Why Ditching Procedurally Generated Dungeons Makes Persona Better

In practice, both games’ dungeons lead to a feeling of running through endless hallways in search of stairs to advance to the next level, but the art design of each dungeon amounted to little more than window dressing. Outside of some thematic textures to the walls and doors, there isn’t much to distinguish the first level from the last, aside from perhaps the size of the floor or the strength of the enemies. Players can ultimately plow through these levels by just watching the simplified minimap without missing too much—guide the arrow through the maze, avoid or fight the red dots, and find the stairs. Compared to the fleshed-out goings on in the towns of Inaba and Iwatodai, the staid interiors of the Midnight Channel and Tartarus felt like a missed opportunity to continue to build upon the games’ narratives.

The dichotomy of everyday high school activities by day and monster-battling dungeon crawling by night defines the series, but where Persona 5 shines is in making those dungeons feel as lived-in and essential to the story as the various towns, subway stations and cramped corner stores of the daytime.

While it doesn’t strive for the reality-eschewing playfulness of Double Fine’s Psychonauts, for example, Persona 5’s Metaverse comes closer to making the player feel that they’re trawling through the metaphysical manifestations of internal psyches than ever before. The sprawling, vibrant “palaces” do more than serve as a setting to bash on shadows, but provide environmental storytelling opportunities and offer up details about each palace owner’s true intentions and malicious deeds. Whether it’s a salacious teacher who considers all of his female students “queens” and uses curvaceous torsos as decorative columns, or a greedy banker who only thinks of other people as walking ATMs, we never forget where in the metaverse our Phantom Thieves currently sit, and these touches give us reminders of the crimes each villain has committed. Compare this to the bathhouse in Persona 4, intended as a demonstration of a character’s conflicted sexual orientation that instead boiled down to repeating hallways full of benches.

Not only does the environmental storytelling further flesh out the narrative, it also makes the action portions of the game more enjoyable to play. Allowing each dungeon to be intricately designed creates opportunities for thrilling in-the-moment tactical decisions that were previously unavailable in previous entries, with furniture, columns and more obstacles to hide behind while lying in wait to ambush your enemies. As players bound through a celebrated painter’s increasingly surreal museum dedicated to his life, puzzles inherent to the narrative—determining which version of his masterpiece is the “real” one from a handful of fakes—keeps the player on their toes as they battle through monsters. It’s a far cry from the simplified mechanics of Persona 3 and 4, which required players to hang back while shadows ambled around the room and pounce on them the second they turned their backs, or the random encounters of the older titles.

It’s rare in JRPGs to feel like you’re actively role-playing; while the genre often offers up engrossing tales of saving the world, oftentimes the player is reduced to a passive observer and tactician, navigating menus and tabulating experience points to guide characters to victory. As you sneak through each palace, it’s hard to not feel like a thief yourself, zipping from hiding spot to hiding spot in order to line up the perfect ambush, and slyly making your way into these environments unseen to rob the owners blind and catch your enemies unaware. This is all compounded by the game’s upending of seasoned Persona players’ expectations from previously straight-ahead dungeon crawls. Breaks in the action, like gated areas within palaces that require IRL sleuthing, or narrative events that require splitting up your group, such as trapping party members behind security lasers, disrupt the day-in and day-out grind of the previous games.

While procedural generation is capable of creating a seemingly infinite array of variety in games such as No Man’s Sky or Spelunky, Persona 5 shows just how vital a well-crafted setting can be. As a reward for spending dozens of hours trawling through these dungeons, Atlus has crafted a story with expressive environments that reward players’ attention and enrich the experience beyond simply updating the set dressing.

Davis Cox has written for Kill Screen and is on Twitter @dontstaylong.