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You’re the Only One, One World, One Love! The Persona 3 Retrospective, Part 6(d); Characters-Fuuka and Aigis

Posted by Aether on March 3, 2021

Fuuka Yamagishi

The Priestess

Starting here, every Persona game is going to have a member of the party that doesn’t become a playable character themselves, but rather frees up your mission control member to focus on combat. In this game, that’s Fuuka. When you get Fuuka, you really get Mitsuru. Fuuka just takes Mitsuru’s place as the voice in your ear.

Anyways, Fuuka is demure, shy, and physically very small. She apparently spends a fair amount of time in the hospital, and that’s where Akihiko and Mitsuru first come to realize her potential to use a persona. However, she doesn’t seem to be especially sickly. She’s also revealed as missing a lot of school, although not due to illness. Her parents are relatively average folk among a family of high achievers, and out of jealousy of their more successful siblings, put a lot of pressure on her to succeed and raise their social standing. At school, she’s rather horribly bullied by the local ganguro girls, culminating in them locking her inside the school gym and leaving her there. Anyways, the game doesn’t make it clear, but I imagine that all her time out sick is really time trying to escape from the stress she’s facing at both school and home. If that’s the only place she has that’s safe for her, I can see why she’d be finding herself there with frequency.

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

Watch Out, They Move, They Diss You Loud! The Persona 3 Retrospective, Part 6(c)-Characters: Akihiko and Mitsuru

Posted by Aether on November 29, 2020

Part 6(b)Yukari and Junpei

Akihiko Sanada

The Emperor

Akihiko is basically the ace of your group. Which is fitting. He is left-handed, after all, a member of that genetically superior race. Dude is good at nearly everything. He’s an excellent boxer, and is riding on a 16-match win streak as of the game’s start. He’s a great combatant against shadows as well, shown taking them on without backup in the game’s opening act and being one of two people you need available to be allowed to take on the tower of Tartarus in the early game. And he’s got a sharp mind and a stable core, to boot, coming up with great tactics on his own while also keeping S.E.E.S. emotionally grounded during its most difficult moments.

Unfortunately, Akihiko’s also the character most ruined by the sequels completely discarding a lot of what makes him special and the character growth he went through here in favor of over-emphasizing just a few strange moments from him. So let’s go over just who Akihiko is in Persona 3.

The big, central thing to Akihiko’s arc and personality is his constant drive for self-improvement. He’s incredibly competitive, although it often seems that he’s competing more with himself than others. He often drives others to do the same as well, taking on a sort of mentoring/managerial role. He’s the one who guides and protects you as you’re new to the art of shadow-fighting, introducing you to all the resources S.E.E.S. has mustered thus far and making sure you’re adequately prepared. He also takes a direct hand in helping the academically-challenged members of S.E.E.S. prep for big tests. When others are trying to temper your expectations of an upcoming athletic meet you’re competing in in the face of the stiff competition you’re set to face there, he’s the one to encourage you most whole-heartedly. His drive to improve does go too far at times, seeing him take risks alone that others are really uncomfortable with and leave him injured, refuse to rest to allow his injuries to heal, and do make him seem insensitive others when they think he’s focusing on the wrong things. It can also make him a bit single-minded. Shinjiro does remark at one point that he is so focused on the future that seeing him think about the past even a bit means that something is dearly wrong.

The game dances around this a bit, spending a lot of time hinting that Akihiko’s got some traumatic events in his past, before coming out that this drive for self-improvement comes from the death of his sister in a fire. It seems they were living at an orphanage at that point, but otherwise, there aren’t a whole lot of details to go around on it. He felt a whole lot of guilt for not being able to save her, and devoted everything to getting strong enough that he’d never lose someone like that again. That pursuit of improvement has its good and bad points throughout the story, as seen above, and continues up until the death of one of his closest friends, Shinjiro. At that point, he’s forced to come face-to-face with the fact that, as powerful and skilled in so many different ways as he has gotten, there are things in life that he will still be completely unable to prevent. His pursuit of improvement as a safety measure will never be absolute, and he won’t be able to save everyone important to him from everything arrayed against them. At that realization, he recommits himself to fighting against the dark hour, knowing that he’ll need to find a new way to live once its done.

And with that, maybe you can see a bit why I find the ‘Let’s eat protein! Train all the time! Fight fight fight!’ personality he adopts in Persona 4 Arena and Persona Q so disgusting.

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

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

Posted by Aether on October 19, 2020

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.

