrees, plus several spin-off titles, having Hama and Mudo be instant kills with low chances of hitting, Persona 5 revamps the two elements into being, offensively speaking, similar to the other spells available in the game by changing them to Bless and Curse respectively, allowing the player to use both elements on enemies weak to it without wasting SP on a unreliable instant kill. This also makes fighting enemies who use them less difficult since instead of only having instant kills, they can now be challenging without being unfair.
  • The shift from bubblegum J-Pop/Shibuya-Kei-laced soundtrack from Persona 4 to groovy Acid Jazz in Persona 5 has been well-received by fans, as many people were honestly getting tired of the P4 poppier style after having it to be the most recent thing for eight whole years.
  • Persona 5 Royal Edition seeks to address some of the larger issues the game had with viewers, namely that after beating the final boss, the game time skips a few months forward like it did in Persona 4, alongside how the dungeons were overall pretty straightforward with few gameplay twists beyond simple puzzles. Royal will be removing the timeskip at the end of December, allowing the player to play through the roughly three month period, and dungeons are going to be altered slightly to add new elements that were either originally planned to begin with, or help expand the dungeon to avoid being too familiar.
• Awesome Art: The menus and interfaces are incredibly stylish. Some standout moments include a shop menu where the silhouetted shopkeeper shifts around as you browse the menus, and the results screen which shows the final blow in the background while your rewards are tallied up as if they're points on a line.

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B

• Badass Decay: Downplayed. The Reaper, in previous games a terrifying and powerful Stalked by the Bell Bonus Boss, can here be brought down by the common flu if it's going around. Otherwise, he's just as strong as he is normally. He also speaks like a "beast" type shadow if you try to negotiate with him, despite appearing mostly humanoid, so while he's one of the few to always blatantly refuse to be intimidated by you and his sentiments are still terrifying, his awful grammar takes away from the effect.
• Best Level Ever:
  • The fourth Palace, aka Futaba's pyramid, has received this treatment. Not only is this is a Breather Level, but many fans found the Palace interesting due to the Palace ruler not actually being evil, making it a nice contrast to the Phantom Thieves having to change the hearts of Hate Sink villains. Not to mention the Palace starts out as a nice Call-Back to Persona 4, but it subverts people's expectations by not having Shadow Futaba be the boss of the Palace and having Futaba actually accept her Shadow.
  • The sixth Palace, aka Sae's casino, has also received this treatment. Unlike most Palaces where the Phantom Thieves have to sneak their way to the Treasure, Shadow Sae forces the Phantom Thieves into playing rigged casino games to reach her treasure. This causes the Phantom Thieves to have to rig the games in their favor to reach the treasure, making the Palace interesting. Not to mention how the Palace was way easier than the previous palace.
• Breather Boss:
  • The boss of the Bank Palace, Shadow Kaneshiro, isn't a cakewalk, but he doesn't have any gimmicks backing him up that stop you from dealing damage to him, he doesn't debuff your party, and the normal attacks he uses aren't particularly powerful. His strongest move takes two turns to charge, and the battle gives you multiple different ways to stop it. Towards the end, you can even sacrifice relatively common items to make him skip his turn.
  • The boss of the Space Station Palace, Shadow Okumura, especially since his palace bordered on Marathon Level with That One Puzzle right before the boss fight. He's a Flunky Boss who summons mooks that the player has already fought earlier in his palace, with the boss himself hanging out of reach providing support. The mooks all have weaknesses that the player can easily exploit, and once they're all defeated, the boss himself turns out to be a total weakling who goes down with just a few regular attacks.
• Breather Level:
  • The fourth palace; a.k.a Futaba's, is a lot more straightforward (both figuratively and literally) than the other palaces, with relatively easy puzzles, and while it does have two mini-bosses, both come at the very start and end of the palace, and both are against Mot, meaning if you made an effort to discover its weakness the first time, you should have no problem, and while the main boss of the Palace does have two stages, your HP and SP are refilled at the start of phase two, preventing it from being cheap. Combine this with you being given an extremely generous 26 in-game days to complete it rather than the usual 14-16 affair of other Palaces as well as going right in after you send the calling card and not having to wait an extra day, it by far and large solidifies this trope. Preventing it from being a complete cakewalk, however, is the presence of a few enemies who can be rather nasty to players towards the lower or average end of the leveling curve, such as the Anubis, who can use Mudoon for cheap insta-kills.
  • Futaba's Confidant requires the player's Kindness (one of the harder stats to update) to be at level 4, but is otherwise quick to finish due to a lack of holdover periods.
  • While it may take some out of the box thinking to start it, Toranosuke's Confidant is one of the easiest to level up in the game. To begin with, the part-time job at the Beef Bowl Shop only requires permission to go out at night and Rank 2 Proficiency, which, by the time you have the former, you should be reasonably close to attaining as long as you haven't been intentionally neglecting it. Past that, he ranks up each time you see him, independent of having the right Persona Arcana and your choice of responses, and he is also the only non-party Confidant that doesn't have a Mementos request that is required to advance past a specific rank. The ease of his Confidant line may have to do with the fact that, unlike most of the others, it has a deadline (which he will warn you about just in case): November 17th, which is when in-story election campaigning begins.
  • Like Futaba above, Haru's Confidant requires a high stat check (namely, requiring the player's Proficiency to be maxed out), but is quick to finish due to a lack of holdover periods. Also, much like Toranosuke's Confidant above, there are very few responses that she doesn't like, especially late into her Confidant.
  • In a similar fashion to Toranosuke, Mishima's Confidant levels every time you see him - no matter what you choose to say and regardless of whether or not you have a matching Arcana persona on hand. The fact that he's the Moon to Toranosuke's Sun makes it quite fitting. The only difference is Mishima has no deadline so to speak, but due to his personality a number of players don't get around to finishing his Confidant anyway or only do it for the battle bonuses it gives.
  • The summer holidays can be considered as such from a scheduling standpoint. On days when you actually have control, as you have no school, you can spend a single daytime slot in any day of the week to make more infiltration tools than normal, saving time for Palace preparation. While the final week of the holidays is filled with cutscenes as the gang tries to get Futaba to open up, you retain the ability do your nighttime activities instead of being forced to sleep like what would normally happen in the earlier parts of the game.

C

• Captain Obvious Reveal:
  • The fact that a traitor in the party sells the protagonist out, resulting in him being arrested, is spelled out right at the beginning of the game. The identity of said traitor is treated as a huge mystery throughout the story. But by the time it comes to pick out who you believe betrayed you, it's pretty easy to guess that it's Goro Akechi. He wasn't heavily promoted in advertisements, he joins the party in the dungeon where you know you'll be betrayed, not to mention the fact that the characters and audience know the least about him out of the party members. By process of elimination, it simply has to be Akechi. The fact that both the prior games in the series had similar plot twists only compounds it.
    • If you're paying attention to dialogue at the time, you can catch onto the Traitor's identity way in advance. During the school trip to the TV station, the Phantom Thieves have a conversation in the corridor after Joker and Ryuji assist with the camera cables. As the conversation reaches the subject of where they should spend their free time, Akechi strolls by and comments about "delicious pancakes". Not only was food not on the agenda to begin with, but the only member of the group to mention the word "pancakes" was Morgana; Akechi shouldn't have been able to understand Morgana if he hadn't already become able to venture in and out of the Metaverse.
  • In Yusuke's dungeon, it's fairly obvious to figure out that the woman in the paintings throughout it is Yusuke's mother and by extension that Madarame committed Murder by Inaction, especially since Madarame otherwise didn't seem that bad compared to Kamoshida.
  • In Futaba's dungeon, it's not hard to figure out that the boss is Futaba's cognition of her late mother, Wakaba Isshiki, as soon as you see it: throughout the dungeon, you need to recreate several murals as a part of puzzles, many of which depict Futaba's mom. Because of this, it's easy to notice that the Sphinx has the same face and hair as Wakaba on the murals.
  • It's very easy to figure out that Masayoshi Shido is one of the main antagonists. The game basically spells it out for you when Ryuji and Joker encounter Shido at the hotel while going out to eat and Joker suspects that the man holding up the elevator is the one who pushed false charges on him. There's also the fact that Shido has a character portrait during this scene and after Yusuke joins the party, his character portrait is reused when Joker is recalling the situation. By the time Shido begins making his speeches on the TV at Leblanc, many players can be safe to assume that he'll eventually be a target of the Phantom Thieves. And depending on how early you max one of the Confidants, you might see a big hint towards this very early in the story. Ohya's Confidant ends with Shido's name directly implicated in a political scandal involving a mental shutdown. It's not hard to connect the dots after that.
  • One of the hints towards the biggest twist in the game is considerably easier to figure out in the English version than it is in the Japanese version. The fact that Igor is an impostor. Igor's Japanese voice actor passed away, justifying his change of voice. So Japanese fans would be less likely to question the change. Igor's English VA, however, is still alive and available, which makes it a lot more suspicious that he'd now be played not only by a totally different actor, but one that doesn't even attempt to sound the same as the old voice. Naturally, False Igor's deep, menacing voice is because he was a villain all along; the real Igor does have a new voice actor, but he makes an effort to sound like the original.
• Cargo Ship:
  • Akechi and Pancakes, due to him bringing up the topic of "delicious pancakes" to the Phantom Thieves when he first meets them at the TV station which later is revealed be a crucial piece of evidence that outs him as being Black Mask.
  • Yusuke and any form of Art in general, due to his ambiguous sexuality and obsession over art. Yusuke and Lobsters is also a close contender, stemming from the scene at the beach where he buys a pair because he liked their aesthetics.
• Catharsis Factor: To say it's satisfying seeing bastards like Kamoshida or Shido confess and beg to be punished for their crimes is an understatement, to say the least.
  • Playing this game could also provide this in an out-of-universe way. All of the villains represent or derive from some kind of social ill plaguing not only Japan, but most other countries around the world. These include: a serial sexual predator who gets away with it because everyone around him turns a blind eye due to his position of authority and past achievements, a corporate CEO who reaps immense profits by horribly overworking and otherwise exploiting his employees, and a crooked politician who claims to stand for the masses but is really only looking out for himself and a small number of cronies. Chances are that you've been pissed off or even victimized by at least one of these types of people in real life, and this game gives you the opportunity to not only beat them to a pulp, but make them publicly confess to their crimes in order to wake everyone else up to how evil they really were.
• Complete Monster: While Yaldabaoth may have set the plot in motion, these two villains prove that Humans Are the Real Monsters:
  • Masayoshi Shido is behind the atrocities of the game, profiting off the other villains. Using his abandoned and illegitimate son, Akechi, Shido has him assassinate both his enemies and allies who have outlived their usefulness to work his way up to becoming Prime Minister of Japan. Stealing the research of Wakaba Isshiki before having her killed, Shido also uses his influence to ruin peoples' lives, driving the aforementioned researcher's daughter into depression and getting the Protagonist on probation for trying to stop Shido from harassing a woman. Using Akechi as a mole within the Phantom Thieves, Shido plans to have them arrested for getting in his way and for the Protagonist to be tortured and murdered. After Akechi is defeated by the Thieves, Shido is revealed to be planning to dispose of his son and pin his own crimes on him after killing the mentally unstable boy. When defeated, Shido's final action is to destroy his own Palace in an attempt to take the Thieves down with him. While Shido claims to be acting for Japan's greater interests, in reality he values only power and glory for himself.
  • PE Coach Suguru Kamoshida is a dangerous sexual predator. Protected by the school administration due to his past fame as an Olympian, Kamoshida perversely extorts sexual favors from his female students. Forcing his male students into brutal training regimes, Kamoshida often beats them, resulting in students of both genders living in constant fear of him. Seeking to shut down the track team, Kamoshida provokes their star athlete into punching him and breaks the boy's leg in "self-defense". When his "favorite" victim refuses to sleep with him, Kamoshida rapes her best friend in petty vengeance, resulting in the girl almost committing suicide.
• Crack Pairing: Akechi and Haru sometimes get paired together by fans who pair Joker with other characters, in part due to both of them being celebrities and both of them having Archnemesis Dads, even though Akechi murdered Haru's father, resulting in her brief Heroic BSoD, and Haru makes it explicit during the confrontation with Akechi in Shido's Palace that she can't forgive him for it.
• Crazy Awesome: Shadow Kaneshiro. A purple-skinned banker with a Hitler mustache who morphs into a Totally Radical fly-man who speaks in jive slang, and pilots a Humongous Mecha in the shape of a piggy bank!

D

• Demonic Spiders:
  • Any enemy that's immune to both Physical and Gun skills is this, since you'll essentially be unable to damage it without expending SP. Girimehkala in the Space Station especially stands out, since his only weakness, Bless, is an element that only the protagonist can use at the time you first encounter him.
  • Speaking of enemies immune to both Physical and Gun skills, Arahabaki also found in the Space Station qualifies. While it is weak to the element used by the newest party member you will have when you encounter them and it's not that high leveled, it knows two moves that more than make up for it: Makarakarn and Abysmal Surge. Makarakarn allows it to repel 1 magic attack, making it temporarily immune to everything except Almighty, which uses large amounts of SP. And then there is Abysmal Surge, which can cause Despair on the whole party, which makes them unable to move AND instantly kills them after 3 turns have passed. If your entire team is suffering Despair, it's game over. And they will spam it if Makarakarn in already in effect.
  • The Archangels in Kamoshida's Palace are your first wake-up call that you don't want to mess with red Shadows. They're at Lv 16, much higher than the player is expected to fight Kamoshida himself at, and can use an insanely powerful Makouha and strong multi-target physical attacks which can cause a Total Party Kill if you let it get a turn. It's weak to lightning and darkness, but they show up late into the dungeon when the player is likely to be running low on SP.
  • Anubis in the Pyramid is about 10 levels higher than the protagonists by the time you run into him for the first time, and he comes packed with several instakill spells (which he will likely use if you ambush him). He also has no weaknesses, meaning you need to rely on crits to get a Hold Up, and his level advantage means he can generally be expected to survive an Ambush and then retaliate with a vengeance. To top it all off, in the later areas of the stage, you can run into two or three at the same time.
  • Dionysus in the final dungeon knows Thermopylae, a full-party Heat Riser that only works when surrounded. It's a Useless Useful Spell in your hands since you generally want to avoid being surrounded, but since a player is likely to be Ambushing almost all enemy encounters at this point in the game, Dionysus will be able to use the move most of the time. And Dionysus has no weaknesses, so they get quite a lot of use out of Thermopylae.
  • Also in the final dungeon, Nebiros. One of the few basic enemies in the game to have Brain Jack, the full-party hitting Brainwash spell. This late into the game, Ann, Makoto, and Morgana will all have full healing spells, and the protagonist likely will too, meaning Brainwash will lengthen the fight dramatically. And if you've been leveling Futaba's Confidant, Ultra Charge can spell a Game Over if brainwashed characters attack the protagonist. Nebiros are only weak to Bless, a skill that only the protagonist has access to, and often show up in groups along with the aforementioned Dionysus. In a dungeon with only two save points, random deaths due to brainwash are very punishing.
  • Following these, any enemy that has zero weaknesses. Not necessarily because of difficulty, but more because of the added effort needed to take them down may force you to use more resources than normal since it limits your options: either try to bolster critical hit chances, hope a Bullet Hail is triggered (which will cut enemy HP to nearly 50%), gamble on insta-kills, maximizing status ailments (to aim for Technicals), or just trying to "brute force" them into submission. This only really gets bad at higher levels, where this can make otherwise quick encounters into grueling battles of attrition if the player isn't ready.
• Disappointing Last Level: The endgame runs into this territory in some regards:
  • The seventh dungeon is extremely long, to the point of being draining. The main gimmick of the dungeon is puzzles that involve turning into mice and pressing switches to continue forward, and they become very tedious and easily outstay their welcome. The dungeon also has at least five mini bosses, then a showdown with The Dragon, culminating in a fight with the Big Bad. Unfortunately, the Big Bad boss fight has effectively five phases to go through.
  • The final dungeon is Mementos, though if the player has been making regular trips throughout the game, then it won't be too bad. The Mementos Depths, on the other hand, is full of uninspired and easy yet time-consuming and poorly-justified Hamiltonian Path puzzles with only two save points in the entire area (making death a very steep penalty). The final sequence is just a boss rush of four archangels and then the two phase final boss fight. At this point, from the seventh dungeon and onward, that's around a dozen bosses to fight before reaching the end, with some of them being multiple phases.
  • The endgame takes place late December, earlier than the endgames of Persona 3 or Persona 4. The rest of Persona 5 consists of Time-Skips to Christmas, Valentine's Day, and then the ending, with all of the time in-between being unplayable just like vanilla Persona 4. There are plot-related reasons for the time skips, as the protagonist is incarcerated between Christmas and Valentine's Day, though some feel that Atlus may be deliberately setting up for another Updated Re-release. It is worth noting, though, that because the game has more night confidants available unlike the other two games, that extra month may not be needed.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Unsurprisingly, The Traitor gets this treatment as they are one of your teammates. Specifically focusing on Akechi's genuine desire for improving the world, developing a real affection for the team despite his conflicts of interest, and Trauma Conga Line of a past, and not enough on the fact that his motives were, by his own admittance, completely selfish and made him rack up an enormous body count which still included parents of some of the people he starts considering his "friends".
• Dueling Games:
  • It was initially this with Tokyo Mirage Sessions #FE, due to the game being very similar in presentation to the series, them being on opposing consoles and, for a good while, it looked like the two games would come out quite close to each other. However, the second delay creating a release gap of nine months, combined with TMSFE having horrid sales, killed this.
  • Its stiffest competition was with Final Fantasy XV, which was scheduled to come out worldwide two weeks after P5's Japanese release, with both games being high-profile and likely to be lengthy JRPGs. As mentioned on the Awesome page, Square Enix even opted to ask its Japanese fans which game they'd pick, and whether they would be willing to buy both in the same season, demonstrating that Square is wary of being unseated. Then FFXV was delayed by two months, negating the issue entirely. Indeed, the delay actually caused a 450% increase in pre-order sales for P5. The Western fanbases are more apathetic and friendly to each other though, due to Final Fantasy being released in late 2016 while Persona wasn't released until April 2017, over five months later.

