For the last two decades, hot springs scenes have been a staple of the Persona RPG series, just like social links and exam week. Beginning with 2006’s Persona 3, the series always takes its ensemble cast of high-school pals on a vacation. On paper, it’s a way for players to get to know the cast in a more relaxed and informal setting, but in practice it’s mostly a transparent excuse to see the pretty girls wearing very little clothing while they giggle and praise each other’s shapely bods.
Several weeks after Atlus officially revealed Persona 6 at the Xbox Showcase, fans on Reddit have been speculating about what the next installment will be like. This week’s hottest topic? Hot springs. Turns out, nobody really enjoys these scenes. Some people tolerate them, while many, many others never want to see another “hilarious” misunderstanding between teens in various states of undress.
“Just include a hot spring scene to make the gooners happy but don’t do the tired ‘girls and boys have misunderstanding, girls beat up boys.’ joke no one has laughed at in 20 years,” wrote one commenter on the post above. This isn’t an oversimplification: this is pretty much exactly what happens in the hot springs scenes in Persona 3, Persona 4, and the Phantom Thieves’ tactical RPG spinoff Persona 5 Strikers.
It’s not that people find these interludes particularly offensive — they’re just dated and unfunny. Hot springs generally have gender-segregated schedules: there are separate windows of time for men and women, as you’re generally bathing in the nude. In the Persona series, there’s always some kind of mix-up with this schedule. Inevitably, the men overhear the women complementing one another’s bodies in a fanciful “just us girls” way that exists only in fiction written by men. Instead of announcing their presence from the start, the boys are scared into silence, sending the girls into a rage when they inevitably discover them lurking around. If you’ve watched one of these scenes, you’ve seen ’em all.
Persona is far from the first RPG to include a fan-service hot springs sequence. It’s an old trope that appeared in ’90s games like Lunar: Silver Star Story, Suikoden 1 and 2, and Tales of Symphonia, among numerous others. It hasn’t entirely disappeared — 2022’s Xenoblade Chronicles 3 features an interesting riff on the cliché. Rather than playing a mixed-sex bath as fodder for titillation, having everyone bathe together underscores the distressing fact that these characters have no concept of sex or romance because they’ve been robbed of their humanity. It enriches the story, rather than feeling like a weird tonal shift.
Hot springs aren’t a new debate topic in the Persona community, either. There are posts going back six years asking for Atlus to quit wedging these “bullshit out of character moments” into the games. “Please, for the love of Christ, either can these fucking scenes in the next game or make them in-character for everyone and actually funny,” wrote another.
“Make girls peep this time,” suggested another reddit commenter in response to this week’s discussion. Honestly, it’s not a terrible idea. Better still, maybe just use these moments as fodder for more intimate conversations between characters — and no, I do not mean chattering excitedly about boob size.