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

Posted by Aether on September 30, 2020

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.

Right Here, Shadow 10 o’clock Direction Seize the Moment, Destroy the Nation! The Persona 3 Retrospective Part 5-Plot and Themes

Posted by Aether on July 19, 2020

Yeah, so, as it turns out, a combination of my limited schedule and my desire for variety in what I write leads me to not move through these long-form projects quite so quickly. But you know what? Time is on my side. As long as we keep moving forward, we’ll get to the end eventually. One of the perks of being functionally immortal. So let’s get to the next step of our Persona 3 retrospective. Today, talking about the plot.

PLOT

Persona 1 had a pretty barebones plot. Persona 2 gave it a lot more focus, but still had it second to the gameplay. In Persona 3, the plot eclipses the rest of the game. At the time, this was really rare, the gameplay is structured around what’s going on in the plot, rather than vice versa. The pace of the plot progression controls the way the gameplay develops. And you can tell that the story is where more importance is placed.

So it had better be a darn good one.

Also, be mindful, I am dropping some spoiler bombs here. Some absolute spoiler nukes. If you haven’t played the game yet, and you still want to don’t read the rest.

So, normally, I wait until the end of this to talk about themes. Give you a sense of what the plot is, in itself, before we jump into talking about the hidden meanings in there. And we’re going to do that. But let’s lead off, as well, because there’s one theme that’s absolutely pervasive to this game, and I feel you absolutely need to know that going in to get a second-hand handle on this plot.

The Battlegrounds Right Here: Persona 3 Retrospective, Part 4-Setting

Posted by Aether on March 26, 2020

Part 1-Intro

Part 2-Gameplay

Part 3-Presentation

Nailing down the setting of Persona 3 can be a little difficult. There’s a bit going on here.

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As is traditional for an SMT game, Persona 3 takes place over a much smaller geographic area than most other rpgs, in this case limiting itself to a single city, Iwatodai. Iwatodai is a large coastal that is a major area of operations, although not the headquarters, for a major business megacorp, the Kirijo Group. Much of the city’s landmass is made up of an artificial island, Tatsumi Port Island, that I would guess the Kirijo Group played a major hand in constructing. It comes complete with all the major amenities you’d expect a large city to have; schools, shopping centers, train stations, residences, etc.

The Kirijo Group seems to have their hands in half of everything that goes on in Iwatodai. They own the school, your dorm, the shopping mall, tons of businesses, probably your dog, some of the residents might be their slaves in disguise, it’s hard to draw the line there. And we’re going to get into spoiler territory from this point forward, so watch that. The Kirijo Group used to be a part of the Nanjou Corporation, of which one of your characters from Persona 1 and 2 was part of. They went independent some time ago, but still maintain a pretty close partnership there. Perhaps because of this connection, they became aware of the supernatural, particularly the persona that your crew use and the shadows that are newly introduced this game, and were experimenting on them, their owner eventually seeking to use their powers to create a ‘time manipulation device’. Not a time machine. A ‘time manipulation device’.

Of course, as with every experiment ever conducted, this went wrong and almost destroyed the world. Well, in this case, it ended up creating the whole dark hour deal that we mentioned earlier. Whatever time manipulation magic they had going on there ended up inserting an extra hour into the day between midnight and midnight o’ one. The experiment was conducted in what would become Gekkoukan High School, so, as that’s the epicenter of the event, it faces the most drastic transformation, becoming the dungeon tower Tartarus during the dark hour. Everywhere else gets bathed in a sickening light, gets inundated with bloodstains, and sees monstrous shadows prowling all over the place. So yeah, dark hour, not exactly pleasant times. Although, you know, you can just stay in your dorm and get an extra hour of sleep. So, on the bad side, people are either dying or having their desires consumed and becoming one of the Lost. But on the good side, you get to be better rested. So I’d say it’s really a wash.

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Lets talk about the Shadows a bit. Persona 2 introduced Shadows already, although these are quite a bit different. Like the Shadows from Persona 2, these Shadows were created by the collective unconscious, but that’s where the similarities end. The Shadows fit a lot more fully into the Jungian Psychology mold the game series has been using, being manifestations of the parts of the emotions, thoughts, and feelings that people don’t want to acknowledge. In Persona 3, they gather in the collective unconsciousness, clumping together until they take some monstrous physical form. Which is then vulnerable to pummeling. Most people will transmogrify into a coffin during the dark hour, which is apparently a defensive instinct, them playing dead so the Shadows will ignore them. Not everyone does, though. Some keep their form, and serve as prey for the monsters, their minds being eaten and forced into Apathy Syndrome until our heroes beat the big shadow boss at the next full moon, and temporarily drive the shadows back. Some will endure the dark hour until they get taken over by their own Shadows, their physical form dissolving and being replaced by a Shadow themselves. And some just do fine, there.

