Despite being a lot more light-hearted than Persona 5, and being one of the very few Persona (or even Megaten) games to even end with an Everybody Lives ending (at least for its chronological duration), neither of these stops this game from being Darker and Edgier than the previous Q.
WARNING: All spoilers ahead are unmarked, as per Nightmare Fuel guidelines!
- While, unlike the previous Q, the game doesn't feature any horror elements in most of its aesthetics (with the exception of the one pictured), it also doesn't attempt to sugarcoat any of its darker elements. Compared to the false Yasogami High in the previous Q, which at least looked populated, the Cinema that acts as the hub of this game almost looks deserted - there's only a few people in there, and one of them isn't even a 'person' to begin with. When the Phantom Thieves get in there, the first thing that greets them is a large blob-like monster resembling a Shadow that doesn't talk at all. The other two are also distinctly off from the beginning; unlike Rei (who hides herself behind a Stepford Smiler facade), Hikari doesn't even try to hide that she's a depressed mess. And although Nagi doesn't look as bad as Hikari or Doe, her bystander stance and patronizing kindness is a red flag reflecting what she actually is, striking a hard contrast to how Zen is willing to sacrifice Rei's happiness for her ultimate well-being. The movies also, straight off the bat, depict questionable entities such as Kamoshida and A.I. gods as Designated Heroes - and anyone who opposes them as Designated Villains. All of these "protagonists" are just villains with good publicity in their own worlds who are out to destroy all of their opposition... righteously, of course!
- Perhaps fitting as a Persona 5 spinoff, the game seems to base itself out of natural fears a lot; The majority of its darker elements are adult fears instead of outright horror. Furthermore, it portrays bullying by peers and its mental effects with disturbingly high accuracy, even by Atlus' standards.
- Each movie's plot focuses on a situation where Individuality Is Illegal, and justice is defined by leaders and the majority.
- Kamoshidaman is a movie where a figure based on Kamoshida, Persona 5’s Starter Villain, is the title character. Kamoshidaman protects his city from villains and evil... the only problem is, Kamoshidaman decides who's "good" and who's "evil", and the city listens to him. That sort of power shouldn't be in the hands of a bully like that.
- Junessic Land is a movie about an abandoned island theme park, where dinosaurs roam and the strong rule. In order to survive and escape their predators, the herbivores grouped up together and formed a herd - however, from within their group, an unspeakable evil emerged: one of their own expressed his personal opinion. Bringing up your personal opinion (especially a dissenting one) is against majority rule, and whatever the majority does in retaliation to a minority speaking up against them is justice. The movie’s protagonists, the righteous majority of the herbivore herd, aim to silence the evil minority who dared to speak up against them.
- A.I.G.I.S is about a sole robot becoming a unique individual, inside a society where every robot is the same... and that unique robot is the villain of the movie; conversely, the protagonists are the robot society and their leader, who must destroy the single robot that decided to stand out.
- If you don't know that Kamoshidaman isn't Kamoshida, seeing Makoto and Haru kidnapped by him can be quite disturbing: Kamoshida is a rapist who is sexually aroused by girls like those, so a person who looks exactly like him kidnapping the two girls should ring red alarms.
- If you disagree with Hikari's supposed ending of Kamoshidaman, Akechi hints that such an ending actually happened in real life. What has Akechi gone through, that he'd be so indifferent to a situation like that?
- Super Kamoshidaman can be pretty frightening at first glance. If you think that Kamoshidaman was bad, just think that he's now turned into wererabbit abomination while mercilessly trying to kill you and saying that it is "Justice!" Even Ann and Akechi admit that Super Kamoshidaman looks disgusting. For a first boss, he's definitely no pushover, either; he can oneshot party members with many of his attacks, and his carrot guns have ridiculous amounts of HP. Removing them lets you all out attack him reliably with physical attack criticals, but it doesn't stop him from using a bunch of physical attacks to destroy your party.
- Doe making the keys can be terrifying. This usually inanimate and silent thing just spasms out like he's going to explode, while making incredibly frightening screams. It's the worst the first time around when you aren't expecting it: the entire progress is depicted in detail, and poor Hikari can be seen writhing in pain alongside him.
- Yosukesaurus's Sanity Slippage can be quite terrifying, in context. All he did was lead the other herbivores into a non-existent paradise at the isle's end — even though he didn't know that place would just make them easy prey, it's just as bad where the rest of the herd is concerned. Although the other herbivores already unanimously want to lynch him, they then force him to attack humans only because he read about the paradise from a human book! They mindbreak him piece by piece for them and threaten to ostracize him if he doesn't attack the Persona users, even if they didn't write the book and they were his friends; and then he turns into a carnivorous dinosaur himself and takes on their speech patterns, while viciously attacking the party!
- Making this worse, the whole situation is a scarily accurate metaphor for a new student at school being convinced to become a bully just to fit in with the "popular kids".
