Persona 5 review: spectacular simulation of teenage life

Latest in long-running high-school franchise boasts characters as deeply written and well observed as a multi-season TV series

Like Scooby-Doo, the Famous Five and Harry Potter, the Persona series of Japanese role-playing games fits into a long tradition of teen fiction in which young people band together to expose the schemes and exploitations of corrupt adults. The abuses that Persona 5's teenagers must confront are, however, unusually and uncompromisingly grave.

The game opens with a typical example: one evening your character, a 17-year-old high-school student, confronts an inebriated, groping politician who is trying to force a woman into a taxi. The consequences of intervening with such a powerful local figure prove life changing. You are summarily expelled from school and banished to Tokyo, to live with a crotchety cafi(C) owner. There you are enrolled in an academy whose halls are filled with whispering students who, having read the headlines, judge you as a toxic delinquent.