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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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I just played through Persona 5 royal and its so weird because the gay comic relief characters are absolute dogshit but Yusuke is clearly coded as gay and you can't pursue a relationship with him. Its almost like some of the dev staff were a lot cooler than others or things were altered in later development.
The relationship stuff in general is odd. The main character is clearly a college student, he has an apartment over a coffee shop, he goes to bars. Why not just age the characters up a bit, set it in university and make the whole thing way less awkward and creepy
I read Yusuke as Aroace myself (being one myself), but it's a fact that in the preceding game that was explicitly the case. Your main sidekick and man of questionable behavior was supposed to be a gay romance option. It's even been coded into the game, so that mods that restore it exist, but it was removed at some point of development.
That's a super common criticism, and Persona 2: Eternal Punishment actually has its main cast be entirely adults with jobs. Its gameplay is different from P3 - P5, but it exists.
Frankly, I think nowadays that romance options in such games are kinda mid and it wouldn't be too much of a loss if they were removed and the Social-Link/Confidant system is a bad way to tell a character's story.
I like the mechanics of it. Its an interesting puzzle to balance getting all the social links with the scheduling to unlock all their abilities but I wouldn't care if that was replaced with needing the two personas to be more in tune or something. I definitely found myself fast forwarding through some of them by the end. I think part of that is just how clumsy and ham-fisted it all is. There's potential for a really interesting story about found family there, they just didn't really pull it off.
Case in point I got all the relationships up to ten and then never hung out with anyone again if I didn't have to. I wasn't interested enough in any of their stories to want to see more. My Joker was less an outsider uniting and discovering the value of friendship with other outcasts and more a manipulative bastard that dropped people as soon as he got what he wanted from them.
Maybe that's just how I played it and maybe it'd be different if I was younger but the mechanics seemed to encourage that.
Wait, I thought Yusuke was Aroace or something? My man only ever seems interested in art.
I read the lake scene as him being interested in the protagonist and he's clearly not interested in women. But I could just be inadvertently writing my own slash fiction here. Some googling reveals people debating for either side. Amusingly the question, "is Yusuke gay or European" is a top search question. I'm not sure what's going on there
That's what I've tended to find with Persona games, so pardon if I'm being too charitable.
IIRC in P4, Yosuke was planned to be a romantic option for Yu, so it makes a little bit of sense how he might give Kanji some shit because he's dealing with his own internalized homophobia, ironically much like Kanji is, hence the shadow. There was one "beauty pageant" part that I find difficult to defend where the premise is crossdressing, they don't explicitly use the term "trans" but they call the costumes "drag outfits".