Persona 5 Strikers is about Futaba, actually
Major spoilers for Persona 5 Royal and minor spoilers for Persona 5 and Persona 5 Strikers ahead.
Want to read more from me? Find me in English and German on my games culture and game linguistics website Language at Play.
Futaba Sakura is one of Persona 5’s more prominent pop culture exports. People love her for being the youngest member of the Phantom Thieves party of protagonists and the most pop culture referential figure in the whole Persona 5 universe. Additionally, with one of the more interesting character arcs of her being a target-turned-friend to the other thieves, Futaba’s backstory stays consistently important to the plot of the game, a thing which cannot be said about most other party members.
Among the seven antagonists of Persona 5, the Palace Rulers, Futaba Sakura is the exception. Different from the other six Rulers, Futaba is not an abuser, but the victim of abuse herself: Struck once when her mother was killed and again when her murderers gaslit Futaba into believing her own behaviour caused the murder victim to commit suicide. Her Palace, in turn, is not the physical manifestation of Futaba’s ‘cardinal sin’, as with the other rulers, but effectively a mental prison Futaba erected for herself. The narrative and ludic structure of Futaba’s dungeon change accordingly: She is the one Palace Ruler that asks the Phantom Thieves to change her heart, embracing their influence. The final boss of her tomb dungeon is not Futaba’s evil other self, as would be the case with the other Rulers, but Futaba’s cognition of her wrathful mother.
This disconnect from the remaining, very rigid structure of the game’s narration struck me when I first played the game in 2016, and it hit me again when playing Persona 5 Royal. Futaba is in even more ways different from the other people the Phantom Thieves confront, rescue or recruit. She is not a fighter, but a navigator; as ‘Oracle’, she takes over several HUD functions. Her Persona, ‘Necronomicon’, falls in line with the other Personas being literary references, but it is the only inanimate among the bunch. The other team members summon protagonists or antagonists from works of fiction to express their inner powers. When playing the original Persona 5, I alwys imagined this might be because of her social anxiety. Even without the harmful influence of her cognitive tomb imprisoning her, Futaba avoids social interaction except for meeting with her friends and foster father. She prefers to be alone, programming, watching anime, playing games and surfing the internet. An internet that, interestingly, very heavily resembles the real world internet including most of the same memes, fandoms and controversies. In Persona 5 and Persona 5 Royal, Futaba’s occasional fourth wall breaking acted as a subtle comic relief; there was not much substance in it, but it gave her character as a computer savvy nerd, a genius, and a person for which humor counted as one of the most precious qualities. Her metacommentary grounded the world of Persona 5: Yes, this is a universe where gods give humans the power of C.G. Jung’s psychosocial archetypes every decade or so to test if humanity should be eradicated, but it is also the Japan of 2016, with real corruption and stable internet connections to the U.S. and Europe. Futaba’s references to the Power Rangers, Attack on Titan and The Legend of Zelda served the backdrop, and they made Shibuya, Shinjuku, Akihabara more convincing areas to walk and shop around in.
Now, in Persona 5 Strikers, this backdrop has already been set. The main cast of the Phantom Thieves remains the same, and as such, most characterisation is taken from the preceding titles. Strikers takes place some months after Persona 5, without taking Persona 5 Royal’s significant story additions and epilogue changes into consideration, probably because Strikers was already deep in development when Royal was first released in Japan. In Strikers, so called ‘Monarchs’ change the hearts of people all over Japan into husks without free will. Those Monarchs are not Palace Rulers however. Instead, their realms are considered to be ‘Jails’. The reasons become apparent when the Thieves confront Alice, the first Monarch. While the Rulers — apart from Futaba — were abusers, every Monarch is a trauma victim themself, so deeply scarred by their experiences of the past that they unconsciously reproduce the circle of abuse in the present. Defeating their shadow and stealing their desire does not reduce a Monarch to a weeping heap of guilt as was the case with the Rulers, but gives them perspective on what they did, why they did it,making them genuinely want to do better. Likewise, while a Palace collapses when the Ruler is defeated, the Jail remains — even though they are called Monarchs, the antagonists of Persona 5 Strikers are the prisoners of their own minds, not their wardens.
In this, Strikers does actually negotiate a lot of the new story beats Royal dealt with, even though Strikers is canonically set in a non-Royal Persona 5’s Japan. Both games put trauma at the core of their new content, even though their resolutions differ a lot. Dr Maruki, newly added psychotherapist social link and the additional antagonist in Royal’s new epilogue, believes he can heal trauma by making people forget the event that traumatized them and changing the world around them so nothing reminds them of their painful past. His persona is Azathoth, an old god out of H. P. Lovecraft’s fictional work, just like Futaba’s Necronomicon. The fictitious horrors of the Cthulhu mythos become manifestations of trauma. And while Futaba slowly overcomes her anxiety by confronting her past, thereby retaining control over her persona, Maruki remains controlled by Azathoth before he changes his own resolve with the help of the Thieves. Strikers doesn’t reiterate on the imagery of the Lovecraft cosmos, but it gives some perspective on Futaba’s persona choice through her fourth wall breaking.
You’ll see that my mind is too fast for eyes
You’re done in
By the time it’s hit you, your…
What was a welcome comedic relief in Persona 5 and Royal becomes a defining character feature in Strikers that reframes the whole game’s perspective on traumatic experiences and the Monarchs’ cognitions as their own personal prisons. Futaba breaks the chains of her trauma-induced social anxiety by breaking the game structure. When she references the battle themes of Persona 3 and 5, Mass Destruction and Last Surprise, in her battle reports, for instance, she imports the Persona fandom inside the game, making players aware of the barricade between game and reality. When she talks like Siri or Alexa (as ingame speech assistant EMMA does quite literally) while grabbing a loot crate, she hints at contemporary technology’s influence on capitalism. (She also reconstructs That One Titanic Scene, because why would she not.)
Futaba’s persona is not a book because she is too traumatised and anxious around people to imagine herself as a person. Her persona is the Necronomicon, an object not all that important in its own fictitious universe but so popular in general pop culture it became more established as a reference than its creator. Through the course of Strikers, the similarity between Monarchs and her singular status as Ruler does not fly over Futaba’s head, while her personality goes through some significant changes that eventually lead to her adjusting to open spaces and crowds.
Futaba Sakura is putting pop culture referencing on its head to work as her own empowerment and healing process.
