Imagine Toy Story but with shuake figurines. An entire shelf full of persona collector's merch and the toys come to life. A Joker figure and an Akechi figure would probably react to each other the same way Barbie and Ken did in Toy Story 3. Joker and Akechi nuis hanging on an ita bag, reporting to the others what they see in the outside world. Or they don't realize they're toys and duel all over the house. They can still play chess together, just with a giant chessboard. Alternatively, a huge Joker fan buys their first Akechi figurine resulting in an entire shelf of Joker figures doting over a single Akechi (his worst nightmare)
[image description: screenshot of a quote retweet. the original says "reviewbrah with his hair down" and has three pictures of reviewbrah, an androgynous white guy with light blue eyes and side-parted brown hair that goes almost to his jaw, wearing a floral top over a button-up and tie.
the quote retweet says "persona 2 innocent sin npc called shit like The Demon Taster who resides in the velvet room". end ID]
oh yeah there he is right next to igor in my psp copy. huh. i don't remember this
(teehee jkjk sprites under the cut and image descriptions in alt text)
I burned 2 hours to make a handy-dandy (unofficial) Kaneko art style bible
There’s probably lots of mistake in my part. I’m so sorry if that happens. This is just my analysis of Kazuma Kaneko’s stuff (particularly the eyes).
Every composite pics have the same eyebrow and black upper lips except in category 2 where it’s smirking, and 5 have doomguy style cheekbones.
NOTES :
*serph is a mix of eye type 1 and 4
*Junpei and Akihi– I mean Jimenez and Roland’s eye shape is a mix between 2B and 3B. …Ignore Angel’s one… it’s a mistake on my part :p
Kaya eyes are a mix between 4A and 2B
*Heck, Chiaki and Yuko can fit in 2B’s category
*SMT 1 hero is a mix between 3A and 4A eye shape
* 5A seems to be doomguy exclusive face. I dunno who else to put in 5 category, so I put Mastema and Junk shop manikin to fill the empty spaces…
*Kyouji is what happen if eye type 3A doesn’t have enough eyeliner and mascara.
**Zelenin gaga belongs to either type 5 or EXTRA. please see the extra part.
on the riiiiight part is a simplified version of Kaneko’s art style.
found out the best persona amv to ever exist (the p2 anime commercial clips of joker & tatsuya and put to "call me maybe" carly rae jepsen) got deleted with no archive. im crushed. fucking devastated. consider this post a memorial
heres my absolute shot-in-the-dark, nigh baseless attempt at guessing some plot threads surrounding persona 6. to preface: i am almost certainly wrong, and am only doing this so i can gloat if i get even a fraction of this right :>
WARNING FOR DISCUSSION OF P6 LEAKS; TURN AWAY IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE SPOILED
persona 6's official teaser trailer shows us a western graveyard, a figure reaching toward an important tomb, and a precision of madness following their contact with the grave. the game's xbox page mentions a plot centering the occult—it is reasonable to assume P6 will likely fall on the more macabre end of the altus tone spectrum, likely featuring a shadow world intertwined with sprits of some sort (atleast aesthetically)
leaks from just before the game was teased contain references for a female character donning her school uniform:
under that, however, is what appears to be her shadow-world attire (note, the addition of the trenchcoat & earpiece):
this gives us great insight into the shadow-world—and thus the setting & themes—of persona 6. what i believe her shadow world attire resembles is a priests' clerical clothing—i think the p6 characters are exorcists.
the presence of the clerical collar and the singular button against the monochrome is a dead give-away; it's in harmony with the aesthetics of a more western-style graveyard and it's occult themeing. if a cast of priestly figures are exploring something akin to a haunted graveyard, they must be there on a sort of "holy mission." an exorcism seems the most likely to me
(this additionally vastly separates them from the dark, chaotic, satanic phantom thieves; i believe atlus would want to diverge as much as possible from persona 5's style).
