Persona 5 / Tropes G to M

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Persona 5 provides examples of the following tropes:

G

• Gambit Pileup: The final act reveals that the entire overarching plot was riding on it. Masayoshi Shido and his band of conspirators had been using the Metaverse to ruin the careers and lives of their political opponents and anyone who got in their way, and The Dragon, Goro Akechi, was doing their bidding for the sole purpose of exacting revenge on Shido, who happened to be his father through an illicit affair, when the time was right. Shido suspected this and planned to dispose of Akechi once he was elected. This conspiracy begins plotting against the Phantom Thieves when they start to (unknowingly) target their associates, in an attempt to frame them for their own crimes. The Phantom Thieves catch on to this and hatch their own plot against Akechi so that they can uncover who's behind everything. And finally, all of this is just a solitaire game by Yaldabaoth, who deliberately rigs the most despicable, ignorant and tyrannical conspiracy possible into power and have the masses worship them, then have either Joker or Akechi dismantle them so he can justify his despotic rule over humanity so there will be no more corrupt and impotent conspiracies like the one he sets up. And then he manipulates the masses to delete all Phantom Thieves as well. At this point, Joker can either cut a deal with him in order to keep himself in business so he can take over the city for the price of all of his comrades, or put a stop to all the plotting and collusion and take him down.
• Gambit Roulette: The entire casino heist and everything after was all part of a plan by the Thieves to expose Akechi as a traitor, find out who his boss is, turn Sae to their side and fake the Protagonist's death so that The Conspiracy will stop chasing the Thieves for awhile. However, as everyone points out, nobody knew what would happen past the Protagonist's capture and the entire plan hinged on the Protagonist appealing to Sae's long lost sense of justice. And then there's the fact that the drugs the interrogators used messed with his mind so much that he didn't even remember that there was a plan until the last minute.
• Game-Over Man: Velvet Room attendants Justine and Caroline bring your corpse to their Eldritch Location and read various poems lamenting the end of your journey whenever you die.
• Game Show: You can occasionally catch quiz shows on TV, which ask questions related to Japanese laws. Guessing the right answer to a question ahead of the contenders will even net you a bonus parameter point to knowledge without spending any time.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: Has its own page.
• Gaslighting: Futaba was gaslit into believing that her mother Wakaba hated her and that she committed suicide because of her. The truth is that Wakaba was murdered by The Conspiracy, and The Men in Black forged a suicide note saying that she wished Futaba was never born, which they read out loud in front of Futaba and her relatives in order to convince her that her mother hated her. This caused Futaba to develop severe PTSD while worsening her social anxiety to the point where she turned into a Hikikomori. However, her Shadow Archetype points out to her that Wakaba was always a loving mother who never acted abusive, causing her to realize that the image of the abusive Wakaba who hated her was a false memory created through this psychological manipulation, allowing her to figure out the truth and awaken her own Persona.
• Gender-Blender Name: Those who know nothing about Morgana other than his name may be forgiven for thinking that he is female. Haru also chooses "Noir" (the masculine singular French word for black) for her Metaverse alias.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: The Phantom Thieves of Hearts become this by the end of the game. The boys are Joker, Morgana, Ryuji, Yusuke, and (in Royal) Akechi, while the girls are Ann, Makoto, Futaba, Haru, and (in Royal) Sumire.
• Genre Shift: Story-wise, shifting from the Persona 4 Murder Mystery in the suburbs to a Conspiracy Thriller in metropolitan Tokyo. Additionally, each dungeon is treated as The Caper instead of a Rescue Arc.
  • The Third Semester in Royal shifts from Conspiracy Thriller to more of a Psychological Horror with Lovecraft Lite elements. It takes place after The Conspiracy is defeated, but the new conflict is about Dr. Maruki having gained Reality Warper powers and putting everyone into a Lotus-Eater Machine. At the same time, Joker learns the secrets about his classmate Yoshizawa. A major recurring theme and danger in the Third Semester is Death of Personality instead of literal death.
• Genre Throwback:
  • Elements of previous SMT and Persona games are brought back in this game, including the ability to recruit Mons through negotiation and guns as an equippable weapon for all party members. Elements of the SMT main series' "YHVH vs. Lucifer" narrative also bleed into this game near the end, with Yaldabaoth having elements of YHVH's characterization (chiefly, his desire to subject humanity to his whims) and being defeated by a Persona that is a Gnostic interpretation of Lucifer.
  • In Royal, further references to the obscure Xbox SMT Shin Megami Tensei: NINE are added, including a heroine named Sumire, Adam Kadmon and a dream reality resembling Idea Space, with its guardian Maria acting as the Faith Arcana's ultimate persona.
• Get A Hold Of Yourself Man: Like in Persona 4, your party members with high enough Confidants can smack each other to cure certain status aliments. Unlike in Persona 4, they do this by pulling a giant Paper Fan of Doom out of nowhere.
• Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul: Maruki's plan in Royal. By merging Mementos with the real world, he can create a perfect utopia where everyone is eternally happy, but which will also be stagnant, controlled solely by Maruki, and never give anyone a chance to grow or become a better person.
• Giant Mook: Most of the mini-bosses are regular Shadows/Demons with upgraded stats and elemental protections.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The Reaper, a terrifyingly powerful Shadow that will appear and attack you in Mementos if you stay still for two minutes. It's even viewed this way in-game, with Morgana saying that he doesn't know anything about the Reaper besides the fact that it's pants-wettingly terrifying and should not be messed with.
• Glass Cannon: The "Merciless" difficulty turns everyone into this thanks to adding a 2.5x multiplier to critical damage. If you get a critical hit, technical or exploit a weakness, just about every opponent and party member other than bosses can be killed instantly.
• The Glasses Come Off:
  • The protagonist loses his Purely Aesthetic Glasses any time he enters the collective unconscious to fight Shadows. Particularly played up at the start of the game, where his glasses are knocked off by a guard right before he awakens to his Persona.
  • This also happens to Sumire Yoshizawa after she's exposed as not being Kasumi and you max her Confidant to rank 10.
• A Glitch in the Matrix:
  • In the start of the Third Trimester in Royal, Joker gets clued in immediately that things aren't right when there's a strange boy in Leblanc (Morgana in human form) and Futaba mentions her mother, Wakaba, having brought her yukata. Similarly, Akechi immediately notices things are wrong because the police simply let him go after giving him routine questioning, despite the fact that he'd confessed to multiple felonies.
  • In Royal, due to the Metaverse as a whole operating on Your Mind Makes It Real, the various deviations that have a small chance of occuring within Mementos can easily be described as this.
• Global Ignorance: Ryuji thinks that Los Angeles is not only the capital city of America, but assumes it's somewhere in the middle of the country. The other Phantom Thieves immediately mock him for this.
• The Gods Must Be Lazy: While the Greater-Scope Villain creator of the Metaverse seems to be spreading access to his Eldritch Location to multiple individuals and filling an entire underground labyrinth with monsters, the Big Good Igor just sits in his room and fuses new Guardian Entities for you. Subverted when it turns out that (a) the Greater-Scope Villain has been impersonating Igor all along, thus explaining his general enthusiasm about your deal which the real Igor never sports; and (b) the real Igor created Mr. Exposition Morgana to help you, and his assistant Lavenza has been appearing to you as a Butterfly of Death and Rebirth throughout the game.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • The Phantom Thieves question the morality of their Heel–Face Brainwashing actions a lot. However, they always end up in situations where they need to do it anyways, because their targets are practically untouchable otherwise due to having connections with authority or being authority themselves, rendering them unable to be punished for their crimes.
  • The first Target, Kamoshida, really emphasises this, as Joker and Ryuji are all on board with Morgana's plan to help steal his desires to get payback on him until Morgana mentions the need to be careful in how they do so, as the slightest mishandling of his heart's warped desires could cause him to suffer a Mental Shutdown. Despite the harassment, oppression and threats to their lives done by his shadow, neither teen is comfortable with consigning Kamoshida to a Fate Worse than Death if they screw up, especially once Morgana admits this would be the first time he's ever done so, even if he's confident in his understanding of Palaces and their treasures. However, once Ann's friend is (heavily implied to be) sexually and physically abused by Kamoshida, pushing her to try and commit suicide off the roof, and Kamoshida not only remains unapologetic about it, but the teens confronting him over it only convinces him to abuse his influence to get them all expelled at the next faculty meeting, all doubts are discarded, as the teens realise they have no legal means of making kamoshida pay and are now on a time limit to stop him whilst they're still free to move around. Even Ann, ignorant of the Metaverse and the team's excursions into it, offers to help them to avenge Shiho, even aware that it'd be illegal and potentially harmful to Kamoshida from what she overhears.
• Going Through the Motions: Animation tailored to a particular scene isn't uncommon, but there are several canned animations that are used reliably for each character. One noticeable wrinkle is the fact that a character model's lip flaps don't seem to be timed or tied to any sound clips – there are many, many occasions where someone's mouth will simply continue to move even when they're not actually speaking in the scene at moment.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: After the protagonist turns himself in to the police, all of the party members and max-ranked Confidants do their part to ensure the charges against him are dropped. While the party members manage to track down a key witness to prove the protagonist is not guilty of assault, the Confidants use all of their available connections to stir up a massive public support campaign, which manages to convince the prosecutors to drop the case.
• Good Capitalism, Evil Capitalism: Haru Okumara reveals that her grandfather started Okumura Foods as a small café that focused on serving delicious and healthy food. However, this led to him collecting debt — his son (and Haru's father) was thus a lot more ambitious and success-focused, turning his company into an enormous burger franchise that became infamous for cheap food and overworking its employees, and became far too ambitious that it ended his life. At the end of Haru's confidant, she concludes the goal of starting her own café just as her grandfather did.
• Good-Guy Bar: Sojiro's Cafe Leblanc serves a the protagonist's home, a hangout for his friends, and later in the game, a hideout.
• Good Policing, Evil Policing: The entire Tokyo police department is shown to be in the pocket of Shido, being extremely corrupt, willing to beat the shit out of Joker and frame him for assault for no reason beyond Shido told them too. In contrast, Akechi is a teenaged detective who is devoted to maintaining justice, and the sole member of the police force against the plan to use the Phantom Thieves as scapegoats when they are unable to catch the one behind the murders, preferring to actually arrest the criminal. Double Subverted since it turns out he's Shido's hit man and the true killer and during his Villainous Breakdown, Akechi becomes psychotic and rants that he doesn't give a rat's ass about justice, but he's a Tragic Villain who similarly despised Shido and plotted to betray him by exposing him as his abusive father, and yet Shido knew all along and plotted to assassinate him first.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: While things seem to be Black-and-Gray Morality for the majority of the plot, the endgame shakes it up, especially once the Phantom Thieves prove their justice near the end of the game.
  • The Phantom Thieves (and their associates) are The Good, Akechi is The Bad, while Shido and Yaldabaoth are The Evil. Despite being a major antagonist and a murderer, Akechi's goal is to ruin Shido's reputation and get revenge on him, even if it means his death or imprisonment. He only attacks the Thieves out of anger over the Sunk Cost Fallacy of his plan's failure and his personal jealousy of Joker. By comparison, Shido wants to rule Japan with an iron fist and kill anyone who does not revere him as a God while Yaldabaoth tries to use Shido's rise as an excuse to enslave all of humanity.
  • In the Third Semester, it is Subverted. With Akechi alive again and Maruki with his Lovecraftian Persona being the new God of Control, it looks like Akechi is set to reprise the role of The Bad and Maruki to become the new Evil. Instead, Maruki is a Well-Intentioned Extremist, and Akechi is entirely cooperative in trying to stop him. Even Sumire, who Maruki briefly turns against the party, rejoins them very shortly after. This turns the conflict into either White-and-Grey Morality, Grey-and-Gray Morality, or Good Versus Good, depending on the player's interpretation of events.
• The Goomba: Pyro Jack, a jack-o-lantern in a wizard costume, and Pixie, a tiny fairy girl, are the two weakest enemies in the entire game, to the point they serve as Video Game Tutorial fights during your first few days in Tokyo. You'll only encounter them in the first few areas of the very start of the game, and they are the lowest level Guardian Entities behind your Starter Mon Arsène.
• Gorgeous Garment Generation: Unlike P3 and P4, awakening to your Persona abilities in P5 also grants you a cool thief outfit in a blaze of magical blue flames. Morgana explains it by being a side-effect of the Mental World - your outfit is what you think a 'rebel' looks like. In Haru's case, she has her thief outfit before she can actually use her Persona, as she awakened to her potential by going into the Metaverse, but her Persona was unable to take form until encountering her father's Shadow.
• Gory Discretion Shot: The screen turns blood-red and your characters can be seen blasting holes in their enemies' silhouettes when you perform an All-Out Attack.
• Gosh Darn It to Heck!: Generally averted, especially with Ryuji who has the foulest mouth on the team, but for whatever reason he only drops a single full-on F-bomb the entire game (in a text). Otherwise he restricts himself to saying "eff" and variants thereof, which he says frequently. Other characters outside the party drop F-bombs throughout the game, however.
• Gossipy Hens: The female and male students of Shujin Academy. They are constantly spreading Malicious Slander about the protagonist and his friends and gossiping about them.
