Most of the women available for romance in Persona 5 are your fellow high school students. But not all of them.
Taking the role of a kid in his second year of high schoolâwhich in Japan would put the player at roughly 16-17 years oldâPersona 5 surrounds you with single girls who might befriend you, may become attracted to you and also potentially follow you inside peopleâs hearts on daring heists to save the world.
This is all normal and expected for a Persona game. Romance isnât just an option in this series, it isâlike Mass Effectâfor many fans an endgame in itself, a statement on how you approached your playthrough and the decisions you made. âOh, you dated her? Well, I kissed herâ, etc etc.
Persona 5 is different though. Itâs a darker, more mature game, both in its toneâit opens with player being beaten and drugged before leading into some sexual assault allegationsâand the company it keeps, with less of an emphasis on your fellow kids and more opportunity to forge relationships with adults.
This includes dating them. And the way you do it is kinda messed up? But also hot. Hot and messed up. Itâs complicated, like love often is.
Know that romancing grown women in Persona games is not entirely new. Anyone who has finished Persona 4, for example, will know that itâs implied wink wink nudge nudge say no more that you can fool around with Sayoko Uehara, a local nurse.
But in Persona 5, it is straight up. You can date older women, kiss them, and even (in the gameâs own sweet little off-camera way) sleep with them. And when I say âolderâ I donât mean older high school students, or college girls, I mean grown-ass professional women.
Letâs meet them.
Ichiko Ohya
Easily the worst-dressed character in the entire game, Ohya is a hard-working reporter with a nose for the truth. Sheâs also an alcoholic, and the majority of your confidant meetings will take place at night, in Tokyoâs red light district, in a bar.
The bulk of your relationship revolves around you exchanging inside information on your supernatural exploits in exchange for positive press in the local paper.
Sadayo Kawakami
Kawakami is your homeroom teacher at school, and is mostly responsible for your care while youâre at school. She is also, by night, a maid, who offers house-cleaning services up-front, and implies…other services are available as well.
Call her around to your house enough timesâin a maid uniform, after hours and alone in your roomâand you can develop a relationship with her. Your teacher. Who is also a maid.
Tae Takemi
The local general practitioner, Takemi is living and working in exile, disgraced by a falling-out with her former employer. She is punk as hell and spends half the game feeding you experimental medicine that has drastic side-effects, sometimes knocking you out for hours at a time and leaving you with no memory of what took place.
These are your adult romance options in Persona 5. Three women at various crisis points in their careers and lows in their personal lives, desperate and lonely and vulnerable. And along come you, the player, a kid with a dangerous rep and a pretty haircut, ready to sit, listen to their problems and offer all the help they need, up to and including stealing the hearts of the men and women who have led to their downfall.
Itâs a messy situation for a number of reasons, one that gets you thinking a lot while youâre playing through itâI personally found it a bit uncomfortable, especially when it comes to your teacherâand Persona doesnât back away from the complexity of the issue. On the one hand, itâs wrong! On the other hand, the doctor is hot.
Functionally, your relationships with these characters are no different than any other in the game. You spend time with them, you listen, you say the right things, you go some places with them, and over time your bonds of friendship will grow. Grow them enough and youâll be given the opportunity to take things further.
If you head down this path, all three women know what theyâre doing with you is not on the level, and all three are reluctant as heck to get sexually involved with a minor. Indeed, theyâll only do so after some extensive soul-searching and conversational probing, during which one âwrongâ answer can banish you to the teenage friendzone.
And if they do submit to your charms, itâs hard not to immediately think: what is going on here? This is a high school kid. With a grown-up. And weâre dating, in front of other people. And doinâ it. And while the age difference is significant, thereâs a sincere relationship that has developed here, over the course of dozens of hours of playing the game, in which our characters genuinely mean something to each other beyond just a physical rendezvous. There are lot of things to unpack.
Aside from the obvious moral considerations present, especially when it comes to dating your teacher, there are also legal issues! While Japanâs national age of consent laws may seem generous on paperâitâs a common internet myth that anyone 13 or over can have sexâin practice, the country has a myriad of local and prefectural laws that mean in Japan, like any other developed nation, it is against the law for an adult to have sex with a minor.
So technically speaking, and running with the idea that youâre playing as a kid from Japan (a real country) attending a school in Tokyo (a real place), sleeping with these ladies isnât just an offbeat story direction, itâs a criminal offence.
And yet itâs not, because Persona 5 is not a documentary. You ever wonder why games have those âthis is a work of fictionâ disclaimers? Hereâs a reason: because this game, by not being real, let you have sex with not one, but three women in circumstances which would normally be frowned upon (at best), but which within the confines of this game are considered entirely possible.
Which is why the doctor you can date happens to be a smokinâ hot punk. And why the teacher you can date happens to also moonlight as a maid, that most well-worn of otaku tropes, and who is scruffy by day but cute as a button by night. These arenât meant to be real, believable characters. Theyâre avatars, gate-keepers to more powerful abilities and perks, with their roles and personalities designed with one thing in mind: you might be playing as a kid, but not many kids play Persona
https://kotaku.com/the-best-thing-about-persona-isnt-the-fighting-or-mit-793756763
Like Iâve said before, virtual time travel is half the appeal of this series. The vast majority of people playing this game are adults, who arenât living through Persona 5’s calendar year, but looking back on it through the lens of their own high school experience. Only this isnât a simulation or biography, so instead of dwelling on bad lunches and bullying, we spend a year hanging out with cool and interesting friends.
