Blood Oaths with Polygons
Why is one of the best-selling video games of all time one that requires players to spend large amounts of playtime developing lasting relationships with friends?
By Jake Casale
Last month, I was supposed to head to California for a reunion with my college roommates. It had been nearly four years since we were last together in person, and for weeks I eagerly awaited shedding the last throes of New England winter to bask in sunlight and the presence of some of my dearest friends. But, in a sharp reminder that winter’s staying power is dwarfed by that of the pandemic, I found myself the unlucky bearer of a positive COVID test fifteen hours before my flight. My week of adventure on another coast morphed overnight into a quarantine staycation in my basement apartment.
Even under the circumstances, I elected to take the time off work—I still needed the break. I was now staring at an unruly pile of empty days and unstructured hours, intrigued (if one can be intrigued while nursing a disappointed, exhausted edge) by what I might craft from them. I wanted something engrossing to take my mind off the stinging letdown, to go more than a few minutes without wishing I was with my people. My eyes wandered to my video game backlog, and then settled on a little title called Persona 5 Royal.
And that is how I ended up spending more hours playing a game about committed friendships than I care to publicly quantify. Irony? Never met her.
For those uninitiated in the finer details of the video game genre universe, Persona 5 Royal is a role-playing game (RPG), where the player assumes the role of a fleshed-out protagonist character who lives in a particular world and moves through a narrative arc. In addition to gameplay, RPGs can feature a generous number of cutscenes, or vignettes that advance the narrative plot without much player input. In that sense, playing an RPG can feel at times like watching a film, albeit one with blurry boundaries between viewer/player and the main character.
In gaming circles, Persona 5 is considered one of the greatest RPGs of all time, if not one of the greatest video games period. Upon release, it netted several near-perfect and perfect scores from the crème de la crème of game journalism publications, and it has sold over 5 million copies worldwide. As one can glean from the title, it is just one entry in a long-running franchise, but each installment stands on its own, featuring a unique story and characters.
Persona 5’s moral universe comes into focus, revealing itself to be a world deeply enamored with the idea of committed relationships.
Speaking of the story, it bursts with fever dream kookiness: the player controls a high school student in Tokyo who discovers a special power to enter into the psyches of those around him. These psyches are referred to as the Metaverse, a world born of humanity’s subconscious longings, and your character (codenamed Joker) gathers a band of friends to explore the Metaverse and steal the dark desires of powerful figures in society, transforming bad actors into repentant ones. This vigilante group, known as the Phantom Thieves, is primarily composed of other high school students who were wronged by society in some way and want to break cycles of abuse, neglect, and manipulation. It’s a bonkers premise, but in practice, it creatively lends itself to concretized depictions of abstract psychological worlds, which give rise to profound meditations on the misuse of power and how the consequences warp both perpetrators and victims.
Despite this supernatural setting and the multitude of complex gameplay mechanics the player must learn and use as the Phantom Thieves change society one distorted heart at a time, much of the in-game action takes place in Persona 5’s Tokyo, outside of the Metaverse. As Joker, the player navigates all the ups and downs of being a high school student, from taking tests to working part-time jobs to going on dates (ahem, outings). The game progresses through three semesters of high school, and the player has a large degree of autonomy in determining how they spend each day of their in-game life. And it is in this simulation of real life’s nuts and bolts that the core of Persona 5’s moral universe comes into focus, revealing itself to be a world deeply enamored with the idea of committed relationships.
As I was feeling the ache of separation from friends who I am confident will be in my life for the long haul, I was surprised at the impact this relationship-building layer of the game had on me. This layer has both narrative and gameplay components. As Joker’s story progresses, he has the opportunity to meet and interact with several characters in Tokyo—other students (within and outside his band of thieves), mentors, and city residents. Some of these characters turn into what the game calls your “Confidantes,” people who you agree to help or support with a challenge they are facing. Once this confidante relationship is established, player choice becomes critical to how it develops—or doesn’t. Your relationship grows deeper with a confidante the more time you spend with them, but time is a limited commodity in Persona 5’s world, just as it is in ours. In-game, you may get home from school in the evening, and have messages from three different confidantes inviting you to spend time with them. The narrative of that evening will unfold differently depending on who you pick (or if you choose to do an activity alone), and some opportunities close as time passes in-game.
This also has consequences for other areas of gameplay; as confidante relationships grow, the player unlocks unique power-ups that aid Joker’s vigilante efforts. Some of the most dedicated gamers thrive on the challenge of “100%’ing” a game, but Persona 5 forces the player to make sacrifices—and not just a sacrifice of this power-up versus that cool enemy-slaying ability, but choosing to advance a relational plotline with one character at the expense of another you may find equally compelling. The mirror to how humans actually build relationships is both compelling and unsettling.
While it may seem that the game developer’s intention was simply to build a glorified tit-for-tat system, where the player exchanges time with characters for cool gadgets and gameplay tricks, I was disabused of that notion after I met my first few confidantes. On a narrative level, these relationships emit a near-covenantal aura. When a confidante relationship is established, narration text gives an extended poetic description of the “vow” that has been made. As relationships grow, characters express their affection and appreciation for you—and the player has the option of expressing similar sentiments back, or delivering neutral, even caustic, remarks. Near as I can tell, responding to your friend with snark doesn’t erode any of the progress you’ve already made with them (you just advance to the next stage less quickly), which functionally ascribes a kind of otherworldly unconditionality to these bonds. And when you’ve become as close as you possibly can with a confidante—apparently, even the best of friendships hit a ceiling at 10 milestones!—the narration text gets pretty extreme. It says the “vow” has now turned into a “blood oath,” and the confidante expresses some variant of an “I will always be there for you” line of dialogue. This is where all the player’s efforts crystallize. The relationship is set in stone, and both parties can count on the perpetual availability of every single benefit (read: power-up/special ability) the relationship has to offer. Nothing is left on the table.
