Persona 6 Must Avoid One Major Issue From Persona 5

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Content Warning: This article discusses sexual abuse, including some involving minors.

was a major success for the series, but it wasn’t flawless, and should do its best to avoid one major issue from the previous game. ’s minor flaws — like Atlus’ classic overly-long introduction — can be easily overlooked thanks to the quality of the rest of the game. However,some of ’s narrative decisions are a bit harder to forgive and leave an unfortunate stain on an otherwise pristine game.

This isn’t to say that isn’t still a great game, just that it can be improved upon in. Most notably, the next game could be even better than if it just focuses on ironing out ’s tricky relationship with romance. While most of ’s romances are sweet and surprisingly innocent for an M-rated title, a few cross the line into uncomfortable territory. Worse, some even undermine the game’s powerful themes and messages. must fix these issues.

One of the strangest narrative choices makes isallowing players to romance adult characters, despite playing as a 16- or 17-year-old. Even more troubling is the fact that one of the romanceable adults is Joker’s teacher (Sadayo Kawakami) and another is a doctor who performs questionable medical exams on him (Tae Takemi). By having some sort of authority over Joker, these potential romantic partners have even more of a power imbalance in their favor.

Xbox Game Pass has a number of truly incredible RPGs, but one has gone sorely overlooked, despite combining gameplay elements from Zelda and Persona.

Although these relationships may be upsetting to some players, it's worth noting that developer Atlus is likely not seeing these relationships as problematic. The national age of consent in Japan is 16 (via ), which would make Joker's relationships with certain adult characters less of an issue within that cultural context. That said, Japan's different prefectures each have their own laws on the subject, and Tokyo (where takes place) has an age of consent of 18 (via ),