Also know as: Male Teacher with Glasses; Dr. Maruki
First Appearance: Persona 5 Royal
Occupation: Counselor; Psientific researcher
Height: 180 cm (5'11")
Weapon: Staff
Arcana: Councillor
Persona: Azathoth, Adam Kadmon
Takuto Maruki is a major non-playable character in Persona 5 Royal. He is a counselor hired by Shujin Academy to support students after the incident caused by Suguru Kamoshida.
If the protagonist maximizes Maruki's Confidant, he would have granted him knowledge of the Metaverse, which Maruki would exploit next year to fulfill everyone's ideal realities by overwriting tragic events from the real world. Maruki is the ruler of his Palace, and acts as the main antagonist of the final arc of Persona 5 Royal.
Maruki is a tall, bespectacled man with brown, short unkempt hair and a small stubble underneath his chin. He wears a blue dress shirt tucked into his upturned khaki slacks with a checkered dark blue tie. He wears a white lab coat over the top. On his feet he wears open-toed sandals without socks. In his suit's chest pocket, he has a yellow pen and a staff ID that's further tied around his neck with a red strap.
Outside his work uniform, he wears a white ribbed sweater over a dark blue dress shirt, a light brown jacket with dark brown fabric at the cuffs and collar, dark jeans and tan shoes with laces. When he was younger, his chin was clean-shaven, his hair was shorter and neater, and he wore a white polo shirt with blue trimming and jeans with a black wrist watch.
Maruki is a voluntary counselor who cares about the students in the school and sympathizes with Suguru Kamoshida's victims. As a counselor, he is quite friendly to those who reach out to him and is extremely patient, allowing them to control the flow of their conversation. He is alert and quick to pick up on minor comments made by his patients that helps open them up. He is also highly clumsy, quirky and is prone to messing up in comedic situations, unlike most of the other teachers who have no-nonsense, regular personalities. According to Shibusawa, he also has a tendency to charge into things rather impulsively. He is quite popular with the Thieves and even Yusuke from Kosei High School comes to Shujin Academy to take his counseling, making him a popular figure among students and one of the Thieves' greatest sponsors. He also appears to be a skilled cook.
However, Maruki was secretly bestowed the power to warp cognition thanks to his Persona, who reached out to him because of his extreme grief over his ex-fiancée's post-traumatic stress episodes. Once he began working as a counselor, he used this ability to temper or neuter crippling mental illnesses by granting things that they wanted that would cancel out their depression, although the extent of that power only applied to the cognition of the person themselves, instead of radically changing any qualities that person has, resulting in cognitive dissonance. According to him, this also only happened once during his counseling job, implying that this would only happen if Maruki interacts with a person who reminds him of his ex-fiancée.
Maruki was one of the original researchers of cognitive psience, and he reaches out to the protagonist for help completing the paper he has been working on since before the events of the game. If the protagonist does help him finish this essay and complete his Confidant, a combination of the loss of his ex-fiancée's memories, having his research stolen and funding stymied by Masayoshi Shido, and the Day of Reckoning will finally allow him to fully awaken to his Persona, as a result of the Metaverse merging with reality. He conducts his final solution against all suffering after Yaldabaoth's fall by granting humanity's wishes accordingly with no strings attached and takes his place as the world's savior, as frequent interaction with emotionally suffering people in the past made him conclude that pure happiness will remove all pain from the world.
In reality, deep down, Maruki is a torn and sorrowful man who was unable to process his own grief; as a result, he desires to stop others from experiencing similar pain. This leads to him assessing that all grief must eventually be removed, ignorant that his actions prevent people from moving forward. Despite his intentions not being fueled by malice as he genuinely wants to make people happy, this causes an ethical dilemma as he still retains his desire to let others decide if they want to accept his world or not. With the protagonist spearheading the resistance against his reality, Maruki ultimately leaves the decision to him and above all else seeks his approval, although he'll ultimately fight for the realization of his world to the bitter end no matter what the protagonist chooses, even to the point of using Sumire and Akechi's situations as a bargaining chip. Deep down, he fears that the protagonist may never accept it, so he allows him to experience the happy realities of his friends and continuously tries to persuade him and the Phantom Thieves, without overtly trying to force them, to join him even during the very apex of their battle.
While he acknowledges that hardships are a natural part of life and that some people do come out stronger from them, it is only after his defeat that he realizes that he needs to do the same. It is in the final clash with the protagonist alone that Maruki's inner frustrations come out and showcases all of the pain he endured. The one on one fight in his crumbling Palace finally gave him a real opportunity to vent out this grief with someone who could truly understand him. It is in that moment that Maruki finds solace and can finally move forward with his life.
(Source: Megami Tensei Wiki)
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