Goro Akechi

* Akechi
* Crow(Prince)
* Crow(Black Mask)

(黒い仮面) Kuroi kamen

Ray Guns

Silenced Pistols

## First Appearance

### Debut

Persona Record - Chapter 6 (As Crow/Prince)Persona Record: Magi Arena - Chapter 5 (As Black Mask)

**Goro Akechi** is a major character and an antagonist who appears in Persona Record Series. He is touted by his fans and the media as the second coming of the detective prince (Naoto Shirogane), and is investigating the mysterious Phantom Thieves of Hearts case sensationalizing Japan.

## Background

Akechi is the illegitimate child of Masayoshi Shido, the same man responsible for Ren Amamiya's probation period. His mother was a sex worker who was shamed for having a child out of wedlock and committed suicide. According to him, before her suicide, she raised him alone, and whenever she brought men from the red light district into their home, she would tell him to go to the bath house. Akechi desired to make Shido apologize for his crime of making her illegally conceive a child, but was powerless to do anything because Shido was already a high-ranking official by then. He was then passed around child institutions as an orphan.

Two years ago, Akechi acquired the power of the Wild Card and gained access to the Metaverse, although he is never shown in, and is likely not permitted in the Velvet Room. He then offered his newfound abilities to Shido, who employed him as an assassin to achieve his goal of becoming Prime Minister. However, in truth, this was just a plan by Akechi to catch Shido off guard so he could presumably expose him to of the public right during his premiership, before presumably killing him.

Shido proceeded to teach Akechi about inducing mental shutdowns by abusing Mementos. One of the first people he killed is Wakaba Isshiki. After Akechi killed her, Shido seized her research and read a false suicide note to her daughter Futaba out loud, ruining her life in an unnecessary act of evil. During their collaboration, Akechi used Loki to fabricate scandals of Shido's opponents to discredit them, then proceeded to "solve" the case himself. This, along with his already standing charisma, earned him the title of "The Second Coming of the Detective Prince," along with celebrity status. If any of Shido's enemies proved particularly troublesome, Akechi would assassinate them personally by inducing a mental shutdown. Akechi's powers and pragmatic tendencies quickly made him a valuable tool for Shido to dispose of his opposition, and his connections often commission him to use Akechi to dispose anyone they don't like or deem incompetent in exchange for funds and connections. With a powerful tool to instill fear and silence all opposition in his hands, Shido becomes nigh-impossible to stop by normal jurisdictional means courtesy of the fear of experiencing a mental shutdown or a psychotic breakdown.

During an unknown period in his celebrity career, Akechi was also interviewed by Shinichi Yoshizawa's talk show "Good Morning Japan" for one week in a row, allowing him to know Shinichi's daughters, Kasumi Yoshizawa and her younger sister, Sumire Yoshizawa personally.

Around a day after Ren is pulled into the rehabilitation game, Akechi causes a massive subway accident for the sole reason of framing the traffic department for incompetency.

Akechi is first brought up to the Phantom Thieves of Hearts by Shadow Madarame and Shadow Kaneshiro after their fall, as a nameless figure wearing a black mask, which alarms the group. Akechi first meets the group during a Shujin Academy school trip to a TV station in Akasaka Mitsuke, where he is scheduled to appear as a guest in "Good Morning Japan." He passes by and overhears Morgana talking with Ren, Ryuji Sakamoto, and Ann Takamaki backstage about the shape of the TV dome resembling pancakes, attracting his attention. During the show, he expresses a distaste for the Phantom Thieves, whom he accuses of taking the law into their own hands.

Akechi quickly takes an interest in Ren, approaching him after the show and telling him that he enjoyed their conversation, and hopes to speak again sometime. As the Thieves' heists continue, and Akechi continues to state his disapproval of them, his own popularity begins to dip.

Once the Phantom Thieves' popularity reaches its peak, the Conspiracy tricks them into making their next target Kunikazu Okumura, who is also one of Shido's enemies and an obstacle to his path. After their target's defeat, Akechi takes the chance to assassinate his Shadow Self before his Palace collapses, subsequently causing the real Okumura to suffer a mental shutdown and die. This leads to the public believing the Phantom Thieves to be behind his death. On the other hand, Akechi's support skyrockets due to his staunch disapproval of their methods, and Shido's conspiracy takes advantage of this to frame the Phantom Thieves for a crime that they did not commit.

Later, as Shujin Academy is voting for a guest celebrity to speak at their cultural festival, Akechi is chosen by a landslide majority, and he accepts Makoto Niijima's invitation. During his speech, he boasts of knowing the Phantom Thieves' identities on stage, knowing full well they were listening, and uses a fake call as an excuse to talk to them personally. Backstage, he blackmails the Thieves into a deal using photographic evidence of them leaving Okumura's Palace.