E

• Ear Worm: Quite a few, some of which has become a Memetic Mutation in the fanbase.
  • YOU'LL NEVER SEE IT COMIIINGGGGGGGG
  • A RIVER IN A DRY LAND
  • I'm a shapeshifter...
• Ending Fatigue: Some criticize the game's final arc as such. After seemingly resolving all loose ends with the defeat of The Traitor and the Big Bad, the game suddenly shifts to two final dungeons and a long-drawn battle with The Man Behind the Man. The first such dungeon also has only two save rooms — in the middle, and at the end — and the second dungeon only allows saving at the beginning area, as opposed to after a large Info Dump, though you can quick-travel from the second dungeon's end back to where the Velvet Room is, if you need healing/to save.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Tae Takemi became an instant hit when she was unveiled as part of the Cooperation cast, simply thanks to her bizarre behavior and excellent design. Once the game was released proper, Takemi continued to garner praise for her sympathetic backstory and for offering one of the steamier Did They or Didn't They? Rank 10 scenes in the franchise.
  • Hifumi Togo was planned to be a party member, but was Demoted To Confidant due to the game's story already being packed enough as-is. She has a large fan following, with many people wishing she still had her original expanded role. It helps that she has one of the most useful Confidant gameplay bonuses, allowing party members to swap out mid-battle.
  • In a game full of Adults Are Useless or Adults are Bastards; Toranosuke Yoshida is a refreshing relief with a heartwarming S.Link story about the difficulties of redemption. He's one of the few adults who admits his wrongdoing after a major scandal (and laments it), and has his own change of heart. Yet despite the past, he strives to better himself and tries to fight for the people. The conclusion of his S.Link is also a wonderful sight to behold and his Confidant abilities are some of the most helpful in the game.
  • Munehisa Iwai won himself many fans due to his interesting backstory, Vitriolic Best Buds dynamic with Joker, and his genuine desire to become a good father for his adopted son.
  • Shinya gets this because of his cute little brother relationship with the Protagonist, his sharp tongue, and for his "Get Smoked" hat.
  • Sojiro is fairly popular, due to having some of Dojima's better qualities as a Parental Substitute without his more controversial decisions.
  • "Floral Pants Man," a nameless character who shows up to cheer for the Phantom Thieves in the final battle if you didn't complete Yuuki's co-op.
  • Lala Escargot, the owner of Crossroads. More than a few people have lamented that she wasn't a Confidant, due to her personality, being a good boss who looks out for the MC, and being a respectful portrayal of a non-hetero-normative person (either a male crossdresser or a transwoman, and referred to with female pronouns), which many found refreshing after seeing the duo mentioned under The Scrappy below, as well as being a Gonk person that's not a complete Jerkass like the ones in Persona 4. She placed first in the NPC popularity poll in Japan.
  • Shiho due to her kind nature (being one of the first students to actually talk to Joker like a normal person, as well as to talk to Ann without thinking first about Ann's Mixed Ancestry), her Woobie status and the impact she has on the story. Many fans hope that if there's an expanded re-release ala Persona 4 Golden that Shiho gets her own Confidant role.
  • In a surprising way, the Protagonist's Persona, Arsène himself. While Izanagi and Orpheus undoubtedly have some fans, as all three Personas have a history of players min-maxing them so they can be used throughout their respective games, Arsène has been received a lot better due to his Dark Is Not Evil design and him seemingly having an actual personality by having him speak to Joker at various points. The fact that he essentially becomes Satan doesn't hurt either.
  • The Newspaper Girl in the Shujin Academy hallway has gotten a lot of attention among fans. There are even some who would have wanted her to be a Confidant as she could have been an ally to the Phantom Thieves given her interest in the game's plot points. Some even go as far as saying that she should have been a Confidant over Ohya.
  • Lavenza, Caroline and Justine's combined/true form, only showing up shortly before the final battle, came a very close 2nd in the Japanese NPC popularity poll, losing out by just a single vote.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • The return of Nyarlathotep is a perennial Epileptic Tree that happens with each new Persona game. But when a new character was revealed to have the Necronomicon as a Persona, that speculation gained a few more teeth. Especially since Word of God referred to Futaba being a character critical to the narrative. He doesn't come back. This theory has gained new fuel with the release of Kasumi's Character Introduction trailer for Persona 5 Royal, which has her fighting against Biyarky, one of Nyarlathotep's servants who hasn't appeared in a MegaTen game since their debut in Persona 2: Eternal Punishment.
  • The Arcana of the main cast was, as usual, home to intense speculation from many fans before release.
  • The identity of the traitor has been a magnet for fan speculation. As of now, the one most suspected of is Goro Akechi due to how little was revealed of him and one of the revealed shots revealing that, while he appears to be a fanboy of the Phantom Thieves, he finds their methods unacceptable. It turns out to be him after all, despite him being the obvious choice, though it does serve to divert attention from the game's second big bad.
  • Goro Akechi's ultimate fate. Is he dead or still alive? We Never Found the Body, so will he return in a future spinoff? Suffice to say, he's gained quite a lot of debate and speculation in the fanbase.
  • A popular theory for Royal is that Kasumi will turn out to be a Wild Card, owing to her having similarities to the protagonist and Akechi.
• Even Better Sequel: It currently boasts a higher rating on Metacritic than its already highly praised predecessor, often being lauded for its many gameplay improvements, pacing and characters, creative dungeon design, and even its Darker and Edgier tone. Fans seems to agree, as Persona 5 is the highest-selling title in the entire Shin Megami Tensei series, with over two million copies sold.
• Evil Is Sexy:
  • Shadow Sae, at least before her transformation. She wears a Sexy Backless Outfit that doesn't really leave much to the imagination. Concept art◊ takes this Up to Eleven, where it's clear she was Going Commando.
  • The traitor Goro Akechi also plays this straight. This is due to his Pretty Boy looks and the gentle and soft-spoken voice given by his voice actor. This is probably what contributed to his massive Draco in Leather Pants fanbase.

F

• Fanfic Fuel: Take any fictional (or real) villain from any medium, and you can be sure the Phantom Thieves will be there to change their heart.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • Similar to Yosuke and Chie before them, there's a number of fans who felt that Ryuji and Ann had great chemistry, and should've became an actual couple in the game. It was enough to start a rumor shortly after the game's initial release, which stated that if the player didn't romance Ann, she'd hook up with Ryuji. Even Ann's English voice actor thinks they're cute together.
  • As far as same sex pairings go, Joker/Akechi is the undisputed fan-preferred gay ship for fanworks, due to their Foe Yay dynamic and Akechi's canonical affection towards Joker, which gets turned Up to Eleven in the western release. The pairing receives tons of Fan-Art and Doujinshi from fans, and has the most stories out of all of Joker's potential pairings on sites like Archive of Our Own.
  • Joker's most "preferred" female partner is a cause of division among the general fanbase.
    • Western fans overall prefer to pair him with Makoto, due to fans finding the Opposites Attract aspects about them endearing and interesting, as well as her having some Ship Tease moments with Joker.
    • In the Japanese fandom, Futaba is the most popular choice. This is helped by the Japanese fanbase having less of an issue with her being Sojiro's daughter and by how she develops a crush on Joker regardless of whether or not you pursue her romantically. Fan-Art and doujinshi of the pairing often showcases their Huge Guy, Tiny Girl dynamics, and the amount of fanworks Joker/Futaba receives from the Japanese fandom easily overshadows those for pairings involving Joker and the other girls.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Thanks to the Dueling Works status, Persona 5 fans and Final Fantasy XV ended up being at each other's throats, though this does mix in a bit with Friendly Rivalry, as liking both games isn't seen as a universal sin. It also helped that there was a large window between the release dates of the games.
  • For one within the series itself, fans of this game aren't in agreement with fans of Persona 3 over which of the two games is better. Fans of this game refer it to Persona 3 for having better polished game mechanics, proper cutscenes, a much larger overworld with more stuff to do, characters and narrative threads that are more relatable, a protagonist that's not just a wooden puppet sitting on the sidelines, better pacing in the main story, actual dungeon designs, and even a soundtrack that highlights the best aesthetics of previous games in the franchise. Persona 3 fans, however, claim that its mechanics aren't as polished and that the Character Development works better in the narrative than this game, as well as the final arc having more payoff.
    • A similar debate came up with Persona 4. How much you enjoyed this game could vary on whether or not you felt Persona 4 fell under Hype Backlash. Fans believe Persona 4's story suffered from serious pacing issues, comedy scenes that were dragged out, mean-spirited, and superfluous, and the characters playing Hot Potato with the Idiot Ball.
  • While the two fandoms are rather friendly, not all fans of Persona 5 and NieR: Automata get along. It all boils down to the fact that both were critically acclaimed JRPGs that came out in 2017 with many gamers already labeling both as "Game of the Year". Which game you like more all comes down to your gaming preferences. Those who just want a fun game with likable characters and a lot of heart and soul into it will most likely enjoy Persona 5 more. However, gamers who value narrative more than gameplay and want emotional catharsis from their games will most likely enjoy Nier: Automata more.
  • A rivalry with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild developed in late 2017, when the two games emerged as leading candidates for Game of the Year at the Golden Joysticks.
• Fanon:
  • The Protagonist's parents tend to get characterized as neglectful Hate Sinks similar to the minor Mementos targets, considering they seemingly believed the very flimsy accusation laid against him, dumped him off on a guy whose cafe is mildly frequented by a friend of theirs, and apparently never so much as called or wrote him. Others tend to write them to be much more sympathetic, in that they obviously didn't believe the accusations against the protagonist, but were powerless to stop his probation from happening, and were forced to send him away. The ones who write them as the latter tend to point out that we don't exactly see every single aspect of the protagonist's life.
  • Alternately, fanworks often jokingly feature Bayonetta as Joker's mother, due to both of them being dark-haired gunslingers who have powers associated with darkness as well as a few other similarities.
  • Some interesting theories involving Akechi and Futaba have been slowly rising up: The first is Akechi being repeatedly forced to know his father in the biblical sense, given that it's shown that, on top of being morally repugnant, Shido has him thoroughly under his thumb. The second is Akechi and Futaba possibly being paternal half-siblings, since absolutely nothing is known about the latter's biological father, and Shido is shown to have been highly fixated on Wakaba's cognitive psience research. Relating to that is the possibility that Akechi's mother might have been involved with the aforementioned psience, or was at least more than some random lover Shido got knocked up, as when he's confronted about Akechi being his son before his boss fight, the way he refers to "that woman" seems to go beyond just merely recognizing him by his looks alone. The release of the Maniax book spurred the theory further, as it reveals that Akechi has type AB Negative blood, the same blood type as Futaba's (which was revealed in the official art book beforehand); this becomes more significant knowing that 99% of the Japanese population is RH+.
  • Thanks to Sae taking the revelation that Makoto is part of the Phantom Thieves rather badly, fans have taken to portraying her as something of a Knight Templar Big Sister, often doubling humorously with My Sister Is Off-Limits! since Joker and Makoto is such a popular ship. To the surprise of absolutely no one, this gave rise to stuff like this and this. Further fuel for this headcanon comes from the fan databook, where it's revealed that much like Makoto, Sae also practices martial arts as a hobby, in her case kickboxing.
  • Many fan works taking place post-narrative often depict Joker as aspiring to work in politics. Many fans believe he'd be motivated to do so after the Phantom Thieves and Shido's corruption drove him to change society. He also does have experience and a mentor figure through Toranosuke's Confidant. Especially popular among Joker/Makoto fans due to Makoto's Confidant ending with her resolution to become a police commissioner also being motivated to work in the government to correct society's corruption.
    • Another popular post-canon occupation for Joker is that he takes over LeBlanc once Sojiro retires, or otherwise gets involved in the restaurant business — this also makes sense given how Sojiro teaches him the tricks of the trade and both he and the other Phantom Thieves admit that the coffee and curry that Joker makes are pretty decent considering that he's there for less than a year. It helps that the part-time job that's considered the best involves working in a bar, allowing him to learn other skills that would benefit him should he go into that sort of business.
  • Due to a case of Angst? What Angst? in the aftermath of Joker's arrest, some fan works depict Joker having to deal with PTSD as a result of his experiences while being brutally interrogated by the police.
  • Hifumi, one of Joker's many Confidants, shows slight Chuunibyou tendencies whenever she plays Shogi. Outside of that, she's fairly reserved in personality with everything else she does. Fanworks have taken that quality and ran with it, often portraying Hifumi as a full blown Otaku with many nerdy interests outside of shogi.
• Foe Yay: Joker and Goro Akechi, obviously.
  • Word of God states that they were designed to contrast like light and shadow. Akechi's thief outfit has similarities in design to Joker's, as well as opposite colors. Furthermore, their Dancing All Night DLC costumes pair well with each other.
  • After The Reveal, you find out that despite being responsible for the mental shutdown and psychotic breakdown incidents, Akechi has not lied to Joker about his feelings and his past.
  • During the infiltration of Shido's Palace, Akechi tells Joker that he admired Joker's prowess, and wishes he could have met him a few years earlier, before Akechi had gone on his Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Akechi further admits that they could have been good rivals, culminating in another rank up to his confidant link.
  • Not to mention Morgana reveals later that Akechi has a fondness for Joker, which also happened to be the one thing to drive Akechi over the edge as he was in denial over it. This resulted in quite a few fans thinking Akechi also had Tsundere traits.
  • Akechi's feelings for Joker are rather complicated. It is a mixture of jealousy, admiration, and fondness. Sometimes one feeling may override the others, jealousy being the dominant feeling in their last battle.
  • The even bigger reveal at the end is that both Joker and Akechi were chosen by the Big Bad, Yaldabaoth, and given powers, destined to fight against each other.
• Fountain of Memes:
  • Pretty much everything about Akechi has given way to some form of meme within the fanbase.
  • Morgana for his Memetic Troll status and the fact that many fans have taken to quoting his overworld and battle lines.
• Franchise Original Sin:
  • One of the biggest complaints about the game is that Morgana stops you from going out and doing whatever you want at night, making you go to sleep. Except this is not new for the series, just the first time another character is preventing you from going out. Even in Persona 3 and Persona 4, you are told that you can't go out at night numerous times.
  • When the announcement came that the Updated Re-release Persona 5 The Royale would be released as a PlayStation 4 exclusive, more than a handful of fans and critics decried what they saw as Atlus' attempt to get people to pay for the same game again on the same console three years after release. What these people tend to forget is that this is, in fact, the second time that Atlus has done something like this. Persona 3 FES, an updated rerelease of Persona 3, was released in Japan in 2007 and 2008 for the US for the PlayStation 2 only a little more than a year after its initial release (or the same year as release in other territories like the EU and Australia), and with less substantial changes than the ones announced for Royal. What changed was that with the release of Persona 3 Portable for the PlayStation Portable and Persona 4 Golden for the Playstation Vita, people had come to expect that the updated version would be released on a handheld.
• Friendly Fandoms: With NieR: Automata, another highly-anticipated Japanese developed game that's international release was around the same time. When Persona 5 came, out internationally many were either finished with or wrapping up Nier: Automata.
• "Funny Aneurysm" Moment:
  • This◊ fancomic for Persona 3 has Minato act like a Jerkass to all his friends, preventing him from maxing out any social links, and in Keisuke's case, Minato takes credit for Keisuke's prize-winning painting. In Persona 5, Madarame has been stealing the credit for his students' work for years.
  • In Persona 4, Chie is relieved that you only moved to Inaba because of your parents' work, noting that she thought it was something more serious, as a dig at the Persona 3 protagonist's gloomy backstory.^Note His parents died in a car crash. The Persona 5 protagonist gets arrested and put on probation for saving a woman from assault, thereby causing him to be expelled from his previous school and is forced to move to Tokyo to attend Shujin Academy.

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• Game-Breaker: See here.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Evidently, the reaction to the Phantom Thieves in Japan was much more mixed, seeing as the archetype is more associated with extreme gaudiness and camp. Meanwhile, western fans don't have as much exposure to the trope and, alongside that, tend to think of thieves more as badass rebels, in addition of America's current turbulent times in the political world during the time the game was released and the greater emphasis on freedom and battling corrupt institutions. As you might expect, audience reception in the west has been much more favorable.
  • Toranosuke Yoshida is more of an appreciated character in America, due to superficial similarities and some shared philosophies with 2016 Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders.
• Genius Bonus: While one might be familiar with Leviathan, the second form of the boss fight with Shadow Sae Niijima as a reference to The Book of Job, one might not be aware of its reference to Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil by Thomas Hobbes, a 17th Century treatise on government (and trope namer for Hobbes Was Right) that, essentially, argued that man was naturally warlike and brutish and could only be contained by a strong government. Considering the line of work that Sae Niijima does and how they view criminals, the reference to the latter seems appropriate.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • The former noble in Shido's Palace. He's weak against Zio attacks, but that's his only saving grace. The thing that makes his fight such a massive pain is that he almost never attacks directly, and instead spams brainwashing moves to force your party to fight each other. And that's basically what he does for almost every. Single. Turn. Making the fight insanely monotonous. So not only do you have to constantly deal with brainwashed teammates, but you'll probably end up chewing through your stock of status-ailment curing items. By far the worst outcome is if he takes control of Morgana or Makoto, as you'll have undoubtedly unlocked Diarahan (instantly restore the target to full health) on both of them by the time you fight him. If they get taken over, there's a good chance they will use them and instantly heal the boss back to full health.
  • Shadow Youji is fought as a Duel Boss, greatly reducing the action advantage you have on him. He has a simple pattern of spamming Rising Slash, but if he catches on that you have physical immunity, he chooses to rain Megidolas on you. And while he's vulnerable to status ailments, he always recovers from them at a faster-than-normal rate, making it difficult to trivialize the fight. If you're rushing through Sojiro's Confidant on a New Game+ and engage this boss as early as possible, Joker's lower-than-usual HP and SP can make this boss a tricky stumbling block.