- The A.I. Overlord in the third Labyrinth is outright terrifying. Not only he can force Ribbon to completely comply to him before the Persona users come in to help her, he successfully kidnaps the P3 Hero and Aigis of all people: these are supposed to be some of the strongest Persona users in the series, and they still get kidnapped by this A.I. God — who's just a movie character, not even a powerful Shadow. The A.I. also looks like Shuji Ikutsuki, shocking S.E.E.S. at him being a futuristic dictator... and they have absolutely no idea that their beloved Ikutsuki is actually a Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, exactly like the A.I. Overlord. Oh, and unlike other movie bosses, he doesn't spit out any Large Ham dialogue or roar at any time; he's eerily calm and monotonous, even when he's cruelly manipulating Ribbon.
- The reason why it's an A.I. God is even more disturbing, since that's actually how Hikari sees her relatives; her cognition of them is basically that they can wipe her dreams out, any way they want. If it hasn't sunk in yet already, this is how serious the emotional abuse of her relatives was.
- Much like the Yosukesaurus case above, this is a disturbingly accurate metaphor for your parents or caretakers not letting you do anything you want to do, regardless of cost.
- The entire Kamoshidaman arc is much more unsettling when seen in-depth.
- Chicken Kid (the first FOE seen in-game) may seem like Nightmare Retardant, but it's very serious about its job, and is - in fact - responsible for kidnapping Makoto and Haru, and handing them over to Kamoshidaman. If you're unlucky to fight it when exploring the labyrinth and don't run, it's likely to wipe out your party in only a few turns. This is the Fridge Horror part — in the fourth labyrinth's cognitive primary school, Hikari mentioned that she once thought that her teachers were heroes (until the rabbit incident took place) because of a movie she watched where a teacher transforms into a superhero, and the official PQ2 art book explicitly states that Chicken Kid is based on her trauma: it's actually one of the rabbit keepers, who simply went with the teacher to feed the rabbit bad food.
- There's also another FOE that looks like a Gynoid. While it isn't as terrifying as Chicken Kid, it's actually based on another student who just went with the teacher. After the rabbit incident, Hikari said that she was fed up with heroes, implying that she was traumatized to the point that she thinks that movie superheroes are actually terrorizing people, instead of protecting them — and her cognition of those two students is that they are demonized superheroes, out to get everyone who does not comply to authority.
- Then there's Super Kamoshidaman himself. He looks like a Giant Space Flea from Nowhere, but he's there for a reason; Kamoshidaman is actually Hikari's primary school teacher as Kamoshida, who blamed young Hikari for "poisoning" a rabbit that the teacher gave bad food to. In other words, the teacher didn't even care about the rabbit: she was just blaming its death on the idiot with the loudest mouth!
- To add insult to injury, remember it was just the teacher herself who didn't care for the rabbit; the students, most likely, still considered it their beloved pet. This meant that Hikari was - probably - branded as the "rabbit murderer" from this point on, which made it almost impossible for her to make friends in her primary school, all because she called a teacher out for giving the bunny unsuitable food.
- Don't forget: Hikari, at that time, was just a primary school student - who are supposed to admire their teachers. If that admiration alone was crushed by a jerkass teacher at such a young age, there's no wonder why she would end up with that level of PTSD.
- Overall, the entire movie is a disturbingly accurate portrayal of how primary school students absolutely cannot speak against their teachers, even if the teachers are bullying them or actively wrong.
- The fourth world's content is largely a mystery, outside of being heavily based off of The Wizard of Oz and various fairy tales, but it opens with a fairly unsettling musical number where Hikari questions her identity while surrounded by overly-cheerful cartoon characters; one shot in particular shows them looming over her with sinister yellow eyes. More than a few fans have said they're reminded of Omatsuri Island. Then you actually get into it, and realize the film is actually Hikari's Palace; everything in there is literally an embodiment of depression that came to life purely to torture her. It's nothing but deep nightmare fuel mixed with some of the very few instances of aesthetic horror in the game, and somehow the horror elements depicted there are more striking than the visual horror.
- What doesn't help, either, is the music. The one played in the upper floors is fine, but the one played on the lower floors simply feels like... something is burning and collapsing, and that "something" is Hikari's life.
- One of the FOEs in this area is a twitching, demonic, teddy bear that moves so fast it practically teleports — meaning it'll frequently pop up just out of the corner of your eye, if not right in front of you... and when it starts pursuing you, it hulks out into a MUCH larger form with very big, sharp claws. Making things even worse, in battle, it seems to alternate between child and adult voices.
- There's another FOE in the fourth world that's just as bad: it appears as a Tin Man like the one from The Wizard of Oz, and when it's not attacking you, it even looks rather silly. When it becomes aggressive, however, it opens up its body and reveals a large, menacing killer robot with a red skull on its chest. Just WHAT kind of abominations has Hikari created with her depression?
