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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.
I’d like to take a second crack at explaining what I think may be going on here, mostly because I made an ass of myself in the Persona Modding Discord and I want to clear the waters.
The way fields in Persona 5 generally work is that they are a composite of other parts. A field is essentially a “package” of different models glued together to form one cohesive whole.
The problem is, the prototype isn’t very cohesive— there are a lot of completely random spare parts floating around that can never be accessed in game. For example, Okumura’s Palace has a lot of early assets floating around inside of it.
Which is notable because Okumura’s Palace is nowhere near this unfinished in the prototype. Also, hello Utah teapot!
There appear to be two different fields in the stuff from Shido’s Palace, as best as I can tell: the one associated with both f059_050 and f059_051, and the one associated with f059_040, f059_041, and f059_042. The naming conventions seem to indicate these two groups should form one cohesive whole.
These parts may very well just be early Shido. The _040 series in particularly looks a lot like the Ark, and the _050 series may just be an early version of the boss chamber.
However, there are three things I didn’t include in the above post that make me suspicious.
First: the Persona 5 artbook contains one piece of artwork that is definitely for Shido’s Palace (caption says Shido’s Palace Image).
Now, this is all we have for the early concept, and it’s entirely possible that there’s art we’ve simply never seen or that I don’t know about. However, given that this piece of artwork features Joker’s old design where he has a scarf and top hat, it likely predates most of the later 3D assets from Shido’s Palace.
There’s no castle motif, which means either they made a detour in Shido’s concept at some point — which would be interesting in its own right — or something else is going on. If anything would have caused them to start incorporating different motifs, it probably would have been Akechi, because he’s the one between the two of them with a “monarchy” or “castle” theme. However, personally I feel that it’s notable that the early version of Shido’s Palace in the prototype seems so distinct from what we know its earliest and latest forms are.
Second: there’s something really weird going on with naming conventions here. I was able to find a lot of parts from Futaba’s Palace…
…Except, the textures for these models use the code 050, instead of 055 like everything else. Which is notable, because nothing in the entire final game uses any textures with the 050 code; they all just share the 057 code with Sae, because… well, it’s Sae’s Palace. There are also random Mementos Objects, but they have the correct code for Mementos textures. What they’re doing in the opening Palace is anyone’s guess, though.
Granted, there’s a difference between models and field objects: field objects are much less likely to be misplaced. But, I do think there’s at least some merit to the idea that a lot of different parts in the game were moved around at some point. I haven’t finished going through everything yet, so currently the only other field asset I know to show up in strange locations is this placeholder safe room, which shows up identically in Okumura, Sae, and Shido’s Palace.
Maybe it’s cope, but if the developers were copy-pasting field assets like this one, I don’t think it’s improbable they could have done the same for the most unfinished Palace in the game, if for no other reason then to use as the basis for whatever revisions it seems they were making to Shido’s Palace.
Third: it’s impossible to say too much at all about the prototype, because only at most 45% of it has been documented. Right now, not including my own additions, only the overworld textures that are visibly different from final when you play the game, dialogue from Kamoshida’s Arc, some loose confidant dialogue, miscellaneous differences that are apparent by playing the prototype, and a few very notable objects and textures, have been documented.
I don’t believe Yukari’s stage or any of the other P4AU assets have been uploaded yet — which I’ll try and get around to — much less all of the differences in the main campaign.
So, who knows? The only thing left to do is go and find whatever the hell is left in there. Which… I will at least try to do as far as I’m able, however long it’s going to take. But it is going to take a really long time.
My tablet being so outdated makes this very complicated, the contrast was so strong I spent an extra hour color correcting ): gonna be two more for Yuu and Makoto. thank youuuu!
