AKA “How to Ruin a Passable Game with Bigotry”
If you’re into JRPGs at all, you likely know at least two things: It’s one of the least progressive video game genres, and Atlus is the current king of it.
The explosion of the Megami Tensei series has been incredible. Despite being around since 1992, it only really gained traction in the US market with the out-of-nowhere success of 2017’s “Persona 5.” Since then, there’s been a renewed interest in Atlus’s games and game design. And while I have my own problems with both their developed and published games, that’s not what I want to talk about. I don’t feel like complaining about how they copy and paste 60% of every Megami Tensei game, or how the games generally examine the same few concepts over and over again. No, I want to instead talk about how frequently homophobic and transphobic their games are.
Now like I said, JRPGs and queerphobia go together like peanut butter and jelly. It’s hard to find a game that doesn’t fuck up at least a little. Final Fantasy VII notoriously used “f*g” as an insult a few times, and had a “joke” cross-dressing segment. And numerous other RPGs – typically in the earlier PS1/PS2 era – had gay panic scenes or handled the subject matter in less-than-ideal ways. But even among all of these, Atlus JRPGs reign supreme.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 has a scene on a beach where a trans woman “lures” some of the male protagonists over, listens to their relationship woes, offers some advice, and seems open to having sex with one of them until someone notices a small patch of hair on the woman’s chin. She then acts like her plan to have sex with the teenage leads been foiled, while everyone recoils in horror that “she was actually a he.”
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 has a gay protagonist who’s constantly the butt of another protagonist’s constant homophobia. Kanji’s arc about learning to accept his sexuality, while pretty flawed, is not half bad for a 2008 release. What is half bad is that he’s repeatedly and callously demeaned by another protagonist for the rest of the game. And this homophobic character – the main character’s best friend who ALSO happens to be gay-coded – never receives any sort of comeuppance for his homophobia. It’s a joke, something you’re meant to laugh along with, or at least find understandable. There’s also the matter of Naoto, in which you talk a trans masculine teenager out of transitioning, despite their extreme discomfort with being a woman in every sense of the term. However, that can of worms is so gross I’d rather not touch it. Others have explained it better than I possibly could.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 has an older gay duo who specifically target one of the teenage protagonists, and although these sexual harassment scenes are played off as jokes, it’s a frustrating stereotype to still see in a game that released only five years ago. Admittedly there is a vaguely positive portrayal of a cross-dressing bar tender, but the character is as background as you can get.
That’s not to say Persona is the only Atlus franchise with some terrible shit in it. Catherine and Catherine: Full Body are notoriously transphobic. In the former, two side characters are dating (one of whom is a trans woman) and it’s portrayed as a humiliating joke for the boyfriend, as everyone seems to know that the woman is trans except for him. She’s also constantly dead-named in media surrounding the game, including manuals and art books. In the latter, a new dateable character is added who, surprise, is a trans woman. Well not technically, the game plays them off as a man who is extremely feminine, effeminate, wears an outfit that’s the color of the trans pride flag, and despite resembling a pre-op trans woman exactly is totally a man. Granted, if this were an actual statement from Atlus with the character purposefully trying to show that identity and appearance are separate, that’s great. But Atlus’s track record, the trans panic scene the character is involved in, and the clear transphobic advertising of the character with “what’s below the skirt” themes make me doubt it’s a good faith attempt, to say the least.
Also of note is the Atlus-published dungeon-crawler Wizardry: Tale of the Forsaken Land, which uses homophobic slurs a few times throughout the game. Although it’s not directly developed by Atlus, so it’s not exactly their fault, but I mean they still published it. And I’m not feeling generous enough to leave this one out of the pile.
So why does this matter? “It’s a couple of video games, who cares?” says the faux-intellectual pundit. Well I’ve got two points in laying this all out: The lack of trans representation in video games as a whole blows, and this shit is not okay permissible no matter what.
Representation matters. This is something that every single person who isn’t a cishet white gamer bro understands. Atlus games are some of the only major JRPGs who put queer (specifically trans) characters in he spotlight. And they do it terribly. Every single time, without fail, every queer character is either meant to be laughed at, a horror element, or outright harmful. They exist to either be “corrected” and returned to the norm (as in Catherine and Persona 4) or as an annoyance or obstacle to the main cast (Persona 3, Persona 5). And it sucks.
And nothing excuses this transphobic streak. It’s not “cultural differences” or something that’s uniquely excusable because the developers are Japanese. It’s not a small mistake that just so happened to get through development. It’s got consequences. Shitty queer rep sucks, and while some may say it’s “better than nothing,” sure. But it could be a whole lot better.
I hope that, despite all odds, Atlus changes. Maybe Persona 6, or a future SMT game changes things up. Maybe it’ll be a new series all together. But things are only going to change if this shit keeps getting pointed out. If people still keep complaining, keep explaining why this shit’s harmful. Maybe one day it’ll reach the ears of Atlus developers, and we can avoid ever having a Naoto situation again.
But I won’t hold my breath. I don’t plan to pick up any new Atlus games, and I recommend others do the same. There’s other franchises to spend your money on, and the odds of you finding an insulting caricature of yourself being ridiculed and mocked will be quite a bit lower.
Copious Critiques 