Call of Duty Mobile's Persona 5 crossover skins look deeply unsettling

Call of Duty Mobile is getting a Persona 5 crossover event called Take Your Heart, launching July 1. Joker, Ann, Makoto, and Sumire are all coming to the Activision shooter — but not in their usual anime art style.

Instead of keeping the Phantom Thieves looking like themselves, Call of Duty Mobile has rendered them as hyper-realistic military operators. The result is somewhere between uncanny valley and dress-up doll, and it's already making people uncomfortable before the event even goes live. It's a familiar pattern for the mobile game, which has previously pulled in characters from The Boys and Godzilla among others.

The broader Call of Duty series has been taking heat for years over crossover skin bloat. Infinity Ward, developing Modern Warfare 4, has publicly promised no "clowny" skins in that game — a direct acknowledgment that a chunk of the fanbase is fed up. Whether that commitment holds once the game is out and monetization pressure kicks in is another question.

On the Persona 5 side, Atlus has been licensing the Phantom Thieves out so aggressively that the collab has become something of a running joke — several games that featured Persona 5 characters have since shut down, giving the crossover an unofficial reputation as a kiss of death. Call of Duty Mobile is presumably safe from that fate, but the skins themselves might haunt fans regardless.