I'm also preparing the Generation IX Pokemon reviews, which is sapping a lot of my time as well -- I do plan to release the Pokemon reviews sometime in March, which is why it's been a bit slow on the Persona end.
Anyway, enjoy! I think I'm starting to unlock a bit more of the available Personas and there's a lot that I can do if I want to go a bit wild with guillotining everything, but... well, I'm taking my time.
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Goemon
"Have you finally come to your senses? How foolishly you averted your eyes from the truth... A deplorable imitation indeed... Best you part from that aspect of yourself!"
- Monster Name: N/A
- Arcana: Emperor
So as with our first reviewing segment, let's start off with the new party member's Persona, this time based on Ishikawa Goemon. Like our previous four party members' Personas, Goemon is based on a Japanese outlaw that is based on the highly-dramatized telling of the life of Gorokichi. Most of the stories of Goemon highly exaggerated and it has elevated him into the status of a folk hero, with a lot of them being attributed with anti-authoritarian stories. Similar to the other 'heroic thieves' theme of the main character Personas, Goemon is described to have stolen from the rich and given it to the poor, eventually being boiled alive alongside with his son, with his heroic act involving him holding his son above the pot of boiling water as an act of defiance. (And, yes, in addition to probably seeing Goemon referenced in many Japanese pop culture, readers of this blog would recognize that the legend of Goemon partly inspired that of Kouzuki Oden from One Piece).
Now Persona 5's Goemon is a very, very interesting redesign! The kabuki-inspired clothing with the giant platform shoes and very cool-looking nio-daisuki cords. There's a lot of kabuki inspirations with Goemon, but the most interesting thing is the gigantic pompadour they decide to give him, becuase I guess this Goemon is a bit more modernized and a delinquent. I also like the gigantic pipe that he's holding, which the animation shows him either clubbing enemies with, or to use them as a way to unleash his ice skills.
I don't quite think Goemon and his user, child-prodigy painter Kitagawa Yusuke, is particularly connected all that well beyond the 'rule of cool' of how Goemon is tied to a lot of traditional art. Actually, I guess that's what the aesthetics might be, with Goemon's design mostly looking like one of those traditional Japanese ink paintings, but with a few additional bits of modernization like the pompadour. Yusuke's Metaverse outfit himself (pictured on top) seems to draw on a lot of the 'ninja thief' vibes that is associated with Goemon in more modern retellings of his legend. He's honestly not my favourite of the main cast's Personas that I've met so far, but he's an interesting design regardless.
Nue
- Monster Name: Night Chimera
- Arcana: Death
The Persona Nue is a pretty faithful transcription of how the being is described in legends, although I feel like they do a great job at making it look much more monstrous. It still has the snake-tail (not visible thanks to the dark background of this screen), and the very humanoid 'sitting down with long arms' pose like a gorilla or a human really does make the Nue look much more intelligent and intimidating than if it had been on all fours. The tiger markings are there, too, but the head and face -- a dark face with red glowing eyes, a grinning set of teeth and a white mane -- really does make this easily one of the cooler monster designs.
Actually, looking through all the various depictions of Nue in the SMT Wiki, I really do think that I like this version that appears a lot in the newer games, and the huge, heavy-set body and the creepy lemur-esque demon face is so, so much more threatening and inhuman-looking than the more feline Nue models that previous games in the mega-franchise used.
Kurama Tengu
- Monster Name: Monk of the Valley
- Arcana: Hermit
Kurama Tengu is the name of a play that describes one of the most powerful Tengu in Japanese legend -- Sōjōbō, the Tengu that lives in Mt. Kurama. While we've met the lesser Koppa-Tengu, the Kurama-Tengu represents all of the more powerful Tengu spirits in Japanese myths, and he's a more humanoid-looking tengu-man compared to the goblin-nosed Koppa-Tengu. It's perhaps a bit hard to see since the background and the skin of the Kurama Tengu are the same shade of dark blue, but he's a stern-looking man holding a giant conch-trumpet thing.
The Kurama Tengu is most associated with teaching the samurai warrior Minamoto-no-Yoshitsune the art of swordsmanship when he was met the tengu in the mountains. I don't know if Persona has other Tengus in its repertoire, but I do like that we do get two different renditions of the Tengu. One to represent the more simple 'crow demon trickster' trope that is more associated with lesser tengu and have been ubiquitous with the word tengu outside of Japan, and this 'greater' tengu that fits more with the hermit-ascetic vibe. I do like that they still kept the giant bird wings, though!