H

• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • One of the nicknames fans gave to Akechi is "Not Ken" due to looking like grown-up Ken. Like Ken, he ends up trying to kill one of the party members (in Akechi's case, the MC). Unlike Ken, Akechi will succeed if you get the Bad Ending. As detailed in the Foil portion in his entry as The Traitor, Akechi comes off as an older, more psychotic version of Ken.
  • In Persona 4, if you picked to spend time with Kou instead of Daisuke for the Strength Social Link, you learn that he's having a crisis about his (highly traditional) adopted family, wherein his parents, initially unable to have a child, give birth to a daughter not long before the start of the game. Although initially afraid of being rejected by them, he comes to terms with his status, manages to find something to do after graduation, and knows that his family loves him as he does them. Bastard child Akechi, unfortunately, isn't so lucky, having no real home for himself and no one to bond with about it for most of his life.
  • Also from the fourth game, Ai is on the verge of throwing herself off the roof over being rejected by the Strength Social Link, due to how the rejection essentially has convinced her that she's worthless if people don't value her for her beauty. In the fifth game, Shiho actually goes through with it after being raped by Kamoshida, surviving but being injured and hospitalized.
  • When Ryuji asks Makoto if she has anyone whose heart she'd like to change, Makoto coyly says it's a secret. Later on, it's revealed that that Makoto had known all along that her sister had a Palace, and while Makoto had always wanted to change Sae's heart, she'd hoped that they wouldn't have to steal it, so one can imagine she found the question more difficult than she let on at the time.
  • After the proposal of Dojima being the killer was rejected, Atlus originally toyed around with the possibly of having Yosuke or Yukiko be the killer in Persona 4. Looks like Atlus revisited the idea of one of your party members being the villain, as Akechi is the Traitor and one of the most prominent antagonists in the game.
  • From the game itself, after the fourth dungeon, the Phan-site adds a poll where users can vote for who deserves a change of heart. At one point, Akechi's name shows up on the list, just because he disapproved of the Thieves earlier. Turns out the Phan-site posters were Right for the Wrong Reasons. Akechi himself even jokes about being a villain.
  • After the big reveal at the end of the game, the voiced This Is a Work of Fiction at the start of the game takes on a very sinister new meaning, given the voice saying it is Yaldabaoth. In the final part of the game, he erases the Phantom Thieves from existence because the public believes they weren't real. It's possible that by forcing the player to agree the story is a work of fiction and the characters within aren't real, he's making YOU complicit in erasing them.
  • This game about exposing corrupt people who project respectable veneers and are seen as heroes by many came out in the United States in 2017. Later that year, the entire American celebrity scene was rocked by scandal after scandal as numerous famous and much-lauded people, especially actors and directors, were exposed as sexual predators, costing many people in real life their idols as well.
  • Also in late 2017, Shinzo Abe, Japan's exceedingly controversial Prime Minister, who many fans assume was an at least partial inspiration for Shido, was reelected, thanks in a large part to only 30% of Japan's votership actually bothering to go to the polls, showing just how great the country's public apathy problem, one of the things the game speaks against, really is.
  • In late 2017, the US Olympic Gymnastic team doctor, Larry Nassar, was convicted of doing exactly what Kamoshida was doing, using his position of power in a high level sports team to sexually abuse the girls under him. All the while those in charge either were willfully ignorant of the situation or were actively covering it up.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: Accepting Ryuji's invitation to hang out with him at the fishing pond on July 3rd is this once you realize from later canonical information that he did it to spend time with the protagonist on his birthday.
• He Really Can Act:
  • Robbie Daymond, known for playing Nice Guys and teenage heroes, really shows off his voice acting chops as Goro Akechi. Daymond perfectly captures the smooth, focused, and intelligent side of the ace detective while also nailing Akechi's Villainous Breakdown scene, capturing the character's unhinged screaming with chilling effectiveness.
  • Cherami Leigh also faced something of an uphill battle with her casting as Makoto Niijima. Makoto is far from the Plucky Girl characters that Leigh usually finds herself playing, which initially caused a small bit of WTH, Casting Agency?. However, come the release of the game, and Leigh's performance was widely accepted.
• He's Just Hiding!: Fans have applied this to Akechi's "death", due to the sound editing and the event where he seemingly dies happening offscreen, as well as his popularity amongst the fanbase. Fans wonder if ATLUS deliberately left the scene ambiguous in case they wished to bring them back for future games.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Naoto Shirogane's social link in Persona 4 involved a manufactured Phantom Thief case. In Persona 5, this same trope becomes a major thematic focus.
  • Speaking of Naoto, her Valentine's Day event mentions that the Persona 4 hero has stolen her heart. One of the romance options in this game literally has her heart stolen by the Phantom Thieves.
  • One of the alternate readings for Shujin School is "Prison School", as noted on the main page, and it's almost certainly intentional considering the themes of the game. Hmm, why does that sound so familiar?
  • Michelle Ruff as the voice actor for Sadayo Kawakami brings a chuckle for anyone who knows that she played Yukari Takeba from Persona 3. It's especially funny when you remember that Yukari became an actor for the Phoenix Ranger Featherman show, meaning both roles have her character be a Reluctant Fanservice Girl in their adult years. Oh and there's the fact that they both dress up as maids briefly.
  • Amanda Winn Lee as the voice actor for Ichiko Ohya. Cue the jokes from the fan base that Yukiko Amagi decided to secretly ditch Yasoinaba^note She'd originally planned on doing so, but gets over that idea by the end of her Social Link, head to Tokyo, and changed her name and career and enjoys her new fondness for beer. She lampshades this fact in her Twitter when she announced the role.
  • The protagonist being an expy of Lelouch was even voiced by Jun Fukuyama. While his English voice wasn't Lelouch's English voice actor, the previous protagonist Yu Narukami was.
  • Two of Hiimdaisy's most known parody comics feature a Persona game and the Metal Gear series, the latter has a huge emphasis on stealth and going undetected by the enemy (not to mention one of the protagonists eventually starting with knife & gun (knifegun). Persona 5 uses the thief motif to emphasize the stealth and the protagonist is a Knife Nut with a gun. It's just a pity that Hiimdaisy has moved away from parody comics, otherwise we may get something like this.◊
  • One of the Social Links in Persona 3 involves a student having the hots for a teacher. Here, the player character can do exactly that and can romance Ms. Kawakami.
  • Even better, the Hermit Social Link in Persona 3 is your teacher, who unknowingly tells the player that they have a crush on the MC.
  • Thor being the final opponent of the 6th Palace's Battle Arena is sure to get a chuckle from players who've seen the Thor: Ragnarok trailer, which makes a big deal of Thor fighting in a gladiatorial arena.
  • No need for context, just this face swap of Joker and Akechi as Barney Stinson and Marshall Eriksen from How I Met Your Mother, respectively.
  • A real world example: During the Hawaii trip in September, Yusuke's plane which was originally set to fly to Los Angeles gets diverted to Hawaii because massive storms in LA made it too difficult to land. This takes place in September (and the in-game calendar corresponds to the year 2016 despite the "20XX" moniker). In real life September 2016, California was suffering from a several-years long severe drought that was impacting the entire state and causing all counties to enact water usage restrictions. However, in late January 2017, California actually did get hit by a series of massive thunderstorms that miraculously ended the drought, including Los Angeles, so Yusuke's plane scenario would have been right on target with reality had it occurred a few months later.
  • Another film example in that the genuine twist of the Phantom Thieves having been playing Akechi for a fool from the day they crossed paths without his knowing, can be quite amusing to anyone who has watched Ocean's Twelve, which uses the exact same twist for its big reveal. Even funnier considering they're both about ensemble bands of thieves.
  • Even more film examples: Okumura's Palace takes place in a space station, with his Shadow self in particular being a Darth Vader Clone. The game was released in Japan before the international release of Rogue One, which focuses on another Ragtag Bunch of Misfits stealing stuff to rebel against evil forces, albeit this time from the army led by the very man Okumura's Shadow pays homage to. Not only that, but the game is heavily implied to take place in 2016, the same year Rogue One was released; the final dungeon even takes place in December, the same month as said film's release.
  • As this video proves, Mitsuru Kirijo may have known some Memetic Mutation involving a certain cat telling you to go to bed way before this game was even out.
  • This comment Yosuke made in Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth became more ironic after the release of the game.
  • The MC in this game being called Joker has had many fans making references to The Joker of Batman fame. In the Batman Tell Tale series, one of the routes you can take in that game has The Joker himself becoming a vigilante fighting against a corrupt system that wronged him, just like the MC and the Phantom Thieves. The Joker's outfit in that route (purple longcoat and painted on domino mask) even resembles the MC.
  • When beginning your first time working at Crossroads, Morgana muses about the possibility of the MC needing to cross-dress. Cue Persona 5: Dancing Star Night, where the MC gets a cross-dressing costume.
  • In Sae's Palace, Futaba makes a reference to Super Smash Bros. here◊. Fast forward to December 2018 at The Game Awards and Joker himself debuts as a fighter in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate. Sufficed to say, a lot of fans never saw that coming.
  • One of the retro games that Joker can play in his room is called Punch Ouch, an obvious riff on Punch-Out!!. Now, as a fighter in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Joker can go head to head with Little Mac, the star of the actual Punch-Out!!, and fight in the boxing ring from that game.
  • Futaba has frequently been noted to have a striking resemblance to an Inkling, specifically the orange-tentacled girl that's the unofficial mascot of the game. Futaba's Spirit Battle in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate has her represented by the very same Inkling girl.
  • The Protagonist being given an official canon name of Ren Amamiya became this after the seiyuu chosen to voice new character Kasumi Yoshizawa in Persona 5 The Royal was revealed to be none other than Sora Amamiya.
  • Makoto's Phantom Thief biker outfit having some similarities to Kenshiro is amusing enough, especially considering that Atlus' parent company Sega released a few games based on the license, and shared a voice actor with this game in Lost Paradise. Then The Royal came, and it was revealed that Makoto received a new finisher that's very similar to Ken's famous Hundred-Crack Fist.
• HSQ: The first gameplay trailer was filled with this. An earlier trailer depicted the main character as a seemingly mild-mannered student. The reveal that the main character was not the standard Ordinary High-School Student but an over-the-top Gentleman Thief was quite the bombshell. The trailer also showed new ways of traversing the field and heavy usage of firearms in combat.
  • The fourth trailer was this in spades, revealing huge amounts of the in-game set-up, revealing three party members, several boss characters, the release date, box-art, and more. Compounding the matter is that there was little to no news for close to eight months.
  • In the game proper, when you finally face off against The Traitor, Goro Akechi, who's gone batshit insane at this point, suffering no fewer than two Villainous Breakdowns, with his second form gaining his true persona, Loki, and revealing that he's a Wild Card, just like the Protagonist. Shortly after you defeat him and while you're trying to recruit him back to your party, suddenly a shadow manifestation of how the Big Bad views Akechi appears and both Akechis attempt to kill each other. There's a reason why the scene spawned so many memes.
  • The identity of the Big Bad caused this reaction in many fans. It's Igor. Or rather, the Igor you've seen all game was really the Big Bad in disguise all along, and they've been playing you ever since the opening narration.
  • While Joker summoning his Ultimate Persona with The Power of Friendship was expected, what wasn't expected was Satanael being so freaking massive! Satanael is the biggest Persona shown thus far, equaling or even surpassing the size of the Big Bad Yaldabaoth in height, with his main body and all six black wings being the size of skyscrapers. Satanael giving Yaldabaoth a Boom, Headshot! was equally surprising and awesome.
• Hype Backlash: Despite loving the game, some fans don't think the game deserves all the praise it gets, commenting that, while the game had incredible art and music direction and vastly improved gameplay, the story and writing itself took a nosedive after the first boss, with the narrative being weak with multiple instances of hypocrisy (such at the lack of a Gay Option, despite it being a game about fighting society's norms, Ann's Male Gaze treatment as the Reluctant Fanservice Girl, and so on) at best or a full-blown Broken Aesop at worst.
  • Sometime after the game's anime adaption finished airing, A-1 Pictures announced an OVA special titled Dark Sun..., and some time later it was announced there would be a teaser for an upcoming project named Persona 5 R at the end of the special, coinciding with the discovery of several Persona 5-related domains that had been registered months before. After "Dark Sun..." finished airing, fans got to see the teaser, which was thirty seconds long and served as an announcement would be another teaser released in March 2019. This caused backlash in the fandom with fans upset that the teaser was an announcement for another teaser trailer, but was mitigated slightly by Atlus announcing there were several other projects in the works.

