It’s been a dream of many a pinball players to re-theme a pinball machine, but few have actually taken the leap. Tyler has decided to re-theme his Iron Maiden Stern into a Persona 5 pin. Check out his story below:
There were a few parameters to picking a theme:
It had to have a strong enough soundtrack to support 12 songs.
It had to have enough video content available to pull from for the LCD display without having to do much heavy lifting since I’m new to video editing.
It needed to be complex enough to map concepts to the deep Iron Maiden rule set.
I intentionally avoided themes popular enough that they could possibly be made into a commercial machine.
Persona 5 fit this pretty well. The soundtrack is one of its strongest features and the game contains over 100 hours of HD content (plus an animated series spinoff) to pull assets from. It’s also niche enough that there is zero chance of a commercial machine using this theme.
The basis of the game is that you direct the life of a teenager in Tokyo by day and dungeon crawling at night.
Initially I was intending to include map a different dungeon to each mode, but the cast of allies is a lot more compelling than the cast of villains so I am now planning on each mode being focused on a different teammate. There is a system in the game where you build “social links” with allies so the soul shard will be completing that ally’s social link. 2 Minutes to Midnight will be mapped to an ally that turns out to be (spoilers) a traitor.
Two allies in particular narrate during combat so most of the non-mode call outs will be pulled from their voice lines.
During the ordinary life segments you can perform activities to upgrade five attributes (intelligence, guts, proficiency, charm, and kindness) that are required to unlock upgrades. Power pops/targets/ramps/etc. might map to these well since there are 5 and you’re building them in parallel with the rest of the game.
You traverse deeper and deeper into a side dungeon called Mementos throughout P5, so each tomb treasure will be converted to a new level of Mementos.
Running out of characters! I’ll add more later!
Tyler
