 Welcome back to the Video Game Storytime Advent Calendar. It's time for another teensy tiny video as we count down the days to December 25th, which may or may not be a holiday for you, depending on your culture and religion. The Persona series is unashamedly Japanese, but games in the series often have different settings. After Persona 4 gave players a murder mystery in a small rural town, Persona 5 went big by recreating many iconic real-life landmarks and locations around Tokyo. Originally, this wasn't the plan. Persona 5 started out as a game about backpacking around the world before a real-life tragedy caused the development team to rethink their plans. Said Persona 5 director Katsura Hashino, because the past works in the series were stories centered around school and its surroundings, I had been thinking of backpacking, a game where you're flying around to various places with a theme similar to that of a journey of self-discovery. But in the midst of thinking a lot, the Great East Japan Earthquake struck, aka the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. I felt that at once my mood about Japan had changed as I rethought things. I wanted to refocus on Japan rather than direct my feelings to the outside world. From this point on, we had no intention to fly around the world and started to look at the adventurous spirit of the human mind instead. Sometimes, art can be a wonderful tool for helping people to process trauma. It's interesting to know that a game as beloved as Persona 5 grew out of such a poignant national tragedy. Come back tomorrow for another tiny advent calendar video, which we promise will not in any way feature natural disasters, but might feature a couple famous skeletons.