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• Idiot Plot: Morgana leaving the team during the first stages of Okumura's palace is considered by many as this. Fans criticized how poorly handled the characters are, particularly Ryuji and Morgana, who both seem to be playing hot potato with the Jerkass Ball. The rest of the Phantom Thieves also grasp the Idiot Ball for being completely oblivious to Morgana's own problems of not being useful enough until it was too late. The only person who could be seen as completely blameless would be Haru, since she is new to the whole experience and doesn't really have much power to decide one way or another.
• Informed Wrongness: The people that oppose the Phantom Thieves' actions that didn't have ulterior motives behind it. While you can make the excuse that their targets were irredeemable bastards that were too powerful to be dealt with by the authorities, many of the people that oppose them didn't know the circumstances. As far as they knew, the Thieves were brainwashing innocent people. By the end of the game, these people end up having their minds changed.
  • To some, the decision to steal Okumura's heart. After it's revealed that the Conspiracy tricked the Thieves by hacking into the Phan-Site and pushing Okumura to the top of the polls, in order to lure them into a trap and dispose of a member who'd become a liability, the Thieves lament that they've lost sight of their real goals. However, the group as a whole showed no signs of letting fame go to their head (the only exception being Ryuji) and even hesitated about changing Okumura's heart despite popular demand until they met Haru. Furthermore, Okumura had committed many of the same abuses of his power as a businessman and a father that the other targets had (exploitative working conditions, giving his daughter in an Arranged Marriage to an abuser), and was the prime suspect for the mental shutdowns at the time (while he only ordered them, as opposed to carrying them out himself, it doesn't make it any better). Essentially, while the decision to steal Okumura's heart has disastrous consequences, it's hard to say that it wasn't justified.
    • And for that matter, it's not even clear that what happens to Okumura after the Thieves cause a change of heart wouldn't have happened without the Phantom Thieves, anyway. He'd clearly been set up to die by a powerful conspiracy, and even if the conspiracy couldn't have caused a mental shutdown on Okumura without following the Phantom Thieves into Okumura's Palace, Akechi shooting Joker clearly demonstrates that the conspiracy wasn't above old-fashioned murder if the need arose. It's hard to see a situation where Okumura lives, even if the Phantom Thieves had avoided being the patsy. In that light, Okumura dying isn't a consequence of the Phantom Thieves' actions, it's a consequence of the conspiracy putting out a hit on him.
  • The game makes a big deal of the Phantom Thieves' methods being morally questionable and akin to brainwashing, but the Phantom Thieves can't do anything but make somebody feel guilty about bad things they've actually done. The Phantom Thieves can't frame somebody for something they didn't do, and they can't technically even force a confession; all they can do is make somebody feel really bad about what they've done. It's hard to see stealing hearts as that morally gray when it has less potential for misuse than a lecture from your mom. Even fans who find the whole "taking your heart" element odd fall into this, since the villains are so evil that there is no alternative way to do so.
    • That being said, there is an air of moral greyness to the Thieves' actions as a whole; the notion of changing hearts, as well as Morgana's statements concerning the act (namely that once a distorted heart has been stolen, the person affected by the heart-change will never experience a distortion again), indicate that the Thieves are essentially "stealing away" a fundamental part of someone's personality. Likewise, the act of stealing hearts does place those targeted in danger of suffering a mental breakdown if the act goes too far, which is what befell Okumura (at the hands of Akechi) and nearly befell Kamoshida (if not for Ann deciding to let him live). With all that out of the way, the public is largely unaware of the mechanics behind the whole "changing hearts" thing to begin with. So from their perspective, the Phantom Thieves are just making people feel really bad about things they've done, despite the actual circumstances centered around the Thieves' actions are more complicated than that.
• Internet Backdraft: The western release has been filled with these reactions:
  • The game's release date. It initially was going to be released in American and European areas on Valentine's Day, 2017, a full 5 months after Japan's release, a move that has already enraged the fanbase, especially those who wish to go into the game blind and will now have to dodge spoilers for months on end. And then it was delayed further to April.
  • Adding to this is that the west won't be getting the 20th Anniversary Special Edition, but a completely different Premium Edition◊. While it includes a soundtrack CD and the artbook from the Japanese 20th anniversary edition (albeit with a different cover), as well as a few things not found in the Japanese edition, such as a Morgana plush, a Shujin High School bookbag, and a steel book case for the game, it lacks the "All the Best" soundtrack CD containing tracks from all the Persona games as well as all the DLC.
  • Dual audio has made people argue more often than not. Before it was included as a DLC, a lot of people were mad considering the Japanese's All-Star Cast. However the announcement of the free dual audio DLC as an apology for Atlus USA delaying the game again to 4th of April has made quite a few fans angry thinking that the delay was caused by including Dual Audio.
  • Another cause of backdraft was the confirmation that the game lacks positive representation of LGBT culture (lack of a Gay Option for the protagonist, gay NPCs are depicted as stereotypical Camp Gay men, etc.), which was also a major complaint about Persona 4. Polygon's review even accused the game of having a Clueless Aesop for not depicting a major issue of the characters' generation positively despite having a central theme of social reform and youth being misunderstood. This is mitigated as, as mentioned elsewhere on this page, Lala Escargot is either a crossdresser or a transwoman and is portrayed as a positive character. She's even referred to with the pronouns of her preferred gender, and gets a ton more screentime (playing heavily into the Devil Confidant's scenes, and being the MC's employer if you choose to work at her bar) than the Camp Gay NPCs, who don't have names or any real sort of importance.
  • With the release of Persona 5 internationally, many streamers and Let's Players found to their annoyance that Atlus Japan would not allow the game to be streamed after the 7/7 in game date, and that the in-game screenshot, vidcap, and streaming functionality native to PlayStation 4 would be automatically disabled after proceeding past a certain point in the game. And even before that, Atlus USA advised against uploading content due to risk of copyright takedown, unfortunately using phrasing that was construed by both players and journalists as outright threats. The reason for this they claimed was that Atlus Japan didn't want spoilers going out, even though the game was released six months prior in Japan. Predictably, many people posted spoilers of the game out of protest.
  • Also, shortly before said streaming threat, Atlus threatened to take the developers of RPCS3, a PlayStation 3 emulator, down using the DMCA, for just mentioning that Persona 5 is playable on said emulator. This one invoked the ire of not only a number of fans, but also many open source and freedom of speech organizations. People were vexed to the point that Atlus had to back down of the threat. However there are still people who're rubbed the wrong way, as Atlus is still trying to defend their action by posting a petty excuse on their blog instead of admitting that they're wrong (again, the blog post came across as an outright threat and had what a lot of readers perceived as an arrogant tone).
  • Hashino's comments in some interviews has not endeared him in the eyes of fans, especially the older ones. One notable is the one with 4Gamer where he seems to blame the lack of initial success with titles such as Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga as well as the failure of his directorial debut, Maken X, to "Atlus house style," i.e. Kaneko's art for not being "cute", and just in general showing disdain for it. Given that Kaneko and his art is held as nearly sacred by the fans, this did not sit well with them and gives a less idealistic reason as to why the older games get no representation.
  • The lack of a Nintendo Switch port. After Joker was revealed to be the first character of the Fighter's Pass for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, many rumors about a port or an Updated Re-release of Persona 5 for the Switch started popping on the internet, which made Switch owners excited. Come the Persona Sound Live 2019, where Persona 5 Royal was announced exclusively for the Playstation 4 while a spin-off was announced for both the Playstation 4 and the Switch. This did not sit well with Switch owners at all, who then proceeded to bombard Scramble's trailer with dislikes and Atlus' social media with angry comments. And just to rub salt in the wound even further, Atlus stated in a FAQ that they have no plans to release Royal on other platforms almost a month after Royal and Scramble were announced, angering them even further. Some are even boycotting on getting the Fighter's Pass for Smash, as they don't want a character that servers as advertising for a game that's not on their console.
  • Atlus released some information regarding Royal for those who played the original game, and fans weren't happy about it: the game has an Old Save Bonus system which rewards the player with an "useful bonus" at the beginning of the game, regardless of which version they played (Playstation 3 owners need to upload their save data to the cloud, but it requires a Playstation Plus subscription). The problem? The Persona Compendium's data and player stats will not be transferred to Royal. This angered a lot of players who spent hours completing the compendium with every Persona in the game, especially since Persona 3 FES could transfer the compendium's data from the original game with no problems. Not only that, but Royal will not include every Downloadable Content from the original version on the disk. Those who purchased the DLC (Playstation 3 and 4 owners) must repurchase the content again in an "all-in-one" pack for a small fee (though in fairness, it's very cheap, being a 10 yen repurchase in Japan, and it's only happening because of Japanese commercial laws).
• Iron Woobie: Joker. He goes through a lot of crap throughout the whole game. Whether it be treated like a social pariah for a crime he did not commit, being betrayed by his own teammate and mentor figure, or nearly getting himself brutally interrogated, killed, or erased from existence, it's all one big Trauma Conga Line. Despite this, he does not falter from his goals (discounting one of the bad endings) and takes all the abuse with stride.
• It Was His Sled: The plot point about Goro Akechi being the one who sold out the protagonist during the Casino heist became well known days before the game was even released, due to datamining of digital preloads of the game. Some official merchandise, such as the cover artwork for the volume 11 DVD and Blu-Ray releases of the anime adaptation, makes no effort to hide that Akechi is also the Black Mask.

J-L

• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Goro Akechi. They've done some terrible things, but they wouldn't have turned out the way they did if not for a horrific childhood.
  • Natsuhiko Nakanohara, the first Mementos target. He might be a stalker toward his ex-girlfriend, but he's also suffering a great deal of bitterness from Madarame using and discarding him, as well as guilt from not being able to stop his senior apprentice from committing suicide. It helps that, once he admits he was wrong, he actually has the courage to speak face-to-face with the Phantom Thieves and ask for their help in taking down a bigger target than him.
  • Morgana. There are many times where he acts like a Jerkass, notably when he constantly heckles Ryuji and when he leaves the Phantom Thieves. However, he also has a lot of personal issues which includes an identity crisis and doubts of self-worth, especially when he felt that he wasn't useful to the Phantom Thieves anymore.
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Joker, obviously, for being the main character. Popular gay ships include Joker/Akechi, Joker/Yusuke, and Joker/Ryuji, while the top hetero ships are Joker/Makoto, Joker/Futaba, and Joker/Sadayo.
  • It's to the point where there's even a small but growing subgenre of shipping fic called Polythieves where Joker hooks up with the whole party at the same time, interdating within the harem optional.
• LGBT Fanbase:
  • Whatever reason it may be, due to androgynous design, or his dynamic with Joker, Goro Akechi seems to have a sizeable portion of fans who identify as somewhere on the LGBT Spectrum.
  • Gay male fans also tend to find Iwai a total Silver Fox.
  • A lot of lesbian fans seem to headcanon Makoto as being a butch lesbian despite her being a potential love interest for Joker, due to her strong "steel hiding velvet" type personality and the leather-biker image of her Queen outfit.
  • The LGBT Fanbase is so strong that there are plenty of memes going around essentially treating the Phantom Thieves as a Cast Full of Gay.
• Love to Hate:
  • Fans generally agree that Kamoshida is one of the best written and most delightfully despicable antagonist in the game. Some have gone as far as criticizing the game for peaking too early due to this.
  • The only other antagonist to rival Kamoshida in this category is Masayoshi Shido. He is responsible for ruining the life of The Protagonist over the pettiest reason and is willing murder innocents, including his own son all to improve his career. Fans seem to enjoy his onscreen appearance and love hearing his speeches, though clearly not as much as they love giving Shido the ass kicking he deserves.

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• Memetic Badass: Despite not having a Persona herself, popular Fanon has taken to portraying Sae Niijima as a Knight Templar Big Sister who is the one person capable of intimidating Joker.
• Memetic Molester: Tae Takemi. Her confidant starts off with her giving Joker an experimental drug that knocks him unconscious. Combine that with the fact that, should she be romanced, Takemi actually drops some Casual Kink foreplay. Naturally, it didn't take long for the fandom to have a field day with it. The anime adaptation takes it a step further by having Takemi preemptively offering Joker drugs rather than him having to convince her to take him on as a test subject like in the game.
• Memetic Mutation: Has its own page here.
• Memetic Loser:
  • Mishima gets this treatment both from fans and In-Universe, as he is treated as The Friend Nobody Likes by the Phantom Thieves, despite him being the admin of the Phan-Site. A lot of options the player can take during his Confidant involve the protagonist showing irritation towards him, and even Futaba mocks him via Brutal Honesty during Rank 5 of her Confidant.
  • Within the wake of the announcement of a new party member in the Updated Re-release, Hifumi has gotten this treatment given how she was supposed to be a party member but became a Confidant instead while a brand new character ended up joining the Phantom Thieves and Hifumi was still not a Phantom Thief. It doesn't help much that pre-release footage made it seem like P5R's story will diverge from the original Persona 5.
• Memetic Psychopath: Several of Haru's Mementos skits have her talking aloud about how much she enjoys fighting shadows, coupled with her having one of the more aggressive reactions despite remaining somewhat calm and composed should you cheat on her during Valentine's Day, has naturally lead to fans characterizing her as Cute and Psycho.
  Haru: "Why is it that I get a shiver of excitement whenever the Shadows plead for their lives?"
• Memetic Troll: Morgana, due to him dictating the player's time and refusing to let them do anything but sleep during several parts of the story, and after coming back home from the Metaverse. He quickly gained a reputation amongst players as "that asshole who keeps forcing me to go to bed."
• Misaimed Fandom: A decent-sized segment of the Western fandom wishes that a player had the option to flat-out execute the targets. This is despite a few key issues. Firstly, the idea of killing a target defeats the entire premise of stealing a target's heart as the Phantom Thieves; it makes the team into assassins instead of theives, making them no better than those who oppose them. Second, Ann explicitly shuts down killing a target when Kamoshida suggests it in favor of what is pointed out to be a Fate Worse than Death, with a better chance of positive side effects on top of that. Finally, the fallout from the Okumura arc, wherein Black Mask kills Okumura by killing his Shadow, leaving the Phantom Thieves to take the fall and ruining their reputation, demonstrates exactly why this is a very bad idea.
• Misblamed: The announcement of the free Japanese dub DLC and the announcement of the delay to April 4 were right next to each others, causing some fans to accuse the Japanese dub, or rather the fans who wanted it as the reason for the extended delay when the reality is the script took longer than usual. It got so bad that John Hardin, PR Manager of AtlusUSA, had to go onto the ''Persona 5'' subreddit and explain this.
• Moe:
  • Ann Takamaki is one of the most attractive characters but her dorky, yet cute mannerisms comes up when Yusuke asks her to become nude for his painting and she becomes adorably off-guard.
  • Futaba Sakura. With her odd but cute quirks and mannerisms, her Shrinking Violet nature, and her diminutive stature, she's incredibly endearing. She gets especially adorable should the player romance her, as once Joker confesses his love to her, she gets incredibly flustered around him, to the point that she completely shuts down for a good eight to nine text boxes. Additionally, she also has a rather tragic backstory which explains why she's a shut in. With all of this in mind, one can't help but want to give her a huge hug.
  • Haru Okumura. Her fluffy hair has brought comparisons to a sheep with a cute voice to match. She has a sweet personality, and her mannerisms in battle are adorable to watch. Her introduction to the Thieves as a rival "Beauty Thief" was her attempt at being a cool thief, only to keep messing up what lines she rehearsed, making the scene just kind of awkward, but in an endearing sort of way.
  • Makoto Niijima. She gets adorably flustered and hesitant whenever out of her rather narrow comfort zone. For instance, despite her seemingly tough exterior, she freaks the hell out when the Thieves are at Sojiro's house and the lights go out. There's also her tailing of the protagonist prior to joining the team while she hobbles around with a big manga book in her face.
• Moral Event Horizon: Fitting to the Darker and Edgier tone, this time the villains do not play around, to the point that two of them (Kamoshida and Shido) actually have an entry on Complete Monster above.
  • Kamoshida did a lot of terrible things, including causing Ryuji's Career-Ending Injury, spreading rumours of his home life (thereby provoking Ryuji into punching him and using that as an excuse to get the track team shut down just to make the volleyball club stand out more) and of the protagonist's record (thus turning him into a social pariah), and also harassing Ann. However, the one thing that makes the protagonist and the players conclude that he's crossed the line is his sexual assault on Ann's friend Shiho, which resulted her suicide attempt.
  • Madarame crossed this when he reveals that he allowed Yusuke's mother to die, all so he could claim the painting she had made as a memento for her son as his own work. While they're gathering intel on him, the Phantom Thieves are also told that Madarame's emotional abuse of his students was so intense that at least one of his students was Driven to Suicide — with the implication being that Yusuke could do the same if the abuse isn't dealt with.
  • Kaneshiro crossed the line in one of the bad endings, where it was implied that he kidnapped, drugged, and forced Makoto into prostitution. It doesn't actually happen, given that it's a false memory caused by the drugs, but when he makes comments about how Makoto might earn the money she needs to pay him off, it's clear that this is not out of character for him.
  • If Kunikazu Okumura did not cross it when he was implied to be a patron of the Black Mask who had his competitors assassinated via mental shutdowns, or his lack of regard for the welfare of his employees, he definitely crossed it with the horrible treatment of his daughter. Despite knowing that Haru's fiance is a Domestic Abuser, his shadow shows that he doesn't care and even encourages such behaviour as long as it benefits him.
  • The Traitor crossed this when he murdered the protagonist in the bad endings (something he attempts in the good ending route, but is tricked into killing a body double) as well as when he murdered Haru's father, and possibly Futaba's mother. As a hitman working for the main villain, they would have crossed the line before the series began, as they were also involved in the mental shutdowns and psychotic breakdowns, causing dozens of people to be seriously injured or killed over the period of about two years.
  • Shido has so many Kick the Dog moments it's hard to list all of them, but the biggest one is not only causing Futaba's mother's death, he also created a fake suicide note to make it look like Futaba's mother hated her and blamed Futaba for her death, in front of the rest of her relatives. While his crimes usually have the purpose of covering his own tracks to reap the benefits or a case of You Have Outlived Your Usefulness, the fact that he deliberately chose to ruin the life of an orphaned girl just shows how needlessly cruel he is.
    • Even in-universe, the Phantom Thieves felt he crossed it for the last time when he has Akechi disposed of for his murders (even though most of them were on his orders), with his cognitive version of him, no less, despite him being his own illegitimate son. When they confront Shido about the latter, he confirmed that he already suspected it, and figured that his whole alliance with him was really an attempt at revenge. For the Thieves and (possibly) the players, this ended up being the moment where he established that absolutely no one was safe from him. No matter who you are, if you get in his way, he will kill you. Even if he (or rather, his Shadow) has to do it himself.
  • The Dirty Cop who was interrogating the Protagonist in the beginning of the game crossed it when he beat the crap out of the Protagonist. including grinding his foot on his head and forcibly injecting him with truth drugs. He then proceeds to threaten to break the Protagonist's leg if he refuses to sign a False Confession, and should you refuse, he makes good on that threat.
  • Yaldabaoth may have long since crossed it when he bestowed the power of Personas to Goro Akechi, knowing full well of the atrocities he may commit while abusing that power. However, his definitive moment would be his Hope Crusher moment when the Phantom Thieves first confront the Holy Grail, where he slowly and painfully erases them from existence one by one. Afterwards, he as Igor orders Caroline and Justine to execute the Protagonist in a case of You Have Outlived Your Usefulness, all the while gleefully watching them from the sidelines. Of course, considering how close you came to finding out the truth, he's also simply smart enough to know that he should get rid of you while he still can. It's interesting to note that in contrast to Shido, his We Can Rule Together offer is actually genuine.
• More Popular Replacement: While Sojiro is seen as similar to Dojima from the previous game, Sojiro ends up being more popular for a few reasons. He tries somewhat harder to close the gap between himself and Futaba than Dojima did, although his success is limited by the fact that Futaba's issues are far worse than Nanako's. Late in the game, after learning that the protagonist and Futaba are Phantom Thieves, Sojiro asks for the full story and agrees to shelter them, in contrast to how Dojima decides to bring the protagonist in for questioning after getting the threatening letter. It also helps that Sojiro has a good amount of Character Development and gradually warms up to the protagonist.
• Most Annoying Sound:
  • Whether your navigator is Morgana or Futaba, they each only have one line for each party member knocking down an enemy. If said character uses their One More Turn to knock down another enemy, and then another, the same line is repeated over and over again, which quickly becomes incredibly grating. The lines for Morgana knocking down an enemy ("It's almost scary how good I am!" and "Bona Fide Monafied!") are generally agreed to be the worst.
  • "The opponent is strong, don't do anything reckless!" This is Makoto's analysis line for every boss and miniboss after she joins, so expect to hear it a lot if you need to check their affinities and moves. Even in battles with multiple enemies, she'll say this line for each one.
  • "Ooh, we can do this!" During the school exams, Morgana says this every single time you correctly answer a question. If you know the answers, expect to hear that soundbyte several times in quick succession.
  • For some, Mementos's background music, which is a ten-second loop with no chorus or bridge. Regardless of your actual opinion, hearing it over and over may wear out its welcome real quick.
  • Short clips of speeches play pretty much everywhere in the Cruise Ship palace, and you will get tired of not only listening to these clips overlap each other to the point of them becoming unintelligible, but in the case you can understand them, hearing the same ones play over and over again.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The shattered-glass sound effect of an impending critical that accompanies a Super Move Portrait Attack, moreso when the same effect is used to announce one of Futaba's support interventions. Few things in the game are quite as satisfying as getting caught in a surprise attack only for Position Hack to trigger and turn the tables, and who doesn't love free heals and stat buffs?
  • Sojiro's "Let me explain!" sound bite which accompanies his coffee and curry trivia.
  • "Here come the buffs!" — It's already nice when your party receives a free group buff, but all three at once is really gratifying.
  • The popping in of character portraits after a battle, showing that they (or one of your Personas) have just levelled up. The more the better — and it's even more satisfying when it's then followed by a jingle indicating someone's learned a new skill.

