Nightmare Fuel / Persona 5

I am thou, thou art I...

"I ain't lettin' you sleep tonight!"

— Shadow Kamoshida

While Persona 5 is ultimately an optimistic game about change and standing up to corrupt authority, it's nonetheless the darkest game the series has seen in years, full of realistic, personal horrors, abhorrent villains, and the Lovecraftian terror we've come to expect from Persona.

WARNING: All spoilers ahead are unmarked, as per Nightmare Fuel guidelines!

---

In general

• This game uses enormous amounts of visual horror, in addition to realistically horrific elements scattered throughout the entire game. Disturbing imagery and scenery of all kinds are prevalent from beginning to end. Unlike in Persona 3 and Persona 4, a lot of the antagonists you deal with are also outright despicable people whose good traits may have long been erased once the events of the game occur. While some targets like Futaba or the True Final Boss of Royal, Maruki, are clearly not malicious, and other targets like Sae or Akechi are merely acting out of selfish intent instead of being flat-out heinous, they still come off as terrifying at points.

Both games

General gameplay and story

• The method for summoning Personas in this entry is even more graphic and disturbing than the Evokers of Persona 3. While those used Bloodless Carnage, here the characters tear off masks which pull off part of their own face. The moments leading up to the mask rip aren't exactly pleasant, either; Ryuji convulses in pain with horrifying bulging eyes, and Yusuke drags his fingers across the ground so hard they bleed. After forging a contract with their Persona, they can remove the mask normally and summon the Persona at will by striking a dramatic pose with one hand on the mask, but it doesn't dull the horror of the original awakening.
  • Upon closer inspection of critical attack and skill animations, where the camera views the Phantom Thief and their Persona from the front, it can be seen that the face behind their hand is completely black. This suggests that every single time a Persona is summoned for combat, the Persona user is still mentally ripping off their own face, just like how in Persona 3 the Persona user has to shoot themselves every time they summon their Persona. It's pretty unsettling, if you happen to notice it.
• The leader of the Phantom Thieves is shown to be a powerful, charismatic, and overall badass individual during the opening act. Yet when he comes face to face with an army of policemen, he is detained and arrested. He is then interrogated by being beaten to a pulp, injected with several drugs, and forced to sign a confession under threat of being crippled if he doesn't comply. The horror aspect of this scene is heavily mitigated when the context of this scene reveals that the protagonist is deliberately getting himself arrested as a counter-move he was most likely holding back and letting himself arrested as part of a plot to out-gambit Akechi since he could've easily mopped the floor with them with his Persona, but the scene is still difficult to watch.
• The looming fear of someone mind raping you in the Metaverse is utterly terrifying. With the exception of Persona users, anyone's Shadow is vulnerable to attack. It's also possible to learn someone's deepest secrets or desires, either from their shadow or within a Palace. Shadow Madarame implies there's somebody running around doing just that, with Shadow Kaneshiro outright confirming it. What seems to be even more terrifying is that this is actually someone that you managed to befriend later on... and can hang out with regularly during Royal. Not only that, you hang out with this obviously dangerous and insane man knowing fully who he actually is and what he does, and since the Batman Gambit you're pulling against him means he must not be aware that you know his true colors until after you've played him like a fiddle, you can't openly object to his actions.
• The Shadows you fight say some creepy things in the midst of battle from time to time, giving them an intensity that 3 and 4 didn't have. They otherwise just boast and mouth off most of the time, so it's hard not to be caught off guard when they start saying something that catches your attention. Unlike the Shadows in the previous games which are mostly blobs with a creepy mask, these ones also take the form of mythical figures that any Shin Megami Tensei fan will recognize, giving out a vibe that you're playing a mainline game rather than a spinoff, and all of these Shadows are Demons out to kill you like they would in said mainline games.
• After Shiho attempts suicide by jumping off the school's roof, the Phantom Thieves express surprise that the door to the roof is left unlocked even though students aren't supposed to go up there. While it does give the Phantom Thieves their first hideout (as well as a rooftop garden for Haru) it's also a small but chilling demonstration of the sheer apathy that the school administration possesses towards their students and their abuse at the hands of Kamoshida.
• Morgana's nightmare that is first seen during Rank 7 of his automatic plot-based Confidant. You see a formless, slimy mass in a deep red part of Mementos. It squirms around for a bit, then bursts in the same way enemy Shadows do, turning into a Shadow Morgana, with giant glowing yellow eyes. You see a second of this before jumping back into reality. There is no dialogue during this sequence except for beastly snarling. What makes this whole event so freaky is that it happens out of nowhere with no warning. Making it worse is that, in context, this is what Morgana fears is his true form.
• While the on-screen victims arguably more-or-less deserved it, the Mental Shutdown deaths are still horrifying to watch. At least we don't see Wakaba's death, considering it's clear that she died in the exact same manner as said on-screen victims and poor 13 year-old Futaba had to see every moment of it...
  • Principal Kobayakawa's is particularly disturbing; he tries crossing the street, only to suddenly stop. His eyes go bloodshot, then blank, he starts gasping for air and he stands completely still while a turning truck slams right into him. All while ominous music plays.
    • Adding to the terror is the ambiguity of the lead-up to his death; you have no idea if Kobayakawa is sweating because he's an out-of-shape man in a suit in the middle of summer, or if he's sweating because he's terrified about what's going on. Given that he's a member of the Conspiracy (albeit a minor one), it's entirely possible that he knew what was coming and was just hoping that he could tell the police what was going on before the assassin got to him.
  • Okumura tries to out the culprit behind the Mental Shutdowns, then starts convulsing and slowly rises up to reveal blank eyes and black sludge oozing out of his face: the player is treated to a good few seconds of him staring vacantly ahead, mouth agape and oozing sludge before the TV crew frantically cuts to Relax-o-Vision. Even worse, this is shown on live television; and unlike Kobayakawa and the SIU Director, he did not deserve this. The man's own daughter gets to watch every moment of it, as well. Haru is both heartbroken in response to his death, and rightfully outraged at the murderer for taking his father's life.
    • A couple of the comments that flash across the feed before the puppy screen is pulled up is "wwwwwwwwwww". If you're familiar with Japanese internet slang, that's people commenting on the scene of death with laughter.
  • The SIU Director dies in a very similar fashion to Okumura, around the time the Thieves gun for Shido. It's just as abrupt and nearly as disturbing, since his portrait changes as he's dying.
• Shido's "popularity" is slowly revealed to be anything but. According to the Phantom Thieves' SNS messages, the news has been basically talking about nothing but Shido 24/7, to the point that the election sounds like a mere formality, and his followers and supporters seem more akin to a brainwashed cult. If you pay attention to the overworld and start-of-day dialogues, you'll find that people aren't even supporting him for a valid reason; all you hear is empty flatter or people saying they plan to vote for him just because he is the only viable candidate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Shido worship is not organic, and the people are getting brainwashed; the brainwashing just isn't coming from Shido himself.
• After defeating Shido and getting him to confess his crimes, the masses still want him to lead their country while completely forgetting that the Phantom Thieves even exist. Supposedly, this happens because those in authority - the remnants of the Conspiracy - are lying to the public that Shido will pull a comeback and he's just feeling "mentally unwell", and it's just so much easier for the public-at-large to believe what those in authority say, no matter how absurd or contradictory it is, than it is to think for themselves and voice their own opinions... aside from the fact that the conspiracy lacks the resources or competence to instantly brainwash every single person in Tokyo with just propaganda, suggesting that something even worse is rearing its ugly head. Surely enough, it's the first signs of the true leader of the Conspiracy springing directly into action, having seen Joker successfully taking down the Conspiracy on the surface. It's not actually the authorities brainwashing the masses, but a literal God of Evil is exerting full-blown brainwashing upon the public. And the reason why he's doing this? Purely out of a desire to toy with Joker and the other Phantom Thieves.