- Hikari's breakdown cutscene is kind of unsettling; it depicts her having a Flashback Echo trip of her tormentors asking her "why do you have to be like that?"note after her father supposedly asked, because he loathed her and was told by her relatives to make her "normal". In some of the scenes, she even makes this
◊ Kubrick Stare that she never makes anywhere else in the game. It's pretty obvious that she isn't enjoying it. The only dialogue she has during this musical is just two cries of agony, both during the flashback trip; the other dialogue are muted as if she were catatonic, and in the real event they were just weeping sounds. You should get how bad her depression has became. - Making things even worse, it's revealed that none of the events at the musical before the breakdown ever happened: Hikari's father asked her the question out of genuine concern for her mental health, not knowing how triggering the phrase was to her, so she was simply destroying herself. The thought of society itself driving a nice girl into becoming a self-destructive mess is just downright frightening.
- And the reason why her father knows absolutely nothing about why she's so depressed or her trigger phrase? She just let herself break because she's scared of angering him and getting punished by letting him know he raised her ineffectively.
- The next floor is EVEN WORSE; it's almost like this thing shouldn't belong in the fourth labyrinth, or even in a Persona game. All of the bright colors in the labyrinth are now gone, and the flowers now have hollowed out eye sockets, crying blood. What's not explicitly mentioned in the game is that this is actually Hikari's mindset: the emotional abuse she's suffered, along with the misconception that her father loathed her, have made her think that her life is so horrible that she should just kill herself already. Even the name of the floor itself is Nightmare Fuel — It's called the Endless Interlude (as in the break between a movie or musical), and the "movie" going on interlude is a metaphor for Hikari's life: it's not hard to connect the dots and assume she doesn't want to live anymore.
- The Doe Jump Scare that happens before you fight him can catch you off guard, especially when accompanied with the background music. JUST LOOK AT THIS.◊ The Blob Monster form that he uses to fight the player is quite disturbing too, as it looks like something coming out of Bloodborne instead of Persona. It constantly repeats the HikariHikariHikariHikariiiii!!!! Madness Mantra, even though its attacks are directed towards the player, and it never says anything else (besides trying to say "Why do you have to be like that...") once throughout the battle. The most horrifying thing: this grotesque creature is how Hikari sees her father. She really thinks that he despised her for not being able to fulfill his expectations, and his accidental use of her trigger phrase just acted as The Last Straw to solidify her delusional thoughts.
- The fight itself can also be really panic-inducing; After you remove his head, he is still alive... then he proceeds to cast triple binds on your entire party, which can't be healed with any items or skills. In fact, it can even bypass any passive null binds you have! Hikari is the only thing able to rescue the party from that triple bind; even then, she can only unbind one person at a time, and Doe recasts his binding ability every five turns.
- Her real father is actually a kind, bespectacled old man who genuinely cares for her and is truly a Good Parent. He is absolutely not the terrifying figure that Hikari perceived him as, and he in fact encouraged her to develop her talents. It's really shocking that such a man is viewed as an Eldritch Abomination by his daughter, all because he unintentionally activated a Trauma Button that was drilled into her by society itself - in a well-meant attempt to relieve her!
- You still get to see the Doe Jump Scare once before you fight his projection in the final labyrinth, and the animation is even more disturbing this time.
- Speaking of which, Hikari's background story itself is basically nothing more than Nightmare Fuel. Unlike other Persona characters closely related to adult fears (such as Shiho, Futaba, or Akechi), her background is merely an extremely accurate portrayal of how youngsters in Japan get their life ruined by peer pressure; she could basically be anyone. Although her background story is not as much of a Tear Jerker as Rei's, it's simply unnerving because of how sane her Dark and Troubled Past is, even for Persona standards - most Persona traumas are simply outright cruel and usually not anything like this.
- Hikari's actual condition is implied to be a lot worse than how it appears to be at the start of the game; just what kind of depression can cause a girl like that to create not one, but four cognitive worlds, each with dangerous Shadows and Cognitions out to harm or kill any trespassers? Not even really distorted people like Adachi or Shido ever managed to create more than one cognitive world with their distortions.
- Hikari herself has a cute design, although a close examination on her models will reveal that her eyes are somewhat off and creepy.
- The fifth labyrinth reveals that Nagi is the big bad after all, and she's actually "Enlil", a god summoned from the collective unconsciousness to end all of humanity's pain. Weak people end up in her domain, and she attempts to bring forth "salvation", by having her hapless wards watch how others suffer like them. Then you're being shown a bunch of people who are apparently so soaked in their depression and apathy that they refuse to get out of their broken shells, and she in fact lets them leave all the time, it's all just a Self-Inflicted Hell between all of them. At the scene after you confront her Shadow minions at the depths, she even shows you a man who just lays on his seat in a catatonic fashion after displaying a More than Mind Control mentality. While the game doesn't directly show Hikari inside the Cinema before the Phantom Thieves arrived, this heavily implies that she was exactly like those people before Doe appeared to make the negative films come to life, and at one point during those reveals you can even hear her saying "I don't want to think about anything."