• Grappling-Hook Pistol: In Royal, Morgana gives the player one of these in the first palace, allowing you to launch yourself onto certain objects to progress, find hidden rooms and bypass some enemies and traps. With the Faith Confidant, you can also launch it at distant shadows, starting an ambush battle on top of inflicting random status effects on the enemies.
• Gratuitous English:
  • Like the previous games, the entire soundtrack except the credits theme is in English. With the lyrics being penned by a native speaker and Lyn having a rather manageable accent, however, it's significantly better than the occasional Engrish that was in P3 and P4. (Still, there's some hard-to-understand songs, like "Beneath the Mask" seeming to pronounce "shapeshifter" as "shahp-shiffu")
  • Numerous UI elements are randomly written in English. The localization changed some of the more Engrish-y phrases, such as the text that appears when ambushing an enemy, "CHANCE!", becoming "AMBUSH!"
  • All of the character's codenames are in English (or, as is the case with "Mona", a name that has English origins), with the exception of Haru's still-not-Japanese "Noir".
  • The splash screens at the end of each character's All-Out Attack (plus Caroline and Justine, and Lavenza in Royal) have a Bond One-Liner in English, once again except Haru who keeps employing French instead.
  • Ryuji and Futaba's wardrobes makes extensive use of random, albeit actually sensical, English phrases: Ryuji has t-shirts reading "ZOMG!", "ON UR MARK", and "NO MO' RULES". Futaba has a Tetris shirt that says "NO WAY!!", another that says "JLMK" - "Just let me know" - written on it, and while the length of her hair makes it difficult to ever see, her flight jacket has "AFK" written on the back. Besides these two, there's also Ohya, who wears a t-shirt reading "LOW LIFE FIGHT THE POWER". Unlike the UI example, this one makes a bit more sense - apparel with English phrases written on them is a popular fashion trend in East Asia.
  • Ann tends to pepper some English both in and out of battle ("Get ready!"), but this can be justified since she's been raised overseas for most of her life and is said to be fluent in the language (not that it shows in her actual voice acting). Not so much Ryuji, however. When Ann is pretending to be a descendant of British royalty, she says "It's nice to meet you. My name is Ann Windsor," in English.
  • Ms. Chouno, who is Ambiguously Brown and implied to have spent a good amount of time out of Japan, tends to call people "Mr." and "Ms." in the Japanese version, rather than using Japanese Honorifics. While it's partially justified since she's an English teacher, she refers to her co-workers with the English addresses, making it this trope. In the Japanese voice acting, she says "Hello, everyone" and "Please answer" in English now and then.
  • Shoji Meguro finally revealed in an interview the reason why the battle themes in the series are in English: it's treated as a background instrument while a song in Japanese might distract Japanese players.
  • Futaba will speak English when using her Support ability if the voices are set to Japanese, saying things like "Power up!" and "Speed up!"
  • When you rescue Futaba from her cell in the Mementos-Velvet Room, she says "Real jail break" in English.
• Gratuitous French:
  • The tarot cards go by the French names, fitting since the designs draw heavily from the Marseilles designs. Fitting with that deck, though, the Death card has no name.
  • Haru's codename that she picks out for herself offscreen, "Noir". As she cheerfully informs the rest of the party, "It's French for 'black'!"
    • The Bond One-Liner at the end of Haru's All-Out Attack is likewise in French: "Adieu." ("Goodbye.")
• Gray Rain of Depression:
  • Almost every morning and evening, "Beneath the Mask", a slow, quiet ballad where the singer laments their Loss of Identity, plays. However, on rainy days, the song loses its bass line and percussion, and becomes even ''more'' subdued and sad-sounding. On days with extremely heavy rain, no music plays at all.
  • A straight example happens during the truth Maruki displays to you, Akechi and "Kasumi" about the real Kasumi's death, which took place at a gray, rainy day.
• The Grim Reaper: "The Reaper" from previous Persona games now stalks the halls of the underground Mementos dungeon, forcing lower level parties to not stay on one floor for too long if they don't want to face an untimely death. As in previous games, the monster wears a white bag over its head and long black jacket, to invoke the standard grim-reaper black-cloaked skull imagery.
  • Making its debut in the Persona series in Royal is Macabre, a pale, black-dressed Shadow wielding a scythe.
• Growling Gut:
  • Ryuji after exiting Kamoshida's palace when he gets his Persona for the first time has his stomach audibly growl.
  • Happens to Yusuke at a certain point in Joker's bedroom.
  • Futaba has this happened to her due to her random hunger, but it's strangely not heard sometimes.
  • Kasumi gets two. During the summer, Joker accompanies Kasumi to lunch. Joker comments in incredulity about the myriad of empty plates in front of Kasumi, yet her stomach audibly growls at the end of the scene. Much later on, the Phantom Thieves hold a party for Joker's return in the third semester. Haru mistakes a hunger growl as Joker's, but Kasumi ends up being the culprit! When it happens, her eyes widen and she turns away in embarrassment.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy:
  • In Palace infiltrations, it's quite easy to ambush a Shadow guarding the Palace Ruler and their Treasure by sneaking up behind them, despite the fact that they're supposed to be guarding the source of a Shadow's distorted desires.
  • Invoked when it turns out the guard outside the interrogation room is actually a pawn for Shido and Akechi, who is completely unaware that he'll die by their hands to cover their tracks as part of their plan to kill off Joker. Too bad for them, the Phantom Thieves thought ahead due to Akechi's slip-up when the Thieves first meet him and work out beforehand he's nothing more than a disposable pawn.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • For most players, the first instinct upon seeing the boss charge up a powerful attack is to put everyone on guard. However, there are several instances in the game where this is actually the worst possible option, either because the attack takes more than one turn to charge (this is actually a plot point in Futaba's dungeon, as the Sphinx's attack can take multiple turns, but can't be accurately predicted until Futaba joins the party) and/or there's something you can do to stop or minimize the attack. Most prominently, doing this against the Last Ditch Move of the Final Boss means that the attack will be too powerful and inflict a Total Party Kill (what you need to do is destroy its Cognizant Limbs or debuff its Attack stat in order to weaken the blow to manageable levels). And since it's a Last Ditch Move, it means you'll have to go through the whole boss battle all over again.
  • Whenever a new Palace infiltration starts, you're given a specified number of days to complete it which is shown in the top right corner. What the game doesn't tell you (Unless you look at your Calendar in the menu) is that you need at least three whole days to fully beat a palace. You can get to the treasure in as low as one day^note Except for Madarame and Sae Nijima's palaces, as both have a road block that requires you to exit the palace and make a small change in the real world in order to continue, and afterward you need another day to send the calling card, and then you fight the Palace's boss the following day. So even if you did secure your route to the treasure, the game will allow you to run out of the amount of time you actually need without immediately giving you a game over.
  • If the player decides to use gifts as a way to earn more points, be prepared to waste a lot of them. Some gifts are obviously meant for certain characters, while others are much more vague — for instance, Ann will love the Snack Pack while Futaba will simply like it — meaning the player will either have to check a guide, or make a shot in the dark based on a character's personality.
  • Every Persona has their own "inheritance type" based on one of the many elements in the game (including Recovery, Ailment, and Almighty) that decides what element of skills they can inherit: generally, Persona of one element cannot inherit a skill of the opposite element (i.e. Fire cannot inherit Ice, Nuclear cannot inherit Psychic, Ailment cannot inherit Recovery, and vice-versa); Physical-type (which includes Gun) Persona cannot inherit any skill type but Ailment and Recovery; Bless and Curse-type Persona cannot inherit Physical skills and Ailment or Recovery skills respectively; Ailment-type Persona cannot inherit Bless skills; Recovery-type Persona cannot inherit Physical or Curse skills; and finally Almighty-type Persona can inherit any skill, and conversely any Persona can inherit Almighty skills. None of this is directly stated in-game, and you can only determine which Persona is what type through trial-and-error. Confusion is compounded by the fact that some Persona can still learn skills in the element they cannot inherit (i.e. Arsene is a Curse-type Persona yet can naturally learn Cleave) and that this rule does not apply to Skill Cards.
  • If you intend to create and use Skill Cards extensively, be warned: While most skills are available by itemizing Personas from the Electric Chair, there are certain skills that you cannot obtain this way. The other way to obtain skill cards is through item negotiation, and you're going to need a guide to understand which enemy gives which skill card. Some enemies will give the same skill card as they would if you itemized them, just to complicate the process.
  • In the darts minigame, you can use the X button instead of flicking the controller to throw the darts. Nowhere in the game is this told to the player.
  • In the Okumura boss fight in Royal, the Corporobo enemies he summons will run away if they aren't removed after two turns and be fully replaced, forcing you to restart the entire wave. This is mentioned nowhere unless you trigger this behavior from him. Adding to the fact that Okumura will throw buffs and debuffs around quite frequently, and most players will get stuck for their first few tries. The robots are also vulnerable to Gun or Ailments, which are not even mentioned, leaving this all up to trial-and-error.
  • To access the Third Semester in Royal, you have to max out Maruki's confidant before he leaves Shujin on November 18th, otherwise it'll be lost for good and you'll be locked out for that playthrough. While the game subtly encourages you to do so several times (such as mentioning when he'll leave during his introduction and having several characters like Kawakami and Morgana tell you to talk to him), these hints can be easily missed or dismissed as unimportant until it's too late.
  • Then, there's also the true final boss of Royal Maruki and Azathoth. While the instrumental final boss theme might make you think that this is only a warm-up like Shido or Cendrillon, this is the actual final boss and the phase after it is a bonus phase. The game does not give you any clues on what to target and if you are playing blind, you can and will get stuck. The correct solution is to kill either Azathoth or Maruki twice, which requires dismantling the tentacles to soften a passive that is making the former take No-Sell damage and/or removing a tentacle that heals the latter for copious amounts of HP to make sure your attacks go through effectively. This is not told or indicated anywhere during the fight.
  • In Royal, unlocking Hereward is easy to miss on a first playthrough. This is because to get him, you have to pick specific dialogue options during Akechi's Confidant (specifically those indicating that you see him as a rival), and picking any other choice will not unlock him during the third semester, even if the Confidant has been maxed.
  • While the other seven Showtime attacks are obtained automatically during Royal's story, Joker and Violet's has to be unlocked without anything in the game telling you so. You have to max Sumire's confidant, then access the hideout after January 20.
  • In Royal, the menu does not inform the player of the passive effects of the Will Seed Rings. For example, Vault Guardian is said to raise Defense for the whole party for three turns, but it is not mentioned that it gives the wearer an automatic Tetrakarn and Makarakarn at the start of battle.
• Guilt-Based Gaming: Even outside of the Bad Endings, the game makes use of this:
  • Going for an all-out attack instead of negotiation becomes more of a moral dilemma when a Shadow is begging for its life (unless, of course, your name is Haru). That the shadows have distinct voices and personalities doesn't help either.
  • Morgana will repeatedly insist that you go infiltrate the Palace if you haven't secured a route to the Treasure, and if you try to hang out with your party Confidants during this period^note All of them except Akechi are available during the daytime, when you infiltrate Palaces, they will ask you if you're sure you have time to waste hanging out with them. The exception is if you're waiting for the day of the heist, like with Sae and Maruki's Palaces.
  • Occasionally, the game will make you feel guilty about something it forced you to do. For example, you don't get to opt out of hitting on the girls at the beach, but it will still press a Jerkass Realization on you. There is also a point where the thieves admit to having become Glory Hounds, even if you've been playing Joker as cautious, altruistic or circumspect.
  • As they're all teens who you then choose to bond with, each of the girls on the team take rejection or being "friend-zoned" as well as one would expect a young woman at that age: Futaba is quick to sublimate her crush on you as "teammate friendliness" and Haru takes it so poorly she goes cold for a moment. Ann crying over Shiho moving is a big visual indicator that encourages you to hug her instead of staying friends, and for what it's worth Makoto takes it the best provided you don't back out from the first choice. Even being a loyal boyfriend (or unattached bachelor) won't save you from a guilt trip. On the other hand the older female options, perhaps to show their more experienced world-views (as well as them all being aware of the age gap issue) don't take rejection anywhere near as badly. For example, if you tell Takemi that you came to see her because of your exams, she says that she "can take a hint." In fact, each of the three older women have specific dialogue options that have to be chosen in order to even open up the romance option, with Chihaya's being in the previous rank, meaning the question may never come up at all.
  • In Royal you are going to face the dilemma of killing a fake Shiho as it is about to let Shadow Kamoshida instantly kill you with a Gold Medal Spike, or attack Kamoshida himself for a moderate amount of damage so he will drive her away anyway. Your party members are also having the same issue because they know it's not really Shiho nor does it even act like her, but deliberately targeting her makes them uncomfortable.
• Gunboat Diplomacy: Knocking down all enemies will allow the party to hold them at gunpoint, after which Joker can negotiate with an enemy to give him items, extort money, or make them become your Persona. Or you can just hit them all with an All-Out Attack. If a negotiation is going south, a Confidant skill also allows Joker to fire warning shots to get the enemies in line.
• Internet Jerk: Since the posters on the Phan-site are anonymous, a lot of the posts can get quite nasty. When Okumura is killed, for a few days, people rejoice over his death, but soon, opinion turns against the Thieves, and people start calling for them to be tracked down and executed for the murder that they didn't commit.