• There's a notable detail that's easier to notice upon replaying the game; much earlier on in the story (up to 2 - 3 months ago before the authorities actually start targeting you), the Phantom Thieves start growing in popularity, which doesn't seem too bad on the face of it. The horror kicks in when you realize that it's more of an apathetic, forced bandwagon rather than genuine loyalty; it's hammered home when it's followed by a very sudden and significant polarized popularity drop towards the Thieves, complete with total demonizing. To be more accurate, the popularity shift occurred within less than a day; people were genuinely delighted by Phantom Thieves killing Okumura on one day, and on the next morning they were treated as violent killers. It's even worse if you pay very close attention to the scenes directly beforehand; the popularity shifts happened instantly after Igor (who was revealed to be impersonated by the Conductor much later on) warns you about an overconfidence trap (right before the popularity starts rising) or a contingency (right after Okumura dies). This means that even way before December 23, where the Conductor's mind control has gone through the roof, he's already trying to fix the game by brainwashing the public to mock you.
  • Even before the drop, the sheer amount of support the Phantom Thieves are getting can be incredibly unnerving, especially on repeat playthroughs. Having over 90% of the population supporting vigilante justice is not normal; while this is going on, one outlier on the Phan-site points out that "it's like a creepy cult". Worst of all, one possible "supportive" message encourages the Thieves to kill Okumura's entire family - and Haru is reading all of this.
• Guess what? The Reaper is back. Have fun! He's not a talkative sort, either. Thankfully, the way he does it is a bit Narmy.
  The Reaper: Me no want to talk to you! Me just want to hear your screams!
• The first Bad Ending shows the same end result as the Non-Standard Game Over, but this time you know what events led you up to this point, and it happens if you forget about the plan you and your teammates forged and you sell them out. As per series tradition, it definitely delivers in this department, though while earlier ones went for subtle horror, this one is considerably more in-your-face. Akechi approaches the protagonist in his interrogation, flashes a Slasher Smile, then shoots him in the head. With a lot of blood. And makes it look like a suicide. Moreover, after offing the protagonist, he plans on murdering the rest of the Phantom Thieves one by one to make it look like an "accident". It plays even when you made the right choices, although there is foreshadowing that Akechi didn't kill you, which is the flash that happens when Sae shows him the phone.
  • The way the animated cutscene was built reminds you that despite the game's awesome and sometimes downright hilarious moments, you're playing a game from a series that employs Psychological Horror.
  • The shot of a dead Joker on the floor of the interrogation room features an pool of blood growing increasingly large in both the Bad Ending and the Non-Standard Game Over. In the latter, the "Psycho" Strings of the interrogation room music continues playing during the shot — but the former has no music in the background, just the sound of echoing wind off the walls and the guard announcing that Joker is dead.
• The other bad ending is when you've decided to become Yaldabaoth's right-hand man, forever leaving the people of Tokyo unable to think for themselves. Sure, you may be popular and will be recognized as a hero, but what's stopping Yaldabaoth from suddenly removing you from reality as a whole once he's gotten what he wanted from you? Not to mention the fact that the true Igor is permanently trapped, and his assistant Lavenza is left to watch the world fall into ruin. And no, there will be no more gods like Nyx or Izanami trying to terrorize humanity... because humanity's desires are exactly what summons those gods. Yaldabaoth has basically stagnated any form of thinking and has created a real utopia of sloth that completely ENDS Persona history as we know it. And just to add a cherry on top of the shit-cake, the scene where your friends all fade out of reality is the last time you see them in-game if you make a deal with Yaldabaoth. That's it, you don't see them after that, not even Morgana (who usually follows him everywhere he goes). All we see is Joker grinning at the news of his new power. For all we know, he could be the only one of the Phantom Thieves to even exist, and he's become so Drunk with Power that he doesn't actually care anymore.
• The implication of just how disturbing stealing someone's heart is. It is, at its very core, brainwashing someone into being a good person. Yes, your targets are often depraved bastards hurting everyone around them, and removing their distorted desires might be doing their psyche a great deal of good, but the idea of basically mind-controlling someone into not being a criminal is something even the four founding members of the Phantom Thieves admit they don't want to resort to. The creepiness of it is played up for all its worth once you get to the bottom of Mementos. On your way through the Prison of Regression, you find the Shadows Selves of Kamoshida, Madarame, Kaneshiro, and Shido together in a cell. When you destroy a Palace, they just end up here, and what happens is actually Yaldabaoth engineering you to remove an entire political conspiracy that he set up deliberately to justify that these are humanity's upstanding citizens so people would pray for him to save them with his iron fist. To make things worse, if you opt out of the Good Ending and strike a deal with Yaldabaoth, it's implied that Joker and Joker alone rules the city through fear of brainwashing his opposition, with even the police being afraid to take action against him... and the rest of his teammates don't even escape Yaldabaoth's clutches.
  • Even worse, that good person the Thieves have turned their target into must now live with the guilt and shame of what their old self did. Condemning a genuinely remorseful and changed person to spend the rest of their lives paying for what they did before, with no chance for redemption. Most of their major targets were arguably past redemption, but still.
  • There's a single exception to this rule. When the change of heart consists of removing the target's depression or self-destructive impulses, they get magically cured of their depression, and whatever lies are causing the self-harm will be instantly denied by the target. This not only happens to Futaba, but also several Mementos heist targets Mishima asked the Thieves to deal with. It's a good use, but still.
    • It's also implied that the other changes of heart weren't supposed to be how they were when it comes to the Palace Rulers and that they were the only ones to become weeping husks after they have their treasures stolen. The Mementos targets don't act this way when their hearts are changed, as evidenced by some of the targets acting a lot more normal (like the stalker at Shujin, Tsuda, or Shinya's mother, as well as the Monarchs in Strikers) and how we don't see any of their Shadows in the Mementos Depths. It's more likely that you're purifying their hearts by taking their treasures, thus unblocking the conscience and moral compass these people had before their desires manifested into treasure or treasure buds (kind of like removing to tumor, especially from the brain). What it really shows is how strong Yaldabaoth's ability to brainwash people is that he's able to rig the purification process to achieve his end goal. It's a good thing the Phantom Thieves were able to get to the Depths at all, because they were the only ones able to stop him from bringing the other Mementos targets into his prison as well.
• We never see Okumura's cognition of his daughter. Morgana has a few theories as to why this might be, but comments that Haru probably wouldn't like them. The most obvious answer is that Haru just isn't important to him. What matters to him is what Haru can get him - namely, political power through an arranged marriage to the aforementioned sexual predator. While in his Palace, when the cognition of Haru's fiance offers to give Okumura power for Haru without wanting to marry her, Okumura's Shadow agrees to allow him to take and keep Haru as his "personal plaything" instead of a wife so long as he gets his political clout. That's why he gets a cognition and she doesn't. The fact that the deadline states "days until Haru is sold off" (the Japanese version even flat out saying her body being sold) implies that even the team are well aware of the horrible fate that awaits her.
  • Haru's fiance is generally an awful man and part of this is because he almost gets away with forcing the marriage anyway. Haru's father died before he could cancel it and he takes advantage of this by convincing Haru that she's legally obliged to marry him, thinking that the company would go bust. How was he able to get away with that lie for so long? Because he's manipulated the board members into thinking that they were legitimately in love (or otherwise get along well), knowing that Haru would struggle to admit the truth. It forces poor Haru into this awful situation where he's smugly belittling her, while the adults who are meant to watch out for her are excitedly asking her about wedding preparations.
• The move "Psycho Blast," which hits all targets for severe Psychic damage, is rather freaky compared to nearly every other move in the game. It involves a bunch of funky eyes popping up all over the place while creepy whispering can be heard, and some of these eyes look right at you, the player.

