Mommy’s not here, gotta fight! The Persona 3 Retrospective, Part 6(b) – Characters: Yukari and Junpei

Part 6(a) S.E.E.S. and Protag

Yukari Takeba

The Lovers

Ah, Yukari.  In my view, she’s the most realistically complicated character in the Persona series.  She is complex and inconsistent in much the same ways that real life people are.  She is very open and socialable and popular and has no close friends whatsoever and is incredibly lonely. She’s a caring person who keeps an eye out for the needs of those around her and she frequently lashes out at others with little to no provocation. She is incredibly insightful, often picking up on things that nobody else even notices and remains grounded even when everyone else is distracted, and also fears abstract concepts and fictional spooks greatly.   She’s a lot more complex a character than you usually find in fiction.  As a very complex character, fan opinions of her also vary quite a bit.  Some like her.  Some hate her.  Some are annoyed by her at first, but like her more as the game goes on and she develops as a character.  Some start out a fan of hers, but then hit a point in her social link where Japanese and western principles and values vary greatly and she ditches you if you do what seems most natural and supportive to her from our perspective.  Fun times.  

Yukari officially joined S.E.E.S. a short while before you did, although she’s been on their radar for a while before.  She just recently awakened to her persona before the start of the game, and isn’t yet adept at facing down the emotional hurdle required in summoning it.  When Yukari was a kid, her father was one of the scientists working on the Kirijo Group’s Shadow project, the thing that ended up creating the Dark Hour in the first place.  When things went south there, the only thing the public knew was that there was an explosion that killed a lot of scientists, for which the survivors used Yukari’s dad as a scapegoat, posthumously.  Because we’re dealing with a society that’s horrible and hateful in this game, although Yukari’s dad also died in the blast, everyone around treated Yukari and her family horribly because of it.  Between the grief from their loss and the combination of pity and hatred they faced, they had to move quite a bit of times, preventing them from building any real connections with anyone.  In her grief, Yukari’s mother sought solace in a series of short-term romantic entanglements, which led to Yukari being neglected, at least in her view.  Yukari started living alone, some time before starting at Gekkoukan High School, and it seems she and her mother rarely talk, now.  Ten years after her father died, Yukari gets a time capsule letter he left for her, full of good feelings and love, and with that, Yukari doesn’t believe he really could have done the things he’s been accused of, and, knowing his experiments were tied with Gekkoukan High School somehow, enrolls there to figure out what exactly happened.  

Eyes on Dead Cells

Yeeeeeaaaaaah!  Let’s talk Dead Cells!

So, Dead Cells is a roguelike action platformer with some Metroidvania elements.  It’s awesome.  Sorry for spoiling the rest of the review there.

It’s also hard, as befits a roguelike.  But sometimes you have to play and beat those hard games.  Because that’s how people know that your penis is big.  Even if you don’t have a physical penis.  Your metaphorical penis is big.  The penis of your soul.  

Anyways, Dead Cells is really a great model of what makes roguelikes so enjoyable to play.  For those who aren’t super familiar with the model, let’s go through what makes a roguelike a roguelike.  The model traditionally built around having a high degree of challenge, a very high skill ceiling, and permadeath, meaning that the games are very hard and if you die you’re right back at the beginning, but there’s a lot of room for you to get very very good at them and they’ll throw challenges at you for near every level of skill.  Given that you’ll be dying and going back to the beginning a lot, the model makes heavy use procedurally-generated levels (well, at least semi-procedurally generated, a lot of games will cheat by just having premade rooms connected in a randomized layout) and randomized gear and resources, which cuts down on the repetition by changing up the levels and your playstyle each time.  In fact, the randomized gear adds a lot to the gameplay of the model, as you have to try out and adapt to a lot of different capabilities and your strategy needs to adjust constantly to the specific things your character is capable of.  In more recent games, roguelikes have started adopting a practice of having you collect resources in each run that unlocks upgrades or new weapons or whatnot that linger between characters, meaning the game will grow as you play it more.  Success in a roguelike usually relies on three factors, your knowledge of the game and its future possibilities and various microcomponents, your ability to use that knowledge to make strong decisions about how you’re building your character with the limited and randomized resources available to you as well as your decisions to manage risk, and your in the moment gameplay skills in whatever genre the roguelike is.

So Dead Cells takes that foundation, just as described there, and builds on top of it a very technically solid action platformer.  Your main character is… well, a sentient blobby mass possessing a headless corpse, but it really doesn’t control like a sentient blobby mass possessing a headless corpse.  Your character is quick and incredibly responsive, and it feels very natural controlling them.  It does take a little bit of getting used to, but soon you’ll be zipping back and forth around enemies, dodging through their attacks, leaping through platforms and coming up behind them to bring the pain in no time.  Moreover, this game does a thing.  A thing with speed.  Every time you kill an enemy, you get a speed boost for the next several second.  This stacks to a certain extent, so if you’re smacking down enemies over and over again, you’ll get pretty darn zippy, which you can then use to beat the level in record time or to be even more deadly against your foes.  Complimenting the great controls and speed here are that your rank and file enemies are very distinct in their moves.  They telegraph their attacks really well, both with their sprites rearing back as well as with a nice exclamation point decal alerting you to the attack, even if it’s coming from off screen.  They’ll also pause just long enough for you to take a single action, aggressive or defensive, as long as your reflexes are on par.  There may be a bit of trouble time as you get to recognize the enemies and the nature of their attacks, but once you learn how and what they do, if you get hit, it’s because of a mistake you made and you know exactly what that mistake was.  Usually.  Because there was at least one point where I got killed by an enemy that attacked in half the time its fellows did with absolutely not warning.  Jerk.  But yeah, the game is hugely demanding and its very easy to make mistakes, but aside from those few times, its completely fair in its challenge.