Freaked Out Now and Dead on Arrival. The Persona 3 Retrospective, Part 6(a)- Characters (S.E.E.S. and Protag)

Part 1-Intro

Part 2-Gameplay

Part 3-Presentation

Part 4-Setting

Part 5-Plot and Themes

Persona 1 Retrospective

Persona 2 IS Retrospective

Part 6(b) Yukari and Junpei

Alright, so this post is proving to be too large and taking too long to write, because it turns out I can run my mouth about things. So we’re breaking it up, rather than going through all the characters at once. Here’s the first bit of our Persona 3 character analysis. We’ll be at this for a while.

Here’s a fun time!  Let’s talk the characters!  Persona is a very character-driven series, and Persona 3 marks a point in the series where you started going over each of them with a magnifying glass.  So what say we dig into them, and see what they’re all about.  Starting with the PCs.  Well, the PC and the sorta-PCs.  They’re not NPCs.  But you don’t control them directly.  Except for that one version where you do.  Uh… maybe I should just lower-case it then.  Let’s talk about the PC and the pCs.  

Also, another warning here.  This is spoiler territory.  I would imagine that if you’re going to play the game, you would have done so by now, but just in case, if you still want to take it on, might want to stop here.  Else we’ll be revealing all sorts of secrets.

Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad (S.E.E.S.)

The party as a whole.  S.E.E.S. is an officially sanctioned student club at Gekkoukan High School, who apparently don’t blink at having a club with “Execution Squad” in the name.  Given the Shadow stuff is all supposed to be secret, I wonder what school staff think S.E.E.S. actually does.  Staff advisor is the school principal, Shuji Ikutsuki, who you never actually see doing any principalling, although in my experience the principal’s only duties are to yell at you when you’re having fun and keep you from flirting in the hallways, so…  In any case, leadership structure is a little varied.  Mitsuru Kirijo is definitely the group’s leader, and she and Ikutsuki are usually the ones to set goals, plan strategies, and coordinate activities, with Akihiko Sanada serving as the group’s underboss, taking more direct action in building up its members and keeping them in line with Mitsuru’s direction.  In the field, however, the protag calls the shots, due to his unique wild card ability allowing him the greatest degree of tactical flexibility.

I think S.E.E.S. is unique in that it’s not your typical group of fire-forged friends.  Most every other RPG will see a lot of strong bonds develop amongst the cast.  Even every other game in the Persona series will have the main cast incredibly strongly together by the game’s end.  Except for Persona 2: Innocent Sin, which ended by killing one of the characters and wiping all the remaining one’s memories except for one who responded by turning into a huge douchebag so the rest wouldn’t lead to the world being destroyed again.  That’s the odd one out.  Anyways, S.E.E.S. is a lot more realistic about it.  The main characters do feel strongly for each other, and do develop good bonds among each other, but the natures of those bonds vary from truly being friends in some to just being good coworkers of sorts in others.  There’s a lot of intergroup conflict, as you would expect if you stuck a bunch of teenagers together and pushed them to do just about anything.  Yukari seems to really hate Mitsuru for much of the opening, before their joint conflicts and traumas lead them to opening up to each other and becoming great friends.  Akihiko is welcoming but aloof and doesn’t really get close to anybody except Mitsuru and Shinjiro.  Junpei spends a big chunk of time resenting and constantly trying to one-up you before he ever actually gets close.  The group starts out rather impersonal among each other, before many, but not all, start developing some true bonds, and they’re not a perfectly cohesive group, in all.  There’s times where the group loses their way, individual members drift apart or strike out on their own aims, or something shocks them and they each need to spend time alone to process.  It leads to a lot of that good character development that we love in these sort of stories, and also sets this group apart from many others.   This is a bit outside the scope of this game, but the Answer shows that the protagonist, your character, did a lot to keep everyone together and moving in one direction; after they’re dead, the members of S.E.E.S. lose a lot of what bound everyone to each other and start drifting apart, although they do find common ground and a good level of trust in each other again when Mitsuru later reorganizes anti-Shadow activities, as seen in the Persona 4 Arena games.

Every member of S.E.E.S. has some sort of complications in their relationships with their parents that lead to them growing and operating independently of them.  Some don’t get along with their parents, some have been deeply hurt by them, and some are tragically orphaned.  Likewise, everyone outside of the protagonist doesn’t really fit in with society as a whole.  Akihiko is popular for his looks and accomplishments but has no social skills, so doesn’t really have any close bonds outside of S.E.E.S.  Mitsuru has a hard time relating with anyone that doesn’t have her same upbringing.  Junpei is so wild he puts people off.  Fuuka is very shy and has a hard time opening up with people.  Etc.  Between the two of those factors, perhaps that level of disconnection from one’s family and community is necessary to independently muster up a persona in corporeal form.  

Hey, lets dig into these guys.

Eyes on Death’s Gambit

You know Dark Souls, right?  It’s a great game.  Absolutely phenomenal.  Honestly one of the best I’ve played.  We’ve spent some time on it.  Well, let’s imagine you’re a game designer.  And you look at Dark Souls.  And you see how fantastic it is.  And you’re like “Aww, I wish I made that.”  You find your craft at the top of its form and wish you could be there, making something of that level.

