Replaying and re-watching all the P5 stuff is convincing me more and more that this particular team of writers for the game had a great idea and too inexperienced of a staff to do it right. Particularly with Goro.
The problem with Goro Akechi is, at its core, this: he’s too complicated. The writers shot themselves in the foot with such an interesting character.
1. Your conflicts are very binary: rotten adults versus victimized young people, societal well-being versus personal justice. It’s very clear, very obvious, and very opaque. Goro doesn’t fit those binaries at all – he’s a child* who sides with the adult conspiracy and who helps impose “societal well-being” at the cost of personal justice…in order to achieve his own personal justice. In a game that is so hellbent on pushing these definitions of “good guys” versus “bad guys,” they wrote a character who is VERY HARD to put into one box or another. He sticks out like a sore thumb.
* = (He is 18 in the game, but when P5 was written, the age of adulthood was still 20 in Japan. Therefore, he’s canonically a minor.)
2. The morality system is too binary as well: In P5, there are at least two major moral directives: 1. do not abuse your power and 2. murder is an absolute red line. Goro, again, complicates this: he clearly used his persona to bring material harm…but his ability to berserk people’s shadows is such that he has very little control over what actually happens in the real world. We also know that he had less than complete freedom to choose to do it – he was following orders from arguably the most corrupt and abusive character in the game.
Regarding “do not kill,” we know that Goro is canonically responsible for at least eight deaths: Wakaba Isshiki, Kunikazu Okumura, Principal Kobayakawa, the SIU director, and 4 unnamed victims of a car crash caused by a berserked driver. If you add the 11/20 bad end, that number goes up to 10: the police officer in the interrogation room and Ren Amamiya. We know that it was Goro’s idea to make it look like Ren killed himself – and let’s be honest here, Goro looks pretty arrogant about killing him, too.
We also know he regrets it. When you meet him again in Shido’s palace, the narrative says he regrets this turn of events. We also know that with Isshiki, Okumura, and Kobayakawa, those were ordered by the most abusive, evil character in the game – and that Goro had very little freedom to say no. As for the car crash, Goro had no idea anyone would die. There was a chance, but not certainty.
Plus, to add: he’s still a kid according to Japan’s age of majority.
The circumstances of the deaths he caused are MUCH MORE GRAY than, let’s say, Madarame and Okumura: he’s still a minor, he couldn’t say no to the orders, he had no idea that death would actually happen in on case, and in the one instance where he actually seemed to offer to kill someone, he regrets it. In a game where the narrative and characters keep saying that death is an absolute NO GO, what the hell are we supposed to do with this?
3. The narrative screws him over, even when the protagonists don’t want it to. Haru Okumura, arguably the member of the PT who has the greatest reason to hate Goro, says she understands him, offers to fight along side him against his father, and ultimately calls him “a victim we couldn’t save.” Anne offers to let him rejoin the team, and nobody refuses the idea. The PT were willing to give him a chance, and Goro refuses it in one of the cruelest ways possible: he gets shot by his controller’s cognition of him.
BTW, if you get to that point and you don’t beat Shido, Goro shows up to LeBlanc to arrest you. How is that good writing? Even the “sacrifice” he makes is null.
There is the side that can say, “He had the power to do good, but he chose over and over again to hurt people and therefore gets what he deserves,” but… is that really true? Did he really have the ability to choose freely, after everything we know? Why does he get held to a greater accountability (death) than, let’s say Kamoshida or Shido or Kaneshiro? Why does the character with the most gray area get the harshest punishment in the narrative?
In a game that pushes that justice is personal and that young people are vulnerable to abuse by corrupt adults, Goro’s fate is a slap in the face.
P5′s team wanted to write a subtle commentary on society. Unfortunately, they made it too much of an “us against them” setup, and when faced with a complicated, nuanced character that challenged that setup – in a way that could have made the story great – they decided to throw him to the wolves with no conclusion that made sense with anything the players knew about the game’s morality or the character’s history.
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