The Velvet Room

• The new way the game depicts the Velvet Room mechanics involving Personas is not the way you knew and loved.
• Persona fusion. Gone is the supernatural and relatively elegant way of fusing tarot cards. Instead your Persona's models appear, get stuffed into body bags and you can see them struggling as their covered heads are pushed through the holes for guillotines. Yes, you behead several Persona to create a single fusion. Though thankfully, being put into the Compendium to be re-summonable later might help take the edge off.
  • It gets even creepier when Caroline and Justine do this to themselves in order to retain their true form. Thankfully, we don't see the girls lose their heads; they turn into butterflies when the blades hit.
• Itemizing a Persona or sacrificing them to strengthen another Persona. The former has the Persona strapped into an electric chair, while the latter takes the form of a hanging, including the portion where the floor falls away and the victim's neck snaps. Much like with fusions, the Persona themselves aren't actually visible because they are covered in a body bag, which just adds another layer of uncanniness to the whole thing.
• Should a Fusion Accident occur, the guillotines get stuck, only for Justine and Caroline to pull out a chainsaw to complete the fusion, complete with Slasher Smile on Caroline's face. Royal adds the possibility of the electric chair failing, which again forces Justine and Caroline to interfere. All of this is bad enough by itself, but note the difference between accidents in Persona 5 and accidents in earlier games: In Persona 3 and 4, fusion accidents are shown as otherwise normal fusions where the resulting Persona card accidentally falls off Igor's table. In Persona 5 accidents occur before the actual fusion can take place, forcing the Velvet assistants to brute force an already violent procedure to still get a result.
• Igor's new voice will definitely catch you off guard if you aren't expecting it, especially with his new introduction of "Welcome to my Velvet Room," making him sound a lot more sinister than the character longtime fans have known. Of course, both of these things are meant to foreshadow that there is something very wrong going on underneath all this.
  • Speaking of Igor, just like before, he sometimes gives vague hints and advice after clearing a dungeon, which doesn't seem too bad. But unlike previous games, if you pay attention, a few dungeons later all public opinion about the Phantom Thieves and authorities change every single time in extremes, all happening overnight. It begins from the public's fervent support of the Phantom Thieves to the point that they cheer and applaud Okumura's death right after he tells you not to be caught off-guard. When Igor claims that a contingency has happened and you may not get through the "rehabilitation" the people turn 180° against you almost instantly because they think the Phantom Thieves are violent murderers, followed by every terrible thing that the authorities can do to you: forced search warrants, SIU investigations, a 30 million yen bounty on your head if people expose you, and finally an attempt by Akechi to kill you and instigate his plan of chaos. Even the Phantom Thieves are shocked at this impossibly fast, extreme switch in public opinion. And it just gets worse after you return to the present time. To say that it is eerie is an understatement, and no, they are not coincidences.
• Hearing the Velvet Room, which is supposed to be a place to let you rest, play anything other than Aria of the Soul, or more accurately, the danger theme Desire of all things, is just disturbing. Yes, it plays this at the last Velvet Room meeting at December 23 where "Igor" warns you of something that even a trickster cannot solve... And when he reveals himself to be Yaldabaoth.