Makami
- Monster Name: Hunting Wolf Spirit
- Arcana: Temperance
Oh, the Makami! Or the Oguchi-no-Magami, which a lot of One Piece fans will recognize as "that one holy Japanese beast that Yamato turns into, and we have not heard of before". The Makami, or Okuchi-no-Makami (sometimes Oguchi-no-Magami). The Makami is an old and deified alias for the Japanese Wolf, and depending on the legend, it's either meant to represent a particularly powerful wolf god, or the name given to a region where many people were killed by an old wolf. Most myths of the Makami basically had people deify the Makami for its ferocity, worshipping it as a guardian deity who would protect crops against wild boar and deer. The Makami's legends would evolve, turning the Makami into a just deity that will protect the good and punish the wicked. Basically the perception of the Makami depends as their perceptions of wolves also changed.
...that said, I'm not actually sure why the Makami is depicted as this long, flat wolf. I'm not sure if I'm missing the context of a particular legend, but it is still a very interesting design anyway. I like the glowing neon-green lines that goes down its body, Is it meant to be a connection with the Inugami, or the other Shikigami-like beasts? The lore does note how the Makami are drawn on 'prayer boards', but those tend to be wooden and not long like a scarf or a paper.
Overall I do really find the design to be super-interesting, albeit a bit similar to the Kodama and Inugami I've met a bit earlier, but I'm mostly just a bit confused because there's really not much information out there in English about the Makami specifically.
Arahabaki
- Monster Name: Awakened God
- Arcana: Hermit
Oh! Shakkoumon! Or, well, rather, the Shakoki-Dogu figurines from Japan! For a moment I was confused, because the whole deal with the Dogu, a common type of figurine from ancient Japanese cultures that often crop up in archaeology, with their specific purpose still unknown. In Persona, the Dogu is used to represent Arahabaki, a Japanese god from ancient Japan of whom a lot of the specifics has been lost through time and censorship. The Megami Tensei Wiki actually rather helpfully provides some context, because the portrayal of Arahabaki is tied to Tsugaru Soto-Sangunshi, a completely false document which caused a fair bit of confusion and got spread amongst occult magazines and eventually made it to pop culture.
Most real legends about Arahabaki that survived to this day don't actually have a proper description of what he's all about, with the most that we can find out talking about some vague connection to healing or ironworks. But that aforementioned false document has a whole legend surrounding it, where he was worshipped by Nagasunehiko, who was defeated by Emperor Jimmu of Japan -- leading to the association with rebellion, heresy and treachery as worship of Arahabaki is banned and forbidden. So I guess the designers for this franchise decided to use the Dogu, another iconic part of Japanese culture that's of a forgotten past religion and of indeterminate purpose, and basically had it be Arahabaki?
The Dogu look is always pretty cool as a video game opponent anyway, with those creepy slit-eyes and the little mouth, but it's always the large shoulders/hips and tiny arms/legs combo that kind of creeps me out a bit. I did talk about the Dogu-based monsters when I reviewed Pokemon's Baltoy and Digimon's Shakkoumon. In this game, the Arahabaki is a particularly nasty miniboss that spams a lot of status moves, who kind of caught me unawares and led to my first defeat in the game.
Suzaku
- Monster Name: N/A
- Arcana: Sun
Okay, so technically we've finished with all the enemies we meet in Madarame's Palace, but there are a handful of others that I see thanks to fusing Personas or meet as bosses in Mementos, and I'll cover them before we close off this article with Madarame himself.
The Suzaku (Zhu Que in Mandarin) is the second of our Four Symbols of Chinese constellations, with the Genbu (Xuan Wu) appearing before. The Vermillion Bird represents the fire element, the direction of south and the season of summer. The Suzaku is described as an elegant pheasant-like bird, and has feathers in five hues. I particularly like how Persona's Suzaku depicts this detail, with the Suzaku's main body being the expected shades of red, but its tail-feathers, resembling a bird-of-paradise, being in blue, gray, black, red and yellow.
I don't really have too much to say about this. It's a pretty neat depiction of the Zhu Que/Suzaku, but it doesn't really do anything super-interesting with it like Genbu. It's very cool and I think the Suzaku became a bit of my main persona through this leg of the game.
Nekomata
- Monster Name: Ascended Feline
- Arcana: Magician
Nekomata (often confused or conflated with the Bakeneko), are a type of yokai in Japanese folklore that's always associated with cats. Most legends depict it as a long-lived cat that has gained supernatural yokai abilities, such as shapeshifting or necromancy. A different version of the Nekomata legend talks about how they are monstrous, mountain-dwelling cat demons that eat people. Thanks to the 'mata' part, the Nekomata would often be also depicted with a long tail that splits into two. The Nekomata tends to be violent, particularly against humans who wronged it as a cat. This has led into many superstitions like keeping a cat's tail short.
Persona's Nekomata, meanwhile... is a cat-lady? She's not as fetishized as I thought she would be (and definitely less compared to the previous versions of the Nekomata), but still fits a lot of the slender tropes of a cat-woman. Her tail is super-long but doesn't fork into two, which is interesting? Also, that's not a face-mask as I thought it was when I played through the game the first time, but rather a mask-shaped marking with whiskers and a cat mouth. She's a neat cat-lady that punches you in the face with magic.