Well, Death’s Gambit is what you would get if you just went ahead and made Dark Souls again anyway, and put your stamp on it and called it yours.

Honestly, that describes the game really well.  This is 2d indie action-platformer Dark Souls.  Everything about the game, from its structure, to its set up, to its atmosphere, to its means of storytelling, absolutely everything was incredibly clearly inspired by Dark Souls.  Even the unique things it does were built on a Dark Souls base, rather than truly standing on their own.  For a while, I wasn’t sure what I thought about it.  The game is good.  No doubt about that.  This is a team that was just making Dark Souls in a different form, sure, but also a team that truly understood what makes Dark Souls great, way more than most of the game’s imitators.  But the thought I struggled with was whether or not there was a place for a game like this.  Like, why would I play a Dark Souls imitator if I could just play the original?  

It took a while, but eventually, the unique bits about Death’s Gambit won me over.  Particularly, it was the more compact nature of Death’s Gambit that did it for me.  I love Dark Souls.  It is a hugely dense, long-form game.  The run we did here took me over 70 hours of game time, and there are plenty of those hours I didn’t make any real progress in, just trying and failing and learning and trying again over and over.  Dark Souls is a huge, multi-layered cake.  Death’s Gambit is a cupcake.  And sometimes, you just want a cupcake.  You get the complete experience in around ten hours game time.  Even though the bosses required a similar mechanically complex means of handling, and had the same scale of tension as Dark Souls, they were far more achievable and it doesn’t take quite as much an investment in time to achieve them.  The levels have less back and forth, better placed checkpoints, and it doesn’t take as long to traverse them.  So yeah, here, you get a lot of what you probably love about Dark Souls, but you’re able to do it with less of an investment of time.  And I ended up finding that really valuable.  Snack size Dark Souls is really meaningful as well, especially when you don’t have the emotional bandwidth to do the “Try, Die, Learn, Repeat” for hours on end that Dark Souls requires before you complete any particular challenge.

And I do rather like a lot of the unique things it does here, some of which wouldn’t work out in OG Dark Souls.  In addition to your starting class being a selection of stats and starting equipment, they also come with their own abilities and skill trees.  You can still spec any class however you want and gear them with whatever they have the stats for, but your unique abilities and your skill trees are different for every class, and both give more replayability as well as more impact.  I wouldn’t want that in Dark Souls, the ability to design anything however you want there is really powerful to the game’s structure, but it works a lot better in a quicker game.  So does the way they’ll sometimes interrupt your deaths to give you a bit of story before they revive you.  Your character here is a defined personality with a bit of backstory, which I wouldn’t want in Dark Souls but I feel they were able to make work here.  I also have to give particular props to the way this game handles death.  Normally, in Dark Souls and all the games that copied it thinking this was why Dark Souls was good without understanding the other factors around this, when you die, you lose all your money/experience points unless you can get to where you were and grab those back.  Here, you leave behind one use of your standard recovery item.  Which you can choose to pay out the nose with via money/experience if you can’t get those back yourself, so that option is there, but it’s not by default.  It still keeps death feeling like it has consequence and impact, but it’s not as punitive and time-sinky as losing your combined cash/development resource.  That’s something I’d absolutely like to see more Souls-likes picking up on.  Between that and the better-placed checkpoints, you can bounce back from failure with a lot less frustration, which is fantastic in a game that’s built around you failing a whole lot.  Honestly, the walk back after Death in Dark Souls was always my least favorite part of the game, and it almost absolutely ruined both Demon Souls and Bloodborne for me.  You have a game here that mitigates it very well, while still using the same structure, so… yeah.  Good going.  

Combat maintains the relatively slower pace, high consquence actions, and generally more thoughtful, tactical feel of Dark Souls, although it’s slight faster.  You’ve got a couple of additional factors here, though.  Being a 2D action platformer, of course you have to worry about aerial combat and environmental threats.  Positioning becomes a lot more important, and you’ll need to know the range and arc of your weapons in a variety of different circumstances, both ground-based and in the air.  As in Dark Souls, defense is your primary consideration in most circumstances, so you’ll need to keep an eye out for how you and your enemy will move in all these circumstances as well.  In addition to your bread and butter weapon attacks, you also equip three abilities at a time, most of which will have you do a heavy attack, and will often also leave an ongoing buff, debuff, or other active factor for the next while.  There’s a fair amount of variety to them, and I found myself really relying on them a lot as the game progressed.  In fact, by the time of the endgame, my own success seemed to lie just as much as my designing equipment and abilities in effective combination as it did with my in-the-moment twitch reflexes and decision making.

Presentation in this game is a bit weird.  The art is absolutely gorgeous.  All over.  It looks really fantastic in screenshots.  The animation is horrible.  The game makes heavy use of rotoscoping, even for basic animations, and with the complexity of the sprites, it looks particularly unnatural to see them wholly shifted into angles.  You get stray pixels and mismatched components everywhere.  Which is a shame.  Because the art design is so good, and the pixel art, generally, so fitting, this game could have been a visual treat, but that ends up just making the poor animations stand out.  Music is pretty great, though.  Definitely worth a listen.  

