CW: I talk about sexual harrasment and paedo-adjacent content of the game.
In the past I have played Persona 5 and Persona 3 Reload. I am currently playing Persona 5 Golden. I feel this game would be better off if the main characters were college students of college age rather than high school students without having to change the basic formula of the game much.
Reasons why I think so:
- College-aged people struggle with self-discovery just as much as high school students.
- Can still play as a mute pussy magnet.
- The central premise of playing as a transfer student attending an educational institution can remain intact.
- Clubs and sports still exist for social link inserts.
- Persona games often deal with mature themes, which college age students can understand and process better than high school students.
- Rampant sexual harrasment against the female characters is slightly less detestable because it is now being done to people of legal age rather than 16-17 year old children.
- Can preserve the premise of the Heirophant arcana, where you live under the care of a non-parent guardian.
- Several cases of exceptional students become easier to digest. For example, the police being assisted by ace detectives aged 20-22 is more believable than by ace detectives aged 16-18 (Naoto and Akechi)
Cons:
- I don’t know how the classroom sequence would work since colleges have a wider variety of classes with more agency for the students. Perhaps the MC could be the joker because there is a certain discipline like physchology that they are very well versed in and that is hardcoded in.
- Less appeal to paedophiles.
In general I don’t know if I have the confidence to suggest that college students are that much more mature than high school students. For me personally I felt I growed the most after college. But age is definitely a factor and for some people a few years can make a lot of difference.
i am kind of sick about the school vibe too, why not make the protagonist a random 9-6 office worker?
Because of Japanese capitalism, the average Japanese worker (and probably most Western workers also) is incredibly atomized. High school and maybe college are the last times that people get to socially interact with lots of other people without the pressure of money ruining everything.
Thus, high school ends up being the idealized environment for all of the slice of life / romantic anime and games, where authors want characters to have enough free time to fall in love and have friends while not worrying about finances or becoming homeless.
To me, a happy relationship forming between co-workers feels a lot less likely than a happy relationship forming between students, because working adults will always calculate some part of the relationship based off financial gain. Students simply don’t consider that at all.
one of the reasons i’ve stopped watching anime is that high school setting, it’s like they can’t move past that stuff. japan is such a sad place lol