Soon

Persona 4 Golden was my game of the year for 2013. It came out in 2012. The original Persona 4 came out in 2008. I don’t care—I played it in 2013 and nothing else came close, and I’m not embarrassed by the math.

I loved everything about it. Every hour of Social Links and Midnight Channel dives and slow small-town afternoons doing nothing in particular. The game has this quality where ordinary things—joining the drama club, sharing ramen with a friend, cramming for midterms—carry as much emotional weight as the dungeon crawling. Sometimes more. You make choices that feel small and then the story folds back on itself and you realize they mattered completely.

Persona 5 was coming out in February. The story trailer showed anime kids in elaborate thief costumes tearing through a version of Tokyo colonized by monstrous subconscious architecture—explosions, demons, over-designed attack animations, a soundtrack that never holds still. From the outside it looks like beautiful chaos. If you don’t know the series, it tells you nothing. If you do, it tells you everything.

Because Persona isn’t about any of that. The monsters are a metaphor. The dungeons are a metaphor. The whole supernatural framework is the game’s way of asking what you believe in, who you’d fight for, where you keep your fear. The friends you accumulate over a school year stop being characters at some point and become something else, and I’ve never fully explained that shift to anyone who hasn’t felt it themselves. The story will crack something open in you. That’s not a promise. It’s a warning.

Soon. Persona 5. Soon.