now, onto the portion of this post i am significantly less confident in: the specifics of P6's shadow world & a broad guess at it's themes
i believe that the cast of P6 will be exorcising ghostly shadows which possess others. i think this is going to be tied into the jung's concept of shadow projection, in which, people place repressed & unrealized aspects of themselves onto others. it's a portion of jungian psychology the series has yet to explore, and i think its an untapped well of potential
lets say—if altus keep's the structure of a new party member joining every arc, which i hope they dont, but they will—each new character is being "possessed" by the shadow of someone in their life. friends, family, colleagues, etc. their peers are placing this jealousy, insecurity, anger onto the target. the exorcism, then, is the party going into the shadow world, to rid the victim of the aggressors shadow, whom possesses them
it is too far out to conclusively say anything meaningful at the moment, but this is the most harmonious reading of all the information we have which i could muster
!!! i did not realize they drew up a whole design ref for ken's mother, even though she's seldom shown in the film—thats really cool! doubly interesting: she has an entirely different design in reload. peculiar, considering how derivative of the films reload is:
(this photo is in ken's room. you can see it in his linked episodes. if anyone has a direct texture rip, id be so appreciative if you could send it my way)
as far as i can tell, this is an entirely new design in soejima's stlye. It's not a sprite edit with an obscured face (baring the potential that this is a scrapped & repurposed portrait). pretty cool, i think. wish we knew more about her
Back in January, 2024, someone going by the name FrostWolf acquired several debug disks that contained the prototypes of Persona 5. There were five in total, dated as being from Jun 3, 2016; May 27, 2016; Mar 8, 2016; Feb 25, 2016; and Dec 4, 2015.
The December build has always been interesting to me, not necessarily because of its contents, but more so because of the community surrounding it. The interest in datamining was intense for the first few months, and then it died off quite completely. I’m not sure if many people are still actively datamining it, although to be fair I’m not very involved in the community.
Regardless, what I’m about to say should be taken with a massive grain of salt, because I’m saying it in large part because I hope it will reinvigorate the community if I’m correct about it having died down (but I also do believe this to be true).
I think I’ve found Akechi’s Palace.
…or at least something suspiciously Akechi-shaped.
I’ll start by just posting everything here, then give an explanation as to why I think it’s Akechi’s Palace and not anything else under the cut.
【Fields】
【Objects】
【Textures】
First, let me give a brief overview of how Persona 5’s files are organized, to help explain what makes these assets suspicious. All of the locations in the game — “fields” — are referred to by a specific area code depending on what location they correspond to. For Palaces, the field codes look like this:
Kamoshida’s Palace: x51 and x52
Madarame’s Palace: x53
Kaneshiro’s Palace: x54
Futaba’s Palace: x55
Okumura’s Palace: x56
Sae’s Palace: x50 and x57
Shido’s Palace: x59
Sae has two codes for the version of the Palace in the opening (x50) and the full version (x57), and Kamoshida has two codes for… reasons. You might notice that the codes jump from x57 to x59; the unused environment file and enemy dialogue that refers to Akechi as the Ruler is labeled x58, suggesting his Palace was going to happen between Sae and Shido, or at least that it should be there in the files. However, there are no models or textures associated with code x58… but there are some files located suspiciously close to where it should be.
Please note that only the bolded parts of the asset name comprise the actual file name. Anything else is a descriptor I’ve added to give these parts more reference-able names.
【Fields】
f059_050: Early Castle Throne Room
Out of everything here, this is probably the most suspicious, because it’s 1. part of a castle 1.1 with a chess motif and 2. it’s located right at the start of Shido’s Palace before any of the assets clearly associated with the Ark appear. My gut instinct is that this is some kind of Boss Arena — maybe the chess board would be the treasure? Maybe you would meet Akechi / Akechi’s Shadow sitting on the throne? It wouldn’t be the first time in the franchise where you fight the actual person in their dungeon (re: Persona 4) and it wouldn’t be the last (re: Persona 5 Royal) — but l don’t know of any good way to determine what exactly this is.
f059_051: Throne Room Hallway
Judging by the red colouration of the floor, this asset looks like it connects to the Throne Room. Like the Throne Room and all of the following field files, these ones appear earlier than any of the rooms actually used for Shido’s Palace.
f059_040: Elevator and Sewer Room
Originally, I thought this was a concept stage for the bow of Shido’s ship, but I don’t think that makes sense because the corridor along the side would be outside of the ship if that were the case. Furthermore, I think the white hallway connects to f059_042, judging by the shape and composition of the two fields, which would be even stranger for Shido’s Palace since that walkway would be way outside the boat. I think it also connects to f059_041 along the large flat orange section on the opposite side of the elevator.