H

• Hacker Collective: The Phantom Thieves' fourth target is an Anonymous-inspired group called "Medjed" that targets them and their supporters out of jealousy. They present a unique problem as the Phantom Thieves don't know their name or location and so can't change their heart, so they have to recruit their own hacker to deal with the problem.
• Hail Fire Peaks: Futaba's Palace mixes the Desert-type Temple of Doom with several Cyberspace motifs, such as having binary code in place of heiroglyphs.
• Hands Looking Wrong: When Ryujii seemingly dissolves from existence, he notices his hands first becoming translucent before it rapidly spreads to the rest of his body. This is not the case for the other Phantom Thieves whose experience symptoms after him.
• Hanging Around: After you finish the Pyramid Palace, you unlock the "Gallows" option in the Velvet Room, by which you can sacrifice a persona to strengthen another. This is done is by hanging the sacrificed persona until it dies, with its stats and selected abilities going to another persona you own.
• Happily Ever After: This doesn't happen if you play normally, but if you cut a deal with Takuto Maruki in the third term, he will make it happen in a twisted way, where Morgana becomes human, Ryuji becomes a popular man among the track team, Ann hangs out with Shiho as she didn't get abused by Kamoshida, Yusuke reconciles with his ideal Madarame, Makoto and Sae's father is alive, Wakaba wasn't murdered, Okumura is alive and doesn't abuse his employees or sell Haru for political gain, Akechi became a freelance cameraman, and Sumire is completely overwritten by Kasumi and can continue her legacy, effectively making Sumire murdered for good. The protagonist? He had more fun making a deal with Yaldabaoth than Maruki, that is. It has gone over the pure oppression by Yaldabaoth into nothing short of pure existential nihilism, since at least Yaldabaoth needs enforcers to keep people's mouths shut. The protagonist's friends enjoy life with no suffering, no moving forward, and ultimately no meaningful existence in this "happy" ending.
• Happy Ending Override: Downplayed in Royal. The original ending had Joker ready to enjoy summer vacation with his friends, after dodging some incompetent police officers. By contrast, Royal makes sure to emphasize that there is way more to come by more persistent police officers who presumably suspected Joker's involvement in a new Change of Heart incident. He instead has to leave the Phantom Thieves to go home on a train (similar to Persona 4) while his friends distract the police.
• Harder Than Hard: The "Merciless" difficulty, which makes enemies even stronger than on Hard while also raising damage to elemental weaknesses and technical attacks, forcing you to play more strategically to survive. However, it also results in enemies also taking massive damage from critical hits, weakness exploitations, and technical damage, crossing into Non-Indicative Difficulty as several opponents can be destroyed in a few turns with some lucky crits.
• Hard Levels, Easy Bosses: Palaces can rip you apart if you aren't careful, and a lax player can easily become overwhelmed and killed if they head into a fight unprepared or are ambushed. The bosses, however, are fairly easy, with a large number of them being gimmick based. Madarame (or Okumura in Royal) is the exception to this, but after him no boss is really threatening outside of the the Reaper.
• Hard Truth Aesop: While stopping someone like Kamoshida feels good, it doesn't actually accomplish much in the end because there's always another Kamoshida. Literally, given that he's almost replaced by an equally abusive coach due to the school's indifference. The problem is not with individual bad actors but rather the system that allows those in power to abuse those weaker than them. Even accounting for Yaldabaoth rigging the game against Joker, the problems are really beyond an individual's ability to solve. You take what victories you can and either choose to be better than the system such as Takemi's Death confidant or actively work to improve it, even if just a little, such as Yoshida's Sun confidant.
• Hate Sink: Most of the Phantom Thieves' targets are lowlifes who ruin and destroy people as they please, and are deliberately made to be as horrible as possible to make sure the player has an incentive to go after them.
• Hated Item Makeover: When the Phantom Thieves spend a day with Futaba in her room, Yusuke takes a moment to rearrange her Featherman figures in an artistic fashion. Futaba is understandably not amused.
• Hatedom: In-Universe: The "Phan-dom" completely devolves into this some time after Okumura's death, with the majority of the messages on the ticker being calling for the deaths/arrest of the Phantom Thieves, with Mishima trying to delete most of the offending messages. Thankfully, it's turned around when the Confidants rally everyone into supporting the Phantom Thieves defeat Yaldaboath. Following the destruction of the Metaverse after that and the Phantom Thieves secretly disbanding, it becomes neutral and peaceful.
• Haunted House: Your party initially thinks Sojiro's home is this, as Futaba doesn't bother turning on any of the lights during the day. It doesn't help that they go in during a thunderstorm.
• Headbutting Heroes: Following the continuous struggle between the Magician and Chariot arcanas, Ryuji and Morgana appear to genuinely dislike each other. Morgana is unfairly^note Morgana is annoyed at him not understanding things that Morgana refuses to explain, but at the same time doesn't care that you don't understand anything either annoyed by Ryuji for being stupid and a growing attention whore. Ryuji, meanwhile, grows increasingly frustrated until he finally snaps back months into the game, causing Morgana to temporarily leave the party in a hissy fit.
• Healing Winds: Cool Breeze is a passive effect that recovers a small amount of HP and SP after every battle.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power: In the finale, the power of your connections with your friends and accomplices summons a 20 story tall demon king who uses the Seven Deadly Sins in bullet form while the Phantom Thieves are protected by the hopes of the people of Tokyo to shoot a giant mecha god in the head and save Christmas.
• The Heartless: This game builds upon Persona 4, with your party targeting dozens of Shadows that represent corrupt individuals' repressed emotions, who can, in turn, be forced into seeing the error of their ways in order to reform their human selves. Further, you can talk to pretty much any Shadow now, as they all are pieces of human consciousness. And as usual, the Big Bad turns out to be an Eldritch Abomination-level Shadow. This time, he was born from the collective desire to maintain social order, but has gone so out of control he plans to absorb reality and "save" humanity from The Evils of Free Will.
• Hero Antagonist: Naturally, the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department opposes the protagonists for their illicit activities. This includes entirely well meaning characters like consulting detective Goro Akechi and public prosecutor Sae Niijima. Akechi is one of the main villains with his very own agenda at least prior to Royal's third term, and the head of the Public Prosecutor's Special Investigation Department is also in on the conspiracy.
• The Hero Dies: In the in-universe video game Featherman Seeker, the protagonist Grey Pigeon sacrifices himself to save humanity at the end of the game.
• Heroic Build: Discussed by Yusuke in a Mementos conversation, where he says that he likes to read foreign comics due to the impressive musculature of the characters.
• Hero of Another Story:
  • When Joker gets sent to juvy, the Phantom Thieves and the Confidants band together to help clear his name of the crime he was convicted of before the game began. This event happens during the Time Skip at the end of the game.
  • The DLC Personas used by previous protagonists such as Izanagi are described as this.
• The Hero's Journey: The basic structure of how each party member ends up joining the Phantom Thieves, with the character falling into the Palace, where they have to overcome Shadows by awakening to their Persona, eventually leading them to confront the boss of the current dungeon and in the end leave having gained new friends and the power to help others. The Protagonist meanwhile undergoes a larger, more detailed version of the arc over the course of the entire story.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners:
  • Morgana continues the tradition of the Magician arcana. He may have had some ups and downs over his bromance with Joker, but ultimately, nothing can break up their partnership. Even when he seemingly betrayed them, Morgana ends up finding the only way for them to continue, does a bunch of quests that increases the gang's reputation, and (depending on what you choose) helps Joker meet his future girlfriend. Not even death stops Morgana from coming back to be with Joker. Morgana is also one of several mandatory Confidants that increase automatically, meaning it's impossible to clear the game without reaching rank 10 with him. As a result, in Royal, he's the only thief whose third-tier Persona you'll get by default.
  • Although not a part of the Magician Arcana as past best friend characters have been, Chariot Arcana Ryuji Sakamoto can be considered this to the protagonist. Not only is Ryuji the protagonist's first available confidant and friend, he noticeably appears as an alternative option in most story events that would otherwise be spent with a datable female character, even to the point that if the player chooses to forego a romance route entirely, Ryuji will automatically show up on Valentine's Day and give the protagonist chocolate.
• High-Altitude Battle: The battle against the Final Boss Yaldabaoth takes place up in the sky, high above the clouds. Towards the end of the fight, when the people of Tokyo begin to regain their hope and rally behind the Phantom Thieves, the clouds part, allowing the city below to be seen.
• High-Voltage Death: You can itemize Personas to create powerful weapons and gear in this game by sending them to the electric chair, where Justine and Caroline happily throw the switch to "kill" the sacrificed Persona.
• His Name Is...: Subverted and Played for Laughs twice. Played for Drama once.
  • At the school assembly, Akechi is about to give his theory as to who the Phantom Thieves are. Just as he's about to say it, Akechi's phone rings, forcing him to step away to take the call.
  • When Futaba takes over Japan's airwaves to broadcast Shido's calling card, the police shut it off before the livestream announces who their next target is. Futaba is impressed that they were faster than she thought, but then proceeds to block them out and completely take over the airwaves and they then out Shido as their next target.
  • Played for Drama with Okumura's death. He was confessing after his Change of Heart, confessed all his crimes, and was about to reveal the culprit behind the Mental Shutdowns. His Shadow had been killed earlier right after the Thieves fought him, but his real self dies at the most dramatic time possible.
• Historical Domain Character: In addition to Shin Megami Tensei staples, the main characters' revealed Personas veer away from standard mythological figures and include a few real-life characters that fit the roguish theme of the protagonists:
  • Ryuji has Captain Kidd - William Kidd, a famous Scottish sailor who was executed for piracy, despite evidence that he never actually committed anything of the sort and functioned solely as a privateer.
  • Yusuke uses Goemon, a 16th-century Ninja and outlaw who stole valuables from the rich to give to the poor. After a failed assassination attempt on warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, he and his son were executed by being boiled alive.
• Hold the Line: Some boss fights have "special operations" where one party member is sent to expose a vulnerability in the boss while the remaining party members keep up the offensive to distract the boss. Success depends on both whether the right party member is sent and whether the remaining party can keep attacking enough so that the boss doesn't notice what the missing party member is doing.
• Hopeless Boss Fight:
  • The first fight against the Holy Grail is unwinnable, as it will constantly heal itself.
  • In the finale, you get a preview of the fight against Caroline and Justine. Unfortunately, Joker is unable to act during it.
• Hot in Human Form: Morgana (who typically looks like a cat) gains a human form which the protagonist internally refers to him as "handsome guy" before realizing who he is.
• Hourglass Plot: One happens over the course of the game with two NPCs, an Arrogant Housewife and a Modest Housewife. At the start of the game, the Arrogant Housewife enjoys rubbing her husband's success in the face of the Modest Housewife, but the Modest Housewife's husband's fortunes improve. By the end of the game, the "Not-So-Arrogant Housewife"'s husband is forced to quit his job, and the "Not-So-Modest Housewife" subtly gloats about how she and her husband will still be living in Tokyo.
• Hired on the Spot: The game has four part-time jobs that Joker can undertake when he's not raiding Palaces, and these each hire him on the spot, despite he is (supposedly) a dangerous criminal with an assault conviction on his record. One of the four owners gets to know Joker a bit before making the offer, while the others are clearly so desperate for any help that they basically only care that you're breathing.
• Hufflepuff House: Kosei High School has three significant characters- a party member (Yusuke), a non-party Confidant (Hifumi) and a Mementos target (Shimizu)- but apart from this, very little is known about it, and it mainly exists to prove that Joker had few chances to meet Yusuke before the Madarame heist. Akechi goes to an entirely different school from Shujin and Kosei, but it's never referred to by name.
• Humans Are Flawed: Invoked by the Greater-Scope Villain Yaldabaoth, who deliberately manipulates people into abdicating the struggles of critical thinking, responsibility, and ultimately freedom, for comfort, no matter who is hurt in the process, first by rigging the Phantom Thieves to be cherished as saviors who stamp out corruption, only for him to quickly manipulate the public to prop up the corrupt Shido as a messiah instead, even going as far as inversely making him more popular than ever after his heart got changed, all for the sole reason to prove his point that humans are flawed and only he can rule over them as the perfect god.
• Hypocritical Humor: On September 16th, the team will comb through Shujin's yearbooks in order to find the real identity of the "Beauty Thief". After hours of fruitless search, Ryuji will start to get distracted and check out the pictures of cute girls instead. Ann will chide him for it, but not two seconds later she will remark on how one of the girls in the yearbooks looks a lot older than she is and Ryuji will chide her in turn.