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• Narm:
  • Ryuji's use of "effin'" sounds very weird and out-of-place. He's a Sir Swears-a-Lot who casually peppers his sentences with "shit", "bitch", and "asshole", yet he seemingly arbitrarily draws the line at "fuck". It ends up sounding like the voice actor really wasn't comfortable saying that specific word out loud. What's jarring is that his All-Out Attack cut-in has his quote saying "Freakin' boring", which sounds more natural than "effin'".
  • Every time you unlock a new Confidant, the story will flash-forward to the interrogation, where Sae will absolutely grill you in an attempt to get you to reveal the accomplice who, for instance, taught you how to handle a gun (i.e. a grade school kid who plays light gun games at an arcade).
  • The villainous Shadow Selves, for all of their cruelty and wickedness, are so gaudy and ridiculous-looking that it can come off as this. The most egregious offenders are Shadow Kamoshida, who's naked bar a cape and a pink speedo, Shadow Kaneshiro's non-threatening demon transformation (and battle robot), and Shadow Okumura's Darth Vader suit.
  • After The Reveal that Akechi sold you out, his Confidant levels up to Rank 8. While it's similar to Adachi's Social Link from the Golden re-release in how it plays out (the player's bond "deepens" after being betrayed), it still feels kind of silly, especially considering that in this game, you hear the protagonist's thoughts on what happens around him instead of the second-person narration 4 used.
  • The scene before said reveal of the Traitor. The game painfully drags out the "suspense" of who the Traitor is, long after even the most Genre Blind player would have figured it out. The game even outright plays you a recording of the character talking about how they're going to kill you after they betray you, without any real attempt to disguise their voice. And yet you are still subjected to several minutes of the pronoun game before it is dramatically revealed that yes, the Traitor was Akechi the whole time.
  • The game's "sadness" theme is a blues track that sounds almost lighthearted compared to those of previous games. This isn't an issue when in plays during Confidants, as it fits with the style of the rest of the Confidant music. But it really doesn't fit many of the story moments it plays in, such as Goro Akechi's Bolivian Army Ending.
  • The scene toward the beginning of the game's last act where the Big Bad and the Traitor longwindedly describe their own backstories to each other is often singled out as the worst-written scene in the game, as it serves absolutely no in-universe purpose and exists entirely for the benefit of the audience.
  • During her interrogation to Joker, Sae constantly points out that "their time is short", and she often checks her watch and complains that they're running out of time. However, you spend around 100 hours of gameplay reliving the entire story up to that point. Even if Joker isn't actually telling her everything in-universe, it still feels like the longest short interrogation ever!
  • After the Phantom Thieves are erased from existence, you go around finding your teammates once again, reaffirming their faith in what they do and how they can fix society together, which gets diminished by the fact that you do this for every single teammate individually except Morgana, and each time it's the exact same "character feels down, pick any choice from a couple dialogue trees, and they get back up with determination". The first one feels awesome, but since they're all located right next to each other with no gameplay distractions between them, the impact of these scenes quickly gets undermined by their rapid-fire nature. If you happen to talk to Ann last of the group — which is very likely, since she's the furthest away from your starting point (alongside Haru) — you get this line when she responds to Lavenza calling out to you:
  Ann: "What was voice?"
  • Haru's father's death and its aftermath takes place while you're at the game's version of Disneyland, complete with some of the characters wearing goofy animal ear headbands in front of a giant pink castle with fireworks in the sky. To say it's jarring is an understatement.
  • Makoto's All-Out Attack portrait makes her look cartoonishly surprised or shocked instead of composed or tough like the others do, and even bears somewhat of a resemblance to the surprised chipmunk meme◊.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Ryuji's No Indoor Voice tendencies nearly got the Phantom Thieves in trouble twice, but fans tend to treat it like he does that on a regular basis.
  • The time where Morgana ended up leaving the Phantom Thieves. To this day, fans debate on who is to blame for what ended up happening then and it became huge reasons why both Morgana and Ryuji ended up having a mixed reception among the fans.
  • At the beginning of Kaneshiro's arc, Makoto will follow you around the overworld while pretending to read a manga magazine. The game will even have her run up to Joker if he stops walking. A lot of fans remember her for this alone.
  • Yusuke's fascination with the lobsters during the beach scene. It's only one small scene, but that hasn't stopped fans from believing that he is interested in lobsters.
  • Haru's colorful comments about the Shadows in Mementos and her reaction on Valentine's Day if you cheat on her has given her a reputation in the fandom of being Cute and Psycho.
  • Similar to Adachi and cabbages, fans have taken to making Akechi obsessed with pancakes all of because one line he stated.
  • Akechi's Alas, Poor Villain moment in the game is often considered to be poorly executed, and as a result, he gained a huge amount of detractors just for that moment.
• Nightmare Retardant: The Reaper is an intimidating and very powerful Bonus Boss. Except during Flu Season, where he can automatically die to despair. He also talks in You No Take Candle.
  The Reaper: Me not want to talk to you. Me just want to hear your screams!
• No Yay:
  • There is a subset of the fandom that ships Kamoshida with Ann or, less commonly, Ryuji or Mishima, all characters who have either been sexually harassed or physically abused by him.
  • Akechi/Shido has a following in the fandom, despite the fact that Shido is Akechi's father and both of them are aware of this fact. This ship gained traction as Shido is shown to not be above manipulating people for his own gain, and has had Akechi under his thumb as his personal assassin for at least two years. Akechi's supposed Uncanny Family Resemblance to his dead mother and attitude towards Shido doesn't help matters.

O

• Obvious Judas: You know from the beginning of the game that someone betrayed you, so the only question is who. As detailed under Captain Obvious Reveal and The Un-Twist, it isn't hard to figure out that it's Akechi, who's the last person to join your party, his Confidant bonuses not showing him being able to learn Endure next, something every other party member has, is the one most vocally opposed to the Thieves' methods, the one who didn't get a commercial, and he doesn't appear in the opening movie despite his presence on the game's box art and title screen. Even his DLC costumes don't try to hide this, with him having costumes such as Ideo Hazama, Jun Kurosu, Thomas Mutton, and General Munakata, all major antagonists of their respective games.
• One True Threesome: Being the founders of the Phantom Thieves and a very strong Power Trio, fans have taken to shipping Joker/Ryuji/Ann together, with Morgana usually on the periphery but not involved in the dirty particulars for obvious reasons.

• Older Than They Think: Many mechanics from the older Persona games and even from other Shin Megami Tensei titles have re-entered this game in some capacity.
  • The Kouha (Light) and Eiha (Dark) magic spells are from the original Persona. While they're classified as "Expel" and "Death" spells in that game, the principle of Light and Dark still applies, as Hama and Mudo also fell under those categories in that game. The Frei (Nuclear) line of spells was also used in both the first Persona and in Persona 2, and finally, Psy (Psychic) originates from Devil Summoner; technically, the Psy prefix came from Megami Tensei, but it was the original name for the Zan line of spells.
  • Ailments are now divided into Physiological (curable with Patra) and Psychological (curable with Energy Drop). Ailments in Persona 1 and Persona 2, as well as some other titles like Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne, were also divided into different categories, albeit under different titles (Mind, Nerve, etc.).
  • Using guns as a separate melee attack is present in almost all of the mainline games, some spinoffs, and in Persona 1.
  • The most damaging single-target ice spell is named "Diamond Dust," a spell from Persona 2. Same with Inferno and Deadly Burn for Fire magics.
  • After Persona 3 and Persona 4 used more of a drop / chance mechanic in terms of tarot cards for gaining Persona personally, the negotiation system from both the first two titles as well as the main Shin Megami Tensei series returns (albeit revised in that you can only negotiate with Shadows when they're all knocked down).
  • In the West, some have confused Ann's persona, Carmen, with Carmen Sandiego as opposed to the character from the eponymous novella/opera due to Sandiego's well-established reputation as a classy Gentlewoman Thief among Westerners in their thirties and and younger.
  • Dungeons inspired by the Seven Deadly Sins was already done in its Spiritual Predecessor Shin Megami Tensei if... if it can be considered a Persona game.
• One-Scene Wonder: The Traitor's true persona, Loki. Its only appearance is during Akechi's Villainous Breakdown and his boss battle. Yet in those short moments it received praise for its unique design and how it suits Akechi's character.

P-R

• Paranoia Fuel:
  • The Conspiracy, which can travel to another world and make almost any person go berserk or mentally shut down with no warning whatsoever. After Shido's defeat, the remaining members reveal they planned on doing this on a global scale to make Japan a world power. So no one, not even people living outside of Japan, is safe.
  • The Reveal of the true Big Bad. He's been right there, watching you the whole time, in the guise of Igor. Every time you entered the Velvet Room to fuse Personas, you were staring a malevolent Eldritch Abomination in the face. And that "rehabilitation" he kept referring to? An excuse to keep tabs on you all the time.
• Relationship Writing Fumble: Ann and Ryuji bicker to the point of Belligerent Sexual Tension. This works fine if you're not in a relationship with Ann. If you do choose to enter into one with her, be prepared for a lot of very awkward cutscenes when it looks like your girlfriend is on the verge of confessing her love to your best friend.
• Replacement Scrappy: Towards western audiences, Goro Akechi is considered to be one to Persona 4's Tohru Adachi. Some fans felt that Akechi is a poor rehash of Adachi due to their notable similarities including being corrupt detectives and psychopathic murderers, while lacking the qualities that made Adachi endearing as a villain.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: A lot of players dislike Sae at first, particularly when she, in a fit of anger, calls her own sister useless and nothing more than a drain on her life out of nowhere. Toward the end of the game, however, many of those players warm up to Sae, when she proves one of the more sympathetic targets, then becomes a highly useful ally to the Thieves after changing herself without having her heart stolen.
• Ron the Death Eater: The Traitor Goro Akechi is an unusual case where they're both this and a Draco in Leather Pants. While the game doesn't attempt to justify their murders, a large segment of the western fanbase demonises them as an outright monster who is just as bad, if not worse, than his father Shido, and tend to ignore any of their redeeming traits.

S

• The Scrappy:
  • The Camp Gay NPC duo that the player encounters in Shinjuku and the beach. While the jokes about Kanji's sexuality in Persona 4 were polarizing, many players disliked the pair for being unfunny stereotypes, especially in their beach scene. Due to Atlus' previous experiences with non-stereotypical LGBT portrayal (Kanji and Persona 2's Jun, an openly gay party member who was also a romance option), the pair come across as a glaring step back. To make matters worse, they are implied to be attracted to minors.
  • Eiko from Makoto's Confidant is not very well liked among players. The main criticism is that most of the Confidant is more focused on her with most of Makoto's Character Development in it being reliant on her. She constantly acts stupid, shallow, and spoiled, and is also widely disliked for not listening to Makoto as a result of becoming blinded by her "love" for Tsukasa. In spite of being one of Makoto's first friends, Eiko treats her terribly.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Free time matters in Persona games and Persona 5 is no exception. Just like previous Persona games, however, there are still moments—mostly evenings after days with plot-related events—when the protagonist is sent straight to bed by Morgana because he's "probably sleepy". Or worse, only because Morgana himself is sleepy. Apparently, he needs to follow the protagonist everywhere he goes. The most glaring cases of this is during mid-May and early July, two points at which the player spends almost all day doing story related content, then heading home and having to go to bed. Worse yet is that these two examples are not just one day, but include multiple days straight, with early July having the player go almost three weeks straight being unable to do anything after class^note After the player beats Kaneshiro, you have only a day or two of time to do anything before final exams hit, which gives means you have almost four days of not being allowed time, before starting the next mission to go after Futaba, which itself has several days straight of being unable to anything but go to sleep. People have expressed their frustration at not even being allowed to quickly return rented DVD's^note as you will be fined for returning them too late, although the first fine is waived or read a book at home. Unlike Persona 3 and 4, this was only bad when it came time to talking to certain characters just to initiate certain S.Links such as MAX knowledge/academics for Naoto/Mitsuru respectively; but in Persona 5, almost all of them require a maxed or very high attribute stat at some point in the game to finish. A number of players have noted that this could have been mitigated to a certain degree with a simple change of delivery; if it was the protagonist claiming he was exhausted and calling it a night it could at least be seen as personal decision and not one pushed on you by Morgana.
  • The inability to turn Confidant skills off. There are several skills, such as Ryuji's Insta-kill and several of Yoshida's later skills, that could potentially hurt more than they help, thus meaning you can't ever proceed with their Confidants if you feel the negatives outweigh the positives, something that would be easily negated by allowing every ability to be toggled on and off.
  • When you secure a route to the Treasure and get the ability to send the calling card, you can't hang out with any of your party members until you've sent the card and beaten the boss. In a game that requires so much time management, this can be a pain. However, this can be worked around: if you go your hideout and trigger the one-time meeting discussing said calling card, then when available, exit the hideout without sending it, everything will go back to normal (if not that day, then either that evening or tomorrow at the latest).
  • Whenever you leave LeBlanc, no matter the situation, you can't go back in without advancing the day, even on Sunday and summer vacation, where you usually start in LeBlanc. Curiously, this only applies during the day. The player can freely leave and return during the evenings.
  • The high attribute requirements themselves have been commented on as being a particularly annoying aspect of the game for some players. As noted above, almost every Confidant will require one, and some seem ridiculously high for the point at which the Confidant appears in the game. For example, Makoto appears in the middle of the game, but not only do you need Rank 3 Knowledge just to get started, you'll require a maxed Charm stat to get past Level 5. Haru is the last team Confidant, and you better have your Proficiency maxed before she joins, or your chances of max ranking her Confidant are close to nil, given the limited amount of time you have. If you're playing blind, there's no way to know which stat(s) you should work on first, and many of the Confidants that the stats are tied to are somewhat unintuitive (for example, Haru seems as though she'd be tied to Kindness or Charm rather than Proficiency).
    • Some Confidants really rub the players nose in it too, what with continuing to reward players with points in Stats that, by neccessity, would already be maxed.
    • Even more irritating is when the in-game reasons for those caps are so arbitrary and silly: you need to be Rank 2 and Rank 4 in Kindness to hang out with Ann and Futaba because you need to be a sympathetic and sensitive ear to their problems, despite having helped them through much more challenging emotional crises in the regular story; you need to be Max Rank in Charm to finish Makoto's confidant because Eiko apparently has very high standards for her friend's boyfriends (despite dating the greasiest-looking man to ever exist); and you need to be Rank 4 and Max Rank Proficiency in order to finish Yusuke's confidant and begin Haru's because the door to Madarame's shack is jammed and because Haru might need you to move around bags of compost (despite how most of her Confidant takes place in other locations). There are very few legitimate reasons why you cannot help these people to progress in their personal quests, which makes the caps seem more unfair and unneeded.
  • The total stat cap makes it much more tedious to customize the Persona you want. Unlike previous games where you can max Personas through items, this game imposes a stat limit based on the Persona's level (a total of 304 stat points to work with). While this adds more balance to the game, it can also potentially make higher-leveled Personas worse than lower-leveled Personas due to having less room to level them up with the stats you want and possibly having more weaknesses than lower-leveled Personas.
• Ship Mates:
  • Ryuji/Ann is a popular ship that goes well with many other ships, so you often see shippers who prefer Joker with other girls or guys allying with them.
  • Besides the above, many Joker/Makoto shippers rub shoulders with Yusuke/Futaba shippers. Bizarrely, they also sometimes Pair the Spares by throwing in Akechi/Haru of all things.
  • Joker/Futaba shippers like to ship Makoto/Haru instead. Yusuke, meanwhile, is often shipped with art.
  • Among the series as a whole, Joker/Ann shippers are usually those who shipped Yu/Rise in the previous game.
  • People who ship Joker with either Akechi or someone outside the main party often end up shipping Ryuji/Ann, Yusuke/Futaba and Makoto/Haru as a variation of Pair the Spares, in which "the spares" consists of the entire rest of your party.
  • While it mostly happens amongst the Japanese fanbase, fans of Joker/Akechi tend to also ship Shido/Akechi, usually to show how both ships contrast each other.
• Ship-to-Ship Combat:
  • This is most common between Joker/Ann and Joker/Makoto. Points that often show up in arguments range from (but are certainly not limited to) Ann being this game's Lovers Arcana and one of the first love interests you meet, to Makoto being relevant to more dungeons than Ann is, having Kaneshiro's act as her introduction but her sister Sae's being more personal for her, and her popularity in the Western fandom.
  • Joker/Futaba is an odd case, as even though fans end up in conflicts with the aformentioned Joken/Ann and Joker/Makoto fans, as well as Yusuke/Futaba fans, there's even fighting among people who like the interactions between the two. Some fans of the pairing prefer presenting them as being a platonic Like Brother and Sister relationship due to Futaba being Sojiro's adopted daughter, as well as Sojiro serving as a father figure of sorts to the protagonist. Since she's also a romance option, pairing her romantically with Joker is also popular. This fighting is exclusive to the Western fanbase, as Japanese fans see Joker as Futaba's caregiver of sorts and not a big brother figure.
  • A particular nasty one goes on between shippers of Joker/Akechi and those who ship Joker with others (usually another guy or Makoto), mostly on Tumblr, due to Akechi being The Mole and trying to murder the protagonist. People belonging to the latter group have even gone as far as to harass Akechi cosplayers at conventions.
  • Akechi/Haru fans often come into conflict with fans who ship either half of the pairing with other characters, usually Joker/Akechi and Makoto/Haru fans, due to Akechi killing Haru's father and Haru making it explicit that she can't forgive him for it.
  • Joker/Akechi vs. Shido/Akechi gets nasty from time to time, although this conflict usually comes from people going out of their way to harass Shido/Akechi fans. It reached a point where an infamous "block list" circulated around Twitter listing every artist and fan of Shido/Akechi. While this list seemed to have been created to protect people from potentially upsetting content due to Shido being Akechi's father, the block list also included people who weren't fans of Shido/Akechi, who were only on the list because they were nice to Shido/Akechi fans.
• Shipping Goggles: There's a group of fans that ship Ryuji with Akechi of all people, despite Ryuji making it very clear that he's never liked Akechi and Akechi's true colors implying he hates him just as much. Fans of this ship tend to use Ryuji's blantant, loud hatred for Akechi as Tsundere Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today? material.
• Ships That Pass in the Night:
  • Makoto/Ann has a fairly strong following among the fandom especially those who support Les Yay couples. In the game proper however, Makoto and Ann barely interact one on one with the only moments of doing so being the apology after Makoto joins the team, eating flan together, and buying Futaba a swimsuit. There's also the added fact that Makoto is shown to be closer to Haru than she is to Ann, making this ship seem even more odd.
  • Despite interacting only a few times, Yuuki and Shiho tend to get paired together a lot, mostly due to the abuse they both suffered at the hands of Kamoshida.
  • Sojiro and Iwai are frequently paired up together in fanworks, despite never interacting with one another; it's entirely possible that they've never even met. Their popularity stems from the fact that they're both seemingly gruff older men with a heart of gold, who are raising a child who isn't biologically theirs, and who happen to become a father figure to Joker throughout the story.
• Signature Scene:
  • The bad ending in which the protagonist is shot dead by Akechi in the interrogation room became one of these when the game was released, inspiring parodies and memes.
  • The shot of Joker's face covered in blood while giving a Slasher Smile alone has become very iconic to the Persona games. The in-game cutscene itself has him ripping his mask off to make his face bleed in the first place, followed by him being engulfed in flames before his persona Arsène reveals himself.
  • April 15th gives us the scene where Shiho attempts suicide due to how emotionally powerful it is.
  • For those who have completed the game, the summoning of Satanael, and his subsequent dispatching of Yaldabaoth via headshot is a truly epic grand finale.
• Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped:
  • 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. This is particularly relevant in Japan, where the game was made and is set, since respect for social superiors is hard-wired into the culture to the point that many have problems standing up to people who abuse their power. All of the game's villains are the kind of people Japanese society demands respect for, which is why in game it's important to see how the ones who have done nothing to deserve it, and by extension are abusing this system for their own ends, have no way of being redeemed without fundamentally changing who they are as people.
  • On this subject, the idea of seeking approval from society or one's superiors as a means of determining one's actions is heavily criticized. The Bystander Syndrome demonstrated by Ann and Yusuke early in the game, where they seek to placate the desires of their corrupt authority figures so as to not anger them, is an obvious example. But a more subtle example comes from The Phantom Thieves as a whole, seeking approval from society and being baited into targeting Kunikazu Okumura primarily due to his popularity as a target on the Phan-Site, and suffering because of it.
  • 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 is also 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. Ties into applicability as well, as many western viewers, particularly BUT MOST CERTAINLY NOT LIMITED TO, younger players can sympathize with being exploited into working more and more hours with smaller and smaller pay, the reduction of overtime and the lack of health benefits while some out-of-touch CEO makes millions, belittling others about what hard work and sacrifice entails.
• Squick:
  • As if Kamoshida's lust and sexual harassment of students wasn't bad enough, one of the minibosses of his dungeon is a slime Mara. Shadow Asakura, a man whose misdeeds- forcing prospective idols to have sex with him in exchange for his assistance- are similar to Kamoshida's, also turns into Mara when fought.
  • An in-universe example occurs when Joker, Skull and Mona find Kamoshida's topless harem in the Palace, writhing and moaning in ecstasy (remember, these are high school students):
  Ryuji: This is effed up... Is that what he thinks of the girls on the volleyball team...?!
  • The concept art of Kamoshida's boss form is even more disturbing than the final version, as the "Trophy of Obsession" (full of female legs) is not only positioned in his crotch area, it's also seeping white liquid.
  • They couldn't make the party fight an endgame-tier demon like Mara in the first dungeon, so they put in just the tip.
• Superlative Dubbing: The script itself has issues in terms of writing quality and a lot of the lines, especially in the main quest, can be wooden or a bit poorly written, and some of the direction is also working against them (Atlus reps themselves dictated the strange pronunciation of a number of the Japanese names as per Word of God), but god damn if a lot of the cast members aren't working their hearts out trying to sell it all anyway. Max Mittelman, Erika Harlacher, Cherami Leigh and Erica Lindbeck (as Ryuji, Ann, Makoto and Futaba respectively) are often cited as particularly excellent performances, despite all the hurdles in front of them, and Leigh's in particular is a contributor to Makoto's high standing among the English fanbase. For npc's, the voice acting done by Elizabeth Maxwell, Jamieson Price, Michelle Ruff, and Kirsten Potter (as Sae, Sojiro, Kawakami, and Takemi) have received notable praise as well, with their great acting contributing to them being among the most popular characters in the game on par with the main characters. The antagonists also get a fair share of praise, with D.C. Douglas, and Keith Silverstein (as Kamoshida, and Shido) earning high praise for how entertaining they make their villains sound and help bring them up from Hate Sink bad guys, to Love to Hate villains. Even Akechi received praise thanks to Robbie Daymond giving a great performance, especially when Akechi snaps before his boss fight.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The theme of The Final Boss sounds like a heavily modified version of the first few notes of Jared Dines's Djent Wars Round Three solo.
  • The main piano riff in the track "Swear to My Bones" sounds similar to a Recurring Riff from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, found in the tracks "Courage", a section of Hyrule Field theme, and possibly others.
  • The driving guitar from "Rivers in the Desert" may evoke thoughts of "custom kitchen delivery" and "chicks for free" for Dire Straits fans.