Calling this the Elavator and Sewer Room because the tall golden pipe matches a lot of the early elevator objects, and, based on my understanding of what the colours correspond to, orange is for wood/brick, yellow is for metal, black is for water, and white is for generic surfaces; I think this field / Palace has a water feature.
f059_042: Sewer Room Extension
This is a really sparse field, but I think it must be a part of this Palace complex because it looks like it matches f059_040.
f059_041: Roundabout with Chess Paintings
Funnily enough, this asset was the loose thread that caused me to dig deep and find the rest of this stuff. I was originally just looking for unused textures in Shido’s Palace, and happened to stumble on chess.dds and Chess_King.dds, and while I was trying to figure out where or if they were used… lo’ and behold: some really suspicious stuff was lying around.
Some of the white pieces from f059_050 are missing… I’m honestly not too sure what that means, but it’s notable to me that these two fields have a recurring chess motif because this isn’t something you see in any other Palace’s iirc. This is one of the main reasons I don’t think this is an early version of Kamoshida’s Palace, combined with the suspicious placement and suspicious texture names.
As an exercise for the viewer: what might be the significance of all of the pieces except the King being stained red, along with the notable absence of the Queen?
050 and 051 might also be on a different floor than 040, 041, and 042, which could explain the naming conventions?
【Untextured & Simple Objects】
〔m159_040.gmd〕 〔m159_035.gmd〕 〔m040_003.gmd〕
The spears have an animation where they lower; the security camera’s main texture references a Field x40 which, along with the following door, is one of the only references to the nonexistent Field x40.
【Textures & “Catsle” Door】
〔m040_010.gmd〕
〔f040_door.dds〕
〔f040_misc_01.dds〕
This door is probably the most interesting thing here, at least to me, because it’s clearly in the early concept stage. The images on both textures are, according to a reverse image search, from assorted Japanese and Chinese reference image sites. Furthermore, the model has been mapped such that you can easily move parts around to see what it looks like with different parts. Natively, it just uses the white door and the dark decal, but by moving around the texture map and scaling certain parts, you could easily tweak the door until it uses the golden door or lion decal, for example.
Although this particular version of the door appears as one of the three line models that reference the mysterious Field x40, it appears twice in Okumura’s Palace and thrice in Shido’s Palace (in tex056_001_00_00, tex056_101_00_00, tex059_001_00_00, tex059_040_00_00, and tex059_042_00_00). Additionally, the texture and normal map for the Greek-style etchings on the top of the door are labeled as f040_catsle_04.dds and f040_catsle_04_NRM.dds. This door was likely designed for a castle-themed Palace; however, it never appears with Kamoshida’s assets, only by itself or with Okumura and Shido.
As an aside, I think there are some oddities with various naming conventions going on. I won’t go into too much detail here because I’m working on documenting everything on TCRF (which is… reaallllly a work-in-progress). In short: it looks like the opening Palace was going to be completely different, and for some reason there are assets that look like they should be in Futaba’s Palace that are labeled as Field x50 (which is doubly strange because even the casino parts use textures with the code x57 like the rest of Sae’s Palace; nothing in the final game uses x50 for textures). Since everything seems to be in a messed up order, and since I think only like 15% of the text, dialogue, and audio from the prototype has been translated, there could very well be more than this.
Please keep in mind: this might all be confirmation bias.
I went into the datamining project knowing that Akechi had an unused Palace, so it’s entirely possible that all of this is just unused parts of Shido’s Palace. However, I think the really suspicious thing that leads me to believe it might not be is that unused door, simply because it’s textures directly reference a field that doesn’t exist and indicates that the unused field was a late-game castle Palace. Still, there’s nothing that outright confirms where any of this came from, so again: bolder sized piece of salt.
As a closing note, I’d like to point out the irony that, of all the characters it could have been, it just had to be Akechi whose Palace would end up being such a pain in the ass to find.
was cleaning out my google drive and i just realized i never posted this. oops!!!
its a script comparison between Episode Aigis and The Answer i wrote back in april. right now it only has the arguments between SEES, and the coliseum fight dialogue (before during and after), but tbf i think thats what most people are interested in anyway. if theres enough demand, i might go ahead and finish it but i dont really have the motivation to rn
enjoy!
Viewed best with text width set to full (view → Text width → Full) ▌(Preamble) (This is a WIP version of this document. For now, it only i
(side note: i kind of didnt realize how extreme and egregious some of the changes were before i started compiling them. like i knew it was bad, but holy shit atlus 😭)
figured i'd repost this old doc from my main blog. the formatting seems to have degraded, because google docs is really bad about retaining that. eventually, ill throw this in indesign, and make it into a cleaner designed thing, but, for now, i hope someone might get some use out of this !!