I

• I Always Wanted to Say That: Ryuji will give this line as a justification for dropping various Phantom Thief cliches throughout the story.
• Idealist vs. Pragmatist: An odd variation in Royal. Maruki is a kind and compassionate therapist, but after acquiring godlike power, he decides to make everyone happy by any means necessary. This includes rewriting people's personalities to fit the utopia, even against their will. The Phantom Thieves oppose Maruki, as despite him erasing all their suffering, they realize the methods are immoral and people should be free to choose their own lives.
• If You Kill Him, You Will Be Just Like Him!: Joker and Ryuji initially bring this up as their reason for not Heel–Face Brainwashing the school's physically abusive PE teacher Kamoshida. If the process goes wrong, the teacher could die, which would make the heroes far worse than even a monster like Kamoshida. On the other hand, others like Ann know killing them isn't as much of a punishment as forcing them to live.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty:
  • Shadow Kamoshida remarks about executing Ann, "Maybe I'll start with her clothes..." Fortunately, Carmen puts a stop to that.
  • Shadow Kaneshiro implies Makoto will be forced into prostitution to make up the 3 million yen debt, and attempts to pressure her by suggesting he'll make Sae his "personal slave" if she doesn't comply.
• I Know Your True Name: Two variations:
  • Mementos requests: The Phantom Thieves cannot force the Shadow of someone with a distorted desire to manifest in Mementos (and therefore cannot steal that person's desire) until they learn the full name of that person.
  • Palace rulers: To infiltrate a Palace, the Phantom Thieves must know the Palace Ruler's name as well as the physical location of the Palace and how the Ruler's cognition has distorted it. Also, they cause the Palace's Treasure to take physical form by sending a calling card that addresses the Ruler by full name.
• I'm Going to Disney World!: After taking President Okumura's heart, the Phantom Thieves decide to celebrate by going to Tokyo Destinyland, a very obvious Bland Name version of Tokyo Disneyland, complete with a castle in the background reminiscent of the Cinderella Castle. In addition, Ryuji is seen wearing bear ears akin to Mickey, Ann is wearing cat ears with a ribbon akin to Minnie, and Futaba is wearing rabbit ears akin to Goofy.
• Improbable Use of a Weapon: Due to the Your Mind Makes It Real nature of the Metaverse, even prop weapons, such as a toy gun Ryuji gave the protagonist, are able to work as fully functioning weapons that can damage Shadows, although the amount of ammo it can fire is still limited. This would also explain how Akechi is able to use laser swords as his weapon.
• Inciting Incident: The Protagonist tries to help a woman being assaulted by a drunk, only for the woman and drunk to say he attacked them to protect their own reputations. This not only gets the Protagonist sent to Tokyo but also attracts the attention of Yaldabaoth, who gives the Protagonist the Metaverse Navigation app that sets the rest of the plot in motion.
• Incredibly Obvious Tail: When Makoto has been ordered by Principal Kobayakawa to investigate the Phantom Thieves, she starts following Joker around. Makoto attempts to "hide" behind a manga book that she clearly isn't reading, and her excuses as to why she happens to show up everywhere Joker is headed are Blatant Lies.
• Individualism vs. Collectivism: The endgame deals with this as the Phantom Thieves face off against Yaldaboath, a created god that represents humanity's desire to be controlled, but secure. The humans in the game at first begin worship the Thieves as saviors until the Conspiracy and Yaldabaoth make them denounce them as villains, and later not even acknowledge they exist. In the final dungeon, all of the humans' shadows choose to let themselves be placed in prisons and lose their sinful desire as it makes their lives easier and "happier". The Thieves, who had up until this point chased the approval of the masses, decide to save the world against their wishes for oblivion.
• Indy Escape: The Phantom Thieves have to do this quite a bit, since a Palace collapses after its Shadow has been beaten and the Treasure has been stolen. Inevitably, this takes place in the room furthest away from the exit, leading to only one option for the Thieves: run like hell.
• Indy Ploy: Their plans to infiltrate and secure a route to the treasure boil down to this, given how different each palace is. From a castle to a pyramid to a ship, having no prior knowledge of the layout of each palace leads to a lot of "making it up as [they] go."
• I Never Said It Was Poison: How Joker and Morgana find the traitor. Akechi mentions something Morgana said when you first meet him at the TV station on June 9th. As only those who have entered the Metaverse can understand Morgana, it allows your team to later deduce that he was lying to you from the start. Funnily enough, there's a cop drama on TV that Joker and Morgana can see on TV starting May 2nd, with a detective figuring out a guilty party was at the scene of a crime because he mentions a "gunshot" no one else had brought up.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: While you do play as a Phantom Thief exploring a Mental World, there's still no real explanation for why a museum, or subway station, or cruise liner, or a bank with actual vaults, would bother securing valuables in treasure chests you can lockpick.
• Infinity -1 Sword: Ranking up Iwai's Confidant allows the player to customize the guns they can purchase from his shop. While those are not as strong as what the player can get from itemizing Personas, they are also significantly cheaper and can be purchased en masse. Itemization, on the other hand, has a once-per-day limit and summoning the right Personas to fuse what you need can get very costly.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • Some of the most powerful Personas can be turned into the strongest equipment for your party, usually with the highest stats and with the greatest effects. For instance, Satan can become an armor for male Phantom Thieves (aside from Morgana, who has his unique armor type) that has very high Defense and has high magic damage mitigation as an effect. Or Metatron can become a gun that grants +5 to all stats, usable by Joker. Royal takes it a step further by allowing you to fuse such items during a Fusion Alarm, which grants a further boost to its stats.
  • For Personas, there is Satanael. He blocks Bless, absorbs Curse, and resists everything else (except Almighty). Satanael is also the only Persona that can learn Victory Cry, which fully restores HP and SP after a battle. He also gets some Gameplay and Story Integration to let you know how amazing he is by shooting Yaldabaoth in the head after the final boss battle with a bullet made out of the seven deadly sins. There is only one Advanced Fusion to get Satanael, and it requires multiple high-level Personas, most of which are available only through other high-level Advanced Fusions. It's going to take a lot of time and money to unlock him, after which most other battles left in the game will be made into a complete joke.
• In Medias Res: With no context, the game opens with Joker escaping from a swanky casino, carrying a mysterious briefcase and receiving commentary from unidentified allies before being attacked by normal-looking security guards that suddenly erupt into monsters, which Joker fights off with his own Guardian Entity. After he's captured and put into a police interrogation the game flashes back about six months to where the story began, eventually catching back up and providing the opening scene with proper context. Averted with the manga adaptation, which starts in April.
• Insert Song: The vocals of which are all provided by Lyn:
  • "Last Surprise", the main Battle Theme Music that has lyrics bragging about the narrator's inevitable victory that their foes will never expect.
  • "Life Will Change", a Triumphant Reprise of the opening theme with vocals describing the Phantom Thieves' resolve to defeat the corrupt Arc Villain, that plays during the In Medias Res opening and the finales of the last few Palaces.
  • "Beneath the Mask", a Lonely Piano Piece with vocals discussing Loss of Identity and a desire to hide feelings behind a metaphorical mask, tying into the Jungian themes of the series. It plays during nighttime, initially instrumental and later gaining vocals after the first arc.
  • "The Whims of Fate", the theme for Sae Niijima's Palace. The lyrics encourage giving into vices and taking risks, while at the same time seemingly taunting the Phantom Thieves about missing obvious cheating and lies, possibly foreshadowing Akechi's status as a mole.
  • "Rivers in the Desert", Shido's boss theme. The title a reference to Isaiah 43:19, it describes Joker's resolve to change the world and steal his future back from the man who ruined his life, no matter how impossible doing it may seem - comparing the impossibility to creating a beautiful oasis in a dry wasteland.
  • Royal adds several more:
    • "Take Over", the battle theme for ambushed enemies, is a rocking track with powerful horns accentuating Lyn's vocals. The lyrics mock the enemy for having fallen into the Thieves' trap and for getting what they deserve.
    • "No More What Ifs" is a sedate bossa nova song, representing the narrator's uncertainty about the future but their resolution to nevertheless keep going forward. It plays inside the jazz club in Kichijoji (and as such, when the singer is in the club, it's the only track that becomes diegetic).
    • "I Believe" plays during the Day of Fates, as the Phantom Thieves storm the Third Semester Palace to steal the Treasure. With musical and lyrical throwbacks to "Life Will Change", it describes the Thieves' confidence in themselves as a force of freedom, ready to reclaim their future and shape their own destiny.
    • "Throw Away Your Mask" is the battle theme for the True Final Boss, a mournful metal ballad sung from the point of view of the boss himself, pleading for the Phantom Thieves to give up their fight and accept a reality devoid of any suffering or desire.
• Instant Death Bullet: Satanael kills the Big Bad, who was nigh-unstoppable until this point, with a single gunshot to the head using the attack Sinful Shell.
• Institutional Apparel: The Protagonist is dressed in black and white pinstripes inside the Velvet Room's prison. After the real Igor regains control of the Velvet Room, the cell door opens and Joker wears his Phantom Thief outfit instead.
• Interface Screw: Contrary to the Exact Time to Failure shown in previous missions, the final palace simply shows Days To Re-Arrest as "Few", to indicate that time is not on your side and there's no turning back: if you don't finish the palace and steal the treasure immediately, you can't control what happens next.
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Every Confidant has a skill entry in the Confidant menu, listing what skills have been unlocked and which skill will be unlocked next. Goro Akechi's Confidant, however, has the entire skill menu blanked-out with "Unknown", a dead giveaway that something is up with said character. Said Confidant also mostly progresses automatically with the story, which is unusual for characters who aren't intimately tied to the plot. Once he joins as a party member, players might be a little suspicious to find he unlocks all his Confidant battle bonuses at once, at only Rank 6. Once he joins, he also is listed in the menu by his last name, the only one to do so, reflecting that the party didn't trust him from the get-go. This was eventually changed in Royal, with the confidant becoming an optional one that requires spending time with the character, instead of automatically leveling, and giving various abilities like the other confidants as well.
  • Any character who's even somewhat important to the plot gets a dialogue portrait even if they aren't named: this includes characters you won't officially meet until later in the story like Mishima, Makoto and Haru, spoiling their greater relevance ahead of time.
  • Akechi is also included with the rest of the Phantom Thieves on the box art, splash screen, and start menu, but doesn't appear at all in the animated opening, another subtle clue that something's up. This was also changed in Royal, with the character featuring prominently in the new opening with the other characters.
    • Akechi also doesn't show up in the Thieves Den until much later on in the game during Royal.
    • While only possible during a New Game Plus in Royal, if Akechi is anywhere in the current party (Niijima's Palace or the final Palace), you can switch his Thief clothing from his initial Prince outfit to Black Mask outfit and vice versa, with no actual effect on gameplay. This does spoil that he's the Black Mask as early as during Niijima's Palace for an unknowing player watching somebody else play New Game Plus.
  • A minor one is that upon joining the Phantom Thieves, a book for Robin Hood, Akechi's Persona, never becomes available. Slightly mitigated by this book actually existing within the game's data, and even being programmed as a library book, but never being obtainable by the player for some reason, possibly because it would have become available late enough in the game that the player wouldn't need social stats, as well as a month before the player stops attending school. Royal adds the book to the library.
  • Every dungeon starting with the sixth Palace is treated in-story as if it's going to be the last one in the game. It'd be a lot more effective if the Group Guillotine menu didn't show you all the high-ranking personas you can fuse, some of which which have levels that extend to the 90s, which should be more than enough to tell you that your level 45-50 thieves still have a ways to go. Granted, it is possible to complete the original game at around Level 75, and the Special Treatment perk can allow you to fuse much higher level Personas for a fee.
    • The fact you can still collect Will Seeds in the 6th and 7th palaces (which can only be combined into a useful item after the palace ceases to exist) may also tip off canny players that there's still more to the story. Subverted with Maruki's Palace which has Will Seeds that create an item that can only be used on New Game Plus.
  • When fusing Personas in the Velvet Room, you can tell that a Fusion Accident is going to occur if the option to skip the cutscene of the fusion is missing.
  • In Royal, checking Violet's stats during her initial awakening battle (which occurs at a time you're likely to be in the low to mid 40's) shows that she won't learn her next skill until level 75, giving away that she won't be properly joining the party until much later.
    • Furthermore, even after her initial awakening event, you don't unlock her in Thieves Den. Once unlocked during much later in the game, you also find out in Thieves Den she's explicitly referred to as "Sumire", her real name.
    • Maxing Kasumi's confidant at Rank 5 doesn't count towards one of the Achievements in Thieves Den. When you check her out after her initial 5 ranks are completed, you can hang out with her as usual but the text on her name is white as if her confidant isn't actually completed, despite the fact that the card icon has the "MAX" label. These aren't errors or glitches.
    • Her Confidant is also unusual in that it only has five ranks, and the Faith Arcana has a noticeably different appearance than the other Arcana (its border is black and frayed). When she accepts her true identity as Sumire, the Faith is restored to a "proper" Arcana with 10 ranks.
  • The Compendium shows the entire Persona catalog from the get-go, with not-yet-available Personas appearing as silhouettes with no names. Even obscured like that, fans of previous Persona and SMT games will likely notice a few oft-recurring Personas that are suspiciously missing — most notably, Loki, who is unusable by Joker because he serves as Akechi's final Persona in his boss fight.
  • A small one which is easy to miss if you never use Goho-M: after defeating the Yakuza cleaner, the game won't let you use it, since it would otherwise let you bypass the fight with Black Mask.
• Interrogation Flashback: The story is told as the protagonist being interrogated by attorney Sae Nijima about their exploits as the leader of the Phantom Thieves.
• Ironic Echo: "Will Power", the track that plays as your party members awaken to their Personas and get some snazzy new duds in the process, also plays during the second phase of Goro's boss fight, after he reveals that he's got a secret second Persona and goes through an Evil Costume Switch.
• Irony: The heroes save Christmas by summoning Satanael to shoot God in the face. Both of them are manifestations of different human desires and not actually God and Satan, but the imagery is there.
• It Amused Me: One of Yaldabaoth's reasons for hijacking the Velvet Room and setting the plot in motion. He thanks the protagonist on one occasion for "entertaining us thus far" and, at the climax of the game, he states that he sees the fate of mankind as "sport."
• It Began with a Twist of Fate: If the drunk man at the beginning of the game hadn't sued Joker, then he never would have fulfilled the conditions needed to enter the Velvet Room. If Joker had never entered the Velvet Room, then he never would have received the MetaNav from Igor. If he never got the MetaNav, then he never would have met Morgana nor would he and the rest of the Phantom Thieves have become the Phantom Thieves in the first place. If the Phantom Thieves never came to be, then said drunk man aka Masayoshi Shido, the Corrupt Politician would have become the Prime Minister of Japan and Yaldabaoth would have won the game unopposed.
• It Can't Be Helped: The game rips this particular mindset apart. Unlike Persona 4, where characters usually learned to tolerate/rise above unjustified rumors and general poor treatment without giving up who they were, Persona 5 takes the view that by adopting an "it can't be helped" mindset in the face of corrupt authority figures, you are not proving your own sense of forbearance; you are letting terrible people get away with atrocious acts. What's worse, you're letting them inflict the same horrors on other people. The people who adopt this approach — the volleyball team, the track team and the workers at Okumura's businesses — are reduced to puppets in their tormentors' Palaces, a reflection of their lack of action in the real world.
• It Only Works Once: When the Phantom Thieves send a Calling Card to their victims to make the Treasure materialize, they only have that day to steal the treasure. The effect of seeing the card and having your desires threatened won't last long, and can never be recreated.
• It's All My Fault: Most of the good guys will have a moment like this. Ryuji, who was antagonized and permanently injured by Kamoshida, still holds himself responsible for the fate of the track team. Ann blames herself for not directly intervening to protect Shiho, despite having already taken fairly drastic action in order to try and shield her. One of the more drastic cases is Futaba, who thinks she caused her mother's death, but the most drastic one is from someone unexpected: it's "Kasumi", or more accurately Sumire, whose mindset was rationalized by accidentally causing the real Kasumi to die in her place, effectively "murdering" her and stealing her dream.
• It's a Wonderful Failure: If you fail to complete a Palace in time or sell out your friends when you catch up to the interrogation, you are treated to a scene of a Very Bad Thing happening; Sae leaves to give you some time to metabolize whatever shit the cops put in you, during which time a mysterious man (Goro Akechi) murders you in captivity.
• It's Personal: There are personal motives behind almost all of the Thieves' heists.
  • Kamoshida broke Ryuji's leg, ending his promising track career and causing him to become an uncaring delinquent, tormented the student body with impunity, sexually harassed Ann and many others, and molested Ann's friend Shiho, driving her to attempt suicide.
  • Madarame abused Yusuke, stole his work, and indirectly killed his mother by purposefully letting her die so he could take credit for Sayuri, an artwork created by Yusuke's mother for her son.
  • Kaneshiro blackmailed Shujin High School students, causing the principal to force Makoto to get on the case. He also manages to blackmail her and the Thieves. His Shadow, representative of his inner thoughts, threatens her sister as well.
  • Kunikazu Okumura, Haru's father, started putting his company before his family. He failed to realize how much he was neglecting her and put his needs before hers by forcing her into an Arranged Marriage with a guy whose ties would improve his business, even knowing the guy was an abusive, misogynistic shitheel who saw her as nothing more than a sentient sex doll.
  • Sae's ambition and cynicism got so bad that it was straining her relationship with Makoto, who could tell how unhappy she was and really wanted for Sae to be able to live meaningfully rather than slave endlessly after promotions.
  • Masayoshi Shido personally screwed over Akechi, Futaba, and the Protagonist, had The Conspiracy mess with Sae on the job so much that she became disillusioned enough to have her own Palace, ordered a hit on Haru's father to pin the murder on the Phantom Thieves, and had his aide push Ryuji out of the way so he could steal Ryuji's elevator ride. Pretty much only Ann and Yusuke have no personal beef with the guy.
  • Yaldabaoth imprisoned Morgana's master and threatens to enslave humanity, whereas Morgana represents humanity's hope and freedom, and also possibly wiped Morgana's memories to impede his mission, which is to round up Tricksters to confront and defeat him in the depths of Mementos. To a lesser extent, Morgana was also imprisoned by Shadow Kamoshida and wouldn't have escaped without the Protagonist's and Ryuji's help.

