Well, that moment where you mistakenly thought that the Living Emotional Crutch you are holding onto thinks that you don't deserve to be yourself...
Just like the first Q, there are a bunch of Tear Jerker moments right here. It's a Shin Megami Tensei game, after all.
All Moments pages are Spoilers Off. Proceed at your own risk. You Have Been Warned.
- After the Tyranniqueen Post-Climax Confrontation battle, a redition of "A Corner of Memories" plays while the herbivores agreed to Yosukesaurus about building the true paradise.
- The P3P heroine herself in this game. She was just there alone all the time and she Hates Being Alone. Even when she encounters what seems to be her S.E.E.S comrades, they were in fact from another reality and they do not recognize them at all. The Power of Friendship is the thing that motivates her to even live, and even that was gone. Now her Stepford Smiler facade is crushed completely and she isn't any different from the P3 hero by this point; a depressed, apathetic individual. In fact, she even believed that everything she knew was fake, and she was the abnormal error. Thankfully S.E.E.S are still good people, so they tried to comfort her loneliness.
- Perhaps one of the most heartbreaking parts is when the P3P Heroine does the Oteakezamurai or "Junpei, Ace Detective" pose in the Cinema lobby. The pose is usually done for laughs, but in this case it's done because she is desperate for Junpei to recognize her.
- The Special Screening involving Ken, Koromaru and Akechi ends with Ken taking Akechi aside and telling him Koromaru latched on to him so much because he realized he and Ken are not so different. Akechi begrudgingly admits he's right, but it's implied Koromaru is so attached to the two of them because he wants to help them. Those who've played Persona 3 and 5 will know that Ken and Akechi's desire for revenge will inevitably lead to tragedy, and while Ken manages to redeem himself afterwards, Akechi ends up losing himself to hatred entirely.
- While fighting the boss of A.I.G.I.S., Futaba uses Ribbon's interface to hack into Mother Computer, but Mother Computer begins hacking her back. Futaba gives a Declaration of Protection to Ribbon and keeps reminding her of the emotions she gained while she was with the group. Ribbon pulls a Heroic Sacrifice to override Mother Computer, and Futaba is immediately broken up as she desperately tries to rebuild her after its defeat.
- Then there's Hikari's reaction to what seems to be the movie's ending. Unlike the previous movie ending cutscenes, she just trembles in tears with her fists clenched. Then when Nagi asks her what happened, she said that she was like Ribbon, where she wanted to discard her self like the robot since she thought that if she would not have a personality she would not be the screwed up mess she is now.
- Hikari herself. This character alone should be associated with Tear Jerker. Even from the start of the game you can clearly see that she hasn't having a good time, and it turns out that she was one of those people that seemingly nobody likes and can absolutely do nothing right. Every time she resisted against other people, they would tell her "Why do you have to be like that?" then flip out in a mass humiliation parade. Everything that her father told her to make her loved by people, such as movies, being unique/special etc. just made her a Hate Sink by everyone around her. Eventually she just collapsed in a fit of depression and closed herself out because she thought that she was nothing short of a subhuman that even her father, the only person who actually cared about her, treated her as a disappointment. To rub the salt in her gaping mental wounds, her father asking her the trigger word in the exact phrasing out of genuine concern simply and totally crushed her sanity, with Nagi/Enlil further feeding in afterwards. There is no doubt why she doesn't want to live anymore, and if the Phantom Thieves just came one step late, she would had been Driven to Suicide.
- What makes it even sadder is that it wasn't written like the Dark and Troubled Past of most Persona characters at all. Most Persona characters, including Futaba's one are outright cruel, if not somehow realistic. Hikari's one was simply a disturbingly accurate and sane portrayal of how youngsters in modern Japan get their life ruined. These young people might have promising lives and futures like Hikari, but they can be just as ruined as easily like in her case, especially if they don't follow Japan's conformist society rules.
- Speaking of Futaba, her severe PTSD and depression is only caused when her mother got entangled in a government conspiracy and it killed her and put the blame on Futaba For the Evulz. Hikari was simply verbally abused and only that alone, yet it had the same effect on her as Futaba getting her mother killed.
- The fact that her Trauma Conga Line kickstarted since she was of elementary school age doesn't help either.
