Gamerant recently released an article(1) that perfectly showcases the disconnect between the fandoms of the Persona and Shin Megami Tensei, and as was expected the SMT community did not react well. Persona 5 has been in many ways a blessing and a curse for fans of the games made by Atlus's in house talent. For many, myself included, it was our first game in the larger Shin Megami Tensei series, and this is a franchise that has sense become home to two of my favourite games of all time (Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne, and Persona 4), and has built up hype and expectations to those who have never played anything but a Persona titles in the series before this. What also makes Persona 5 a good gateway into the franchise is that it re-introduces guns and negotiating with enemies back into the Persona series, uses the setting of Tokyo (a staple in all numbered entries) and even
To the point that fans of Persona 5 might find themselves drawn to the Chaos route of the game, as P5's themes were taken directly from this conflict and supported the 'freedom' side of the freedom vs security debate that the games often assign to the forces of chaos and law respectively.
However for many this popularity is a double-edged sword, while it sprung from the SMT series, Persona is a vastly different story that usually tells different types of stories with different themes, the two titles are even made by different in-house teams at Atlus, with Persona 5 even being the first Persona title to have opted to not have the Shin Megami Tensei moniker in the title. Regardless of Persona drifting away from mainline more so than most spinoffs Persona 5 was their first entry and so has coloured the expectations of what the long-awaited Shin Megami Tensei V will be. This is nothing new in the community, Persona was the success that Atlus long pursued throughout the 2000s on the PS2, and P3 or P4 are the games that most fans came into the series from, while others games both mainline and spinoff, tend to be passionately beloved by fans and received positive reviews from critics, have always settled comfortably into a niche category while Persona resonated with a wider audience.
A spinoff being a distinct game connected more by the designs of mythological forces is nothing new in the history of Shin Megami Tensei. Last Bible was an attempt at making a more typical JRPG for the time by setting the game in a fantasy setting, Majin Tensei and Devil Survivor are Strategy RPGs that use grid-based combat similar to Fire Emblem, and Raidoh Kuzunoha (a spinoff of a spinoff) is an Action RPG set in 1930s Japan, but for an outsider looking in its an easy and understandable assumption that Shin Megami Tensei is like Persona is storytelling and tone when they only have Persona 5 and maybe other persona titles, for a point of comparison. This is not the case, Shin Megami Tensei is a Dark Fantasy Post-Apocalypse that deals with themes of morality and freedom vs. security primarily and likes to ask difficult questions relating to their subjectivity and the case-by-case basis of these concepts. The world ending, and reviving is inevitable or has already occurred in these games, so instead of asking you to save it from a malevolent God like Yaldaboath, the flaws that led to its destruction are laid bare and the questions of how the world should be remade are asked and challenged.
In many ways Persona 5 should in fact be the argument for what separates the two franchises, over arguing which should take what from the other. Shin Megami Tensei focuses on morality, and on the broadness and subjectivity of what one's values are while Persona focuses on one major idea or theme of focus on and explore. In Persona 5 it was that with Freedom comes responsibility, and that trying to instead force a figure of authority to be responsible for you is leads to stagnation, fearful defensiveness of the status-quo and even toxic relationships.
Going into the article itself, the article seems to be a case of 'slow day in journalism', it is largely bland, and only uses the comparisons of Persona 5 and Shin Megami Tensei IV and Apocalypse for the points, other points are too vague or broad to be helpful in terms of constructive criticism, and some demonstrate that the writer simply does not get that Persona and Shin Megami Tensei are separate games. The first point is that Shin Megami Tensei should ad 'social bonds' to the game play with the main argument being that in IV the characters felt flat because their wasn't enough downtime. While it is true that IV's cast suffered from turning more and more into vehicles for the conflicts of law and chaos this was largely because of the lack of characters expressing their views, or having many cut-scenes that helped flesh them out when they reached Tokyo. The early part of the game does a good job of establishing the cast, giving them banter, differing opinions and personalities to bounce off of, but once they make it to Tokyo it can feel like the characters are lacking as they aren't an active force in the plot, and feel absent from lack of screen time despite technically traveling with the protagonist. An easier fix to this, assuming that V is even going to have the respective law and chaos heroes be traveling companions in the game, would be to have them give a basic opinion about something when an object is examined and have optional cut-scenes if conditions are met similar to the skits from the Tales of series.
Most of the other points in this article are moot ones that show the writer's disconnect with the fandom, be it arguing to keep the open world, music dungeons and negotiating demons (staples of the franchise that would've been included anyway), and I am not the only one who thinks that this is a terrible article lacking substance or points (2,3) and the only other point worth acknowledging is on Silent Protagonists, as the article argues that mainline should change having a silent one to a more fleshed out with a proper personality. Honestly it is a bad joke at this point that nobody seems to get the purpose of a silent protagonist as a lead at one point WatchMojo even made a top 10 list of protagonists, filled with entirely silent protagonists from the series (4), completely missing the point of having a silent protagonist in the first place. In fairness it is not an uncommon complaint that the main protagonists can feel lacking as they are meant to be blank slates to be imprinted upon by the protagonist, and the nuances of an individual cannot be properly conveyed with yes/no or one of three answer questions. While I do believe that sticking to a silent protagonist out of tradition has hurt some of the titles such as Persona and Digital Devil Saga, but at the same time I argue that mainline benefits from it as the idea is to force you to make the decisions, ask you the questions, over asking a fictional character about them, which benefits a narrative that aims to ask personal and subjective but ultimately difficult questions about morality as SMT does.
sources:
(1) Article: https://gamerant.com/shin-megami-tensei-v-5-things-needs-learn-persona-5-5-things-keep-older-games/
(2) https://shrinke.me/WaTvy9n
(4) WatchMojo's Video: https://shrinke.me/ZvsAe
(Youtube videos links end up being uploads of the video for some reason, rest assured the above links are to the videos I mention/source)