It was torture not knowing anything about Persona 5 for so long. Thankfully, since the trailer premiered last week, information has steadily been pouring in about the newest addition to the Persona lineup. Dengeki PlayStation is the latest to reveal some new details on the game’s mechanics and story.
We already know that our innocent-looking protagonist is secretly a thief, although it’s still not clear what he and the rest of the cast are looking to steal. It seems like thieving and dungeon-crawling will go hand-in-hand in Persona 5, and stealth can be used to sneak around enemies you would rather not engage. All-Out Attacks are of course still part of battle, as evidenced in the trailer. Another thing that was featured in the trailer were masks, which seem to be instrumental to the plot in some way. Dengeki speculated that the blue flames we saw enveloping our main character in the trailer is tied to his Persona (named Arsene) awakening, as well as the awakening of a secret side of himself, and that the masks themselves are formed out of the fire.
While the nights may be for thieving, the days are for more standard Persona fare. The calendar and weather systems will be returning, as will student life. The protagonist and his friends attend a private high school called Shujin Academy. Since it looks like the majority of the game will take place in Shibuya, it would make sense to say that the school itself is also in Tokyo.
When not in school or raiding a dungeon, there are a few other places to be and things to do. We already know that the protagonist’s family owns a cafe, and it looks like his team’s hideout is in the same place. Social links are also coming back, but it looks like they may be changed slightly. In the trailer we got to see a Cooperation menu. Dengeki speculated that this system might replace the standard Social Link system.
There’s also a motif of imprisonment in this game, which we’ve known about since the very first Persona 5 announcement where a ball and chain was prominently featured. In this newest batch of information are a few more nods to the theme: the name of the protagonist’s school seems to be a play on words (“shuujin” is the Japanese word for prisoner), and the headline of the Dengeki article was “Steal back the future!” It will be interesting to learn more about how this ties into the story.