Akechi claims he entered the Metaverse a month before, and awakened to his Persona when he was attacked by the black masked man who killed Okumura. Akechi says that his overwhelming need to find the truth and share it with the world was what caused him to awaken to his Persona, Robin Hood. Akechi requests that he accompany the Thieves on their heist in Sae's Palace in order to catch the real culprit and clear their name. In exchange, he'll destroy the photo evidence. However, another caveat is that the Phantom Thieves must disband after this last heist. With no other choice, the group agrees.

In reality, Akechi was planning to have them arrested after they change Sae's heart so he could murder Ren under Shido's orders. However, the Phantom Thieves knew this from the beginning, due to him appearing to hear Morgana talk about the shape of the TV Station Dome despite his cover story dictating that he had never been in the Metaverse prior to early October, allowing them to deduce that he is a mole (since this implies that he spied on the Phantom Thieves all the way back when they were dealing with Madarame) and create a plan to prevent him from killing their leader. The Thieves plan on not stealing Sae's Treasure and instead take an empty briefcase, allowing her Palace to remain, while Futaba plants a bug onto the protagonist's phone to transfer Akechi to a part of Niijima's Palace that Sae has little control of. As Niijima's Palace contains a Cognitive Akechi, Makoto would then hide this fake out of the real Akechi's sight. The protagonist would then leave the Palace himself as a decoy, only to be arrested, and then convince Sae to show the protagonist's phone to Akechi so Futaba can remotely activate the Metaverse Navigator on Ren's side, preventing him from assassinating Ren as well as keeping the other Phantom Thieves and Confidants alongside Ren himself, alive.

When Shadow Sae impedes the party's progress by increasing the number of coins required to enter the Manager's Floor of the casino to the seemingly insurmountable number of one million, Akechi reveals that he had been secretly used a loan card that Futaba told him to get rid of to borrow as many coins from the casino as possible, performing the calculations right in front of everybody, which add up to over one million coins, allowing the party access to the Treasure. After Shadow Sae's defeat and the Treasure found, their victory is cut short with a police invasion outside Sae's Palace, heavily implied to be drawn in by Akechi via passive use of the Metaverse Navigator. Ren decides to act as a decoy so the rest of the Phantom Thieves can escape, and Akechi follows the others while the protagonist catches the police's attention and is ultimately caught.

Back in the present, Sae concludes the interrogation by requesting that he reveal the identities of all his comrades and allies, promising to help lighten his sentence if he cooperates with her. If he refuses, the protagonist's drugs will begin to wear off, and will remember that the group was aware of Akechi's true motives all along, and had been prepared. He then recalls the true extent of the plan he crafted with the rest of the Phantom Thieves, and performs the crucial last step of giving Sae his cell phone, requesting that she show it to Akechi if she happens to meet him.

With Ren captured, Akechi heads to the interrogation room, planning to assassinate him. On his way there, whilst crossing paths, Sae shows Akechi Ren's cellphone. After Sae leaves, Akechi asks the guard outside the room to join him, before killing him with his own gun. He then gloats for a moment before shooting Ren in the head, staging the scene as a suicide before leaving. When he reports to Shido of his success in assassinating Ren, he considers killing the remaining Phantom Thieves. Akechi tells him to wait until after the election to avoid rousing suspicion, and assures Shido that they won't seek revenge without their leader.

In reality, when Sae showed Akechi the phone, he was transported into Sae's Palace, and Ren and guard he killed were mere cognitive replicas, which are present there because Sae had just seen them in reality. Ren also deliberately let himself get caught and interrogated so that his cognitive self would appear in the interrogation room, although he was only unable to recollect that he had a plan in the first place because he was drugged. Sae is shown evidence of Shido and Akechi being the culprits and rescue the protagonist, but to the rest of the world, Ren committed suicide while in custody. The conspiracy, overconfident, never checked for a corpse and immediately filed a false death certificate.

Alternatively, Ren can reveal all of the Phantom Thieves' identities to Sae. If so, Sae leaves and crosses paths with Akechi, not knowing he came to assassinate Ren. Due to Sae not showing him the cellphone, Akechi murders the real guard and Ren as planned, and the residents of the Velvet Room lament his failure and sentence him to be imprisoned inside his cell for the rest of his life.

## Appearance

Akechi has shaggy, neck length brown hair with bangs and reddish-brown eyes. He wears a tan peacoat with black buttons, striped black and white tie, black pants, black gloves and black loafers. His casual winter outfit consists of a white long sleeve shirt with flaps under a blue diamond sweater vest, beige pants and brown shoes.

As Crow, Akechi wears a princely pure-white regalia with red accents and a red, long-nosed mask. His mask motif resembles a long-nosed Venetian mask. His image is a combination of a noble's attire, and a uniform worn by cavalry or guards of honor. As with his Robin Hood Persona, it's meant to give the feeling of putting on the air of a champion of justice, with nothing to do with being a Phantom Thief, robber or burglar of any sort, invoking the image of being at the front of a stage to contrast Ren Amamiya's image of being more of a backstage actor.