There’s not a whole lot in the game to dictate why people enter into the Dark Hour without transmogrifying. I can make some conjecture, though. Survival instincts can be simplified into being one of fight, flight , or freeze. Transmogrifying into a coffin would be a pretty freezy habit. It could be as simple as those who don’t transmogrify simply have another instinct take its place. As Persona 3’s expansion, The Answer, and Persona 4 indicate, a Persona is a Shadow that’s been mastered and is able to fight against them. So the Persona-users who don’t transmogrify would do so simply because they have the ability and the will to fight the Shadows. Their survival instinct falls into the ‘fight’ category, so they don’t ‘freeze’ into coffins. Those poor souls without that power who end up falling victim and becoming the Lost could well be those who are more given to flee than to freeze, whose instincts tell them to get out of dodge rather than hide or wait for them to go away. Since running away hasn’t proven to be very effective against the shadows, it doesn’t typically end up well for them, as far as we can see. Some people are able to calmly enter into the Dark Hour once they’re aware of its existence, and for those, I’d assume it’s because they don’t feel the need to trigger any of their survival instincts at all. For that matter, we do see at least once that persona-users are able to get people out of their coffins and into dark hour awareness, although we’re not given much in the way of an idea as how they can do that. I could theorize within the framework I’ve already established, but I’ve probably conjectured away from the base enough.

Persona 3 is strangely sparse on details of the Dark Hour. Which is a little strange, given the series. Personas 1, 4, and 5 were very clear on where their alternate world comes from, and 2 had everything taking place in its own world, and so didn’t need to bother with it. 3’s just not explicit. Although the series has gone to the ‘collective unconsciousness as a physical location’ well before, and will do so again, that’s not the case here. The Dark Hour is explicitly related to the existence of shadows in some way, and specifically related to Nyx, the shadow embodying humanity’s desire for death. Perhaps it’s for that reason the death and blood imagery is all over the place during the dark hour, and that the dark hour is so draining to everyone within it. After all, the depression and anguish that would be embodied in the dark hour would be rather draining. It’s not explored whether the dark hour is a local phenomenon, or something that happens world-wide.

Like much else, Tartarus, the massive tower that your school turns into during the Dark Hour, is super symbolic and representative of the game’s themes. In this case, it’s representative of the theme of the developers desire to have a place for you to grind. And that’s about it. Really, as much as I will go out of my way to connect poorly arranged pieces of a puzzle in a story, I can’t find a fit for this one. Tartarus is barely connected to the plot, doesn’t really seem to have a thematic fit outside of its reaching for the moon, and doesn’t really seem to deliver anything narratively. It’s where you go to fight shadows when you don’t have a plot-related mission or anything to do. Akihiko considers it a training ground, and we could say, given that it’s growing out of the spot where shadows were unleashed into the world, it’s a hive or nest for shadows. Mayhaps this is where the new ones emerge into the rest of the world from. It’s established that time flows differently there, as Fuuka was trapped in Tartarus for days, yet felt only a few hours passed. It’s also the spot where Nyx is destined to make her descent. Otherwise, it’s mostly a Macguffin. It’s something the story tells you is important, but doesn’t really do all that much to establish it. It does serve, however, as a massive call back to Persona 1’s Snow Queen quest, being a big tower made out of a school named Tartarus that has Nyx at the end of it.

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Perhaps the most striking thing about Iwatodai, outside of all the supernatural stuff and hidden magic conflicts and stuff going on there, is the people in there. Overall, it’s a pretty dour, selfish group. And that comes through a lot. This is a community that largely just leaves the Lost, people who have overall lost any ability to take care of themselves or do anything, completely alone, as long as they’re out of the way. We don’t see them do much to help out the invalids right in front of them. Moreover, this is also the same community that readily organizes into doomsday cults given little provocation and actively takes part in murder requests once the rumor gets out that they work. Missing students get ignored. The fact that the hospital can hold people against their will on behalf of the Kirijo Group is forgotten. Students will whine about going to classmates funerals. Scam artists can proliferate there with little reprisal. The horrible things the town and the people therein are going through end up treated as little more than gossip to most. Even in your social links, oftentimes you’re running across people completely self-centered, thinking only of their own path through life and not how they pave over others.

