After the major success of Persona 5 in 2017, fans of the series have been excited to hear what comes next for the franchise. There have been plenty of Persona 5 spin-off titles, but the true successor to P5 will be Persona 6. Despite the lack of any official announcement that the game is in development, Atlus has stated the studio is interested in continuing to make Persona titles, and recent job listings for the company suggest that the game is in the works.
If it's going to up the ante from P5, Persona 6 has some big shoes to fill in just about every aspect. From the combat to the music to the story, Atlus certainly has its work cut out for itself. While the stories and visual styles change from game to game, one aspect of the Persona series that P6 needs to get right is the confidant system that's a staple of the franchise. Persona 5 had some of the best confidants in the series so Persona 6 will need to feature some stand-out characters to succeed it. Luckily for Atlus, one character archetype seems like an obvious choice to include in future Persona titles: the wannabe social media influencer.
RELATED: Persona 5's Full Universe Explained: Royal, Strikers, and Rumored Fighting Game
Because Persona 5 is set in the ambiguous year of 20XX, it allows for players to decide for themselves what year the game is set in. The problem, however, is that the technology that the Phantom Thieves and their friends use is pretty indicative of the technology available in the mid-to-late 2010s. Between smartphones and group chats, it's pretty clear that the game is set in modern times, but the use of things like apps and the internet aren't a distraction from or a focus of the story. As technology grows more and more connected with our daily lives, Persona 6 might make more use of it in its story.
The Phantom Thieves' phan-site from Persona 5 is sort of an outdated technology/media inclusion for a game ambiguously set in the 2010s. While fan-made websites aren't completely gone from the internet, there are more popular ways that fandoms connect. The main way that people do that now is through social media apps like Twitter and Facebook, which feature the ability to make fan-specific accounts with general ease. If Persona 6's story includes the creation of another fan page, it's likely that it will be done on social media apps instead of creating new sites entirely. This is where P6's social media influencer confidant comes in.
Including a social media influencer confidant in Persona 6 seems like a no-brainer given the ever-growing relevance that social media has in the lives of everyone. There are a few ways that Atlus could take the character all of which could be interesting if given the right background, story relevance, and character arc.
Perhaps the safest bet would be for the new Persona 6 confidant to have a similar role to Mishima in Persona 5. Mishima runs the phan-site and essentially serves as the Phantom Thieves' PR person, crucial to their efforts as he provides plenty of change of heart requests. If the social media influencer were to make fan accounts on sites like Twitter and Facebook, they would also be moderating comments and giving the protagonists insight into how people feel about them. While this might be retreading Mishima's character in P5, he doesn't end up doing a lot throughout his storyline, and it's more about his brush with power than actually moderating the site. A similar character in P6 has a lot of other options as to where they could go narratively.
RELATED: How to Make Persona 6 Radically Different From Past Entries
The confidant's social media presence could also be unrelated to the protagonists and their goals entirely. If they were a character like Yoshida or Mifune, one whose arc doesn't have a lot to do with the protagonist and their goals, then their desire for Internet stardom might not even be linked to the main story. Instead, they could just be an up-and-coming influencer without any overarching connections to the main goal - other than whatever relationship they have to Persona 6's protagonist.
In terms of personality, Persona has plenty of memorable characters, but a social media influencer might be a combination of them all depending on what aspect of social media they would be drawn to. They might have the gaming expertise of Shinya or use Futaba's Reddit-inspired lingo or be as boisterous and carefree as Ohya. To add some complexity, Atlus might make the character the type of social media influencer who didn't necessarily go out looking for fame, but instead was put in the spotlight and have to fill that role. That would make them comparable to Hifumi the Shogi star, but instead of fighting against their distaste in the profession, they might learn to embrace the pros of fame.
Atlus dipped its toes into the waters of social media influencers with Mishima, but they also briefly made use of them in Persona 5 Strikers, the canonical sequel to Persona 5. In Strikers, a character is revealed to be a popular streamer who uses the Phantom Thieves' name to boost their popularity. P5S treats it as a one-off gag, but a streamer confidant would also work well as it's the kind of thing that many high school students are into and could be incorporated into the game's narrative.
As stated above, the Persona series is usually a little ambiguous about when each game is set, but they take real-world influence in their settings and stories. The games have used technology for plot devices and settings, so it only makes sense that the personalities who come with the evolving media world would make their way into Persona as well. Each game has had more and more reliance on social media aspects, so Persona 6 should just go all in and include an influencer. Wherever the series is headed next, it's more than likely that it's going to include some sort of social media elements, so Atlus might as well lean into the changing of times.
Persona 6 is rumored to be in development.