Storywise, it does have a lot of the opaque storytelling that Dark Souls did so well, giving hints and pieces in item descriptions and bits of dialogue and whatnot, and having a lot of features you come across that are only hinted at, while also having a more clear throughline than Dark Souls had.  You’ve got a defined character, Sorun, a soldier of a nation that’s been locked in a decades’ long war with a nation of lizardfolk that had uncovered the secret to immortality.  The rulers want the secret of immortality themselves, while Sorun’s looking for his mother, who was drafted into this same war when he was a child and never returned.  Sorun, is killed in battle early on, but Death appears before him, and offers him a deal.  Death, understandably, isn’t a fan of immortality being out there, and if Sorun is willing to slay all the immortals of the land, Death will grant him eternal life himself.  However, he warns that immortality has costs of its own.  Sorun agrees, and a contract is signed, although Sorun’s more concerned with his own aims, and uses the quest against the immortals as a means to an end.

The world of Siradon here is also rather interesting as well, and it does some nifty things of its own.  As Death warned, immortality has not been kind to its residents, and although everyone else wants it, as you venture inward you find that it has caused this civilization to tear itself apart.  You’ll run across high magic establishments.  You’ll run across unique takes on standard fantasy settings.  You’ll get hints that things aren’t quite as clear as expected, through some enemies and locations that seem way out of place.  You’ll end up in absolutely freaky locations that seem straight out of the depths of your fears.  And through it all, you’ll get these hints, leading you along to greater places.  The locations are phenomenal, both from a soulsian level design perspective as well as from a lore/backstory one.

Also, I’ve got to give good props to the boss fights here.  The bosses are the best parts of the game, and all of them deliver a great amount of tension.  Some of them used mechanics I hadn’t seen before in a game like this.  And almost all of them hit that fantastic Souls level of skill ceilings, where they seem completely impossible at first, but you try, and fail, and learn and grow as you’re doing so, until you earn the ability to overcome them and feel absolutely phenomenal doing so.  It doesn’t take as long as Dark Souls did, as I previously mentioned, and they’re not as complicated, but they’re still thrilling fights nonetheless.

So yeah, it took me a while to warm up to Death’s Gambit, but I ended up really enjoying my time with it.  This is a game that copies Dark Souls so closely it’s not possible for it to be anything more, but it does feature enough smart changes and care in the design that it does create something different.  I could definitely see myself diving back into it, and its more compact design makes it easier to do so when I’m jonesing for some Souls goodness but not ready to make a huge commitment for it.

Project G-Godzilla vs. Hedorah (1971)

Alternative Title: The one that was made on drugs, probably

Ask Godzilla fans what they think about Godzilla vs. Hedorah and you’ll get reactions ranging from “eh, it’s OK” to “OMG this is the worst!”  One thing they’ll all agree on though, is that this film is balls to the wall, pants on head, writers with cocaine and a dartboard WEIRD.  This movie runs like a fever dream.  Full of things that you never expected, never thought you’d see, and after you saw them, you’ll wonder why the hell they showed it to you in the first place.  

So this one follows up on Son of Godzilla, being a low budget, quick turnaround, child-oriented take on Godzilla, which is frankly where the series is going for the next while, so buckle in.  Had a new director, Yoshimitsu Banno for this one.  He got fired from the series after this.  Longtime series producer Tomoyuki Tanaka absolutely hated this film.  But Banno did come back to help out with the 2014 American Godzilla.  So… that I guess.  Anyways, this wasn’t a film that was set up to succeed, and then had some really weird and questionable decisions upon release, was reviewed horribly upon release, and had significant ramifications for that.

But, at the same time, there are some interesting things it does.  It’s limited budget was used with purpose, Hedorah is legitimately threatening, and it has some neat parallels to some of the better Godzilla films, so it has some layers to it.

Also, Banno started this film with an ENVIRONMENTAL message in mind, inspired by seeing heavy pollution in the rivers and smog in cities.  So there is an absolutely heavy ENVIRONMENTAL moral to this story.  That being that the ENVIRONMENT IS GOOD and POLLUTION IS BAD.  It will hit you over and over again with all the grace of a jackhammer.  So, keep that in mind as you’re reading this.  To be fair, this was made at a point where ENVIRONMENTAL conditions in Japan were absolutely horrible, and it got better in the years following this film, so maybe it was super called for and Godzilla vs. Hedorah is exactly what Japan needed to make a comeback.  But in any case, there are few morals that will be slammed into your brain harder than this.  It will crash and splatter everywhere.  Kind of messy, in all.  If there’s ever a point while you’re reading this that you’re thinking something other than how absolutely terrible it is that there’s POLLUTION in the ENVIRONMENT, you need to adjust your expectations and start over again.  It doesn’t matter that nothing else in the film makes sense.  ENVIRONMENT!!!