Deadlines

• Like Persona 4, you get a Non-Standard Game Over if you fail to complete a dungeon within the time limit. Unlike the previous games whose endings took place in the present, this game is a Whole Episode Flashback for most of the story because of the protagonist being interrogated after the Casino Heist, so the endings that come after the failed dungeon are really the protagonist misremembering how things went due to having been drugged. They all begin with the protagonist being approached by some officers at Leblanc. However, the descriptions of what the police are there for from these false memories tend to be disturbing, terrifying and frightfully accurate to what probably would have happened if Joker & co. had screwed up. At the end of those it cuts back to the present-day interrogation wherein Sae realizes that the protagonist is too drugged to tell the truth, so she leaves to give him time to recover, but he is then shot stone dead by Akechi, while the guard outside calls for backup and asks what happened. Needless to say, the stakes for completing the dungeons are very high.
• For Kamoshida's dungeon, Kamoshida files a complaint against the protagonist. Based on his threats, it's implied Ryuji and Mishima will get expelled and Kamoshida will get away with his horrible deeds with nothing stopping him from preying on Ann next.
• For Madarame's dungeon, it is implied that Madarame filed legal action against the protagonist, Ryuji, and Ann. Not only do the three face very serious legal consequences, Yusuke will be forever stuck in a life of being exploited for his art.
• Failing Kaneshiro's palace takes the results of your potential failure to even greater heights than with the previous two palaces: failing that dungeon will lead to Makoto being kidnapped, drugged, raped and pimped out as a Sex Slave before eventually being found by the police, where her delirious muttering of your name gives the police enough reason to incarcerate you, believing that you were the one who made her this way. Jesus Christ... and for even more fun, this Bad End becomes even worse when you realize the potential implications of it: imagine being in Makoto's shoes: you are kidnapped in the middle of the night, drugged, raped repeatedly by several unknown men, and no matter how much you cry out for your friends or Cool Big Sis to save you, they aren't coming to rescue you. Thankfully for Makoto's sanity, this scenario never actually happened, but it's still horrific, because it could've very well have had Joker and co. failed to take Kaneshiro's heart. This isn't just the product of Joker's drug-addled mind, either; Kaneshiro's Shadow makes it abundantly clear what he's going to do if the Thieves screw up, indulging in Evil Gloating about how he'll break Makoto and make Sae his personal slave, making it a very possible consequence if you missed the deadline. Thankfully, this is just the product of Joker's addled mind.
  Shadow Kaneshiro: Then you better start taking customers tomorrow. All you gotta do is endure it and do as you're told. You'll earn three million yen in no time. Although, your life and everything along with it will be a complete wreck by then! Gwahahahahaha!
• In Futaba's Bad Ending, the protagonist is arrested for blackmail and coercion as well as suspicions of being a Phantom Thief. One can originally assume that Medjed has somehow hacked into his information and leaked it, but later parts of the game confirm that Medjed never meant to actually activate this "cleanse", and planned to fake a defeat if the Phantom Thieves did nothing. Joker's mind is so messed up from all the drugs he's been injected with, he thinks that this unlikely scenario is plausible.
• In Okumura and Sae's Bad Endings, the police receive a tip that identifies the protagonist as the ringleader of the Phantom Thieves, leading to his arrest. It's heavily implied it comes from Akechi, as he was present when the Phantom Thieves first entered Okumura's Palace and was part of the team during their venture into Sae's Palace. Even worse, the Bad Ending for Okumura leaves Haru to deal with an arranged marriage to a potential domestic abuser who desires her for her body.
• Failing to change Shido's heart before he unleashes ruin to all of Japan results in Akechi leading the police to your room and having them arrest you (weirdly enough, this takes place even if you defeat Akechi himself near the end of the Palace). After all, the police Never Found the Body, therefore the cops think you faked a suicide and escaped, shooting a guard in the process. One can only assume that this time, he'll make sure that the protagonist stays dead. The cherry on top is the glare cut-in when he says "Game over"; it feels like he's staring directly at the player. When this scene is over, you don't get any extra ones detailing what happens after that. It just cuts to the protagonist being confined in the Velvet Room for eternity with the poem-like message saying that he fell and lost his life. It really makes you wonder just what Akechi did to him; the game had no qualms showing Joker being shot right in the head prior to this ending, yet what happens to him here is apparently so bad that it's never shown.
• While all of the deadlines are nerve-wracking already, the final mission in the Mementos Depths throws in a chilling twist. Rather than a time limit, the amount of days until Joker's rearrest is "FEW." Nothing Is Scarier indeed.
  • The consequences don't show up in the real game, but there's an unused ending for failing to complete Mementos Depths, in which the police tell Joker that he has been "chosen by god" to be an inmate for an eternity, and that he "made the right choice". Sojiro says that he wishes he could've been an inmate. The man in the suit says that mankind will face ruin soon, but Sojiro responds with a resigned "We're ruined already..." It's bad enough to see ordinary people corrupted, but seeing Sojiro, the man who took you in, grew to care for you, whose daughter you helped to save, twisted so thoroughly by Yaldabaoth's power is just disturbing.
  • Sojiro is a Confidant, which means every other one gets corrupted in the same way and forced to knuckle down under the status quo. Sae will become more and more corrupt as she rises to the top, Kawakami will keep working herself to death for Takase's relatives, Yoshida will become an underling of Matsushita, Mishima will remain a helpless loser, and on and on and on...

