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It's a quintessential high school predicament: with the first taste of financial independence still fresh on your tongue and a part-time paycheck burning a hole in your pocket, you have to choose whether to go out with friends or to put the cash towards The Big Purchase. As with everything in high school, the stakes of this choice are life and death.

How strange, then, that in Persona 5, money is meaningless. No stakes to be found. Coins rain from enemies like candy from a piñata. Items that exist exclusively for resale are littered throughout every dungeon. For being a game of two (supposedly) complementary halves—a high school life sim and a dungeon crawler—, the economic nuances of the former are flattened by the latter at every turn.

I say "flattened" because instead of merging the shared design language of both genres, Persona 5 stacks them one on top of the other. Why do dungeon enemies drop money when there are part-time jobs to be had? Why do dungeon chests contain gear and equipment when there are stores selling clothes and accessories? Similar overlaps are found everywhere.

But these overlaps do not mean that both halves are given equal weight—the free-form structure of the life sim (where you define your goals) means that it is forever secondary to the dungeon crawler (where the game defines your goals). You do not *have* to work a part-time job. You *have* to fight enemies in the dungeons. They both reward comparable sums of yen. Guess which one, across 100+ hours, will eventually fall by the wayside?

There are simply too many sources of money, to the point that opportunity cost (once integral to the series and still integral to the real-life high school experience) is all but non-existent. You can have it all. And it feels hollow.

So Atlus, here's some advice for reinforcing the high school role-playing fantasy in the inevitable Persona 5 Remake*—isolate the life sim's economy. Make me show up to work on a weekend. Make me wince when I shell out for new equipment. Make me miss my date with Sumire (the best girl, tee hee) because I can't afford to take the subway. Atlus, bust my balls so that the paychecks feel more substantial, the upgrades more tangible, and the social links more meaningful—so that pissing away disposable income is once again a matter of life and death.
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Video games as escapism, you say?!? Preposterous.

*Persona 5: Repeat Offender