T

• Take That, Scrappy!:
  • Goro Akechi is a very controversial character in the West, and every dialogue choice the player can make towards him will always include at least one choice to act antagonistic towards him. This includes an option to kick him out of LeBlanc during the Okumura's Palace arc, even if the player plans on doing nothing there.

• While more of a Base-Breaking Character than a full-on scrappy, Mishima gets a lot of these moments. Most of the Phantom Thieves treat Mishima as The Friend Nobody Likes, and his Confidant is one of the few that will always rank up regardless of how you treat him, and the game gives you several dialogue choices to express irritation towards him. Mishima even gets brought in during Rank 5 of Futaba's Confidant, and she mocks him via Accidental Misnaming and Brutal Honesty.

Futaba: Ah, I've got it! This overwhelming forgettable appearance, generic speech style, and total lack of sex appeal... Nishima... Are you an NPC!?

• That One Achievement:
  • The trophy for "Hear 250 Navigator Lines" that was also present in Persona 4. It's difficult to achieve due to A: the huge variety of quotes needed, B: the lack of any sort of list or progress meter to aid the process and C: the highly contextual requirements for some quotes. If it's anything like it was in 4, a player may go through the game several times and still not get the achievement. It doesn't help that one of your party members leaves forever, denying you some character-specific lines if you haven't gotten them already. On one hand, the lines you get in a playthrough don't carry over to the next, but on the other, it's not limited to battle lines; any voiced line from Futaba that appears in the upper-right corner (including Mementos driving conversations, scanning a floor, etc) does count toward the trophy.
  • The trophy for buying every kind of drink from vending machines can be a bit tricky to keep track of, mainly because you will often have drinks that you didn't buy from a vending machine and they do not account towards the trophy. There's also various vending machines throughout the city that carry different drinks.
  • Another trophy that's somewhat difficult to obtain is the one for freeing a hostage through negotiation. Since it requires one of your party members to be knocked down (either via critical hit or weakness exploitation) without being killed, it can be difficult to trigger the necessary conditions for a hostage negotiation. This achievement usually comes from getting lucky in the first dungeon, as after that weakness hits will either KO your party members outright or do too little damage to prompt a hostage situation. It's not uncommon for players to play the entire game without realizing the hostage mechanic even exists.
  • The play-all-the-retro-games achievement can be this for players who don't also play fighting games. One of the games, Power Intuition, requires the player to execute a few combos requring quarter- and half-circles on the D-pad. If you're a fighting game fan, it's pretty basic. If you're terrible at fighting games though, it can be a struggle. Train of Life is also very annoying, as even with the in-universe Cheat Code it's still entirely luck-based, which forces a lot of Save Scumming.
• That One Attack:
  • Yaldabaoth's "Rays of Control", the boss's Last Ditch Move. The first time he uses it, he revives all of his Cognizant Limbs, then he spends two turns charging up before hitting your party with an amount of damage dependent on how many arms are left. Given that this is an attack that the boss charges up, many player's first instinct is to do nothing but block. However, doing so means that all the arms are still alive, which means that most likely the attack will be powerful enough to KO the entire party, meaning you have to start the whole fight over again. Also, even if you survive, you'll still have to deal with the revived arms.
  • The Hama and Mudo spells return and still have a chance of causing an instant kill. All it takes is a single enemy getting lucky for it to instantly kill a party member, or worse Joker, and force a restart.
  • Status ailment skills in general have been given a significant buff to their success rate compared to earlier games, and while this is a good thing for you (see Game-Breaker), it's not so good when enemies use them. The two worst by far are Brain Jack and Abysmal Surge. The former inflicts Brainwash, which is essentially the Charm status from Persona 3 but somehow even worse as not only can Brainwashed characters heal enemies (including full heal spells), they can now also cast buffs on them. Additionally, it opens them up to Technical damage from Psi skills (Which many bosses capitalize on). The latter inflicts Despair, which causes affected characters to be unable to move for 3 turns, losing SP each time, and then outright die. Items to cure it are rare, and Makoto's Energy Shower won't help if she also gets hit with Despair. Abysmal Surge hitting the whole party is essentially an automatic Game Over.
• That One Boss:
  • Madarame is generally agreed to be one of the harder Palace bosses, after the Warm-Up Boss that was Kamoshida. He's fought as 4 separate portraits, all of which get their own turns and can revive eachother if they're not defeated at the same time. The eyes absorb fire, ice, elec, and wind, the mouth absorbs physical and bullets, and the nose absorbs nuclear, bless, curse, and psi, limiting the effectiveness of multi-hitting attacks that would otherwise make the fight easier. He also has the full array of elemental spells to hit your party's weaknesses, can buff his Attack and lower your Defense, and from the second phase onward he can inflict an ailment that makes one character weak to everything. He loves to follow this up with a Defense-debuff, essentially forcing that character to waste a turn guarding or die. You have to go through at least two rounds of this with the only saving graces being the pieces coming back with less HP each time and the third phase letting you turn his weakness paint against him.
  • Shido can be a pretty huge roadblock as well. He has FIVE different phases, the first four of which serve to soften you up for his brutal final phase. To wit: he gets an extra turn for throwing party-wide damage from every element in the game at you, fishing for weaknesses in addition to doing everything the fourth phase does (a physical Fear-inducing attack and several (de)buffs); if he gets a knockdown, he'll follow it up with a One-Hit Kill attack, another Fear inducer, or Heat Riser to buff all his stats, all of which are really bad because he already hits like a truck on steroids. Your saving grace in the fight is that his rotation for the party-wide skills is predetermined, so having mass party-swap (max Star Confidant) or magic walls at the right times can lessen the sting, but if you lack both, Shido will get three guaranteed knockdowns over the course of the fight, which can snowball into a Game Over very quickly.
  • For Mementos bosses, Shadow Fukurai. He's the boss required for the Fortune Confidant, and is a LOT harder than any other C Rank target. He has huge defence and a lot of HP, even with his Ice weakness he takes a while to bring down. Worse, he has the ever-annoying Brain Jack, which inflicts Brainwash on the party, causing them to attack eachother or heal and buff him. Even worse, he can follow it up with Mapsio, hitting Brainwashed characters for Technical damage. The worst part about this is that Makoto, the one party member at that point who can cure Brainwash, is weak to Psi. And he will always follow up a One More with Marakunda, ensuring your party won't survive another Mapsio. If you've unlucky, he can open the fight with Brain Jack before you even get a turn, and if it hits the whole party you're at a major disadvantage right from the start. He also has Eigaon, the endgame-tier Curse skill, and when that's the move you want to see, you know there's a problem.
• That One Level:
  • Although Futaba's Palace is a Breather Level, the final section after sending the Calling Card is absurdly difficult for people on their first play through. With the previous Palaces, when the player sends the Calling Card they had a straight-shot to the treasure and boss fight, avoiding any enemies and fighting the boss at full health and SP. Futaba's Palace though throws in several enemies that the player can't ambush since they're all on alert, and while the enemies are extensions of the previous areas, the enemies will almost certainly damage the party and even kill a few if you try to avoid them. Worse is that there is some treasure and a chest but getting to it and not wasting both HP and SP is almost impossible since the pathway splits but enemies are set in places where the player has no cover to use. The set up too prevents players from just running to the boss since the enemies are in tight pathways and little cover, so it is very easy for a player to rush towards the boss, get ambushed, and die in a few turns as a result.
  • Okumura's Palace has gotten this treatment due to several of the enemies being resistant/reflective of physical damage and/or gunshots, having most of the areas lacking in proper cover to utilize stealth and ambush opponents, and a very confusing and difficult Airlock puzzle at the end. Okumura also gives you a time limit of 30 minutes not just to defeat him, but also getting to the launchport on time and fighting the Shadows en route.
  • Shido's Palace has mouse puzzles which are lengthy and have tons of backtracking, narrow hallways that make it difficult to avoid enemies, and five minibosses that have to be completed in order to clear the way to the treasure and it springs a two-phase boss fight on you after the last miniboss.
• That One Puzzle:
  • The airlock puzzles in the last third of Okumura's Palace, particularly the one just before the Treasure. To elaborate, you'll have to deal with airlocks that alternate between being opened and closed, some of which change when you flip a switch and some of which change when you pass through them. There's several different colors, making it fairly difficult to unlock the ones you need in order to proceed.
  • Also in Okumura's Palace, finding the Chief Director and obtaining his key card. This involves you traversing an area of his Palace where there are several offices each housing giant robots that look similar to one another. However only ONE of them is the guy you need to face and the others do not have to be fought. How do you figure out who the Chief Director is? You have to listen in on the conversations of robot workers who will provide very specific details about him that you must remember. You can avoid fighting the optional ones provided you choose the right dialogue options.^note That said, many of those optional fights allow you to discover their weaknesses during the Okumura boss, allowing you to speed the process up and save time.
  • The mice puzzles in Shido's Palace. They aren't particularly difficult but are lengthy and repetitive with a good deal of backtracking involved. There are also FOUR of these puzzles that must be completed in order to progress through the dungeon making it feel even more tedious. While you're turned into mice, you still have worry about not running into enemies as doing so will trigger a battle where everyone in your party has the mice ailment and is thus unable to do anything.
• That One Sidequest: A few of the Confidants qualify.
  • Chihaya's Confidant takes a lot of time and money to establish. First, you have to get a fortune telling, then pay 100,000 yen for a "holy stone" (she pays you back later but this is a steep price, especially early on in the game), then complete a mission in Mementos and finally talk to her to start the link. It also has a particularly difficult Mementos mission needed to pass Rank 7.
  • Sadayo's Confidant requires you to pay money every time you spend time with her, even visits that don't result in a rank-up. The Mementos request required to finish it can also be tricky, in that it requires her to approach you on a school day once you've reached Rank 8. If you reach this point during Summer Vacation, the Confidant will be stalled for a long time. Worse, leave the Confidant too late and you'll be at the point where Joker stops attending school, cutting off your chances of completing it.
  • Like with Mitsuru and Naoto, Haru's Confidant is the last to open up, and has steep stat requirements (maxed out Proficiency is required to progress past Rank 1).
  • Sojiro's confidant begins fairly early on, but not only do you need to wait for Futaba to join in order to progress to the latter half of the confidant, but you also need to max out your Kindness and defeat a Duel Boss that, unlike other Mementos bosses, takes up its own afternoon, to complete the confidant. What also stands out is rank 3 to 4 of the Confidant which is abnormally slow to advance — players have argued over how much coffee they need to make or how much time they need to spend with Sojiro to nudge that rank up.
  • While Iwai's confidant is available around the start of the second dungeon (since you only need to be able to travel outside Yongen-jaya at night), it requires Rank 4 Guts to start, and maxed out guts to complete. The requirements are steep enough that you may not be able to start it for several months, and might not finish it on a playthrough.
  • Progressing through Makoto's Confidant requires eventually having to max out the protagonist's Charm stat, one of the hardest stats to max out on the first playthrough. However, once you have the stat requirements leveling up her Confidant itself isn't terribly difficult since as long as you answer her Confidant answers correctly, you will not have to go through any holdovers.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Some fans viewed the Confidants as wasted opportunities as a whole. With a few exceptions such as Sojiro, the game seems to treat the Confidants on a more professional level rather than as friends and feel less personalised than the Social Links of the previous games. Rather than focusing on the relationship between the Confidants and the protagonist himself, the focus instead shifts to the relationship between the Confidants and some out-of-nowhere side character. Afterwards, the player has to go to the Metaverse and change that guy's heart in order to progress, rinse and repeat.
  • As always in Persona games, fans like to speculate about the supporting characters gaining personas and becoming playable, but Hifumi Togo stands out, as she was originally planned as a party member. In addition to this, despite enrolling in the same school as Yusuke, they don't interact at all, and Yusuke simply mentions her once while Hifumi never talks about him at all. Instead, it's Makoto who can interact well with her due to both being smart and bookish girls and showed more concern to her when Hifumi's mother becomes a Mementos target.
  • A lot of people wish Shiho were a confidant outright, but her only role in the plot after Kamoshida's arc is resolved is a brief appearance in Ann's ninth-rank conversation, although Ann does often talk about her friendship with Shiho.
  • Some fans feel that Lala Escargot should have been a Confidant. She averts the tendencies of making Gonk characters jerks by being a legitimately nice person and a Benevolent Boss for the protagonist as well as trying to keep Ohya in check. She is also mentioned as the best example of LGBT representation on the game, which is a touchy subject for western fans.
  • Many feel so much more could have been done with Goro Akechi, especially given he outright disappears from the story after the events of Shido's Palace and is completely absent for the final battle against Yaldabaoth. A common example of this is that many viewed his Bolivian Army Ending scene as being poorly written, leaving those who were expecting Akechi to redeem himself and rejoin the Phantom Thieves disappointed.
  • To some extent, Haru. While she has a significant role in the plot and receives a fair amount of Character Development, she only becomes involved late into the game, giving her character less room to develop (especially with how steep requirements are to progress in her social link). By comparison, Naoto joins in early October (shortly after Haru), but had been a recurring character since May. Moreover, the rewards her link yields is access to the only other source of free SP curatives in the game (the other being Sojiro's coffee and curry)- but her method is a garden which takes a few days at the very least to grow the items; meaning that by the point she can be accessed, this potential source will never be able to be used to its fullest potential. It also pales in comparison to using the coffee and curry made from Sojiro's Confidant, which the player can have Kawakami make for them, freeing them up to do more tasks that night, and improve at a good rate.
  • As an extension of Haru, there also comes Sugimura, Haru's fiance and an early antagonist during the Okumura Palace. He's introduced being Haru's abusive fiance and is the catalyst behind there needing to be a deadline to complete Okumura's palace. And then he largely disappears from the remainder of the story. He also appears early in Haru's confidant but again disappears from the remainder of the game with his engagement with Haru being resolved entirely off-screen. A lot a players felt that Sugimura should have, to the very least, been a Mementos Target given how much attention he was given early in the game.