J

• Japanese Ranguage: During the cutscene of the various Phantom Thieves' reactions to Joker's apparent suicide in police custody, Futaba is looking at a forum with multiple posters talking about Alibaba, her hacker persona. However, they all spell it as "aribaba".
• Jerkass Has a Point: While the vice principal and the other unnamed Shujin staff are typically not represented positively in the game, their subtle threatening of Kasumi to either achieve results or risk losing her honor student status and scholarship seems to be portrayed as being at least understandable: Maruki defends her by criticizing their approach as being counterproductive, but they point out that she's being given special treatment under the assumption that she will perform well in gymnastics. They aren't there to coddle to her and her scholarship was granted under the assumption that she would improve the school's image, so if she's underperforming, then she hasn't done anything to merit the special treatment she's being given. The scene seems to imply that at worst you catch more flies with honey than vinegar given that stressing her out will cause her to perform worse and make it more likely for her to lose said scholarship, which is something the school doesn't really want either. Kasumi herself acknowledges that they're not wrong, just being rather callous when they think she can't hear.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Most of the party and the accomplices, as while they're mostly good people at heart, their mistreatment at the hands of society turned them into misanthropes.
  • Sojiro Sakura is extremely distrustful of you for your first few months, despite being a man willing to take in both you and Futaba.
  • Ryuji acts like a delinquent due to the rest of the school doing nothing when he was physically and emotionally abused by a teacher, but is also willing to whatever it takes to protect other students from said teacher and other corrupt adults.
• Jesus Taboo: Enforced for the sake of consistency with the Arcana names. The French Arcana names shown on each card, just like their design, are taken from the Tarot de Marseilles, which includes Le Pape and La Papesse ("The Pope" and "The Popess", explicitly referring to the Catholic Papacy). In all other instances (menus, captions, Personas, etc.) the Arcana retain the Rider-Waite naming scheme used in the preceding games, which calls these cards with the non-denominational names of Hierophant and High Priestess respectively.
  • Averted in Yusuke's Rank 5 event, wherein he uses the crucifixion of Christ as a model to capture the theme of anguish in his art. Iwai also uses "Christ" as an epithet in one of his confidant events, at least in the English translation.
• Just Friends: Most of the female confidants have the chance to upgrade into a romantic relationship, with many of said confidants having somewhat flirty undertones at points that could really go either way cleanly. A few links imply the girl in question had been hoping for more if you choose not to skip the Relationship Upgrade while others indicate they hadn't really considered the idea but didn't hate it when asked.
• Justified Save Point: Saving games is contextualized as the protagonist writing into an activity log as part of his probation. As such, it is possible to save almost everywhere, so long as it is safe to do so: you can save anywhere in the real world, but when entering the Metaverse, you can only save in safe rooms.

K

• Kaiju:
  • While many Personas are quite large, the DLC exclusive Asterius is positively colossal. Unlike every other Persona in the game, only his head, arms, and upper torso are rendered instead of his full body, and his head alone is larger than all of the Phantom Thieves put together.
  • Another Persona that qualifies as this is the true/ultimate form of Maruki's persona, Adam Kadmon. Despite being a persona, it's around as big as the God of Control (and probably even taller considering that it's standing on its feet) and is seemingly autonomous.
  • Black Viper, a spell that's exclusive to Satan and Satanael, summons the head of a gigantic black snake to bite the target- the snake's head is larger than even a large shadow, indicating that the full body of the snake is probably hundreds of feet long.
• Karma Houdini: Virtually every villain, major and minor, in this game gets what's coming to them, with the notable exception of Haru's abusive fiancé Sugimura and the host who attempts to "recruit" Makoto's friend in her Confidant arc. Both are foiled in their efforts to go after their initial victims, but there's really nothing stopping them from trying again with someone else.
  • There is also the Dirty Cop who was overseeing Joker's interrogation, which includes drugging and beating the boy. There's no mention of him facing any repercussions even after The Conspiracy collapses.
• Kick the Dog:
  • Out of one of the most vile and despicable acts of any in-game villain, early on in the game, after Ann rejects a sexual advance from Kamoshida he instead calls her friend Shiho, another preferred victim of his to physically and sexually violate her, causing the poor girl to try committing suicide by jumping off the school roof. Apparently Kamoshida did it to "vent out his frustration against Ann not going to bed with him", and it's heavily implied that Kamoshida still wants to molest Shiho further after her attempted suicide according to his Palace in Royal.
  • As part of his campaign to discredit Takemi and ensure that she continues to be blamed for his mistake, Oyamada lies to her and says that her old patient, a young girl, died. His Shadow openly delights in the pain this causes her while admitting that they pretended she died to avoid having to admit a patient chose to leave their hospital and go elsewhere.
  • Futaba's mother, Wakaba didn't commit suicide. She was killed by Akechi per Shido's orders. The latter proceeded to blame Wakaba's death on Futaba, by forging a suicide note saying that she committed suicide due to her regret about giving birth to her child. The justification for that? None. Shido decided to push the blame onto a 14-year-old child just because he could.
• Killer Rabbit: In Persona 5 Royal, if you collect all of the stamps in Mementos he needs, Jose will offer to challenge you to a fight. He's a little boy in a toy car that can hit suprisingly hard, and the music that plays in his fight is "Rivers in the Desert".
• Killer Teddy Bear:
  • This time around, Alice's unique "Die For Me!" Special Attack involves an army of giant Action Bomb Teddie bears rushing the enemy before they explode.
  • Bugs (a.k.a. Bugbear) also returns and has this motif.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: A justified case. You are a thief after all, so of course you'd steal everything that isn't nailed down while in a Palace.
• Kill the Parent, Raise the Child: A Murder by Inaction example occurs when Ichiryuusai Madarame lets Yusuke's mother die from a seizure, both to claim her final painting she intended to leave for Yusuke and announce it under his name, and to also adopt Yusuke to keep him from finding out the truth. The fact that Yusuke is also a good artist he can exploit ended up being an unexpected bonus to Madarame.

