 |
| The Cast of Persona 3 |
Initially writing off the first game as a dismal wreck (I’ve still yet to play it) from hearing about the awful localization job done on it; there was still this gnawing desire to try out the rest of the series.
In what I can only describe as a leap of faith I decided to grab the FES version of Persona 3 online. Certainly I’d had some other purchase lined out in advance, I tend to never impulse order shit off of Amazon, but I remember the game being a price way lower than I’ve ever seen featured before.
Among my prior experience with JRPG’s were the regulars – pretty men, dragonball-ass-lookin-warrior dudes and folks that wear black lipstick on their upper lip (Thanks, Kazuma Kaneko!).
Persona still represented something I wasn’t entirely used to.
All of the games are set in different cities located in Japan, taking a page from Detective Comics and envisioning them as either real places or fictionalized hodgepodges of various culture centers in the country. In all of these cases, there's some sort of Paranormal occurence that only the plot-important characters know about.
While still in the same series, I’d like to note that Persona 2
and Persona 3 are practically apples and oranges. Much like apples
and oranges are both fruit, the two games have a lot in common in the
way of setting. Yet both are set wildly apart by their tone, older games in the
series tend to deal with more mature subject matter like YA novels. The later games drift into videogame melodrama
category a bit more, though from what I can tell they also tend to
feature a cast that skews towards the younger cats.
For a series featuring mainly Anime Teens as the leads, it’s a fucking huge surprise when you realize that most of them aren’t whiny. Persona 3 is the game that made me think maybe it’s actually appropriate to be asking for better writing in the games we play. Probably the best part of Persona’s Social Links system is that if you can’t tolerate a character you don’t have to deal with them for most of the game.
Most – if not all modern roleplaying games go out of
their way to pad out the cast. Besides a few western examples that
all tend to be more of the triple-a mega Epic kind of games, very few
of them give you any freedom on who you have to interact with.
Even fewer give you a reason directly tied with the mechanics to deal with them.
Social Links in Persona function by giving you points the more you spend time with your peers. Each one of those characters is associated with the major Arcana in the same way that the Persona the player can summon are.
On the surface, this can just be taken as a simple way of making the player deal with the relationship aspect of the gameplay. Even if you were to focus hundreds of hours into raising and combining Persona, the only way to get the strongest one is by maxing out the relationships tied to their Arcana. That’s fucking cool as hell because it means the player doesn’t just have to deal with ascending through the dungeon in the game, but also managing time spent among school activities and doing things with friends. Nobody strengthens relationships by brushing people off after all, even if a fitting excuse to be a prick would be saving the world.
What’s most interesting to examine about Persona 3, and really the concept of the Social Links system is that the actual story of the game presents both the strongest argument for and against its inclusion.
The game briefs us that the core events take place in a hidden hour between 11:59 and 12:00.
During this hour, the people of the city the game takes place in are turned into coffins while they’re locked in a daze. Anyone caught outside during the midnight hour are incredibly vulnerable and hunted by the monsters called shadows.
The player gets much more heavily invested in the tertiary characters than most games offer the attempt to. What reasons the story has for the justification of Social Links is actually negligible, what’s more important is how it presents that relationship.
You’d expect a game that puts so much emphasis into character relationships to have some sort of failure condition. Outside of just not making enough time for people – no one is ever put in danger.
The question that arises is why include the system at all. If it’s going to directly tie to the mechanics of character progression, why have no failure option, or risk involved?
At no point in the game’s story is one of those Social Links characters ever placed in any danger.
There’s no real way to ‘lose’ a Social Link other than simply not encountering a character, or deciding on a different route through the story.
Rather than attempt to build any tension by making the player not only fear for the safety of others – but by putting their own choices and power at risk, the game opts to simply have the idea of Social Links be another way for the player to make progression easier.
The route the developers opted to take is much more manageable for players as well, but seems significantly less interesting when considering other things they could have done.
ATLUS decided to pick the most videogame-y route ont op of what was most manageable, I think.
While social links are an interesting concept, i'm ultimately more curious to see what ATLUS might do with the concept of the 'social' RPG they've been working on with the Persona series.
Pencil me in under eagerly awaiting Persona 5, I guess. A game which, so far, has promised to go to darker places than the existing Persona Games.
I don't really see a point in that.
The Persona series is practically built on darkness – where Shin Megami Tensei prefers the outright macabre; Persona takes a more subtle approach. It's the filtering of standard interactions through a slightly distorted worldview.
Much of the tension of Persona 4 in particular comes from the interactions with side characters and the direct supporting cast. It is the only game where you can interact with a character knowing full well if you can't rise to the challenge the game presents, they will be dead tomorrow.
Maybe the reason I like the games so much is
because of the youth of the cast is something I can actually relate
to. Contrast the protagonist of a game like Final Fantasy VII
with that of the Persona games, for a better example. 'Final Fantasy
Teens' are pretty impossible to relate to easily because I've never
saved the god damned world, or blown up a nuclear reactor. Instead,
we have to wait to get through the exciting parts with those sort of
games until the time the characters are allowed to become fleshed
out.