  • In a surprising way, the Protagonist himself. Unlike the previous two main characters who were working to save people without really an end goal in mind, Joker pushes forward with the bigger picture constantly in check, not only managing to be the most calculating and proactive MC in the series, but also the first to desire change at a social level rather than just individually. Unfortunately, him being another self-insert Heroic Mime as per series tradition has not gone well with many fans (particularly series' newcomers), since he is also a surprisingly tragic character with a more fleshed out personality than the previous protagonists, leaving much of his character as well as his reactions to all the terrible things that happen to him through the entire game up to interpretation. Thus, many fans agree that giving him a consistent voice would have been incredibly tantalizing to anyone who enjoys character analysis and development.
  • Toranosuke Yoshida. Considering that the late-game centers largely around Shido's attempts to run for prime minister, and that early in his confidant line his entirely-earnest rhetoric is unfairly called a rehash of Shido just saying what the people want to hear, he very easily could've been given some sort of role in the actual plot.
  • Ichiko in terms of her ability in relation to the story. Her Confidant role was to be a rumor monger yet all her ability could do is reduce the Alert level in Palaces. Those who remembered the rumor system in Persona 2 felt that she could have had an ability that would have affected the cognitive world in a similar way to said games. Furthermore, her job as a reporter could've been used as a good way assist with the Mementos requests, as she could be the one who finds out rumors going around and whose causing problems, then report it to the heroes.
  • While Futaba's confidant is often sighted to be one of the best Confidants of the game, many fans felt that her subplot with Kana was slightly rushed and felt underdeveloped as some fans prefer if Kana were to make an appearance in her Confidant.
  • Many Mementos targets are just as bad, if not worse, than some of the main story villains. Targets such as Shiro Asakura, a producer and talent manager who forces his female clients to have sex with him under threat of being blacklisted, or Kana's parents, who have been forcing their daughter to do pornography ever since she was in kindergarten.
  • The woman who accused the MC. It was Shido targeting her that kick-started the plot, it was her testimony that got the MC arrested, and she's found by the team to testify against Shido at the end. She only appears in the same scene she's introduced in, and the MC never gets an opportunity to speak with her.
  • Junya Kaneshiro. He's all but flat-out stated to have his fingers in Human Trafficking and sex slavery, and the game could have easily used this to drive his villainy home considering this basically makes him Kamoshida on a mass-scale, but it's never elaborated on beyond a few stray remarks (and the bad ending for his Palace).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • Despite her popularity, Makoto's Confidant is usually considered among the worst in terms of story because of its focus on a fellow student named Eiko and her slimy boyfriend Tsukasa rather than focusing on Makoto's deceased father, a character who greatly impacted both her and Sae. Although it does at least touch upon her father and how his death affected her, this occurs only in the main story and a few points towards the very end of the Confidant. This causes the Confidant to have an issue with the pacing since it never goes beyond Makoto resolving to follow in his footsteps by studying law to become a police commissioner at the end, a decision that comes a bit out of left field since the Confidant doesn't focus on any of those plot points in order to explain why Makoto would make such a choice. Made more apparent by the fact that her relationship with Sae in the story proper heavily relies on her father with some saying that the Character Development she receives in the main story is a lot more interesting and it does better relate to her chosen goal. In addition to that, Sae herself never appears in Makoto's Confidant, which would've helped reinforce their relationship and gave the chance for Sae to be shown in a more positive light after several hours of her being framed as an antagonist, even if she couldn't interact with Joker directly to keep from conflicting with the interrogation scenes.
  • Like Makoto, Ann's Confidant is often seen as one of the weakest stories for a Confidant due to a lack of focus on telling a interesting, or meaningful story. The Confidant starts with Ann wanting to understand how Personas work better, which is something that very few characters in the series that aren't associated with the Velvet Room or antagonists ask, with the initial focus being her trying to be more understanding of people in the hopes that it would help her better grasp her Persona. However, not long into it, the story abruptly becomes about Ann trying to become a better model and her rivalry with a fellow model named Mika, a shift that feels very disconnected from Ann's original reasons for wanting the protagonist to help her out. Jarringly the Confidant does deal with her relationship with Shiho, and has Ann help her through the trauma she suffered from Kamoshida, but this occurs towards the very end of the Confidant before shifting back to her modeling rivalry with Mika. With how the Confidant is written, it almost looks like an entirely different plotline was thrown in midway as it wasn't "interesting enough". The fact you don't get to go after Mika and change her heart means she gets away with ruining a lot of young models, which isn't helped by the fact that the game railroads the player into agreeing with Mika, which as much as her words might be true towards Ann, leaves many with a sour taste since the player isn't given the chance to form their own opinion on the subject, and are effectively told they have to agree with Mika. Had Ann's Confidant focused on her trying to empathize and understand people better to make up for her own admittance of shame for not helping Shiho, it would've been debatably one of the best Confidants, but instead it feels like a confusingly structured story with a poor "villain" the player can't go after.
  • Considering that the game uses Sae Niijima's interrogation of Joker as a Framing Device to explain How We Got Here and that one of Joker's potential love interests is Makoto Niijima, many players were disappointed that Sae never once reacts to the revelation that the prime suspect of the Phantom Thieves case could be dating her younger sister. Whats worse about this is that the game has a few instances of Developers' Foresight where who you are in a relationship with is commented on or factored into even in voiced dialogue, such as Sojiro reacting differently if the player spends time with Futaba, or Kawakami on Valentines Day.
  • Sojiro's history with Shido and the reveal he knew about Wakaba's research into the Metaverse. For the former, the game drops various hints of their past history with Sojiro's knee-jerk reaction whenever he hears Shido's speeches on television, yet the games explanation of their history serves no real purpose in the story since Sojiro other than Flavor Text more then an attempt to flesh him out. For the latter, Sojiro's knowledge about Wakaba's research is a pretty big reveal, but ends up being pointless since it really doesn't accomplish anything in the story beyond giving him ties to Futaba. It would've been cool to see Sojiro help out the heroes by offering his experience and knowledge of the various problems they face in the Metaverse, or even help the group figure out Shido's motives or plans. Instead both ideas seem to exist to justify why Sojiro knows Wakaba and explain why he would've adopted Futaba, which wouldn't have been an issue if both ideas were somewhat important and actually had an impact on the story in some way.
  • Some feel that the "stealing hearts" concept can feel like it's promoting a "the ends justifies the means" mentality to the entire story, and there aren't more serious consequences for the thieves as a whole for using such morally dubious means to solve their problems. The stealing itself is presented as a form of brain washing, but the effects and possible complications involved (such as potentially causing brain death rather than forced reformation or leading the victim to commit suicide out of guilt) are only taken seriously in a discussion before the first target and then the game only pays lip service to the ethical and moral implications at best, or completely dismisses them at worst. The fact that violence is always seen as part of the brainwashing process^note The only Mementos request that ends peacefully was also explicitly a case where the thieves didn't need to steal the person's heart to help them, and the main target who wanted to have their heart stolen had its own complications only makes matters worse here as while most targets do see "the error of their ways", it's only because you beat the crap out of them to take whatever was "corrupting" their way of thinking away rather than allowing them to resolve it themselves the way previous Persona games encouraged people to do. Ultimately, the problem lies with the fact that the Phantom Thieves aren't given more room to discuss the ethical implications of their actions, regardless of whether or not they're necessary. They're given little time if at all to really think about the worse implications involved in Brainwashing for the Greater Good, and are consistently put in situations where stealing the Treasure is often the ''only way'' to proceed. Worse, as explained in Informed Wrongness above, many who oppose the Phantom Thieves or their methods are often presented as being massive jerks with ulterior motives anyway—and those who don't have ulterior motives end up being converted regardless. By contrast, there are fans who believe that the final Yaldabaoth arc does address many of these issues, with the Last-Second Ending Choice hinging on whether or not Joker gives into the temptation of becoming a Knight Templar who takes his philosophy to the logical extreme of taking everyone's free will away.
  • The game never addresses how Mishima's and Shiho's parents were willing to look the other way in regards to Kamoshida's abuse of their children, which makes them just as bad and selfish as some of the Mementos targets, nor does Kawakami ever explain her friendship with him despite all the teachers knowing what kind of person he was.
  • Shido's entire scheme hinges on using the Metaverse for his own ends, even having Futaba's mother killed to steal her research into the subject. When the Phantom Thieves finally invade his Palace, he's defeated just like the other Palace rulers with no real advantage or difference given to him by his and his scientists' knowledge of how the Metaverse works. The only thing he's able to do is temporarily kill himself in an attempt to destroy the heroes before they steal his treasure, which fails as the Phantom Thieves escape before his Palace collapses.
  • After it is revealed that the final boss is Yaldabaoth, some feel that the game did not take advantage of using a Gnostic theme.
• Tier-Induced Scrappy: Some Confidant abilities are much more useful than others making the ones that can't measure up into these, regardless of the characters or the quality of their storylines, and starting others can be rather difficult which doesn't help matters.
  • Ichiko Ohya's abilities - making the alertness meter in the major Palace dungeons increase slower and decrease faster, and finding extra info on targets - are considered to be the least useful in the game, since they don't help much unless you have trouble avoiding being detected by enemies.
  • Iwai of the Hanged Man Arcana isn't really disliked for his story or abilities (weapon/armor discounts and gun customization), but because of the steep requirements needed to start his link. It opens early in the game during May, but you need Level 4 Guts just to start it, and Max Guts to complete it. Also, the guns you can make by itemizing high-tier Personas in the Velvet Room are all far stronger than any of the custom guns he can make, with two of the Persona weapons (one for Joker and one for Makoto) providing some of the highest item-based stat buffs in the entire game. However, you need mutable guns to make them, which can be very hard to find, and the financial cost of making and summoning said Personas in tandem with a potential time crunch makes Iwai's customization a solid option to fall back on as a sort-of Infinity -1 Sword for guns. (Morgana in particular actually does get his most powerful slingshot from Iwai.)
  • Makoto's only unique Confidant abilities are an upgrade to the analysis screen to show skills and item drops, and the target cursor changing if an enemy won't take damage from an attack or special move. The former has some tactical value and the latter is certainly convenient, but otherwise her abilities aren't that useful compared to other confidants. It doesn't help that, on New Game+, any enemy that you have as a Persona will have this information readily available when you analyze them.
  • Ryuji's Confidant ability allowing you to one-hit kill weaker enemies. While it is helpful when you are backtracking the earlier parts of Mementos, in the game proper it is generally useless. This is because unlike past games you can't revisit any of the storyline dungeons once you've completed them, and when you get to a Palace's boss, you'll usually be around the recommended level to fight them giving you less reason to grind in a Palace, especially if you've been leveling up Mishima's Confidant. Plus, insta-killing an enemy doesn't grant any EXP, items or yen, and automatically adds their mask to your Persona list unless it's full. While it's somewhat helpful to not waste time fighting weaklings, the fact that you can't turn this ability off to ambush enemies even if you want to makes it somewhat annoying.
  • A non-Confidant example is the Speed Reading book. Unlike in Persona 4, you get it relatively late in the game, and it only becomes available after reading three other books that each take three sessions to complete. By the time you have the speed reading ability, there's very little left to read in the game, making it feel more like a Bragging Rights Reward than anything. By comparison, the version in the previous game was much more useful, since many books required three or four free time periods to finish.
• Tough Act to Follow:
  • Downplayed but still present. Even though the game follows in the footsteps of Persona 3 and Persona 4, which both became Cash Cow Franchises for Atlus, Persona 5 is almost universally agreed to be an Even Better Sequel to the point that many critics and fans alike already consider it the best of the series, being frequently praised for cherry-picking and perfecting the best gameplay elements from all the previous games and for having a better pacing and a storyline that allows more mature themes to be discussed while addressing real-life issues without being preachy. Story-wise the game has faced some criticism, but that's not to say Persona 3 and Persona 4 didn't had their own share of flaws either.
  • A rare example of this happening to the game's trailer. The high quality of the gameplay debut trailer led to it becoming one of Atlus' most popular videos and earning high praise around the world, even earning a rare 10 out of 10 from Gametrailers.com. It was only natural that the next trailer would be met with unrealistic expectations.
  • Averted with a passion by the fourth trailer, which showed up the original trailer with the updated main theme, footage of combat, not one, not two, but THREE character reveals, and a clearer image of the overall feel of Persona 5.
  • Kamoshida is the first villain that the player has to take down. The game does a great job at detailing Kamoshida's abuses of power and depicting the effects that they have on the helpless individuals who must deal with the consequences. From his physical abuse on the male students, to his sexual harassment towards the female students, to holding the threat of expulsion on our heroes, Kamoshida is shown to be a horrid scumbag, making it incredibly satisfying to put a stop to him. This is all done within the first month of the game, so his villainy sort of sets a high bar for the rest of the villains to follow. While the rest of the villains aren't weak, Kamoshida usually ends up being the most hated despite him being a small scale threat in the grand scheme of the game's plot, all because the game does a great job of how awful of a mark Kamoshida left on his victims. It also doesn't help that Kamoshida is the only villain till Shido that has an extremely personal reason for everyone to target, including the protagonist. Meanwhile all the other Targets are really the archenemy of one member of the group at a time to justify said character joining, while having a group wide punishment that comes across more as an afterthought.

