Going off my previous post about strikers, it is so fascinating to me that all these out-of-left field scenarios to when the games were written often become relevant to the time period that its actually published. Technically, Persona 5 is a criticism of the ongoing culture within a lot of communities (you could definitely see it in Asian countries like in Japan) to cover up the many horrific incidents in order to advance in society's rat race or to keep the peace by not rocking the boat and bringing instigators to true justice, leaving often the youth to be left alone, often neglected and abused, desperate to the point of wanting to fight against the society that had failed them.
Persona 5 is also a game about how the online space could turn extreme in its pursuit of vigilante justice creating angry mobs that could hurt others just because a popular group had successfully done so which would not have been such a common idea back when the story was probably first being written in the earliest parts of the 2010s but was definitely picking up steam as an issue sometime when the game was gearing up for release. Maybe at best you would have had message boards and early online groups in some social media calling for vigilante justice and blood and even taking extreme actions but it was no means mainstream in the public consciousness at all with the level of fanaticism and copycats seen in Persona 5 almost feeling ludicrous and unrealistic. The closest to anything like that might've been like hacker group Anonymous or other anonymous message boards.
Persona 5 Strikers is a game about how you should not give your information to corporations since they could use that information to gain more power as well as to control and monitor your every action as well as a game about how a person's humanity or their "heart" isn't measured by what emotional ideas society often places on these concepts like what we might call "empathy" or even "love" but the capacity of a being to change and that everyone can change if they wish and will to do so.
It's also a game about how humans over-relying on "Artificial Intelligence" would end in them surrendering their entire being almost in worship of this technology which would lead to people losing themselves including their very free will all for the sake of the convenience from the machine which almost sound so sci-fi and out there even by late 2010s standards and even during its release at like 2021 but then ChatGPT came in late 2022 and we now have people who are losing loved ones to a fake "Artificial Intelligence". Things like Alexa and Siri and Google Assistant are more likely the basis of this but the extreme nature of the narrative is definitely something most of the general population would not expect to be anywhere near reality.
I'm sure that this happens pretty similarly to how the Simpsons "predict the future" which is to say the writers behind the games often focusing on either past patterns that had already existed in history or taking issues with current society and technology and asking the question of "what would happen if we take it to its logical extremes?" which is not that far off with how writers of dystopians often create their own stories.
I'm definitely just rambling here of course but I don't know it's just interesting on how you can write stories that most of your audience may view as surprisingly relevant all by taking note of the past as well as paying attention to new changes in the present. Time is a flat circle after all and reality is sometimes stranger than fiction.