With Persona, the cast is comprised of fairly average people. You will have a friend that is super-into sports, much like you probably did in real life. The main character of Persona 2 has friends of a wide variety of ages, which I think Is true to anyone who grew up around a small enough pool of people.
The effect that's there; the drama the series goes for works because it's easy to relate to.
Darkness like I previously mentioned still creeps it's way into every interaction. There are things wrong in the places the game is set, whether it's the Midnight Channel in Persona 4 or the way rumors affect reality in the earlier games, they capture that feeling people get where they think they're noticing stuff the rest of the folks they know don't. That insistence to self-other so you can hold yourself up to the esteem of being the person who really knows what's going on.
That's what endears Persona as a series to me; the setting of the games is a reality enforced upon the characters on it's stage that shapes and tempers them. Rather than going for what is traditionally prevalent in role-playing games, sometimes you can't shape the world the way you want; just like in real life. Just like we end our relationships with people we know, breaking those social links, it's common for games in the series to begin with some kind of reunion, and end with a trading of goodbyes.
For a series featuring mainly Anime Teens as the leads, it’s a fucking huge surprise when you realize that most of them aren’t whiny. Persona 3 is the game that made me think maybe it’s actually appropriate to be asking for better writing in the games we play. Probably the best part of Persona’s Social Links system is that if you can’t tolerate a character you don’t have to deal with them for most of the game.
Even fewer give you a reason directly tied with the mechanics to deal with them.
Social Links in Persona function by giving you points the more you spend time with your peers. Each one of those characters is associated with the major Arcana in the same way that the Persona the player can summon are.
On the surface, this can just be taken as a simple way of making the player deal with the relationship aspect of the gameplay. Even if you were to focus hundreds of hours into raising and combining Persona, the only way to get the strongest one is by maxing out the relationships tied to their Arcana. That’s fucking cool as hell because it means the player doesn’t just have to deal with ascending through the dungeon in the game, but also managing time spent among school activities and doing things with friends. Nobody strengthens relationships by brushing people off after all, even if a fitting excuse to be a prick would be saving the world.
What’s most interesting to examine about Persona 3, and really the concept of the Social Links system is that the actual story of the game presents both the strongest argument for and against its inclusion.
The game briefs us that the core events take place in a hidden hour between 11:59 and 12:00.
During this hour, the people of the city the game takes place in are turned into coffins while they’re locked in a daze. Anyone caught outside during the midnight hour are incredibly vulnerable and hunted by the monsters called shadows.
The player gets much more heavily invested in the tertiary characters than most games offer the attempt to. What reasons the story has for the justification of Social Links is actually negligible, what’s more important is how it presents that relationship.
You’d expect a game that puts so much emphasis into character relationships to have some sort of failure condition. Outside of just not making enough time for people – no one is ever put in danger.
The question that arises is why include the system at all. If it’s going to directly tie to the mechanics of character progression, why have no failure option, or risk involved?
At no point in the game’s story is one of those Social Links characters ever placed in any danger.
There’s no real way to ‘lose’ a Social Link other than simply not encountering a character, or deciding on a different route through the story.
Rather than attempt to build any tension by making the player not only fear for the safety of others – but by putting their own choices and power at risk, the game opts to simply have the idea of Social Links be another way for the player to make progression easier.
The route the developers opted to take is much more manageable for players as well, but seems significantly less interesting when considering other things they could have done.
ATLUS decided to pick the most videogame-y route ont op of what was most manageable, I think.
While social links are an interesting concept, i'm ultimately more curious to see what ATLUS might do with the concept of the 'social' RPG they've been working on with the Persona series.
Pencil me in under eagerly awaiting Persona 5, I guess. A game which, so far, has promised to go to darker places than the existing Persona Games.
I don't really see a point in that.
The Persona series is practically built on darkness – where Shin Megami Tensei prefers the outright macabre; Persona takes a more subtle approach. It's the filtering of standard interactions through a slightly distorted worldview.
Much of the tension of Persona 4 in particular comes from the interactions with side characters and the direct supporting cast. It is the only game where you can interact with a character knowing full well if you can't rise to the challenge the game presents, they will be dead tomorrow.
With Persona, the cast is comprised of fairly average people. You will have a friend that is super-into sports, much like you probably did in real life. The main character of Persona 2 has friends of a wide variety of ages, which I think Is true to anyone who grew up around a small enough pool of people.
The effect that's there; the drama the series goes for works because it's easy to relate to.
Darkness like I previously mentioned still creeps it's way into every interaction. There are things wrong in the places the game is set, whether it's the Midnight Channel in Persona 4 or the way rumors affect reality in the earlier games, they capture that feeling people get where they think they're noticing stuff the rest of the folks they know don't. That insistence to self-other so you can hold yourself up to the esteem of being the person who really knows what's going on.
That's what endears Persona as a series to me; the setting of the games is a reality enforced upon the characters on it's stage that shapes and tempers them. Rather than going for what is traditionally prevalent in role-playing games, sometimes you can't shape the world the way you want; just like in real life. Just like we end our relationships with people we know, breaking those social links, it's common for games in the series to begin with some kind of reunion, and end with a trading of goodbyes.
-skeletons.
No comments:
Post a Comment