U

• Uncanny Valley:
  • There's something off about Morgana's face in his cat form in the real world. He has large, piercing blue eyes and the way his mouth moves when he speaks looks very unnatural.
  • The Sphinx sports the head of Wakaba, in a way that makes it look very off, and utterly terrifying.
  • In-Universe, Sae Niijima is tipped off that something is off about Goro Akechi by their unsettling behaviour.
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Hostage negotiation. When one of your characters, except for Joker, is knocked down with an elemental weakness, the negotiation mechanic forces you to either pay that enemy something, talk the enemy into letting them go, or do nothing and watch that party member get one-shotted. However, the mechanic doesn't trigger in boss battles, and only rarely triggers in random encounters. A player might go through all of the seventy-plus hours of gameplay and never see this happen, despite getting passive bonuses that make it easier to get away with negotiation. New Game+, which lets you retain monster database information, makes it even less likely.
  • Gun skills are really rare in comparison to the standard spread of Physical skills. Compared to the 40+ Phys skills in the game, you only have four Gun skills to choose from, and there's large gaps in availability between each. On the bright side, it also means each and every one of them is great for the level.
• Unexpected Character:
  • One of the Personas you can use is Bugs/Bugbear, a minor enemy from Devil Summoner Soul Hackers. No, really.
  • A few of the Ultimate Personas have appeared previously in Shin Megami Tensei, yet not terribly often. These include Satanael, the Protagonist's Ultimate Persona, whose only seen form previously was in Soul Hackers while possessing Spooky, and Mercurius, Morgana's Ultimate Persona, who was previously a Breather Boss in the prologue of Shin Megami Tensei II and was meant to be destroyed by Cerberus. There's also Astarte, Haru's ultimate Persona, who actually did appear in the Persona series before. That is to say, she was the persona of Kanaru Morimoto, a character from the now considered non-canon anime Persona -trinity soul-.
  • Another one that no one saw coming was Slime Mara, an alternate form of Mara from Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne that was little more than a hidden one shot gag.
  • Kasumi's Character Introduction trailer for Royal has her, Morgana and Joker fighting against Biyarky, whose only and last appearance in the MegaTen franchise was as one of Nyarlathotep's minions in Persona 2: Eternal Punishment, released over a decade ago.
  • Likewise, pretty much no-one predicted that Kasumi's Persona would be Cendrillon, especially since Cendrillon herself is not a thief, although the story of Cinderella is about rising above opression and injustice.
• Unfortunate Implications:
  • The game lacks any gay romance options for the protagonist, but allows for him to enter sexual relationships with several adult women, which depending on the country would be considered statutory rape,^Note keep in mind, the protagonist is 16-17 years old with Kawakami being one of the more contentious options to the Western fanbase due to not only being older than the protagonist, but also being one of his teachers. This led the LGBT Fanbase won over in Persona 4 with Kanji's ambiguous sexuality and Naoto's issues with gender, as well as those who praised Persona 2 for including a Gay Option, to feel alienated by Persona 5, as the game gave the impression that being gay is little more than a joke despite Persona 5's themes of fighting against society's norms. This wasn't helped by two of the game's LGBT representatives being a pair of Camp Gay men who also double as offensive stereotypes.
  • Ann Takamaki being the source of Fanservice has also fallen under criticism, most notably during the Madarame arc when she is blackmailed into posing nude for Yusuke. Not only does it contradict the previous story arc, since sexual harassment and extortion go from being very serious issues to something now primarily being Played for Laughs, the boys can seem to be acting out of character for no reason, insofar as pressuring Ann to do it despite her objections.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Madarame. The worst of his crimes was being responsible for Yusuke's mother's death via Murder by Inaction and his plagiarism indirectly driving a former student to suicide. It doesn't help that the protagonists only learned about the death of Yusuke's mom after they sent Madarame's calling card, meaning they were willing to change his heart without knowing about his worst crime. While his actions are indeed reprehensible, his villainy pales in comparison to the likes of Kamoshida and Kaneshiro, the two villains his arc is sandwiched between. There is also ambiguity over whether or not he really saw Yusuke as more than a tool, having one Pet the Dog moment when he desperately looked for treatment for Yusuke when he fell sick as a young boy. Whether or not this is the case, people still see him as more sympathetic than Kunikazu Okumura, who had no such Pet the Dog moments and whose acts of villainy are on a much greater scale than what Madarame had to offer.
  • Ryuji gets this at times, as he rarely deserves the misfortune and some of the harsh treatment he often goes through. In combat for example, his successful criticals and any weakness appropriate hits that down enemies are rarely met with genuine praise (at best he gets backhanded compliments) unlike everyone else. However the most prominent example is when Morgana ran away. While you can say Ryuji did seem to go out of his way to get under Morgana's skin, it's hard not to feel sorry for him when Morgana spent the majority of the game berating him, the fact that he was the only one forced to apologize, and that Morgana would continue to insult him after making amends.
  • The Mementos targets are all treated like utter scum by the Phantom Thieves even though the crimes of a handful of targets are hardly crimes at all. Most notably is Yoshikuni Nejima, whose misdeed was that he was cheating at video games. Their Shadows do imply that they at least committed them for their own amusement.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Kunikazu Okumura is portrayed in a more sympathetic light due to his Freudian Excuse, and his gruesome death at the hands of The Conspiracy to frame the Phantom Thieves. The problem is that Okumura's actions do not win him any sympathy points. First of, he's a Bad Boss who shows little to no regard for the welfare of his employees whom he forces to work under terrible working conditions, as seen by his palace's cognition of his employees as mindless robots. Secondly, there were implications that he was a frequent patron of Black Mask whom he has several of his competitors assassinated, which is confirmed when you infiltrate Shido's Palace. The last reason, mentioned in the Values Dissonance page of this game, is his horrible treatment of his daughter Haru. He only sees her as a bargaining chip to sell off to a politician's son so he could enter the political realm himself. What's worse is that Okumura's shadow is fully aware that Haru's fiance is a Domestic Abuser and unfaithful, yet encourages his behaviour. He's no different from any of the other Hate Sinks in Tokyo whose hearts you change, except that he happens to be related to a main character.
  • Morgana, when he briefly leaves the group. While many feel that Morgana's feelings of inadequacy were built up thanks to Futaba joining the group, Ryuji's comments, and Morgana being unsure of what he is (and he does ultimately apologize for his actions in order to ensure that Haru can stay at Leblanc for the night), his outbursts cross into Wangst for many players because of how much of a repeat it is of Makoto's Character Arc but without any justification for it. For Makoto, she was called useless by her sister, her principal, and by the party, resulting in her making a rash move that played into her joining the party, while Morgana is a vital member of the party and never once does it seem like he truly is useless. Additionally people lack sympathy for Morgana because he treats Ryuji like crap for the entire game despite Ryuji often being completely justified for his confusion. However, when Ryuji insults him and jokingly calls him useless, Morgana throws a temper tantrum and leaves, apparently he can't take what he dishes out. This ends up making it seem like only Ryuji responsible and has the group force him to apologize when he unintentionally pushes Morgana too far instead of having both apologize for their bickering escalating to this, and that he brushes off any attempts to talk to him on the matter. Making things worse is that both Joker and Futaba expressed concern over Moragana's feelings, noticing that he seemed somewhat down the dumps, yet he rejected both of their concerns. Combined with Morgana being an Annoying Video-Game Helper, and many see him as less likeable in the situation, even if it is a short moment.
  • The traitor Goro Akechi has gotten this treatment from fans, mostly in the West, who believe their Alas, Poor Villain was heavy-handed and poorly executed, as the Phantom Thieves asked them to rejoin even after multiple people died from their own selfish whims, including Futaba's mother, Haru's father, and Joker in the bad endings, in addition to causing mental shutdowns that ruined a lot of Tokyo and hurt a lot of innocent people undermines how the Phantom Thieves treated most of their targets, where they force the targets into a life of atonement, while making it clear that no matter how much they atone, they can never be forgiven for their crimes.
  • Eiko from Makoto's Confidant as well. When we learn that her boyfriend Tsukasa is scammer who ropes in girls to sell their bodies off to pay nonexistent debts for breaking a super-expensive bottle of sake, we're meant to want to help her out of this situation before it gets worse. Sadly, Eiko does little to earn the player's sympathy, especially after she asked Makoto to give her money so she can give it to Tsukasa, and adamantly refused to believe Makoto when the she tries to warn her that Tsukasa is clearly bad news, and even after learning that Tsukasa has been texting Makoto behind her back, Eiko jumps to the conclusion that her "so called friend" is trying to steal her boyfriend away. According to Makoto, Eiko is The Un-Favourite of her family, because of her bad grades, and she's attached to Tsukasa because she believed he really cared about her, despite evidence to the contrary, such as calling her Princess just to avoid calling her by name. As far we know, she probably didn't put that much effort into her school work, and spent more time working in a salon in Shinjuku. Joker even has the option to say she deserves whatever might happen to her if she kept going with her relationship with Tsukasa. We're also supposed to be happy that she's getting her act together after the incident is resolved, but chances are players are just happy to see her go. She took of much the bulk of Makoto's Confidant, leaving her with little room to grow.
• Unpopular Popular Character: With the Phantom Thieves receiving All of the Other Reindeer treatment, a few of these are bound to happen. However, these people deserve special mention-
  • The other students at Kosei High treat Yusuke differently due to both his association with Madarame and because of his behavior in general, and after Madarame is arrested, he's actively shunned. However, he manages to be one of the most popular characters in the game due to him being a Comically Serious Cloudcuckoolander.
  • Upon her introduction it is clear that Makoto is not very well-liked among her classmates. In fact, it's implied that she didn't have any friends before joining the Phantom Thieves. While some do see her as a Base-Breaking Character, she has still gained numerous amounts of attention.
  • Prior to Futaba being a shut-in, she was almost completely friendless at school with her Only Friend having to be a girl named Kana in which their friendship ended up falling apart. On the other hand, fans really like her due to her Moe personality, having huge amounts of Character Development, and her lacking the Annoying Video-Game Helper tendencies that past Mission Control characters have.
• The Un-Twist: Akechi being the traitor. He joins right before Sae's dungeon, where the player knows that the plans for the heist will be leaked to the police, acts suspicious towards the Thieves prior to joining them and has established that he disagrees with their methods.
  • Similarly, Shido being the main villain or at least an important one. Not only does he have a portrait in the dialog boxes, just about every time he shows up the game drops hints he's a corrupt person in a position of power.

V

• Values Resonance: While some of the more specific power dynamics differs between cultures, the conflict between older generations and younger generations is a general one that's applicable, especially with a recent divide between baby boomers and millennials.
  • Power disparity issues aside, Kawakami's romance is a lot healthier than anything Kamoshida had in mind with Ann, as Kawakami doesn't resort to bullying or dominance tactics at any point, lets the protagonist live his own life without real interference from her, and is extremely hesitant to do anything that might rob the Joker of his agency-all signs of a healthy form of affection in Japan and Western countries.
  • Regardless of culture, nobody likes Miscarriages of Justice.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Caroline and Justine when they were first introduced. Almost everyone already agreed that one was female, but the fanbase was split as to the gender of the second one, until it was revealed that she's also a girl.
  • Until it was clarified in the game, a lot of people thought that Morgana was also a girl, when in truth he is very much a male cat. The name was the biggest cause of confusion, being voiced by a woman in both Japanese and English didn't help either. This is Lampshaded in the game itself, where even the Phantom Thieves themselves are initially unsure of Morgana's gender until he explicitly spells it out for them, and even then he's the only character whose DLC costumes allow him to crossdress by giving him dresses (like with the Maid/Butler set) or having him cosplay as female characters.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: While the previous Persona games were good looking, the Playstation 3 and Playstation 4 really allow Shigenori Soejima's art style and Kazuma Kaneko's Persona designs to shine. The in-engine cutscenes, in particular, look absolutely gorgeous.

W

• Wangst:
  • While Ryuji winds up pushing it too far calling Morgana "useless," many have found his throwing a tantrum and leaving the team during the Okumura arc to be this. Not only is his crisis frequently brought up a slew of times beforehand, but when the time to apologize comes, Ryuji gets the lion's share of the blame, and the party apparently isn't bothered by the fact that Morgana has been treating Ryuji like garbage from the beginning of the game for absolutely no reason. There's also elements of scrappiness involved, as this takes place during what many consider to be the weakest story arc in the game, and you cannot do anything at night (including activities that you can do in your room, like making infiltration tools or watching a DVD) until Morgana rejoins, wasting the player several days of precious free time.
  • Detractors who either don't like Akechi or don't understand the implications of his backstory find him to be this. Causing the mental shutdowns and the several deaths he's responsible for are very much unjustified, and the game makes no attempts to excuse this behavior. But some believe that Akechi's angst over his past - a pointed lack of guidance being a big factor of it - and his hatred of Joker (just not Shido) to be extremely overblown.
  • There's also some detraction towards Makoto, at least as far as the way her pre-Phantom Thief self treated her situation as a pressured model student. While sympathetic, some people find that her dilemma (doing the right thing vs. good college recommendations) failed to carry the same amount of weight as the other thieves' own personal problems, and even with the harsh words of disapproval she received from the likes of Akechi and Ann, didn't warrant the level of desperate behavior she had placed upon herself. The criticism mainly comes from her (self-admittedly) boneheaded move to storm Kaneshiro's hideout just to prove she wasn't useless. While it does get Kaneshiro in the thieves' sights, the ramifications of blackmail toward the thieves and the potential fate Makoto herself faces are extreme, as the player can find out at their peril if they don't complete Kaneshiro's Palace in time.
  • The Shadow Selves of the villains, except for Sae, what with all of them being victims of society, but have taken whatever power was given to them and abusing it heavily. The biggest case, as noted in the Values Dissonance page of this game, is Okumura - the struggle he had in dealing with his father's debts (which were made due to misguided benevolence and a lack of financial acumen) gave him an overblown "kindness is for losers" mentality. Apparently, this not only justifies turning his organic-friendly business into a massive fast-food corporation with overtaxed workers and horrendous pay and conditions, but also gives him the authority to treat his only daughter like a bargaining chip and serve as a key into the world of politics, which he has absolutely no business being in. This is even the reaction by the Phantom Thieves in-universe, as none of them are particularly moved by their justifications.
• What an Idiot!:
  • Ryuji exclaims quite loudly about how he and his friends are part of a wanted criminal group several times throughout the story. In public. Naturally, this comes back to bite the group in the ass at one point when Makoto records him saying it and again when Makoto confronts the protagonist over the recording at which point Ryuji calls the protagonist and once again says quite loudly about how they need to have a Phantom Thieves meeting. Later everyone calls him out on this. He even does it again after the Makoto incident when the group is celebrating at a sushi bar after their latest heist, which makes Ryuji's actions border on Too Dumb to Live.
  • Right before Makoto's recruitment, she confronts one of Kaneshiro's goons while out on the street, openly stating that she knows that they're targeting high school students, and demands that they take her to see Kaneshiro himself. Fortunately the Phantom Thieves follow Makoto when she's taken, and are arguably a large reason why Kaneshiro doesn't hurt her there and then. However, it means that the entire group ends up getting blackmailed, all because Makoto was thoughtless enough to try and take on a ruthless crime lord on her own. While she had been under a lot of pressure to get results in her investigation, as well as just generally being in a foul mood, it's still such a rash decision that Makoto herself immediately regrets it. And despite this, Makoto is swiftly forgiven, and even gets appointed as chief strategist of the Phantom Thieves, though she does pick up the slack later on.
  • After taking down the final target, Shido's followers are clearly aware of what is going on with him following the theft of his Treasure and they state that they intend to try and keep him out of the public eye. And yet, when Election Day rolls around, they are shown to have done nothing and then for some reason seem surprised and visibly panic when Shido spills the beans, something they should have seen coming. To make them even more idiotic, despite knowing that his heart has been stolen, they still let him attend Election Day. Surely nothing can go wrong, right?
  • During the final boss, you would have probably expected for somebody to immediately notice that the supply lines are healing the enemy, and would have asked somebody to take them down to prevent him from healing. Instead, somebody only notices during the second round of that boss fight after the Phantom Thieves was nearly Ret Gone out of existence causing a case for the Phantom Thieves being Too Dumb to Live to be made.
• Woolseyism: Some of the gamey Gratuitous English terms from the Japanese version were changed to more accurate terms overseas.
  • The "Baton Touch" mechanic where you pass your turn to another party member is changed to the more accurate "Baton Pass".
  • "Co-Op's", the replacement for the previous games Social Links were renamed to "Confidants".
  • When initiating a pre-emptive attack in the Japanese version, a large message reading; "CHANCE!" appears onscreen, the English version changes the message to the more fitting "AMBUSH!".
  • The "Sword" command is changed to the much more fitting "Attack", especially seeing as how out of the nine Phantom Thieves, only three of them; Morgana, Yusuke and Akechi, actually use Swords, and even then only Yusuke and Morgana use traditional blades as Akechi's are kid's toy inspired "laser swords". Not even the Protagonist fights with a "Sword" as in game they are all easily identified as types of knives.
  • Futaba's code name "Navi", an abbreviation of Navigator, is changed to "Oracle" which carries the same meaning and manages to be an extremely fitting Barbara Gordon reference. "Navi" is a rather redundant name in the Japanese version—the Metaverse Nav app is also called Navi, and on the Status screen Futaba is given a large stamp reading "NAVI" for her role (i.e. in Japanese the status screen says "NAVI - NAVI" while in English it now says "ORACLE - NAVI").
    • While almost certainly unintentional, "ORACLE - NAVI" does make for a clever Bilingual Bonus, especially given the Persona series' repeated use of Hebrew and Kabbalistic jargon for their mystical phenomena: "Navi" just so happens to be the Hebrew translation of "Oracle".
  • When the thieves decide on their code names in the Japanese version, they come up with a Japanese term, and in order to better keep up their disguises, another character (usually Ann, who can fluently speak English in-universe) comes up with the equivalent term in English, and chooses it as their name (I.E "karasu" for Crow, Akechi's codename, or "dokuro" for Skull, Ryuji's codename). Since this is impossible to replicate in English, the translation angle is dropped and they just pick their names - although it comes back slightly for Akechi, who actually wants to go with "Karasu" as his codename at first. Morgana points out the Gratuitous Japanese, and they go for Crow instead.
  • One of Shadow Madarame's unique attacks is his own variant of Megido. In the Japanese version, the move was written in kanji that phonetically read as "Megido" (The normal Megido is written in Katakana). Since this is imposssible to replicate in English, the localization turns it into Madara-Megido.
  • During the trip to Hawaii, the original Japanese version has Ryuji making a humorously pathetic attempt to speak English with the customs official. In the English dub, where there's no language barrier, Ryuji instead misunderstands the man's question in a way that would be possible if they were both speaking English.
  • Futaba would often quote internet memes and other franchises. For an anti-social computer geek like her, being a Meme Lord isn't too far out there for her. (The Japanese artbook even hints at such).
  • Futaba's "Me near, okay?" during her Confidant was a "Blind Idiot" Translation, but it arguably worked because of Futaba's awkwardness.
  • The bar in Shinjuku was named "Nyuukama" ("Newcomer"), with "nyuu" short for "slippery" (hence the snail in the logo) and "kama" meaning "drag queen." The English version changes it to "Crossroads", with "cross" being a pun for "crossdressing."
  • The magazine Ann gives you at the end of the game isn't named in the original version — it was named "Magazine with Ann's photoshoot." In the English version, the magazine was given the name Vague, a parody of Vogue.

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