- And then there's the fact that she has multiple cognitive worlds akin to Palaces inside her. Most characters from Persona 4 and Persona 5 do not have more than one of these cognitive worlds, including really distorted people types such as Adachi, Kamoshida and Shido. This should give you a really good idea that her self-hatred is virtually unsustainable.
- After that, there's the musical before you fight Order Gigant, if you view it after you view the flashback after you beat Doe. note The full picture basically sums up as she is already deep in self hatred and is closing herself off in her room, then her father is telling her that he got her favorite notebook, but he asked her "Why do you have to be like that?" and she started having hallucinations of people repeating the same phrase. Her whimpering voices during the former and reaction to the hallucinations in the latter is simply heartbreaking.
- It should also be noted that the four traumas depicted on the fourth labyrinth musicals might not be the only traumatic experiences she had suffered; During the relatives musical her cognitive copy stated that everyone was calling her weird and her "individuality" was an excuse, and during her confession to the party she admitted that "it" got worse on high school - This means that she probably has to put with getting bullied or getting scolded for slacking off studies regularly at all three of her schools.
- What makes it even sadder is that it wasn't written like the Dark and Troubled Past of most Persona characters at all. Most Persona characters, including Futaba's one are outright cruel, if not somehow realistic. Hikari's one was simply a disturbingly accurate and sane portrayal of how youngsters in modern Japan get their life ruined. These young people might have promising lives and futures like Hikari, but they can be just as ruined as easily like in her case, especially if they don't follow Japan's conformist society rules.
- Doe is quite terrifying to look at especially in his boss form, but the context is actually really sad. This monstrous Eldritch Abomination is how Hikari sees her father as; A terrifying creature who simply wants her gone. Remember her father is a completely different person and is truly and the only person who cared about her, yet because of one poor choice of word used on a emotional corpse like Hikari, he was considered by her daughter as nothing other than an abomination. Just imagine how serious the emotional scars that exact phrase was to her.
- Film
. The piano tone has an extremely melancholic and wholesome feel, and it will always play during the game's revelations. - The Theatergoer scenes presented by Enlil. The theatergoers she shown you are seemingly in some sort of depression that is so severe that they no longer think for themselves and were watching horrible films that portray them in the most unsympathetic light possible. One of them even just lies flat right after he finishes talking about it.
- There are unsubtitled dialogue in those cutscenes that are seemingly and partially unintelligible, but all of them are implied to say something among the lines of: "I don't what to think about anything" and "(You're) weak." Apparently, one of the people talking without subtitles is implied to be Hikari herself, indicating that she used to act the same way as the theatergoers Enlil shown to you before you came in.
- The motivation speech that Hikari gives to Enlil and the other Theater Wards. Not only it uses the wholesome "Heart" tone that is often used when Hikari is confessing to Nagi when she was first thought as "good," Misato Fukuen's voice acting is also quite understandable even if you cannot understand spoken Japanese.Hikari: Are you really fine with movies where the protagonists stay weak? where they only keep running away?
Can you really say, from the depths of your hearts, that constantly watching movies like those makes you happy?
Please, watch this movie and remember!
Remember the kind of protagonist you want to be in your own movie!
Never forget, you have the leading role in your own life! - Goro Akechi in general as during the game he seems to enjoy himself, bond with the other characters and begin to rethink his personality and motives and is even seemed reluctant to return to the real world as it would mean he would lose his memories of his experiences. If he kept his memories he could have become a better person and maybe not even have betrayed the Persona 5 cast.
- To make it sadder, the consequences aren't just that Akechi lost the chance to become a better person. Without his memories of the theater, Akechi's inability to form bonds or question his actions would almost certainly doom him to die violently and alone.
- As the cast departs from the theater at the end of the game, they make promises to meet again someday. But if you're familiar with their home games and the points in the plot from where they've entered this game, it's a Foregone Conclusion that it won't perfectly come to pass. It especially hurts when the P3 protagonist and P3P heroine hope to meet again, not knowing that they will each perform a massive Heroic Sacrifice to save their worlds.
- In the post-credits scene, the Phantom Thieves are seated in a cinema, ready to watch Hikari's new film. Only Akechi is absent, indicating that he never got the invite or the scene takes place after he's forced to part ways with the Phantom Thieves.