Individual Characters

• Kamoshida may just be the Starter Villain, but he's easily one of the vilest villains possible in a Shin Megami Tensei game (or its spinoffs). He's the coach of a high school co-ed volleyball team who blatantly abuses his male athletes physically and psychologically and does the same for his female students, except he also sexually abuses them in his office. Additionally, he blackmails students he doesn't like and ends their athletic careers over petty issues, and is heavily implied to be a Serial Rapist with at least one victim attempting suicide over the trauma. The guy is to the Shin Megami Tensei franchise like what Chief Brian Irons is to Resident Evil, both being villains who are nightmarish because they represent the most evil actions demonstrated by everyday, mundane humans rather than a supernatural Omnicidal Maniac in a series where the heroes face the apocalypse every other game. People like Kamoshida are not uncommon in real life, and it's horrifying.
  • The infamous offscreen rape of Shiho that drove her into committing suicide? It's likely not the first time something like that happened. According to some students that you eavesdrop on the way to school the day after the Volleyball Rally, it's implied that when he abuses a student in his office, you can hear them scream when you're near it. Oh, and the student saying it implies that there are other weird sounds, hinting that they might be raped. Additional dialogue reveals that some parents are even aware of what happens to their children, but that they turn a blind eye to it, as they believe that Kamoshida's academic recommendations will allow their children to have bright futures as an adult, and for the parents of daughters who had been raped, they keep silent because they fear they will face public shame and stigma if it comes out that their daughter was involved in anything sexual, even if it was against their will. Shiho's parents, while sympathetic to what their daughter endured, relocated her to another city citing this exact reason, believing that Shiho would have a better future if she moves to where no one knows what she was subjected to.
  • What makes Shiho's rape even worse is that Kamoshida did it out of spite and anger. Earlier in the game, Kamoshida told Ann to come to his place after school so she could sleep with him, promising to keep Shiho in the starting line-up in exchange, therefore giving Shiho an athletic future after graduation. When Ann didn't because Joker managed to convince her not to, on the next day Mishima told Shiho that Kamoshida would like to see her in his office with an obviously remorseful tone, making it very clear that he fears whatever will befall Shiho next. When the Phantom Thieves meet Kamoshida's Shadow after the poor girl attempts suicide, he tells Ann that when she refused to come to his place, he took out his sexual anger and frustration on her and adds that he wouldn't have done it had Ann just sexually submitted to him like he asked. This man is so warped and self-entitled that he expects any girl he tries to hit on to be a happy sex slave and go with him the moment he asks them to, and feels entitled to go out of his way to be as horrible as possible just because his advances were (justifiably) rejected.
  • His Shadow taunts the Thieves during his boss fight to come at him and that he isn't going to let them sleep tonight...then he transforms into a grotesque demon with a massive tongue, slurping up legs in a chalice, and a cognitive version of Ann in a wine glass. Yeah, a player running into him is likely not going to sleep that night. Ryuji and Ann even mention having trouble sleeping during a safe room on the day of the heist.
  • Putting the absolutely horrific offscreen rape and abuse aside, his on-screen actions in the real world are no better. They show that he has no compunctions about permanently maiming a teenager just to hog the spotlight for himself, and just as easily declares his intention to have Ryuji, Mishima, and the protagonist expelled. His final line on this subject indicates that he knows he's ruining their lives, knows he can get away with it, and has absolutely no remorse about it whatsoever.
    Kamoshida: You're done for; your futures are mine to take.
• Goro Akechi, also known as the Black Masked assassin, is the one who enforces apathy and terror amongst all of Tokyo by killing people Shido doesn't like out of nowhere, and is justifiably and easily one of the more horrific villains in the game.
  • The most horrific thing about him is that he can kill you out of nowhere just because Shido doesn't like you. This guy is the reason why Shido is so dangerous, as otherwise he would be just a garden-variety corrupt politician who will likely have trouble even making it to the ballot box. Even made worse by how the general public doesn't know that it's just a single mentally unstable boy because they're too blinded by terror and apathy to care. And given his sheer ruthlessness and pragmatism, he will likely do as his boss is told no matter who and what you are.
  • The entirety of the Climax Boss battle against him.
    • After you defeat him for the first time, he goes completely psychotic, freaking out while screaming at the protagonist that he doesn't care about the his superior's plan to begin with and just wants everyone dead. Conspiracy or Thieves? It doesn't matter, he will ruin and destroy everything. He then proceeds to summon his true persona, Loki, all while screaming and Laughing Mad, complete with a Slasher Smile and Evil Costume Switch via his persona... and his eyes seem to be bloodshot. Not to mention how as the battle goes on his screams become more and more deranged. The sheer rage and madness in his voice when he loses it is terrifying, especially compared to how he acted when you first met him. And then there's what he says prior to going berserk, which is just chilling:
    Akechi: Heh heh... oh, this is great. I'm surprised... this is actually a first for me. I might even have to try my hardest against you. You know... I just came up with a fun little idea... I wonder how far I can go with this. You wanted to see my powers, didn't you? Fine... I'll show them to you! Heh heh heh ha ha ha! I'VE NEVER FELT LIKE THIS BEFORE! You're right! I don't give a damn about Shido's acknowledgement... all I care about now is KILLING ALL OF YOU... TO PROVE I'M BETTER THAN YOU!!!!!
    • Oh, and if you think that the phase prior to his Black Mask reveal is any better, don't. He's even scarier for one reason — he's calm. You'd expect him to bust out some Large Ham gloating about his triumphs over the Thieves... but he barely raises his voice above a whisper, and even that sounds like he's barely holding back his rage. It's almost a relief when he starts screaming at you.
    • To make matters worse, all the psychotic screaming and frenzied mania is literally how he fights as the Black Mask when he joins up with you in Royal. He just seemingly loses himself, and goes back to being calm and no-nonsense all of a sudden after fighting. Meaning the same way he used Loki's ability to induce psychotic breaks resulting in tragic accidents? He's got his own Persona pulling him in and out of madness at will as a fighting style. Even Kasumi is terrified when she first sees him in action; it's almost a relief that she's barred from participating in the Shido's Palace heist.
• The One-Winged Angel form that Sae Niijima's Shadow takes on in its boss fight. Unlike the previous demons (a comical long-tongued devil, a man hiding behind a series of paintings, and a comical, rapping fly man), Leviathan is a giant Black Knight wearing spiked armor and wielding a weapon resembling a rocket launcher, tommy gun and a bazooka at the same time in its right hand and a huge, rusty, bloodstained sword in its left that would put Pyramid Head's to shame. See Leviathan here. Her voice becoming even more distorted doesn't help matters either.
  Makoto: This... is my sister's true nature!? No...
  • Made worse by the cutscene preceding her fight, in which the camera glitches for a split-second as Shadow Sae monologues, during which a glimpse of Leviathan is shown over Shadow Sae's normal form. Makoto comments on it, understandably unsettled.
    Makoto: W-what was that!?
• Shido is a morbid Deconstruction of a Stupid Evil villain. The main danger coming from this man is not his charisma, intelligence, or manipulativeness; it's how mind-numbingly open he is about destroying those who get in his way. While any other Stupid Evil villain would otherwise just shoot themselves in their own foot, this is what exactly makes Shido so horrifying and vile. He doesn't care who you are and how important you are to his plans; as long as he wants you dead and/or ruined, he will do so, and for him, the day he destroys and changes your life forever is likely as remarkable as his last breakfast. It seems like the word "consequence" does not exist in this man's vocabulary, because he doesn't care and/or he intends to make it so that no consequences can apply to him.
  • One of the most depraved things he did was to order Akechi to trigger a mental shutdown on Wakaba (Futaba's mother) by killing her Shadow in Mementos to steal her research, causing her to die horribly right in front of her daughter, then having his men read a forged suicide note right in front of the woman's 13-year old daughter telling the poor girl that her mom died to the stress of raising her and wished that she was never born (!!). While there was a motive behind killing Wakaba, there was no reason whatsoever behind the other thing he did; for all we know, he just did it For the Evulz.
  • When you walk into his Cruiser Palace, it turns out he's somehow become so close to four fellow conspirators that their cognitive versions have been replaced by true Shadow Selves... and then his conversations with them after you beat their shadow-cognitions heavily imply that he plans to kill them anyway as soon as they are either of no use, or have displayed themselves to be anything but his mere bootlickers even by the slightest bit. Non-issues or fleeting issues in his way, such as competing premiership with him or half-hearted intents to rat him out irritate him enough to kill people within his circle. To say nothing of Akechi, who was basically the only person who was even halfway competent in his arsenal; ^note "halfway competent" is actually an understatement considering that Akechi is one of the most competent characters in the game! Shido plans to kill the younger man once he becomes Prime Minister because he already knows the guy was never an obedient lapdog from the start, even if he was the de facto asset to his path of conquest. It doesn't matter if you're his best friend, his backer, or even his only useful minion (who he knows is his own son), the moment that you have served your purpose and/or he sees you as someone even remotely capable of disloyalty, Shido will toss you aside to keep as few loose ends around as possible.
    Shadow Shido: There is no need for thieves in my mighty country... only myself and the ones who revere me are needed.
  • Last but not least, when Futaba and Haru confront his Shadow over the deaths of the former's mom and the latter's father, he doesn't even acknowledge their deaths and evades the question. Instead, he merely makes a callous remark about them being inevitable sacrifices on his way to success. Before fighting him on foot, Haru also asks if he means that the people he killed (through Akechi) deserved to die, but he just gives a similar (non-)response that shows he cares nothing about how killing someone important to you ruined your life, this time outright comparing them to ants being crushed down on the road that he couldn't even care about counting. No matter how many people die because of him, it's of absolutely no relevance or responsibility on his part.
• The public's Sanity Slippage is almost insane in this game compared to previous Persona installments. They literally don't treat you as a human being from the very beginning, but after you best the impersonator Medjed they begin to worship you like gods while the government is trying to outright frame you. Once Okumura dies, all hell breaks loose as the masses begin to believe that you are an Eldritch Abomination and an unforgivable criminal. Think that it gets better after you beat Shido? Wrong, as the public literally believes you don't exist, and the breaking point is that when Mementos causes a Reality Bleed, nobody seems to notice it. Once they see it after you kill off the Archangel Shadows, it's already too late.
• Sometimes, the Mementos targets are just as bad, if not worse than the Palace owners.
  • One target in Mementos is a Yandere cyberstalker who can be seen hanging around in Shujin. If you pay close enough attention to the animation model of your target when she's stalking her crush, she has large eyes with small, dilated-looking pupils that make her look as if she is trying to kill someone.
  • Another one is any pet owner's worst nightmare — a man who vents his anger by violently beating and even killing cats.
  • There's an utterly horrible Mementos target in Sojiro's Confidant, Futaba's uncle, who apparently abused Futaba by not letting her take a bath or even have a proper bed, was heavily implied to have been beaten her, and forced a debt on Sojiro for taking her away from him. His motivation was also to get back at Wakaba (his sister) because he was jealous of her talent and because he wanted some gambling money. To him, Wakaba's death in the hands of Shido was the best way to get his revenge through tearing down her already depressed daughter more. Oh and the first time you meet this guy personally, he's seen trying to visibly punch Futaba only to fall into the floor and blame Sojiro for assaulting him. In fact, he's so horrific that when you go change his heart in Mementos, Futaba asks only Joker to go with her because she does not want anyone else to know the horrible things he put her through.
  • The last Mementos request you get that isn't tied to a Confidant is for Shiro Asakura, a corrupt idol manager who is by far the most wretched of your non-storyline targets, putting some of the Palace rulers to shame. How, you ask? He convinces young women who want to become idols or celebrities to commit sexual acts, claiming that it is a necessary step to furthering their careers. Not that he ever intends to propel them to stardom; he's just taking advantage of ambitious young women. His Shadow's transformation only reinforces the heinousness of his crimes, as he turns into none other than Mara. You may find yourself thinking how the hell this guy didn't create a Palace of his own by the time you beat him into submission. In fact, he's the only Mementos target with an S rank!^note Royal downgrades him to an A rank
    • An easy-to-miss fact about this man: you can find him in the overworld talking to women and trying to convince them to "do what it takes" to succeed, with sexual undertones to his language. Unlike Yumeko Mogami and Yohei Kiritani, who are very much out of place in the locations you find them, Asakura is just one of many sleazy men in Shinjuku. This means the player isn't going to blink twice when they see him talking up a woman who's interested in a potential singing career. You can walk past the two for months on end while visiting Confidants, yet it's only when the woman runs away from him in humiliation that Mishima gives you the quest to hunt him down.
• The fact that Yaldabaoth, a mere Shadow with a god complex, managed to kidnap and replace Igor of all people, and subvert a Ruler of Power like Lavenza is just disturbing. Yes, the Big Good watching over you every time you entered the Velvet Room was really the Greater-Scope Villain, and he's been playing you since the game began.