Some of whom are around your age and spend time with you eating ramen and working out and studying. Others, like the ones weâre talking about here, are adults there to exploit dormant teenage fantasies. You can say on the surface that a boy sleeping with his homeroom tutor is wrong, but Hot for Teacher wasnât written in a cultural vacuum.
Now, all this is coming from my perspective, as a heterosexual male who played the game as such. Would I see this differently were the protagonist a girl and the doctor, journalist and teacher all grown men? Or if the player had the option to pursue a gay relationship? Or if you were playing this as a woman and thinking, OK, Takemi is too pefect, but I wish I could be there for Ryuji?
So I asked Persona 5 fansite Kotaku.comâs Gita Jackson whether sheâd happened to have dated any of the older women in the game. She had. âThe social link with Takemi sent me into this wild flashback of being a teenager and figuring out that I was queerâ, she says. âThe first indicators to me that I wasnât straight was my fascination with Winona Ryder. Sheâs a weird, confident, slightly butch womanâan adult woman who had more of a chance to figure out who she was than I had. I didnât know if I wanted to be her or wanted to be with her. The answer was a little bit of both.
âWhen I play Persona 5, the game so badly wants to transport me back into that high school mindset of experimentation and exploration, itâs just very difficult for me not to want to date Takemi. I know I am actually playing a teenage boy having an inappropriate relationship with an adult, but it also feels like I am playing a version of myself that actually did ask out that cute, punk-y senior girl that I longed for as a freshman in high school. Itâs self indulgentâmy taste in women really hasnât changed at allâbut what is fiction for, but a bit of self indulgence?â
I also asked Deputy Editor Patricia Hernandez who sheâd dated in the game, and it turns out that sheâd also decided to pursue a relationship with Takemi. âIt felt wrong, sure, but I also have a problem with Persona games where I feel compelled to romance everyone, even if itâs a bad idea lmaoâ.
Thereâs a definite double standard at play here regarding Atlusâ representation of these relationships, where teenage boys sleeping with older women can be accepted as a cougar fantasy, while girls get shamed for having any sort of sex life at all. The game itself (perhaps inadvertently) draws attention to this early on with the scandals involving Kamoshida, Ann and Shiho.
The underlying circumstances surrounding the relationships are wildly different, of course, but itâs worth noting the way the game rightly tells us thereâs something hugely wrong when Kamoshida wants to sleep with Ann, but tones down that ethical issue when it involves you, a teen boy.
Sex with a minor is tabooâand a serious crimeâin the real world because itâs implied that the relationship is predatory in nature, the result of an adult preying upon the vulnerabilities of a child. This is a big reason why, for example, Kamoshida comes across as being one of the gameâs most evil characters for the way he takes advantage of his students.
But when it comes to the male protagonistâs relationships, Atlus takes a different approach, partly down to his gender, and partly down to who is responsible for his actions. You, the player, are (probably) an adult. Youâre behind the wheel of your character, this high school kid. The game lets you pick your name and constantly choose your conversation options, all with enough agency that you feel like youâre making these calls, not the protagonist.
When you take that into account, your characterâs preternatural cool makes more sense. He isnât some naive high schooler, he has the decision-making abilities of a grown adult. In a sense, heâs the one pursuing these reluctant women, taking advantage of their weaknesses. Depending on how you think of it, the power dynamic can shift completely.
Which brings us to the reminder that you donât have to have sex with these people. I know the design of the game and the lure of Persona fandom leads many to think like this, that sleeping with characters constitutes a checklist of sorts, but there is absolutely no change to the way the game plays if you sit back and think, you know what, this might be a bit much and Iâll pass, thanks.
Like any other confidant relationship with a member of the opposite sex, thereâs the option to pursue a romance, but never a mandate. You can max the rank whether as lovers or friends, and get the same rewards and items for doing so.
Sure, the narrative outcomes will be different, but thatâs the same for every character you have the option to romance and decline. Some characters youâll be drawn to! Others youâll just want to hang out with as friends, regardless of their age.
As it happens, thatâs how I played the game. I actually got weirded out advancing down the confidant rankings with these women, especially once it became clear that the relationship had the potential to be more than a physical one, and ended up âdatingâ none of them. Indeed Iâm glad I never went anywhere serious with Kawakami, because her story resolution seemed to work much better without me around.
Persona 5 is a really long game. It tackles so many real-world issuesâhigh school, love, politics, art, workplace exploitation, sex, social anxietyâthat it was bound to get some more right than others. Much of Persona 5 is nestled in a grey area, inviting you to talk it over with other people playing the game. So here we are, staring at a social-sexual Rorschach test, where the ink blots take the form of a punk doctor in fashionably distressed tights…
