Editing Shin Megami Tensei (section)

===Persona 5===
Released in 2016/17 for Playstation 3 and 4. Followed up by its own improved version, "Royal", which got a Nintendo Switch release in 2022 and was promised to be just the first of the Persona games to make the jump to Nintendo's platform.

You're an ordinary high school student (did you really need to be told that at this point?) who has been falsely convicted of assault and sentenced to a year-long probation in Tokyo. This is more dangerous than it sounds; [[Post-Cold War|it is the year 20XX, and a mysterious plague of catatonic episodes and psychotic breakdowns is sweeping Tokyo. If that wasn't bad enough, public confidence in the government and justice system is falling, and this only emboldens the corrupt.]]  Can't fault the developers for writing what they know.

Anyway... you discover you have the ability to enter the Metaverse; a parallel dimension where cognition becomes reality, and real-world locations are twisted by the thoughts of humans.  Within this world, the most corrupt humans have subconsciously created mental fortresses called "Palaces" where their innermost vices and desires are allowed to run rampant.  Stop laughing, how were the devs to know Facebook would rename itself to Meta a couple years after P5 came out?

But unlike real life, in P5 you can erase the twisted desire that gave rise to a palace by stealing the treasure at its core.  Thus, you gather a brave team of fellow Metaverse-spelunkers and start plotting to strike back against the depraved elite as the Phantom Thieves.

One of the odd things about this game is that it abandons the seperation of Shadows and Personas seen in the last two games. Instead, "Shadows" is the term used to refer to any hostile Metaverse denizen, which appear in "Shadow" type forms on the dungeon map - those in the generic training ground dungeon of Mementos appear as crudely formed humanoid figures with several creepy masks sticking out of their near shapeless bulks, whilst those in the story-important dungeons adopt forms unique to that dungeon. However, when you initiate combat, the Shadow changes into one or more "Persona" type demons, whom you must overcome and can potentially talk to and recruit... basically, it's like fighting in SMTV, only with the enemies' true forms being concealed behind their Shadow forms.

Persona 5 got a spin-off title called Strikers and an updated re-release in the vein of Persona 3's P3 Portable and Persona 4 Gold. Called "Royal", this version of the game shuffles some of the sidequests, adds new Personas, and features an extended timeline with a new post-game campaign. It also marks the first game in the series since Persona 2 to bring in Personas from the [[Cthulhu Mythos]], with [[Byakhee]] and [[Hastur]] as recruitable Personas and the Very Final Boss having [[Azathoth]] as his Persona.