- The worst thing about Enlil is that, much unlike other "gods" Big Bads (such as Izanami or Yaldabaoth), you aren't just interacting with her once a while or using her services - she's literally standing right in front of you from the start of the game. Everyone's asking her for clues about the Cinema, socializing with her. and she acts like a regular instead of a Persona Big Bad. In other words, she is literally "hiding in plain sight". This becomes even worse for Hikari, since Nagi is the person whom she counted on to be able to save her; but, in reality, Nagi's just manipulating Hikari to rot her heart out.
- By the time you get to access the final labyrinth, you'd be long used to the sounds of a movie starting as the party enters it. With the Theater District, you're instead opening the door and heading out of the cinema, and it's eerily quiet in comparison, with only the sounds of the wind outside accompanying the start of your expedition.
- Enlil's domain bears a striking resemblance to the Mementos Depths, and the OST even refers to the soundtrack that plays in the cutscenes where people are trapped as "Movie Prison". You're constantly reminded that there are people inside the walls/cinemas of the labyrinth who act exactly like how the Shadows of people imprisoned in the Mementos Depths are; no lifeforce, extremely apathetic, and - as a whole - they've lost all hope and any desire to think about anything. They just want to escape from their pain that further feed their depression and keep their emotional spiral going downwards, just like how the public in Persona 5 during the last arc wished for the Holy Grail to rule over them so they don't need to think for themselves. Despite the fact Enlil's domain is supposed to be a place of solace for people pressurized by society, it turns out to be a Mementos copycat — even Enlil herself doesn't really understand what she's created, and she doesn't want to admit the truth; in fact, forcing her to admit the truth about what her domain really is ends up being exactly why she fights you.
- The Theaters can also cause a Reality Bleed, and would directly attack Yaldabaoth's domain if they weren't taken care of. Just imagine what happens if it actually gets pulled out; that would most definitely cause two gods with opposing beliefs fighting each other to the death, with unimaginable collateral damage.
- Unlike most Lotus Eater Machines, the Cinemas present themselves as nothing more than a horrible nightmare for anyone trapped inside them; they're just Psychological Torment Zones that constantly encourage their wards to give up living, and feed them with nothing but emotional poison. It wouldn't be any different from locking a depressed person inside a dark room, and having a bunch of people surround and tell them everyday to commit suicide, because life is awful - and passing it as "therapy". This is a sharp contrast compared to the Yasogami High School in the previous Q, whose sole purpose was for Zen to make Rei happy, and he actually managed to make her feel much better at that time - not worse!
- Now here's some Fridge Horror; you really wonder what Hikari is doing in her confines all the time... and how is she supposed to sustain this from the time before Kamoshida's change of heart, to the Niijima's Palace heist, without at least one suicide attempt? Not to say the other people might be around way before Hikari was, and there is no indicator how long they had been trapped, and how many were Driven to Suicide. It's just disturbing to think that these people even manage to live in such a mentally unsustainable condition. Enlil's Cinemas also refill themselves with wards regularly: you now get a good idea of how screwed up society is at the time of Persona 5.
- The Cinemas are only trapping people's will to live, which means that the Hikari you interact with for most of the game is not the real deal: the real Hikari is still in the real world, being withdrawn and depressed, with her will to live taken away. In some degree, it's just as depressing and frightening as Rei's fate.
- The Reaper is back! Thankfully, unlike in the previous game, he just lurks in a very obvious red treasure spot - and the party asks you permission to excavate it - so he's easy to avoid, unless you want to fight him. The catch: beating him is the only way to let you fuse Lucifer in this game.
- Enlil's Slasher Smile that appears only when her human form is hurt, when she attacks the party with a physical attack, or moments before transforming into her true form. It's nothing like her usual calm stance, and her eyes just flip out. The way she transforms is even worse; she makes an even more disturbing grin, and then shouts in a total frenzy.
- If you don't know that it's scripted (or you haven't fought Persona 4's Izanami recently enough to know where this is going), the attack that Enlil casts when she is nearly dead can be panic fuel: it makes it look like the long boss battle you just fought was all for naught. At first, you're completely prevented from fighting... and then she removes all of your combat units in three turns, leaving only your Navigator units and Hikari on the field. Uh oh.... how are you going to fight toothless and armless? She's basically unarming you.
- Think the staff roll will be just filled with both heartwarmings and funnies? THINK AGAIN. HANAKO of all people from Persona 4 RETURNS in the form of a carnivore dinosaur, lusting over a frightened Yosuke.