Also, are all cat Personas all just in the Magician Arcana because our cat party member Morgana represents the Magician arcana? Huh!
Black Frost
- Monster Name: Fallen Snowman
- Arcana: Fool
Serving as a side-quest boss before he appears 'naturally' as an enemy or a summonable Persona is Black Frost, who is Jack Frost... but black and purple, and with meaner angry eyes. And he's a bit bigger! Not much to say -- I don't think the Persona franchise relies too much on model repaints but I'm not surprised that there are a couple. There is a pun in Japan, where 'Jack', jakku, is written as the homophone ja'aku, literally meaning wicked.
Yaksini
- Monster Name: Human-eating Lady
- Arcana: Empress
Yaksini (or Yakshini) are the female counterparts of the Yakshas, a type of nature spirits in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain mythologies. As the Yakshinis are an entire race of spirits, they range from being guardians of sacred groves, attendees of greater gods, or mischievous ones that haunt and curse humans.Depending on the region and the religion, the legends associated with the Yaksini can be very different, and the brief blurb in the Persona description does talk about how the perception has changed across different cultures, turning her from a fertility goddess (associated with asoka trees) to guardians of treasures, and in specifically the region of Kerala, there are a lot of myths about Yaksini being more malevolent. It's from these more violent legends that Persona's Yaksini seems to draw from.
In Kerala folktales, there are stories that describe murdered women reborn as Yakshinis, and some live in their own world and have to venture to the mortal realm to feed on blood. Persona's Yaksini is continually described as a 'human-eating lady', a 'demon' and 'nude, voluptuous'. And... well, she sure is almost nude, being purple-skinned and only covering her breasts with the strategic placement of hair. Not too much to say here, she has some minimal bits of armour like the golden horned crown on her head, the striped loincloth and some rings and two fancy swords, but I really don't have much to say about her.
Shadow Madarame
- Monster Name: Ichiryusai "Azazel" Madarame
- Arcana: N/A
And we finally reach the boss of the second palace, and its creator, the mild-mannered country-renowned artist Ichiryusai Madarame... who actually abuses and plagiarizes from his young charges, and then using his status and prestige to force them out of the art community if they try to rebel. And unlike Kamoshida before him, Azazel's form is... a lot less monstrous and a lot easier to describe visually. Being a painter, Madarame's first form is that of four paintings, each treated as a separate monster with a separate health bar. I kinda like it, even if it doesn't quite have the same oomph as Kamoshida's gigantic demon-baby form. The twitching eyes and noses and mustache are pretty creepy regardless.
I don't like to get too much into gimmicks with describing these bosses, but the idea is that each and every Madarame part has completely different weaknesses and resistances, and if you rely on just spamming area effects you'll instead heal the other enemy parts -- and obviously, not killing them in quick succession will cause the fallen parts to regenerate. There are some gimmicks with Madarame spitting out ink that decreases your party member resistances, but it's honestly not that interesting.
A very fun boss mechanically, which isn't something I normally say about these video game bosses, but not too much for me to say about visually. Madarame's "demon" name and his "sin" aren't exactly traditional of the seven sins! His sin is a bit easier to note, with vanity -- or vainglory -- being one of the two sins of the original nine deadly sins, that gets folded into an aspect of Pride. But since these two 'historical' sins don't have an associated demon, Madarame gets to be called Azazel ("arrogant to God"), a Grigori or fallen angel from Hebrew Lore. Azazel was supposed to be cast out of Heaven after teaching men how to mine metals and create blades and armour, leading them to think they are invincible. In Christianity, the name Azazel is associated with the scapegoat rite.
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I did talk a bit about the monsters in Kamoshida's palace being themed around him being either a pervert or a king, and there's also a similar theming in Madarame's palace though not every monster falls into the theme. Madarame is an artist, so we get some monsters that are tie to painting, sculpture or art (Shiki-Ouji, Arahabaki; the Shiisaa is a statue too) and he's also extremely traditionally Japanese, leading to a lot of traditional yokai or other Japanese-myth related monsters (Nue, Koropokguru, the two Tengus, Inugami, Makami, Ippon-Datara, Ame-no-Uzume) but there are also some outliers like the Mokoi, Apsaras and Hua Po, and... well, not every monster is tied to the palaces and some might just be there for level purposes and the like.
Anyway, I don't think I like the Madarame 'arc' as much as the previous one, but admittedly the Kamoshida arc had a lot going on for it, introducing not just the concept in general but also the stories of all four original party members. In contrast, the Madarame arc really only revolves around Yusuke and Madarame and the story is honestly pretty straightforward... though I do appreciate the buildup it's doing to a lot of the members of the cast that I assume will become important later on in the story. It's our first 'real' palace operation after the first arc, though, so I understand!
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