Palaces

• Shadow Selves in general compared to how they are in the previous game. The Shadow Selves the Investigation Squad encountered are born from dissatisfaction and are mostly the desires of regular kids for acceptance, whereas in Persona 5 the Shadow Selves are the hidden desires of truly despicable people. The difference between Shadow Yukiko and Shadow Kamoshida is stark.
• The Shadow Self transformations in this game are a lot creepier than in 4. Back then, the Shadow Selves simply surrounds itself in a dark cloud that hides it before clearing to show the monster. Persona 5's transformations don't skimp on the Transformation Trauma: Kamoshida's is partly off-screen, but we get some lovely fleshy twisting as he mutates and his shadow falls over the terrified Phantom Thieves. Madarame laughs insanely before his face stretches grotesquely and tears apart into the component portraits. But the crowner goes to Kaneshiro's transformation, which is one of the most nightmarish Shadow transformations ever. He goes limp as he coughs up blood and twitches erratically, looking as if something is trying to burst out of him like he were a cocoon, then he twitches and rubs his hand like a fly, his cognitive henchmen run away in hear, and we get a close-up of his compound eyes. If you played a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game before, you'll likely freak out big time when you see him transform since it looks like Beelzebub ^note It's an actual end-game persona here that resembles exactly like his classic counterpart, but you don't fight that shadow here at all is about to make an appearance. Thankfully, after he completes that transformation, he acts and looks so hammily silly that it becomes flat-out difficult to take seriously.
• Kamoshida's Castle has the male students being physically abused in the dungeons while the female students are throwing themselves at Shadow Kamoshida. The upper floors combine this and squick, as his sexual desires come to the forefront. Those pillars made up of oversexed female torsos in high school P.E. uniforms and what that represents in a Palace are just... messed up.
  • The Stalker Shrine for Shiho in Kamoshida's Palace is freaky as hell, especially given all the torture gear that's present.
  • A minor one in the Vanilla version. In the room where you fight the Mara slime, there are busts of Kamoshida that have darkened faces and glowing red eyes. What's more, they explicitly follow and turn towards your camera wherever you move. Not Joker, but you, the player.^note This might actually be an accidental example, the busts are actually 2D sprites that utilize a graphical technique called "billboarding". It was widely used in the early days of 3D, but nowadays it is usually not used for things other than objects far in the distance. The large number of busts in the room may have caused a notable performance hit on the Playstation 3 had they been 3D. Though, considering how deliberately creepy they look, chances are the developers noticed the billboarded sprites looking at the camera was kinda creepy to begin with, and decided to make them even creepier just to screw with players.
  • Another example inside the castle tower, once you begin the climb: there are non-pillar busts of girl's butts sitting atop certain cover areas. At first, you might not give them a second glance, until you see that they too turn whenever you move around... "staring" at you despite not having eyes. It may not be as creepy as the Kamoshida busts, but taken altogether with the latter, it can give the impression that the dungeon itself is watching you.
  • The regular school where Kamoshida's Palace was in isn't much better than the actual Palace. The worst of it all is the feeling and atmosphere whenever Kamoshida is nearby or brought up, combined with some testimonies you get from the school paints an ugly, frightening picture. It's not like nobody knows what Kamoshida is doing, but rather the inverse: everybody knows how he treats the students and nobody's lifting a finger to stop it, because they don't believe they can (and that even trying would make things worse).
    Mishima: Proving that [Kamoshida]'s abusing us is... meaningless. Everybody knows. The principal, our parents... they all know, and they all keep quiet about it.
    Ryuji: [absolutely horrified] This has gotta be a joke...!
• Madarame's museum reveals that the man views his students as mere paintings that help fuel his ego, his lavish lifestyle, and his sheer sense of entitlement to the point where everything is covered in gold leaf.
  • Aside from the paintings, there's also a golden sculpture within the first four rooms of the Palace. Not only is it described as incredibly disturbing, but a closer look also reveals that the sculpture is made up of statues of people being sucked into a golden spiral. This goes to show that Madarame only saw his students as "golden geese," with earning profit for him being their only purpose.
    "The Infinite Spring - A conglomerate work of art that the great director Madarame created with his own funds. These individuals must offer their idea to the director for the rest of their lives. Those who cannot do so have no worth living!"
  • Just the way that Madarame goes on about how easy it is to steal the futures of children who can't fight back, comparing his pupils to livestock waiting to be harvested, to the point that he let Yusuke's ailing mother die so he could obtain her painting.
  • There is no way to know this from the real person himself, who looks and acts exactly like a great, humble artist. You need to either live with and get extorted by him to know, or else you meet his Shadow. His shadow is the epitome of a Two-Faced person; the real person appears calm and humble on the surface, but the Shadow blatantly flaunts all of his crimes and there's no hint of remorse or sympathy in any of it. In fact, he sounds absolutely proud of himself.
• The people in Kaneshiro's Shibuya aren't even people; they're walking ATMs. And when they run out of money, they collapse and break down. And unlike the last two targets, whose Palaces were based on a single building, this is how Kaneshiro sees all of Shibuya.
• It's implied in Futaba's Tomb that she views everybody outside of her pyramid as bandits who only want to steal her possessions or hurt her, and the fact that it's a tomb says something about her crippling self-hatred.
  • Everything else outside of the pyramid and the small town is an endless desert showing how isolated she is, seeing the outside world as barren with nowhere to go. The fact that the Phantom Thieves are miles away from the pyramid when they entered her palace right next to her room shows how just how far away she sees the outside world.
  • There's also the main boss of the Palace, the Sphinx/Cognitive Wakaba, which is similar to its appearance in myth, but with Wakaba's own unchanged head. It's incredibly uncanny as much as it is absolutely terrifying. The Sphinx is also among one of the largest bosses in the entire game and rivals even Yaldabaoth in size.
  • Think her appearance is bad enough? Try listening to her voice. In the Japanese version, her shouts may be a bit subdued, but one thing that's shared between both the Japanese and English versions that is equally haunting is the Sphinx having a Voice of the Legion. And in English? Courtesy of Erin Fitzgerald's stellar vocal performance, the Sphinx's shouts of condemnation towards Futaba are so goddamn loud, it makes it sound as though a mother is screaming bloody murder towards her own daughter. The Sphinx's screams of wishing Futaba was never born can be realistically terrifying.
  • If you think that Futaba's background is not terrifying enough, she also has Hallucinations of Wakaba appearing behind her back and haunting her. Right before her awakening you can even see a bunch of men-in-black from The Conspiracy haunting Futaba along with incredibly disturbing shrieks coming from illusions of Wakaba that seem to be in distress about Futaba "killing" her. The Anime adaptation makes the former worse than in-game.
  • While Wakaba's death is completely offscreen (and it's better off that way), she didn't simply run into traffic right when she was crossing the road with Futaba. If the other Mental Shutdown victims and her "it's just like what happened to my mom" reaction on Okumura's death were to go by, she dies gruesomely. It's likely that her eyes are rolled back, black liquid spilled from her mouth and she's in excruciating pain as she mindlessly throws herself to be ran over by a car. All the while when a thirteen year-old Futaba watches the grisly scene happen right in front of her, and later gets viciously blamed for it because of a false suicide note. Is there any wonder Futaba is traumatized enough that she generates a literal Palace?
• Okumura's Outer Space is one big factory where every employee is a robot who keeps working 24/7 with breaks being only five seconds and lunch thirty seconds long. When an employee finally breaks down due to exhaustion, they're tossed into the furnace where they're burned for fuel.
  • It doesn't help that the dungeon's theme is literally called Sweatshop, which is a "pejorative term for a workplace that has poor, socially unacceptable working conditions".
  • During his boss battle, Okumura repeatedly orders his employees to sacrifice themselves for his victory, which they gladly will. He really sees them as disposable.
  • The text on the Sacrifice Order.
    Effective immediately, you have been assigned the position of suicide bomber. That is all. Company Identification: Okumura Foods Proprietor: Kunikazu Mammon Okumura
• Shido's Ship shows that the man views the entire country of Japan as a city sinking into the ocean while a small elite chosen by him live on a luxury ship which he steers as its captain. Haru sums it up when the party first sees it:
  Haru: Even though this country may sink, he alone will survive... that's what his cognition is about huh?
  • For such a deranged and distorted person, the cognitions in his Palace are surprisingly nothing short of normal people... his own circle of rich people, of course; no normal civilians exist within the cruiser. This means that he thinks that anyone outside his own circle of nobles doesn't even deserve to exist!
  • Then, there's Shido's chariot of the masses before you fight him: it's a golden lion made out of wailing human statues. This thing wouldn't look out of place in Bloodborne or Dante's Inferno.
  • When you actually fight him head-on, he becomes this incredibly-muscular and grotesque version of himself in muscle braces. Then he smashes them and turns into a red, monstrous version of Senator Armstrong.
• Mementos doesn't seem too bad at first, being little but a bizarre recreation of the Tokyo subway spiraling slowly downwards. The deeper you go, however, the clearer it becomes there is something fundamentally wrong about it. The first sign is the glowing red lines that can be found all over the place, eerily reminiscent of veins, and the wind sounding like screams based on the Phantom Thieves' occasional comments. As you reach the middle floors, you find that the train tracks are made out of bones and the walls appear to be held up by giant ribs, along with other details like rows of tombstones in dead-ends. Things only get worse as you go lower, with the walls and floor taking on an unnerving shade of red that makes the entire area seem less like a subway network and more like the bowels of a gargantuan beast. Yet none of it compares to what awaits you at the bottom: The Prison of Regression, an impossibly large pit filled with unnatural identical stone pillars and enormous spine-like structures stretching out of the red-glowing abyss below, all topped off with incredibly dreary and foreboding music. Even the place's calendar icon becomes a bit too unnerving. Needless to say, the entire area comes across as alien and wrong, even when compared to the likes of Tartarus.
• Looking at it, the Prison of Regression is a terrifying place. Upon entering the Prison, one of the first things you'll notice is that those vein-like structures from earlier all appear to stem from a single point further down. As you make your descent, the veins become more and more tightly knit until you finally reach their point of origin: a giant, blood-red Panopticon with the veins sprouting out from within. So, what are they all connected to? Just what exactly is the core of this hellhole? Why, the Holy Grail, of course! What makes it even worse is that the Panopticon at the bottom is based on a real-life concept for a prison. It was designed in 1787 as a "humane" way to detain prisoners, with prisoners held in cells along a large circular building with a single warden watching them from a guard tower in the middle. The warden could see them all, but the inmates can't see the guard or interact with the other inmates, and are thus held in check by their own paranoia. This concept was so disturbing that it created an entirely new social theory known as Panopticism, which refers to the systematic ordering and controlling of human populations through subtle and often unseen forces - a concept that is embodied by how the entirety of Tokyo is held in line and pacified by the fear of one mentally unstable boy killing them out of nowhere.
  • And then we have the prisoners of the Prison of Regression; in short, none of them actually want to leave. Instead, they all ramble on about how much "easier" it is to stay imprisoned, never having to think for themselves and allowing some higher entity to decide everything for them. The way they try and convince the protagonists to "just take a load off and come over to their side" gives the impression of a massive brainwashing cult, and later on it's revealed that this is what ultimately became of the Palace rulers you worked so hard to reform (in fact, it's heavily implied that you reforming them is what landed them there in the first place). Hell, it hurts just to listen to their voices because of how... spent they all sound.
  • If you take some time to talk to the inmates in the isolated cages within the prison complex (which had their brains connected with VEINS unlike the prisoners within the large cells), their dialogue sounds absolutely beat and they say some really terrifying stuff.
  • If you thought the prisoners' voices were unsettling before, try to listen to them during the fight against the Holy Grail. They scream at the Thieves to stop damaging it, and they sound utterly deranged, as if the prisoners are in immense pain. They chant for the Thieves to leave, sounding completely droning like a brainwashed cult.
  • For extra effect, just turn the music off. It becomes wholly silent, so you can hear the VERY unsettling voices of what seems to be engines (?) on the upper levels, all the while when the whole screen is pitch black. It becomes even worse in the depths, where you will hear sounds of pumping blood, all the while the scenery is still pitch-black, with a significantly more unsettling landscape where Shadow Selves are caged and having the Grail's pulsating veins attached to them.
  • It gets worse; after the Grail expels the Phantom Thieves from Mementos, they seemingly arrive in the normal city of Tokyo... then blood starts raining from the sky, and giant skeletal structures burst out of the ground. But no-one notices this apart from the Thieves and the Confidants. Then once some people begin to deny that the Phantom Thieves ever existed... the Thieves literally cease to exist. Futaba collapses into the ground in a headache and Ryuji notices his hand starting to disappear. One by one, they all vanish entirely, giving either tearful last words or painful screams, made all the more chilling by the fact that each Thief either disappears mid-sentence or in the middle of their anguished screaming. As the protagonist fades, the in-universe social media tracker, with the question "Do the Phantom Thieves of Hearts really exist?" drops to 0%. A player could be forgiven for thinking they'd hit a Bad Ending.
  • The Grail doesn't actually care about who wins; his pawns are not getting what they think will get. Therefore, in theory had either Akechi or the Shido Cabinet won, this will very likely be their fate. The implications are very unsettling even if they (or at least the latter group of people) deserved it.
  • The Prison of Regression theme, "Freedom and Security" is a somber, yet unsettling track that essentially sounds like the game telling you: "give up, there is nothing you can do anymore, people are already doomed and you can change nothing". The other times it plays is if you achieved the Bad Ending during Sae's interrogation or accepted Yaldabaoth's offer to join him, as it becomes the credits theme. In the context of the first ending, not only have you gotten yourself killed; you've also doomed all of your permanent party members and possibly all your Confidants to be killed off by Akechi and Shido; yes, including your best friends, Morgana, your love interest, and possibly even people like Sojiro (your caretaker) and Shinya Oda (a young child who you meet at an arcade). In the context of the second, you've doomed everyone in the world to eternal apathy through the fear of being brainwashed to repent out of nowhere, and are likely enjoying your newfound powers over the public as you become more and more brazen and corrupt, and your former comrades probably still cease to exist.

Other

• Makoto in the manga makes rather unsettling death faces that even Joker and Iwai fear. Yes, Iwai, who is an ex-Yakuza.
• While invisible during normal gameplay, the in-game model for King Frost contains numerous miniature Jack Frost models in it. Is it eating all of those Jack Frosts?
• The character portraits of some of the characters are very startling, especially if one doesn't expect them.
  • Of particular note is Akechi's Traitor Shot; his stare is downright menacing, and it starkly contrasts the friendly facade he'd shown for most of the game up to that point. It shows up the moment it's revealed that he is the one behind the Mental Shutdowns and is working for Shido, and this portrait should tell the player very clearly that this man is an utterly depraved mass murderer who will kill dozens without batting an eye.
    • His cognition (encountered in Shido's Palace) not only uses almost the exact same portrait (bar duller eyes), but also a couple other downright freakish looking ones that make said Traitor Shot look pleasant and inviting in comparison.
  • Yusuke has an "angry" portrait that went unused. With the shrunken irises, Cross-Popping Veins, and snarl, it's a look of barely-contained rage that's as unsettling as it is uncharacteristic for the normally even-tempered artist.