L

• Lampshade Hanging: Most of the conversations the party has when exploring Mementos is pointing out the more unrealistic/weird elements of the game, like the cast's improbable affinity for weapons they've never touched before or Joker's long coat never getting in the way of his extremely acrobatic, stealthy movements.
• Large Ham: Personas and Shadows are all completely over the top, due to representing their human selves hidden emotions.
  Arsène: For the sake of the justice you believed in, make the blasphemers repent! Hahahaha!
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Due to the framing device of the first two thirds of the game being Joker telling his story to Sae while heavily drugged, some conspicuous fade-to-white transitions regularly skip over certain conversations. As it turns out, they are specifically all of the conversations about suspecting Akechi of being the Black Mask, and the plan to fake Joker's death and break him out of jail, which he will only remember in time to play his part in if he decides not to tell Sae about his confidants.
  • After tricking his way out of the interrogation room, a dialogue option can have Joker note that his memory of the whole thing is pretty blurry. Considering the utter Police Brutality he was facing in there, Sae notes that it's probably for the best.
• Last Day of Normalcy: Played with, given that the game starts In Medias Res before jumping back to Joker coming to Tokyo as a Transfer Student and visiting his new school the day before classes start. The next day, a mysterious app appears on his phone that keeps reappearing no matter how many times he deletes it, and inadvertently triggering it causes him and Ryuji to be transported to the Metaverse.
• Last Lousy Point:
  • Wanna complete the Persona Compendium? Better look for every Treasure Demon in the game. Yes, this time around you need to collect the resident Metal Slimes for 100% Completion. Crystal Skull is the most notable, as it only appears in the last few floors of Mementos after clearing the penultimate dungeon. By the time you're likely to go into Mementos under those conditions, the final dungeon is available and the plot is strongly nudging you towards it.
  • Getting every skill in the game is a Luck-Based Mission due to four of them (Almighty Boost, Almighty Amp, Magic Ability, and Soul Chain) being exclusive to results of the the Network Fusion system.
  • If you want to unlock all artwork in Royal's Thieves' Den, you'll need to see all the in-game photos, which can only be viewed by checking your text messages on specific days, otherwise you'll need another playthrough. You'll also be missing a few cutscenes unless you go out of your way not to unlock the third semester: they're from the base game's ending.
• Last Note Nightmare: During the cutscene that plays upon accepting Maruki's world in Royal, an ominous note plays as Joker looks down near the end, heavily implying he regrets taking the deal.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler:
  • It's very subtle, but if you watch the TV programs which reference events from Persona 4, two of them when put together note that Namatame is not the Killer, since the actual killer has his identity withheld on an interview, while Namatame is very publicised in his political career in Inaba.
  • Ryuji's Show Time with Yusuke which involves a beef bowl restaurant. During this scene, however, there's a painting clearly on display on the wall which is the original Sayuri painting.
• The Law of Conservation of Detail: Most seemingly minor characters and scenes play into the overarching plot or one of the other character's backstories.
  • The drunken molester who got you convicted of assault? He's the leader of the conspiracy.
  • That silly conversation about how the TV station building is shaped like a pancake? Clues Morgana and the Protagonist into the fact that Akechi can also access the Metaverse, and eventually allows them to deduce that he is likely the "Black Mask" responsible for the mental shutdown and psychotic breakdown incidents.
  • That blue Butterfly of Death and Rebirth that keeps showing up? It's Caroline and Justine's real personality, trying to help you expose the Greater-Scope Villain.
  • Those chains in the summoning fires of Personas, namely Arsène's? Joker breaking Arsène's chains in the finale allows him to unleash his true self as Satanael, this game's Ultimate Persona - and the one who ends the vanilla game's last fight.
  • Several of the overworld NPC's are (slightly) more detailed than the rest, and quite a few fall into this, if you really pay attention. That homeless guy you asked for information on the Shibuya drug smuggling 'job'? That second-floor schoolgirl obviously stalking a dude, and getting increasingly deranged by the harmless attention he's getting? One of the two guys outside Shujin's school gate arguing with each other, after the first bullying case was taken care of? Future targets that the Phantom Thieves tackle in Mementos.
  • In Royal, Sojiro will talk about a 15-year-old girl that died at a traffic accident a month before you came during the traffic jam on the second day of the game. Who is that 15 year old girl? Kasumi, or more accurately, the real Kasumi who died saving her sister Sumire from being hit by a car because of her inferiority complex-fueled fit.
  • For every confidant hangout with Kasumi, she displays klutziness, depressive fits, or other odd behavior that she admits that she isn't supposed to have. It turns out that this "Kasumi" is actually the aforementioned sister who is living as Kasumi, and the real Kasumi is dead.
• Lawyer-Friendly Cameo: You can rent dvds and go to movie theaters to watch parody versions of Beverly Hills, 90210, Ghost (1990), The X-Files, Ugly Betty, ER, Prison Break, The Walking Dead, Slumdog Millionaire, The Dark Knight Rises, Before Midnight, Les Misérables (2012), Doraemon, The Godfather, Back to the Future, Mission: Impossible, The Avengers (2012), Saw, Die Hard and Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. As Atlus doesn't have the money to license all those works, each have silly names like "I, Miserable" or "Mansion Impossible", and you can hear dialogue making fun of tropes from the given work as your character watches the show or movie off-screen. The only exception is Like a Dragon, or more specifically, the live-action adaptation of the first game produced by Takashi Miike. Seeing as Sega owns Atlus, this was never an issue.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
  • The protagonist will stick his hand out to the screen when you open the menu, with text reading "Don't look at me like that" in the corner of the screen. This is often done in Japan when making eye contact with fictional characters. The fact that the protagonist is doing it implies that he's not the fictional one...
  • Sometime after the success of the second Palace, you'll be asked on the group chat on who should be the next target. If you pick "An evil overlord", Ryuji will point out that "this isn't some kind of video game". In true Persona fashion, you end up doing exactly this at the end.
  • When you fuse Satanael, Joker's ultimate Persona, he mentions that you'll now wear his mask "again." While this could be a reference to him being the unlocked form of Joker's starter Persona, Arsene, it also leans on the fact that you can only fuse him in a New Game Plus and you did wear his mask during the fight against the final boss in your previous playthrough.
  • At one point, Futaba corrects Makoto's use of a phrase from "cognitive science" to "cognitive psience", despite being homophones, as though she read the text box.
• Lesser of Two Evils: At the end of the game, the Phantom Thieves are hailed as heroes and Shido is going to jail for his crimes, but without testimony he won't stay for too long. Plus, the people in power will probably frame the Thieves for some crime to save face. In order to ensure that Shido goes to jail and that his friends are safe, Joker has to turn himself in as the leader of the Phantom Thieves so he can give testimony against Shido. However, due to his prior record and the fact that the Supernatural is not valid evidence about someone's criminal record, Joker gets sent to juvenile hall. Luckily, his friends manage to get his prior record cleared, allowing him to leave early and Earn Your Happy Ending.
• Lethal Joke Character: The twins and in Royal, Lavenza kick your ass with super-powered versions of low-level Personas, such as Agathion and the Jack Bros. Then again, an amped Jack Frost is nothing new.
• Level-Up at Intimacy 5: Similar to the Social Links in previous games, you get bonus levels when you fuse Personas, new abilities, discounts at shops, and so on by hanging with the Phantom Thieves and their various accomplices.
• Light Is Not Good: Seen during the Day of Reckoning. The four mini bosses all appear as angels and take on a heavenly appearance and demeanor. Yaldabaoth himself is designed with a Holy, bright white and gold model, with the arena in which the battle takes place apearing above the clouds.
• Limited Wardrobe: Most of the party has four outfits apart from their thief costumes- casual clothes and school uniforms, each of which has a variation for summer (June through September) and for winter (the rest of the year). Just about everyone else has one outfit. For instance, Sae Niijima wears the exact same clothes (a dark pantsuit) in April as every other time you see her, like half a year later when she interrogates you.
• Literal Metaphor: In previous games, Personas were described as metaphorical "masks" as a tie to Jungian psychology. In Persona 5, the party's Personas literally transform into personalized masks when not in use.
• Literary Allusion Title: Not the game, but the song "Rivers in the Desert" (the battle theme for the last storyline bosses) quotes Isaiah 43:19 from the King James version of the Bible:
  I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert.
• Living Shadow: The aptly named Shadows, inky blobs of shapeshifting negative emotions that can transform into humans, animals, and demons at will.
• Load-Bearing Boss: Because the Palaces are the result of the owner's warped cognition, when the Shadow is defeated, the Palace begins to collapse, meaning the Thieves have to escape as soon as the fight is over. Shido attempts to weaponize this by stopping his heart temporarily, but the Thieves barely manage to escape.
• Lonely Piano Piece: "Beneath the Mask", the nighttime exploration theme, is a melancholy blues tune consisting of little more than a piano, organ, and bass line. After the first act, it gains some equally depressing vocals that deal with Loss of Identity. The version that plays on rainy nights loses the percussion, making the song feel even more lonely.
• Long Song, Short Scene: The song that plays during a Palace trip after sending the Calling Card has a decently long loop, but most players will skip most of it and just warp to the Safe Room nearest to the Treasure.
• Loophole Abuse: When fusing a new Persona, or powering up one using another, the game will randomize what stats will increase from the process. The thing is, the game shows you this before you accept it, meaning you can cancel, select the Persona's you wish to fuse/sacrifice, and then cancel out again if you see stats going up you don't like. This greatly helps making Personas stronger, while taking little time at all.
• Lost in Translation: Or just plain omitted. While leaving most signs untranslated has always been a thing in localizations, the sheer amount of them in this game, due to it being set in Tokyo, makes this happen more often than not.
  • An event between Akechi and Makoto, taking place on June 12th (Sunday), has left many confused due to it being set in a school-like building, but having no other context given to why they're there. Japanese players and those who know how education in Japan works will know they're there because they were taking a mock examination, as both of them are third-year students studying for their college entrance exams. None of the signs were translated to point that out.
  • For whatever reason, the English version makes the relationship between Akechi's mother and Shido more vague (stating that his mother was "in a relationship with a no-good man," as mentioned in his Rank 3 Confidant event), unintentionally watering down the weight of being a bastard child he carries, though later revelations do bring the whole truth to light anyway. In the Japanese version, he openly refers to his mother being Shido's mistress (spelled "愛人" - aijin,; it can be another term for "lover," but in most instances, it refers to a man's mistress).
  • When the group arrives in Hawaii, there's a moment where they check in with customs. In the Japanese version, Ryuji says "I am Japanese!" in English. In the English dub, he says "Yeah! I'm so excited!" instead.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: The entire third semester is such, as it took place in a Tokyo where all of the Phantom Thieves' wildest desires come true courtesy of Takuto Maruki's distorted cognitive warping. This isn't a good thing, as it goes right into the territory of nihilism, robs the characters of all personal growth or potential to move forward, and ensures Mementos would keep them in this state forever.
• Lyrical Dissonance: In true series fashion. This time it's the regular battle theme, "Last Surprise", an extremely upbeat song about how the target has been Out-Gambitted and about to be silently assassinated, while also functioning as a bit of a Bragging Theme Tune for Joker.
  You'll never see it coming!
  You'll see that my mind is too fast for eyes!
  You're done in by the time it's hit you; your last surprise!