Once he reveals his true intentions, Akechi swaps his princely garb for a body-covering, black and dark blue striped outfit. In this form, he has several black studded belts strapped around his legs and arms, a short black cape and clawed gauntlets. He also wears a dark enclosed knight helmet, with a black mask tinted red, resembling a sharp beak, which breaks after his defeat. Much like with Loki's design, it alludes to a lack of agency, and is meant to give a chaotic feeling and invoke the question "what's the real you?"

## Personality

Akechi appears to be well-mannered, friendly, and charismatic. His achievement of being a high-school detective, coupled with his handsome features, makes him highly popular among the general public and he is commented to be "The Second Coming of the Detective Prince." His intelligence and smooth-talk earned him enough trust from the police to conduct his own investigation despite his young age, working with Sae Niijima, who fully trusts him to assist her in her investigation.

He presents himself as having a strong sense of justice, disapproving of the Phantom Thieves of Hearts for their methods. He is candid in expressing his disagreement, but never forces his views on others, and still respects people who have differing opinions. He quotes Hegel on this, citing that "advancement cannot occur without both thesis and antithesis."

In reality, this cheery disposition is merely a mask that hides his true nature. Akechi’s true personality is blunt. He’s quick to get straight to the point but still remains polite while doing so. For most of the game including the third semester, Akechi uses “boku” while referring to himself which is considered a polite, neutral pronoun. Within the Metaverse, he uses "ore." This is a more rough pronoun which is also used by Ryuji. He sought out the protagonist’s presence so often before the true reveal of himself.

He usually speaks in a calm and polite fashion, but when he drops his guise and engages in combat as the Black Mask, his dialogue becomes wildly aggressive and profane. However, he displays this behavior only towards enemies.

## Abilities

Akechi's Persona is Robin Hood and Loki. In Battle, he fights with Laser Sabers, Serrated Swords, Ray Guns and Silenced Pistols.

## Relationship

### Ren Amamiya

The two used to be teammates together before, but later became enemies because of Akechi's jealousy.

### Magical girls

Akechi joins an alliance with the magical girls to fight the shadows and the witches, but as he reveals his true element, a fractured relationship between him and the magical girls arises.

In Persona Record: Magi Arena, When Arena events happen, he decides to rejoin to defeat the reformed Strega once again.

## Trivia

* Akechi's outfit when he uses Loki has a pattern of blue and black in contrast to his outfit when he uses Robin Hood, which has a theme of red and white.
* While Akechi is a Wild Card just like Ren Amamiya, unlike him, he can only use two Personas.
* Akechi has the ability to change his metaverse outfit; how he is the only one to do so is never elaborated upon.
* Within the Metaverse, Akechi's stance mirrors Ren's but lacks the natural sway that Ren has; instead, he stands completely still.
* Akechi is left-handed.
* Akechi's mask is the same as the mask of Corbeau, A Magical girl.
* "Go" (吾) of Gorou is the archaic form of the first-person pronoun "I" in Chinese which carries no meaning in formal Japanese language and is merely borrowed for Chinese translation or naming, while "Ro" (郎) is a suffix attached to certain male given names, meaning "son," undoubtedly a reference to his relationship to Shido. Akechi (明智) literally means "wisdom" in Chinese, the same meaning in Japanese would be "kenmei" (賢明).
	+ It could also be a reference to Kogoro Akechi (明智 小五郎), a fictional private detective created by Japanese mystery writer Edogawa Ranpo (a pseudonym for Tarō Hirai) from the story "The Case of the Murder on D. Hill" in January 1925 and continued to appear in stories for a quarter of a century. Edogawa Rampo is considered the father of the Japanese detective story and was a great admirer of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Akechi is the first recurring detective character in Japanese fiction and is clearly inspired by Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. It also makes sense for Akechi to be the rival of the team as in the introduction to the translated version of "The Early Cases of Kogoro Akechi," The Fiend with Twenty Faces (Akechi's main rival) is referred to as "more of an Arsène Lupin than a Moriarty."
	+ It may also be a reference to Akechi Mitsuhide, a retainer of the notorious daimyo and conqueror Oda Nobunaga who rebelled against him for reasons that are often interpreted as disgust for Nobunaga's flaunting of *bushido*. This ties to aside from betraying the Phantom Thieves, he is also a traitor to Shido as well, as Shido has ambitions that can be compared to Nobunaga.

## Gallery

Akechi in StudioConcept art of Akechi 1Concept art of Akechi 2Concept art of Akechi 3AkechiAkechi and RenJoker (Ren) and AkechiAkechi and YusukeAkechi as the Black Mask