Royal only

In general

• Think Kamoshida's boss fight in the original was bad? In this version, he summons a cognitive Shiho, dressed in a Playboy Bunny outfit. Ryuji cries This Is Unforgivable! upon seeing it, for good reason. And in a morbidly horrifying case of Gameplay and Story Integration, Cognitive Shiho is weak to literally everything, so you can attack and kill the cognition to prevent Kamoshida from nuking your party with his Gold Medal Spike attack. (That said, you can also spare it by attacking Kamoshida, which causes it to flee if you deal more than 300 damage total).
• Madarame's Infinite Spring statue now makes terrifying wails. Based on the fact that he's probably driven a bunch of students to suicide and many don't even get proper rations or resting places, it isn't surprising that the sculpture that he made with his pupils' funds and lives would wail.
• The skill you get from trading Madarame's Will Crystal for its Ring equivalent is called "False Painting of Fleecing" in Japanese. Sounds normal right? The English version is called "Bleeding Dry Brush" - a terrifying name if you consider that he drains all of his students' talents to the point that he either leaves them to die or drives them to kill themselves.
• We finally get to see Okumura's cognition of Haru in the Royal expansion. As it turns out, he didn't see her as anything other than something to support his career, and once everything fails he orders the cognition to become a robot that self-destructs! This means that he not only considers his daughter as a means to advance his path to power, when she is of no use he can just dispose of her. Morgana's claims of how Haru won't like her cognitive self at her father's Palace ring true, and that is exactly what happened.
  • What makes this even worse? Okumura gets the ability to make the Corporobos focus their attacks on a specific party member in this game, with him giving the person he targets an insulting nickname (such as calling the protagonist "The pompous man in the black coat"). What does he call the real Haru? "The phony with the face of my daughter!" Ouch.
• Some of the new all-out attack portraits are just outright frightening.
  • This is the Black Mask Akechi's. You won't actually believe that this is one of your loyal companions... but he is.
  • Then there's Lavenza's. Yes, Lavenza. If you don't believe it, see for yourself. If her yelling at Ryuji wasn't any indication, this Death Glare indicates that Caroline is definitely still a part of her.
• Speaking of Lavenza, in this game, she still uses the chainsaw for fusion accidents... and she seems completely positively thrilled with doing it.
• Upon finding the hidden rooms containing Will Seeds, the distorted voice of that Palace's ruler begins echoing around the player the closer they get to it. It's implied by the context of Will Seeds being the ruler's coalesced distortions that these voices are their inner thoughts, and some of them, when they can be made out, can be extremely unsettling to listen to.
  • The player has no shortage of reasons to despise Kamoshida by the time Will Seeds are introduced. This time, his Castle's rooms echo with nothing but lecherous laughter and sleazy come-ons towards the likes of Ann and Shiho - the latter of whom, at this point, he's already raped and driven towards suicide.
  • Futaba instead cries for help constantly, saying that she's scared and she feels sorry for her mother's death. It's like experiencing her fear and loneliness more directly.
  • Shido's insufferably-smug voice makes it clear that he has no intention of stopping his trail of victims even after he's elected. In fact, it implies that what he's done so far is only the beginning.
    "... Only those who support my efforts deserve my guidance... Who would've guessed the incompetence of others is all it takes to surge in the polls?... The end is coming... in more ways than one... That researcher woman's death was painfully unfortunate timing... There are still numerous additional ways we can capitalize on cognitive psience... First I'll conquer this nation, then I'll conquer the world... Now, who to erase next?..."