The marks we leave on one another can’t be captured using the language of power-ups or special abilities, but do they affect our capacity to help or hurt as we move through the world?
I haven’t finished the game and have only maxed out a couple of relationships by the halfway point (and let me tell you, I had to share a lot of ramen bowls with Ryuji to make rank 10), so time will tell if there’s more variety to the confidante mechanic’s progression than initially appears. But from my vantage point, the arc of every key relationship in Persona 5 bends toward a blood oath. My choices can make the path to the oath faster or slower, and I’ll run out of school semesters before I can take each one there. But, as the milestone meter that pops up any time I advance a relationship reminds me, that’s where this world wants me to take them. All the time that the player spends doing the mundane, innocuous tasks of living alongside their companions—the game makes it clear that it is all an investment in forging eternal bonds; one that has ripple effects in the psycho-spiritual world that lies just underneath the covering of endless metropolitan activity.
The spiritual import of these in-game relationships holds a striking continuity with C.S. Lewis’ famous assertion in The Weight of Glory: “There are no ordinary people. You have never met a mere mortal.” Now for clarity’s sake, I know full well that Lewis is not discussing committed or covenantal relationships in this section of his lecture. His focus is on a particular implication of the classically-understood Christian view of life and death (I’ll leave annihilationism off the table for now): if all people are essentially souls that will persist after bodily death, if there is a more expansive reality at play in human experience than the material world alone, then the impact that we human beings have on each other ought (to paraphrase Lewis) be taken seriously, regardless of the context of the relationship. The marks we leave on one another can’t be captured using the language of power-ups or special abilities, but do they affect our capacity to help or hurt as we move through the world? It’s hard to argue otherwise.
And yet, it’s also hard to argue that these capacities aren’t most strongly affected by those with whom we spend the most time. We may use the language of commitment or bond to characterize a subset of these relationships—usually the meaning is legal and/or biological at one level—but if we have the former without the latter (i.e., marriage), then our choice and desire probably played a big role in establishing that covenantal or covenant-adjacent arrangement. But how do we categorize the other relationships that affect us significantly?
Most American adults would probably not use the language of commitment or vow when referring to their friends. Friendship is conceived as the most elective of relational institutions in our culture; while we may hope for long-lasting and meaningful friendships, we all get touched by conditioning that tells us to temper that thought with more supposedly realistic expectations. But when the rubber meets the road and an important friendship is damaged or dissolved—whether through the fault of the parties involved, or the less personal forces of shifting life circumstances—it feels as though something has broken. Perhaps not an explicit vow or agreement, but a subtle narrative that built itself up over time and implied something like an agreement, unbeknownst to the participants.
We’ve certainly never placed pen to paper, swearing before an audience that we will remain important parts of each other’s lives forever.
I wonder if Persona 5’s fascination with human relationships that are built on a foundation of slowly constructed commitment, that are preserved by the parameters of tightly wound game systems from the decay that so often settles upon relationships that live and breathe, is a significant contributor to its popularity. Long before I played it, a barista at a Starbucks I once frequented told me it was his favorite game ever—and while I may not have heard him correctly over the coffee shop soundscape, I could swear it was because of the characters. More recently, a co-host on my favorite gaming podcast speculated that the relationship simulation is many people’s main draw. It’s all pure anecdote, and the data analyst in me says that without a nicely sized study sample we can’t know much for certain about why Persona 5 routinely scales the gaming community’s best-of lists. But it gives me pause that a fictional world so organized around a covenant-making dynamic between friends is attractive to the human imagination. It may offer a haven where we can see mirror images of the little vows we make and have made, the ones that are never afforded a ceremony, a contract, or perhaps even a conscious thought. It may offer a space where these vows can be nurtured to a maturity and finality that is near impossible to stumble upon outside the screen.
I logged the time with Persona 5 to take my mind off my friends, but unsurprisingly, it drew me right back to them. I wonder about the nature of our relationships. We’ve certainly never placed pen to paper, swearing before an audience that we will remain important parts of each other’s lives forever. Research apparently says that friendship durability sets in place after 7 or 8 years, so we’ve got that going for us, but I could muster a dozen calculated critiques of that data point if I wished. Most people would say I don’t have any guarantee that my friendships will last—and they are right. But, to my own incredulity, that doesn’t faze me. I genuinely think I’m going to stick it out with these people, whether I’m with them on the beach or Zoomed into a DND one-shot a coast away. (Yeah, we did that on Day 6 of my quarantine. They’re pretty great.) Maybe I’m confident because I believe that, in the final analysis, holding my friendships together isn’t ultimately on me, or the people I love. Looking at the last near-decade, I’m not moved to heap praise on my own capacity for stalwart faithfulness, because my record is pretty darn spotty at best. I can only say that someone bigger than me is writing the story, and I believe that he is good and kind—and that, regardless of how the next six decades or so shake out, he has a place for the bonds he builds in the expanse of eternity.
Not a bad headspace to land in after a week making blood oaths with polygons.
Jake Casale lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 2017 and has worked on public health/health systems strengthening efforts both domestically and abroad. He currently works as an analyst for digital health company Cohere Health.