The main Pokemon series has come a long way in humanizing the grunts that stand against you in each entry. Rather than trying to steal everyone’s monsters or flood the world, the modern games have presented more sympathetic antagonists, like dropouts who couldn’t complete the island trials and have nowhere else to turn, or sports fans from a terribly impoverished city who just get a little too enthusiastic in supporting their hometown hero.
But Pokemon Violet’s Team Star take sympathy for the bad guys to the next level. After playing through the five Team Star fortresses and seeing flashbacks of all the struggles of its founding members, I came to a wild realization: Team Star is just a retelling of The Phantom Thieves from Persona 5.
Aesthetically (there’s that word again, Ryuji), members of both rebellious groups’ clothing and hairstyles make them burst forth from their respective crowds, but it wasn’t until the one of the final scenes with Team Star that I really made the connection between the two groups. Specifically, it was after I’d bested Team Star’s Big Boss. The remaining leaders, all holed up in an otherwise empty classroom at the academy, started lamenting about the breaking up of their group while a mournful electric jazz guitar wailed. It felt so similar to all those meetings during which the students of Persona’s Shujin Academy would empathize with an art student whose mother was killed by his teacher so he could claim her masterpiece as his own, or lament a fellow student jumping off the school’s roof because the lecherous gym teacher had sexually assaulted her.
Alright, admittedly Persona 5’s content is a lot more on the mature side, but both games feature environments where the less-socially-acceptable students have found themselves being pushed around, and whether it’s by the cool kids who mock them or adults who force them into impossible situations, the general theme is that both groups are trapped in an uncaring world that would rather not have them around. And so they rebelled.
To catch up anyone who’s not aware of the plot of both games, Persona 5’s Phantom Thieves formed to stop the school’s sleazy, Olympic-medal-winning gym teacher from abusing his students, and they do so by entering his cognition and forcing him to publicly repent for his sins. Team Star, on the other hand, exists in a world where people raise and battle monsters, so they monster-battled the other kids who were bullying them until the other kids stopped. In both scenarios, the authority figures at the school turned a blind eye to the plight of their most vulnerable students rather than offering a nurturing hand.
But it’s not just the overall plot that ties these two games together; it’s the characters themselves, each following a specific archetype. Running through the list, we’ve got the student council president who develops a wild streak after taking a stand against injustice (Makoto and Giacomo), the girl being manipulated over her good looks who realizes an affinity for fire and the color red (Ann and Mela), the prim and proper rich kid who’s holding in a lot of anger issues (Haru and Ortega), the scary-looking student-athlete who grows to forgive their former tormentors (Ryuji and Eri), and the eccentric artist who speaks in an overly formal way and uses his skills for the benefit of the group (Yusuke and Atticus).
That’s too many similarities to be a coincidence, right? It covers the whole of Team Star’s leadership and all the Phantom Thieves except Akechi, who only joined the team as a spy for its enemies, and Kasumi, who didn’t join the canon until the release of Persona 5 Royale. There’s also Morgana, who is a valued member of the team and also a talking cat, so I guess I could stretch that to being another Pokemon tie-in!
We’ll end at the top. Team Star’s leader is Cassiopeia, a mysterious entity named after a mythological figure who never actually appears before those she’s speaking with. Instead, she’s an accomplished hacker, communicating only through cryptic and unexpected text messages typed in electric green letters that could only come from the far-off future technological marvel of the 1980s Apple IIe.
That’s strikingly similar to the one and only non-combatant Phantom Thief, Futaba Sakura, aka Oracle. Futaba’s whole introduction arc involves her observing the Phantom Thieves through surveillance equipment, then hacking into the player character’s cell phone chat app using the alias Alibaba (although she later reveals she’s the original hacker Medjed, so that’s two classical figures as aliases). It’s only after the Thieves run into the roadblock of needing to open her bedroom door, and later literally come out of the closet, in order to accomplish the task she’s put forth, that they see her true form — an emotionally scarred, undersized social anxiety sufferer with big glasses, an oversized sweatshirt, leggings, clunky boots, and hair dyed an unnatural color. Sound familiar?
While Futaba isn’t the leader of The Phantom Thieves, during her story arc the group is completely under her control — if for no other reason than she threatens to expose their identities, but that’s neither here nor there. What is interesting is the role that Medjed plays. Futaba had created the online alias in order to pursue anonymous justice using the Internet. The problem with anonymity, though, is that any hacker could take up the mantle of Medjed, and once a group using that name started taking things further than she had intended, she abandoned the name and used her skills to shut down the group for good.
In the same vein, Pokemon’s Penny, the true identity of Cassiopeia, with her bespectacled face and her quirky Eevee backpack, had originally assumed leadership of Team Star to stand up for all the students who were being bullied. The revolt worked, the bullies retreated, and the war was won. But the team had grown and built up fortress camps, straying too far away from studies and society in general, and its leaders — her friends — were at risk of being expelled. Just like Futaba, she manipulated a third party (you, if you’re wondering) into her schemes and took down her own creation from the inside.
So what do all these comparisons mean? Is it just a really well-thought-out homage from one JRPG to another? Do I just need to go outside and see a concert or a tree or something once in a while? No. Well. Yes to the last one, but I digress. The difference comes in the role authority plays in the games.
In Persona 5, Principal Kobayakowa spends all his time worrying about maintaining the public perception of his institution, doing damage control on its image and cover-ups on its moral shortfalls rather than, y’know, fixing the damn thing. As an education administrator, he fails his students in every way possible. True, he’s eventually revealed to be just a stooge under the thumb of a much more proficient villain, and he pays the price with his life once he realizes he’s in too deep and tries to go to the cops, but in a story filled with decrepit perverts, violent yakuza bosses, and corrupt national politicians, he comes off as one of the most despicable characters around.
On the other side of things, we enter Pokemon Scarlet & Violet after Team Star’s successful rebellion, and we eventually learn that the entire faculty has resigned in disgrace after the bullying was uncovered. Director Clavell, for all his Buscemi-worthy “hello, fellow teens” antics in his Clive disguise, works alongside Penny (and you) to build a learning environment his students can be proud of and feel safe in, and although he’s not too keen on the altering of school uniforms, he’s the true hero of this school story.
Would it have worked to put such a supportive character at the top of Persona 5’s power structure? Absolutely not. The game would have been much shorter and ended after the first palace, if not before. But as the person who had to take this team of very specific and beloved archetypes down, I’m happy to have found someone capable of building Team Star a nurturing environment. It’s what The Phantom Thieves would have wanted.