Third Semester

• The long-desired Third Term is finally playable... and something is horribly wrong. It starts with Joker going to sleep, only to dream about being in school. Except he's in his prison clothes, and he moves very slowly. The school is dark and silent, save for the loud, ominous voices that he hears. After he wakes up, he realizes that the impossible has happened: Wakaba Isshiki, Kunikazu Okumura, and Makoto's dad are all alive once more; Shiho never transferred schools; Yusuke, in a massive OOC moment, has put Sayuri in a museum and is studying under Madarame again; and Akechi (who may or may not have survived his sacrifice in Shido's Palace) is the only one who notices something's off. Apparently, even Morgana isn't immune to whatever's happening here, having turned into a human! And then it turns out that the mastermind is none other than your friendly consultant, Takuto Maruki, who seems to have been reduced to nothing more than a cross between a Madara Uchiha Expy and the him that you once knew. And his purpose isn't even evil; he only wants people to be happy, yet it's just corrupted to total stagnation.
• Kasumi's death is just as terrifying as Joker's assassination during the game's first Bad Ending. Despite being shown as a confident and charismatic girl during the whole animated scene where she was returning home with Sumire... all of a sudden she gets hit by incoming traffic, the music stops, and you see a bloody pile of what was Kasumi laying on top of the rainy road... alongside a grief-stricken Sumire and some shocked passerby calling for an ambulance.
• One thing you start noticing fairly quickly in the third semester is how all the faceless people walking around Tokyo now have smiles plastered on their faces. Once you learn what's going on, these smiling people become incredibly creepy very quickly...
• Lavenza, who was servant to the previous Big Bad and was privy to Yaldabaoth providing Personas to Joker and Akechi, has no idea how or when Maruki first awakened to the Persona that allows him to distort reality like this, let alone how he's managed to acquire a Persona and a Palace at the same time. It's then revealed that each of the Phantom Thieves' prior counselling sessions with Maruki allowed him to see into each of their hearts and let him craft his new "reality" even more believably. Akechi bluntly tells you that you all walked straight into the spider's parlor. At this point, you might remember an important detail: Maruki revealed at the end of his confidant that he'd known you were the Phantom Thieves since Ann's awakening, before the two of you had even met, and had specifically reached out to you because he knew. Which begs the question: just how long has he been manipulating you up until now?
• The Counseling Student REACTS to Dr. Maruki series on YouTube, while ultimately giving Maruki a mixed review, points out that he commits so many mistakes and faux pas that, in real life, would be unacceptable coming from a counselor during his sessions with Joker and friends.^note There's a Values Dissonance aspect here as well, as it is not uncommon for counselors in Asian countries like Japan to take the lead of the conversation and egg on them rather than the other way around. Meaning for a Westerner, it will look obviously wrong but to an Eastern audience, he won't look too out of place. Many of those blunders involve either blatant affirmation or egging them on to talk so he can learn their thought processes and desires in the moment, and there is very little in the way of guidance to actually help his clients move past their traumas. He even goes so far as to mention things he shouldn't already know about, like Ryuji's injured leg - people in real life have walked out on counselors and never looked back for moments exactly like that. In light of the revelation that he at least had a solid idea who was among the Phantom Thieves before they ever walked into his office and that his actual occupation is a researcher trying to complete a thesis paper instead of a counselor, it's very clear that he is collecting data instead of counseling and he's very good at not looking suspicious. A commenter pointed out how disturbingly fitting it is:
  "I just realized how much it makes sense that Shujin Academy, the ones who half ass literally everything that involves their students and couldn't care less about their wellbeing, would hire a researcher as the councilor. Ya know, instead of a licensed and practiced one. Those probably cost a lot more money than a researcher."
• Think that the awakening scenes of the other Phantom Thieves are terrifying? Sumire's awakening scene pushes that up to eleven, complete with what amounts to a Nightmare Face that you won't even think she could ever make. HOLY CRAP, JUST LOOK AT IT.
• The building that constructs this Palace seems fine but it quickly becomes outright terrifying as cognitive patients appear all over the area seemingly more and more brainwashed as you go further, eventually degrading to a status where they can only laugh and ascend to the air, which is revealed to be the Garden of Eden.
  • Throughout the first portion of this Palace, the objects you can steal from are small trinkets and decorations like most palaces. Once you delve into the storage room and beyond, you find new objects: large, tentacle-wrapped capsules as tall as Joker, with a clawed hand inside clutching what appears to be a human brain. And you steal the brain! If the cult-like setup of the Palace thus far isn't enough to tell you that something is horrendously wrong here, this will spell it out like a neon sign.
• Right in the middle of the therapy room is a small space infested with red shadows containing abnormally powerful Fafnir that you are better off running away from if you go in unprepared, and that space contains the third videotape about Maruki's past. And then in that room, you can hear people screaming... and when you pay attention to some of the background decor, there are cognitive people tied onto the beds receiving therapy.
• When he sends out the Shadow near him to attack you after the Sumire cutscene, the Shadow breaks down in an incredibly disturbing way. It walks around slowly towards you, then limps, twitches its body and blue liquid can be seen dripping onto the floor... then it explodes and transforms into Hastur. ^note Though for some, the Hastur would make this Nightmare Retardant because it is a familiar face and looks like a comical, oversized rubber toy.
• The way Maruki handles Kasumi/Sumire, well-intentioned or not. Just as "Kasumi" begins to piece together the truth, he asks her if she's really sure she wants to know, and "Kasumi" says yes... so he replays the moment when the real Kasumi had sacrificed herself to protect her sister from committing suicide, dying right in front of Sumire. This forces her to relive the trauma that made her want to forget herself in the first place, and her cognitive overlay breaks like glass. When you and Akechi tell Maruki to restore the human reality, she rejects the truth to continue living as Kasumi, and Maruki - wanting to grant her wishes of such - takes her hostage to keep you from going against her wishes. When you come back after a week and still refuse his offer, Sumire attacks you in a desperate, yet physically-weak frenzy because she can't handle being herself... then Maruki, still intending on helping her realize her dream of living as Kasumi, ensnares her before send out a bunch of electric cables that push her persona Cendrillon into berserk mode!
  • The berserk Cendrillon fights in an outright disturbing way; Maruki summons Biyarky for her to consume and recover HP!
  • Oh and the manipulation with Sumire is just a warning. In other words, Maruki can do much worse than this if he were truly evil. However, but Maruki is doing all of this by a lethal cocktail of grief and genuine altriusm. It was later revealed that his Persona was originally just an invisible mechanism that he can't even activate on his own volition, but only on very specific situations such as Sumire or Rumi where someone can't possibly get away from the trauma on their own. It's not until Shido placing an embargo on his cognitive psience research career - combined with Yaldabaoth advancing his plans to rig society against the Thieves - caused him to awaken his persona's true power and turning him into the Dark Messiah he is in the Third Term.
  • Speaking of Azathoth, there are Biyarky and Hastur in Maruki's palace, which are instant Paranoia Fuel for Nyarlathotep's return. While Azathoth appears to be just a rogue Persona, it wouldn't make you stop thinking about it, especially since Nyarly himself acted as a Persona at points.
• The regular Shadows in his Palace are incredibly disturbing. Unlike the other Shadows which at least looked refined and human, these Shadows resemble slender, deep black humanoids in researcher outfits sprawling in a building resembling a cybernetic research facility, then a heavenly paradise. The ones in the warehouse and Twilight Corridor are even worse, being undressed, making them appear even more alien-like. When any of them spot you, they'll all chase after you at erratic, alarmingly fast speeds. The ones in the warehouse are the worst of this, with one variant scuttling towards you on all fours with all of its limbs flailing about, while another variant doesn't seem to have arms until it spots you and it spawns a giant mouth with sharp teeth to gnaw at you. You will actually be relieved when they break out into familiar faces like Cu Chulainn or Siegfried. If the Shadows in Persona 4's Heaven don't creep you out with their dissonance, these will.
• The new Bad Ending for accepting Maruki's ideal world is the epitome of Dissonant Serenity. It seems like a Golden Ending at first and would be easily so in any other context. In actuality, this is that Persona 3 sort of bad ending where something is eerily wrong taking the context in mind. It's not even that different, aside that instead of buying everyone one more month of peace before everything gets utterly obliterated, everyone gets to live forever, as in forever devoid of the trauma required for them to undergo Character Development. They all become nothing, as they don't actually feel anything but happiness and are technically still alive, but they no longer feel pain, terror or suffering, nor do they have any potential to move forward or have any sort of development, effectively making them spiritual husks that aren't different from being dead. ^note To put, Morgana is now a human and dating Ann; Shiho has became a volleyball ace and returned to being close friends with Ann as Kamoshida was out of the picture; Madarame reconciles with Yusuke and becomes a kind mentor rather than a fraudulent hack; Makoto's Father was back alive and thus Sae no longer needs to raise her alone, reconciling their strained relationship; Futaba will be attending Shujin Academy during the next school year and is now a happy family with Wakaba and Sojiro, Okumura is Back from the Dead and is the caring father Haru considered him as; Sumire outright becomes Kasumi Yoshizawa as she wishes in her depressed and unstable mental state; Sojiro offers Joker to take over Cafe Leblanc when he graduates from high school; and Akechi is unambiguously alive and is best friends with the other Phantom Thieves. But just like Aigis on the promised day where Nyx kills everyone with all of them no longer remembering that a certain death is around the corner, Joker is the only one seemingly devoid of Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory and is aware that everything is too good to be true. In fact, he's not even smiling in the photo that Maruki takes for the Phantom Thieves, seems to express remorse that Sumire's true self is dead after she walks past him and everybody no longer recognizes him. On top of all of this, Mementos fuses with reality to make everyone's wholesome desires come true with Maruki himself being reduced into a nameless man. The true meaning of the ending is that not only you had failed the spirit of the Phantom Thieves, you had doomed people to eternal stagnation and nobody can or will do anything against it.
  • The reversion of Sumire into "Kasumi" has much, more severe consequences behind it. In this instance, Sumire isn't only brainwashed into thinking that she is Kasumi, she is Kasumi with all of her abilities and talent, and none of her holes that exist within the fake Kasumi are there anymore. In other words, by accepting Maruki's reality, you murdered Sumire for real.
  • To make things worse? A seemingly inconspicuous chat with Akechi after sending the calling card to Maruki can trigger it. There is absolutely no more damning proof that Maruki is setting you up when he said Akechi is a fake.
  • Take note Akechi's voice in this ending on both the Japanese and English versions, namely how it sounds nothing like him. It's not his 'fake-nice' performance from earlier in the game; it's just an... unexpectedly nice voice, to match his personality in this world. That's right. He's no different from being dead just like everyone else.
  • The final snapshot for this ending seems perfectly normal at first... until you look at Joker and Akechi. They're looking at you. Yes, you. They know that this is a bad ending, and they know that you are probably aware of what's going on. And all they can do is look knowingly at you.
• The new Non-Standard Game Over for failing to complete Maruki's Palace is worse than the "Ideal Reality" bad ending. The Phantom Thieves become indecisive over whether to stay in Maruki's reality and believe their desires were subconsciously preventing them from securing the Treasure in time. When Joker goes to sleep, Maruki summons him to his office, confessing that he initially wanted him to accept his reality out of his own free will. However, because Joker cannot decide, Maruki feels responsible for burdening him with the choice, so he, in an eerily calm voice, summons his Persona and forces him to sleep forever, so he no longer has to think for himself. The next time Joker wakes up, you'll notice that he hasn't done anything except sleep, and he's been trapped in Maruki's world for God knows how long, given the amount of cobwebs in his room. Also, Lavenza is unsuccessful in contacting him, as her butterfly weakens and fades, showing that even she is unable to lead him out.
• While this didn't make it to the final game, in the game's coding, there was a Valentine's Day event and a White Day event for the third semester's bad ending, where all of the girls celebrate Joker for cheating on them. Not only that, the girls also look and act like obedient extensions of Joker instead of people. Keep in mind that the overarching reality of Shin Megami Tensei is one wherein almost every potential love interest a protagonist can have has clearly expressed desire for monogamous love in just about every instance—NOT AT ALL an environment ideal for a Harem Seeker.
  • This paints Joker in a horrible light if he chooses such an option, since if Maruki can actualize this for him, it's most likely his mindset for dating multiple women. Forget the general franchise context, this mentality is warned against within vanilla P5 itself. Try to two-time every potential love interest and you'll find them all crying outside Cafe Leblanc on Valentine's Day; in fact, you'll be lucky Sojiro was there to smooth things over or else the damage done might have extended beyond every romantic subplot being closed that night with a beating. If Joker, who no doubt must know that none of his potential romantic partners would ever simply throw themselves at him without any consequences for cheating, is willing to have Maruki actualize this for him, then he must be a very manipulative person.
  • Knowing that the girls in reality would be utterly heartbroken to find that their lover has been spreading his seed to every girl they know, this crystallizes the notion that, yes, all feelings of pain, suffering, disappointment, discontent, failure, etc. are completely shut off in Maruki's reality. If it weren't for Maruki's desire for criminals and villains not to commit crimes period, via taking those desires away and making them content with a 'normal' happy life - not including Shido, since he was arrested and his desires remained unfulfilled in the revised reality - it would have created a world filled with normal people and criminals all getting what they want simultaneously, and everyone would just be happy about that.

---