M

• The Magic Goes Away:
  • In the ending, the Thieves recognize that destroying Mementos and defeating the Big Bad means that they will lose access to the Metaverse and their Personas, and accept that this is a price they must pay. One of the Bad Endings does allow Joker and ONLY Joker alone to stay in business, but if he retains his powers in this case, it will obviously lead to a He Who Fights Monsters scenario, with him being corrupted and becoming the judge, jury and executioner of everyone in Tokyo. It's ultimately subverted, since their powers reawaken once the next Metaverse event starts in Strikers.
  • Played straight in Royal for the Wishing Star that Jose granted you when you first met him. When the second Metaverse incident in-game reaches an end with Maruki's defeat, Morgana transforms into a helicopter to assist the party and Maruki in escaping from the collapsing Metaverse. When Morgana wonders about it much later, it turns out that the Wishing Stone has drained all of its power to turn Morgana into a helicopter, and the power of Unison Showtimes vanish alongside it.
• Magic Is Rare, Health Is Cheap: Nearly every shop in the game sells HP-recovering items. The only places you can obtain SP-recovering items from are Tae's clinic, certain vending machines (the items themselves only being available once or twice a week), and by leveling up Sojiro's and Haru's Confidants (in those you learn how to make SP-healing coffee and plants, respectively). Royal also adds Will Seeds to Palaces that restore SP once they're found, but there's only three of them in each Palace. In addition, Jose can sell you a limited supply of SP-recovering items in Mementos, but this requires grinding his special currency.
• Magikarp Power:
  • The new "Sacrifice" fusion mechanic allows you to power up any low-level Persona to insane levels. However, as they only get part of the experience and one randomly selected skill from the sacrificed Persona, it will take dozens or hundreds of sacrifices to get them there.
  • The same "Sacrifice" fusion also allows for Min-Maxing of a Persona of your choice, since stat points are allocated randomly on level up. This is preferably performed on low-level Personas as they have the potential to grow to become even stronger damage dealers than those with high base level. However, the rerolling process will take an absurd amount of time and money.
    • Of special note would be your Starter Mon Arsène. At first, his stats are mediocre at best aside from Agility. But because his base level is incredibly low, his stats have the greatest potential for growth, allowing one to easily reroll his stat increases until the relevant stats are near-max, making him a Lightning Bruiser that outshines even late-game Personas.
    • Downloadable Content Persona Kaguya falls under this umbrella as well. It starts with its powerful Secret Art Shining Arrows, but it consumes too much SP to be practical. It's only when you can learn and pass on skills like Spell Master and Bless Amp that it truly shines, but that power boost combined with how insanely strong Shining Arrows is makes it one of the best personas in the both the base game and Royal.
    • In Royal the "malfunction" that happens during an alarm will grant 5, or 10 if the sacrifice was fused during that alarm, stat points to the empowered persona but 0 EXP points. Also hangings during alarms don't use up that persona's ability to get empowered. Literally any persona, low or high level, can be made to have max stats. Combine with Ryuji's new Instant Kill and you can have all the skills, exp, and stats thrown on a persona. The only thing you can't change using this method is their inherent skill or resistances.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: Black Mask plans to pick off the remaining Phantom Thieves one by one through this method once everything dies down after his attempt to kill Joker. It can be assumed that it comes to pass in the Bad Ending where Joker is Killed Off for Real. And if he manages to get past the Big Bad? Japan is doomed because he will use the accident to expose Shido and cause mass civil unrest.
• Malevolent Masked Men: Many shadows take the form of humans with the various arcana masks in place of a face in dungeons. Once battle starts they burst apart and change into demonic forms.
• Manual Leader, A.I. Party: You can use the "orders" menu in battle or in the stats menu to switch the majority of your party to AI control. The only exception is the protagonist, whose actions you always have to select manually.
• Marathon Boss: The fight against the boss of the Cruise Ship Palace is really long, even factoring in that it's a Climax Boss. He has five separate phases, more than any other boss, and the last two have quite a bit of health. It can easily take over an hour from the start of the fight to the end of the cutscenes that play after the boss is defeated, assuming you don't skip anything.
• Marathon Level: The last few dungeons end up this way.
  • The Disc-One Final Dungeon, Shido's Palace, has six major mini boss encounters, and the main puzzle gimmick with the mice includes a lot of backtracking. The Cruise Ship is noticeably longer than the more fast paced Casino Palace that came before. To top it off the boss of the dungeon is a Marathon Boss. All of this adds up to the longest dungeon in the game so far.
  • The final heist of the vanilla game is this trope as well because it is effectively two dungeons in a row, three if you have neglected the 66-floor deep Mementos dungeon throughout the game. Mementos Depths is full of strong Shadows ^note in the original game, less so in Royal and very few gimmicks and lighthearted cutscenes. The original game also has some Checkpoint Starvation, with only two safe rooms ^note this is rectified in Royal by increasing the safe rooms to three. The Qliphoth World that follows is essentially a mini-dungeon, but contains four miniboss encounters before the final showdown.
  • The new Palace in Royal is the largest Palace in the game, and takes the most number of in-game days to clear a path to the treasure. It requires at least two days and one visit to the top of the new area of Mementos to clear the roadblock. The sheer number of rooms and areas makes it about twice as large as most of the other Palaces. It also has the highest level spread in the enemy (combatant, non treasure demon) shadows. The previous dungeon had 15 level difference between its weakest and strongest enemy, while this dungeon has 21 ^note The weakest enemy in Mementos Depths is Moloch and strongest is Abaddon, they are levels 60 and 75 respectively. Maruki's Palace's weakest enemy is Bugs and strongest enemy is Fafnir, who are levels 65 and 86 respectively.. The average level spread of most Palaces is about 12-14.
• Mascot Mook: Jack Frost, the adorable Atlus snowman mascot, reappears in the game, you can find him as an enemy shadow in Madarame's palace. Much later, in Shido's cruise, you will encounter King Frost, who is practically a Boss in Mook Clothing.
• Mask of Power: This time around, characters' Personas turn into masks after the first summon, and can then be resummoned by the character ripping the mask of their face. You can similarly weaken Shadows by ripping the masks off their faces.
• Masochist's Meal: During the school festival, the Phantom Thieves order a "Russian Takoyaki" at a maid cafe set up in one of the classrooms. Said takoyaki consists of several normal-looking ones and a "special" red one, which happens to be incredibly spicy. This "special" takoyaki is so spicy that Akechi ends up in pain after taking and eating it as his fee for attending the festival.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: While everyone writes off Futaba's visions of her mom as auditory and visual hallucinations, there's still enough reasonable doubt that it's a result of the Persona setting's psychological based magic.
• Meaningful Background Event:
  • Pay attention to the Phan-site polls after the Futaba and Okumura heists, which drastically fluctuates in exactly the same timing after Igor finishes his typical post-heist bedtime Velvet Room speeches with Joker. The one after Futaba increases the Phan Site approval rate by double, and after Okumura it peaks near 100%, which remains briefly even after Okumura dies. However, the poll's approval rate soon starts plummeting until it reaches single digits within a few days. These aren't random events, but rather they are a very good clue that Igor is not Igor but Yaldabaoth, and he's rigging the public's perception of the Phantom Thieves as a part of his "game".
  • Early in April, Joker and Ryuji are walking down Central Street in Shibuya; Ryuji makes a loud comment about taking down Kamoshida, and Joker tells him to be quiet. A few seconds later, they pass by Sae Niijima and Goro Akechi heading in the opposite direction.
  • On April 15 in Royal, immediately after emerging from Kamoshida's palace after Ann's awakening, for a brief few seconds a man in a brown coat can be seen descending the stairs in front of Shujin Academy at the end of the alleyway before turning and walking down the street off camera; this is Takuto Maruki, heading home after just completing his interview to work at Shujin. More importantly, in the Rank 10 event for the Councillor confidant, we find out that Maruki actually saw the group emerge from the Metaverse while he was descending the stairs, and from there was able to put two-and-two together and figured out the four were the Phantom Thieves. Even more importantly, it can be surmised that with this knowledge, he knew exactly what Joker meant when he hinted at Mementos's collective cognition in the Rank 6 event, which leads eventually to the events of the third semester.
  • Lesser examples include the first day you arrive in Yongen-Jaya, where you'll see Takemi walking to work. In April you can see Makoto in the crowd of students heading to school sometimes, or standing on the train platform with her sister. Major characters appearing in the background before they're introduced to the player's character.
  • On January 2nd in Royal, when Joker goes downstairs in Leblanc to meet human Morgana and Wakaba celebrating New Year with Sojiro and Futaba, the "Sayuri" painting on the wall near the door is missing. This is not a good sign at all, and it turns out that as an effect of Maruki's dream world, Madarame let Yusuke exhibit the painting under his mother's name.
• Meaningful Name: Social Links are now called "Confidants". The meaning behind this is suggested during each Confidant's storyline, and becomes apparent once you max out a Confidant: in addition to them being able to confide their secrets with you (such as Kawakami having to moonlight as a Meido to make ends meet), through your actions in changing the hearts of people making their lives miserable, they come to realize that you are a Phantom Thief. They agree to keep your secret, in doing so making the bond you formed with them unbreakable.
  • Shujin, the name of the school Joker goes to, is homophonous to the Japanese word for prisoner, shuujin. Kosei, the school attended by both a party member and a separate mid-game Confidant, is also pronounced the same as kousei, the Japanese word for rehabilitation, a constant motif of this game's Velvet Room.
• Medicinal Cuisine: Joker can cook curry in at Leblanc for use as an item in Mementos or a Palace. Consuming it restores SP to all allies, making it invaluable for protracted fights.
• Mega Meal Challenge: The Big Bang Challenge at Big Bang Burger, which involves eating increasingly oversized burgers to win accessories and social stat boosts. Taking the Challenge will always increase Joker's Guts stat, but succeeding will cause boosts in other social stats as well.
• The Men in Black:
  • The Shadow Operatives DLC outfit puts your party members in futuristic-looking black dress suits and sunglasses similar to Mitsuru's Spy Catsuit in Persona 4: Arena Ultimax, or the Agent Suit set from Persona 4.
  • Within the narrative, there are the two men in black suits that are tailing your group in the final cutscene. It's heavily implied that the Police are still tailing the Phantom Thieves in fear of losing their public image, as seen in Scramble's story where they are still framing the Thieves as suspects. Morgana stole the spark plug from their car to fix the van the team drives away.
• Mental Monster: Mementos, which reflects the darker nature of everyone who isn't bad or important enough to get a full palace, thus serving as a reflection of the negative parts of society in general.
• Mental Shutdown: People whose Shadows are killed within the Metaverse suffer a mental shutdown. In most cases, this is lethal, but there is at least one case that merely left its victim in a coma, that being of Ichiko Ohya's former journalist partner.
• Mental World:
  • The Metaverse is a parallel version of reality inside the collective unconscious that warps itself to reflect the way humans with particularly twisted desires see things: a gym teacher who sees his school as his fiefdom creates a castle, a painter exploiting his understudies sees his home as an art gallery where his disciples are his works, a teenager who sees himself as a Chaotic Good rebel against the corrupt transforms into a classy Phantom Thief, and so on.
  • In Royal, Joker has a small world of his own in the Thieves' Den (My Palace in the original Japanese). As the name implies, it's Joker's own personal Palace, serving as a gallery for him to admire and reflect on his achievements and experiences over the course of the game. He can also transform into the other Phantom Thieves in this space and interact with Cognitive versions of his Confidants.
• The Merch: After the team defeats Medjed, the Phantom Thieves get so popular that In-Universe merchandise themed after them starts to pop up to cash in on the hype. Not that the Phantom Thieves themselves make a yen out of it, because a clandestine group like them can't exactly go to court and sue for the violation of their personality rights. For particular examples, Shinya Oda collects Phantom Thieves badges, Sojiro jokes about making a Phantom Thief themed menu for Leblanc, and the protagonist himself can buy usable items like a "Thief Mask" accessory that grants a point of Agility and "Calling Postcards" resembling the team's signature Calling Cards that he can mail to his Confidants for extra Relationship Values.
• Messiah Creep: The cast start out as a group of Anti-Heroes driven by personal vendettas, desire for attention and greed, and end up saving the world from the clutches of a controlling god born from the will of the masses.
• Metal Slime: The rare Treasure Demons, which drop tons of experience and money and can be recruited for a Persona that can't be used in battle but is generally quite useful as a fusion material. Unfortunately, they're generally being resistant or immune to all but one type of damage, so defeating them involves either getting a critical hit or finding their weakness, whichever is possible.
• Meta Twist:
  • Futaba's dungeon is set up exactly like one from Persona 4, a mental world created by the inner thoughts and insecurities of a future party member, controlled by their Shadow. It's all flipped on its head once you reach the end: Due to Futaba's outward self-loathing, Shadow Futaba is a Hero Antagonist who represents Futaba's repressed positive side, and only fought the Thieves because she thought they were trying to harm Futaba. She's not the boss of the dungeon, the real boss is a monster born from the feelings that caused Futaba's depression: the belief that she's responsible for her mother's death. Shadow Futaba pulls a Big Damn Heroes to help the party defeat the boss, by convincing Futaba of the truth and becoming her Persona.
  • In the previous two Persona games, The Fool and Judgment arcana are plot-mandated Social Links that rank up as you progress the story. Normally you begin with The Fool, representing your party as a whole, and max it out as you approach the endgame, and then transition to Judgment as the main cast gains a new resolve to fight the Big Bad. Here, The Fool and Judgment instead represent your bond with Igor and Sae respectively, and in an inversion to the usual trend, you immediately max out Judgment as you commence the game's final chapters, and the Fool is mandated to be the last Social Link that gets maxed out in the original game.
  • On a double meta level. It's very easy to attribute Igor's much deeper voice as a result of his voice actor's death and the people in charge choosing to respect his performance by not even trying to replace him. It turns out that it's actually been a fake Igor all along and when the real one returns, his voice also has similar pitch and eccentric dressings as his original performances.
• Mickey Mousing:
  • Morgana's battle victory animation has him bump into the camera right as the music kicks in.
  • The Velvet Room cutscenes open with Joker laying on a bed, his eyes closed. When his eyes open, it's perfectly in sync with the last note of the background music's first measure.
• Minigame: Various human parameter increasing activities like the batting cages and video games involve lining up UI elements, hitting buttons at the right time or hitting them as fast as you can. This is a notable evolution from the last two installments, which featured no such thing when doing after-school activities (other than 4's Fishing Minigame) and were instead passive.
• Mirror Match: An interesting variant. Caroline and Justine can use multiple moves like the past bosses to mimic your own character. However, they also mimic your team dynamic by using Baton Passes and All-Out Attacks.
• Misaimed Fandom: The online fandom of the Phantom Thieves counts as an In-Universe example. When the fan site is first put up, the requests for the protagonists to solve are mostly personal problems and small in scale compared to what they wanted, which is people who are well-respected by society and getting away with their crimes because of their status and power. As they gain more popularity, and make it clearer to the public that their goal is to target societal corruption, the fandom is still misaimed as they become more focused on bloodshed, as shown when they congratulate the Thieves for killing Kunikazu Okumura during a live broadcast, despite his death being a set up by The Conspiracy, then start demanding the Thieves be killed as retribution. The Phantom Thieves quickly realize that their fanbase doesn't care about justice, especially in the meeting before stealing Okumura's heart.
  Morgana: At this point, all they care about is seeing those in power beg for forgiveness.
  Ann: Dammit! This isn't a game...!
  Yusuke: The means and the ends have been reversed. We're starting to be seen purely as entertainment...
• "Mission: Impossible" Cable Drop: In the second palace, Morgana uses a hook and a cable to lower himself down to the Treasure, which is surrounded by guards and lasers, in order to steal it without being caught.
• Mistaken for Insane: Tokyo is plagued by a series of incidents caused by people suddenly undergoing psychotic breakdowns, leading to incidents like a person setting a convinience store on fire. It turns out Akechi has the unique ability to drive targets berserk and was using his powers on his victims' Shadows in Mementos, resulting in the apparent insanity in the real world. The ability is used to frame Shido's opposition as insane to discredit them. Downplayed when he uses the technique on himself, as at it only makes him appear more unhinged than he already is.
• Mistaken for Junkie:
  • After escaping from Kamoshida's castle the first time, Joker and Ryuji run into two police officers, who accuse them of ditching classes. When Ryuji tries to explain they were in a castle, the cops immediately asks them to hand over their bags to inspect for drugs.
  • Tae Takemi assumes Joker is this at first when he requests to test her experimental homebrew medicine.
• Mob Debt: When Makoto Niijima uncovers a drug trafficking ring run by a hangure group in Shibuya, she blackmails the Phantom Thieves of Hearts to help change the ringleader's heart, using her recording of Ryuji's confession as leverage. Unfortunately, Makoto gets blackmailed by said ringleader, Junya Kaneshiro, in the process, taking incriminating pics of her implicating her in underage drinking to the tune of three million yen. This does, however, allow Makoto to join the Phantom Thieves and prove instrumental in changing Kaneshiro's heart. (It's also never brought up what could happen if Joker did have three million yen on hand.)
• Model Museum: Royal has the Thieves' Den, a bonus hideaway where you can unlock models of various set pieces, characters and enemies to display and admire. Characters you've befriended throughout the game will even appear and have conversations about your collection, which can reveal additional information about the story and world.
• The Mole: The game begins with the police revealing there is a traitor in your midst who tipped the police off to Joker's location. As such, one of your goals over the game is to find out if and why one of your friends or accomplices would betray you. It's Akechi.
• Mon: In a return to Persona and Persona 2, you recruit enemy Shadows to become your Personas. And as in all games, you can fuse your existing Personas together to gain more powerful ones.
• Mona Lisa Smile: The "Sayuri". Art critics have tried to figure out the meaning of the expression of the woman in the portrait for years to no avail. It turns out the painting is a self-portrait of a mother who knows she will soon die to illness and leave her infant son behind. Madarame painted over the image of her child in her arms to invoke this trope because he knew that the missing element would create an unsolvable mystery that people would obsess over like in Trope Namer's case and thus make the painting and the rest of "his" art more sellable.
• Money for Nothing: Generally averted in the vanilla game unless you really tried grinding money, but Royal makes earning cash much easier by adding bonus multipliers for both money and item drops in Mementos, and also changing Ryuji's ability to automatically defeat weak enemies by causing it to still drop cash. This means that you can quickly gather as much as you'd like and makes things like the Cash Gate to starting Chihaya's confidant trivial.
• Money Is Experience Points: You can upgrade your gun's stats by spending money at Untouchable once you unlock Iwai's Confidant. In the vanilla version, there was usually only a couple of upgrades for each gun, but in the Royal version, there were a lot more customization options.
• Monochromatic Impact Shot: Defeating Shadows with All-Out Attacks causes them to be shown in a monochrome wash while the triumphant Phantom Thief stands in the foreground. A similar effect is used for Joker's appearance in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
• Mons as Characterization:
  • Joker's ultimate Persona Satanael is the gnostic version of Lucifer, who in their version of the Christian Theology is a heroic figure who seeks to free humanity from the clutches of Yaldabaoth, who is the gnostic version of the Abrahamic God and a tyrant who seeks to enslave humanity via physical existence. This is a reference to how the final boss of vanilla P5 is Yaldabaoth, and how Joker is the Trickster destined to defeat him.
  • Morgana's second Persona is Mercurius, the Roman god of luck, trickery and thieves (among many other things), which befits the team's mentor of supernatural origin.
  • Ryuji Sakamoto's initial Persona is Captain Kidd, after the historical figure who served as a successful privateer (i.e. state-sanctioned pirate) for England until politics brought about his downfall. This refers to how Ryuji was a rising star in Shujin's track team until Kamoshida ruined his leg and his reputation.
  • Ann Takamaki's initial Persona is Carmen, the eponymous villain protagonist of a 19th century novel by Mérimée. She is a gypsy femme fatale, which alludes to how Ann is seen as a slut and a foreigner in her own country due to being a quarter white.
  • Makoto Niijima's initial Persona is Johanna, based on the (probably) fictional Pope Joan, who, according to legend, pretended to be a man and rose through the ranks of the Catholic Church all the way to the papacy before her true sex was revealed when she gave birth during a precession; she died shortly after. This is a reference to how Makoto is an extremely bright and talented young woman, but will face an uphill battle gaining success in any highly respected profession due to her gender.
  • Futaba Sakura's initial Persona is Necronomicon, which is a tomb of eldritch lore that features in various books written by H. P. Lovecraft. This is a reference to her strong interest in otaku culture as well as the fact that her Persona's abilities revolve around gathering information for the Phantom Thieves rather than combat.
  • Goro Akechi's Persona is Loki, a trickster God from Norse Mythology and a Satanic archetype in the mythos. This is a reference to how he was evil all along and tricked the whole world into believing he was a hero of justice.
  • Kasumi/Sumire Yoshizawa's initial Persona is Cendrillon, based on Cinderlla. It is a reference to the delusion imposed on her by Dr Maruki, which fulfilled her wish that she was her dead sister Kasumi, similar to how the Fairy Godmother used her magic on Cinderella to create the illusion that she was a fabulously wealthy princess to impress Prince Charming.
• Monster of the Week: The game's story was modeled on serial novels and TV dramas. Each dungeon involves the Protagonists stealing the hearts of a new target in order to reform them. This comes in contrast with other Persona games, as each one had a main goal and target to stop. Though this eventually catches the attention of a conspiracy with knowledge of the Metaverse, to serve as the overall Myth Arc.
• Mood Whiplash:
  • The School Trip to Hawaii is immediately followed by a cutscene of the school principal having a mental shutdown while crossing a busy street, which leads to him getting stuck in the middle of the crosswalk and getting hit by a truck. It's hinted at, and later confirmed, that he was killed by the Antisocial Force after having outlived his usefulness.
  • In the first raid into Okumura's palace, you find Morgana with a mysterious girl (who later turns out to be Haru) in a thief costume. Tense music plays as she stares you down... but then it fades once it turns out that the girl actually is trying to remember the lines she'd rehearsed with Morgana. Yusuke lampshades this when he points out that the tension has suddenly faded.
  • After stealing Okumura's heart, the group has a celebratory outing to Destiny Land, and while there, watches Okumura give a press conference as a changed man, during which Okumura dies as a result of the Black Mask killing his shadow in the Metaverse. The streaming service Ryuji was using to watch this then cuts off to a "Technical Difficulties" card which is a happy crayon drawing.
  • In Shido's palace, the final miniboss, the "Cleaner," turns out to be a yakuza thug and the party tries to get the letter of recommendation off him by trying to get Yusuke to offer him a tattoo design. After it backfires hilariously due to Yusuke's stubborn pride, the party fights him, and he ultimately decides to pull a Screw This, I'm Outta Here on his boss, to the party's confusion and pleasant surprise. Then as the party starts to leave, Akechi confronts them, his mental state deteriorating enough over the encounter that he resorts to inflicting a psychotic breakdown on himself in a last ditch effort to kill them.
  • The group is shocked by Ryuji's apparent death in Shido's palace. Only for Ryuji to walk up completely oblivious, and tease the girls, getting beaten and left against a lamp post by his teammates.
  • However, perhaps the worst and heavily Exaggerated variant appears during the start of the new year during Royal's bonus storyline. The arc starts with everything seemingly ending on a happy note, save for an odd nightmare and several jarring abnormalities during the New Year. Then at the 2nd of January, after an awkward scene of meeting a human Morgana and Futaba alongside her supposedly dead mother celebrating New Years and happily having an Osechi breakfast with Sojiro, Akechi pops in and triggers a heavily contrasting Downer Arc that is nothing seen before by infiltrating the game's de facto Bleak Level. Things only go downhill from there when Kasumi was revealed to be a fake impersonated by her suicidally depressed sister, the instigator behind the abnormalities being the school counselor Maruki who was actually grieving for his lost ex-fiancee, Akechi himself being revealed to be an abnormality...among other things.
• More Dakka: The "Random Fire"/"Bullet Hail" attack, where the heroes can unleash a barrage of gunfire on the entire enemy party.
• Motif:
  • Hearts. Arsène has heart symbols on his sleeves, Life Meters are shaped like hearts, the party calls themselves the "Phantom Thieves of Hearts", and your goal is to reforming corrupt adults by metaphorically "taking their heart".
  • Masks, in keeping with previous titles and the series' Jungian themes. the word "Persona" is latin for "mask", the party's main Persona all wear some form of a mask, Persona now transform into personalized masks when not in use, and Shadows appear as humanoid figures with masks on during exploration.
  • Chains, which can be found everywhere from the transition to the Velvet Room, to being part of the glowing aura of the Personas. Even the sound effect for moving around the menu is that of chains rattling. It all ties into the theme of all the party members desiring freedom in some way.
  • Fittingly, there's a lot of crime-based imagery: the party holds their HP and SP meters like they're in a mugshot, the names of Personas and characters are spelled out in the menu like a Cut-and-Paste Note, and the "total XP gained" menu is presented as a bounty for each party member, like a "Wanted!" Poster.
  • There's a significant amount of French thematics. Joker, Ann, Haru and technically Kasumi's^note Though the story of Cinderella is an ancient folk tale, it is Charles Perrault's famous version which is used here as a source: note that Kasumi's Persona has the French name of "Cendrillon" Personas all originate from French literature (and Haru is dressed to match in her thief attire), Caroline's name uses the French pronunciation (presumably to make it rhyme with Justine's name), Sojiro's cafe is named "Leblanc" after the author of the Arsène Lupin novels, and, rather than the classic Rider-Waite tarot from previous games, 5 uses the French Tarot de Marseille.
• Moving the Goalposts: The Casino Palace has the target repeatedly changing the rules on the Phantom Thieves. Just as they're about to reach the boss room by paying a toll of one hundred thousand tokens, the target increases it to a million tokens. Too bad for her that she gets Out-Gambitted by Akechi.
• Mr. Smith: The Japanese equivalent of "John Doe": "Taro Tanaka" shows up when Futaba prints out an identification card with this name in one of the palaces. She's aware of this and wants to throw it away since it's extremely unlikely that any of the Shadows there would think it's legit. Akechi keeps it and racks up a huge amount of coins which comes in handy later.
• Mugshot Montage: When the main character is arrested, you get to see the typical frontal and side photographs taken with the main character holding a blank expression the entire time.
• Multiple Endings:
  • In contrast to Persona 4, this game just has one good ending, and two bad endings. There are also several variations of the Non-Standard Game Over Akechi kills the protagonist ending you can get if you don't complete each Palace by the given deadline, starting with the first.
  • Persona 5 Royal adds in a True Ending which is only accessible if the player maxes out the Consultant confidant before the Niijima's Palace deadline. Failing to do so will lead to the player being locked into the good ending route from the vanilla game. Unlike previous games, neither is considered a true ending. They are the Stay Ending where the protagonist accepts Maruki's false reality and the Return Ending where he denies it.
• Muscles Are Meaningful: Samael is quite physically strong in addition to being muscular, and Futaba points out that the muscles are not for show.
• The Musketeer: The main characters can switch between melee weapons and firearms, like in the original Persona and many other Shin Megami Tensei games.
  • The Protagonist uses knives and handguns.
  • Ryuji uses bludgeons and shotguns.
  • Ann uses whips and submachine guns.
  • Morgana uses curved swords and slingshots.
  • Yusuke uses katanas and assault rifles.
  • Makoto uses knuckles and revolvers.
  • Haru uses axes and grenade launchers
  • Akechi uses laser sabres and ray guns.
  • Kasumi uses rapiers and rifles.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: A minor case for the Tycoon game you can play in the Thieves Den: no matter how many times you change your opponents, you will never get a combination of Akechi and either Futaba or Haru. This is because they still resent him for killing their parents.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: The saying is discussed during one of Kawakami's lessons in Royal. The lecture notes its current use to describe blind loyalty to one's country, but also brings up that the meaning of the quote has been distorted over time; in bringing up the full quote^note "My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." the meaning changes from blind loyalty to a sense of responsibility to correct it should the country be led astray. Naturally, this lesson becomes significant when one notices the game's overall critique on society.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Played with early in the story. After seeing the effects of their Heel–Face Brainwashing on Kamoshida, the protagonists are actually somewhat terrified of the implications of their actions, and wonder for several days if what they've done can really be called "right".
  • The targets themselves, who are generally horrified by what they did before their change of heart. Kamoshida believes that he deserves death for his actions, Madarame breaks into hysterical sobs on live television, Okumura appears to be deeply ashamed of himself, and Shido starts to quietly cry once the change takes effect. Kaneshiro's reaction isn't shown, but he immediately turns himself in for his crimes, while Futaba and Sae didn't really do anything bad enough to cause this reaction.
  • This occurs to all default members of the Phantom Thieves during the Third term, should Joker meet them during specific dates after they are all snapped out from Maruki's spell. All of them will thoroughly apologize for falling into escapism and promise to face their grief head on no matter what. They also lament failing to protect the protagonist when he was in danger despite promised to at all costs because they were all in blissful ignorance.
  • Sumire also has this moment during her Rank 6 Confidant, in which she apologizes for being manipulated into "becoming Kasumi" and let her delusional thoughts take her over, as well as fighting Joker over it.
• Mythology Gag: Has its own page.

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