And yet, even then, there’s glimpses of good in people. Starting with your crew, who through all the traumas they’re going through, still keep their eyes on the common good and willingly sacrifice themselves for others, up to and including their very lives. Many of your social links will see people come to a realization of just how self-centered they’re being, and turn around to make amends and improve other’s lives. And, in the end, all your friends do come around for you, too. It’s small, in the wake of the self-centered juggernaut that is the town as a whole, but you can find lots of people with real gems inside of them, you just need to brush off the dirt to get there with many of them.

You Best Took it Serious When You Heard the Tone. The Persona 3 Retrospective Part 3: Presentation

Posted by Aether on January 26, 2020

Part 1-Intro

Part 2-Gameplay

Part 4-Setting

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As previously mentioned (several times), the Shin Megami Tensei franchise as a whole saw a big shift that would change the direction it took forevermore with the release of Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. Nocturne was really the first of the modern Megaten games, changing nearly every aspect of game design. That game brought a whole new level of design, tone, creative direction, and immersion to the series that the rest of the games would follow. So too does Persona 3. A lot of them are gameplay focused, covered in the previous section. There’s a couple that impact the way that the game presents itself.

One of the biggest changes Nocturne made was moving the series away from the old-school CRPG-inspired model into something more akin to the typical turn-based JRPG. But Persona was always a series that was more JRPG-esque than the typical Megaten. So what does Nocturne bring there? Well, it turns the Persona series into a more modern JRPG. Starting with the POV. Your Point of View is something you probably don’t think very much of in games, but it can have a big impact on the how feel of the game. In this case, the POV, lowered a bit closer to your character than past Persona games, serves to put you more into the action. There’s more of a sense of energy as you’re navigating the dungeon, with the walls zipping by you and the shadows right in your face. Battle will place you right behind your lead, feeling the enemy’s presence as they tower over your character. School will… feel… schoolier because of… you there…. okay it’s getting away from me at that point. Point is, even compared to other games of its genre, Persona 3 will play with your point of view, particularly in the battle section, to make you really feel what’s going on. The camera’s zipping and zooming and makes sure you’ve got that scale of your guys against the bad guys, and it’s both rather effective and mostly unnoticed, just like you want good camera work to be.

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Art design is another really big update to the game, here. Nocturne saw art director Kazuma Kaneko make big designs to all the series’ demons, creating a very distinct style and specific appearances that would be used until this very day. Persona 3, as with nearly everything else, makes use of those same demon designs for your personae. However, this game saw the rise of Shigenori Soejima into the head art role, as Kaneko was wanting to stretch his protege’s skills. Soejima was already character designer for Persona 2, and the characters in this game follow along those lines, creating a distinctive slim, lengthened character design for the series that would become rather distinct. With Soejima charged with designing everything else, it would create something that stands apart from the rest of Shin Megami Tensei. The shadows take particular note, becoming tarot-inspired bastardizations of rather common real world items and creatures. Beyond that, though, Tatsumi Port Island, where your characters spend most of their day to day lives, appropriately looks a lot brighter, cleaner, and more active than the typical post apocalyptic Megaten game or even the typical fantasy settings of the time, while the various settings of Tartarus manage to successfully convey the odd otherworldiness of the collective unconscious it resides in. The dark hour scenes look particularly striking, effectively taking the otherwise normal and pleasant looking places and using largely coloration to instill them with a sense of wrongness. The art design of the game is really on point, and manages to carry the anime-style off well while introducing enough twists on there to make it unique.

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And that art style is important, because you see a lot of it in the story delivery. A lot of it is dealt in a somewhat visual novel-esque fashion, lending more to the comparison than just the social linking part of the game. See, stuff goes deeper than you expected. Even for the internet. Even for the Persona-fan part of the internet. Which is a much angrier place than even normal games internet, for whatever reason. A lot of the plot things are all text boxes and character portraits, in front of the 3D rendering of whatever’s actually going on. It’s not a very visually active means of telling a story, to be sure, and it takes some patience to enjoy. I’m a fan of visual novels, so I had no problem of it, but it’s not for everyone. It does lead to a bit of an odd dichotomy, where when things are physically happening, it’ll be rendered with your in-game characters and their animations, but then they’ll freeze and you have those 2D drawings and text boxes for all the speaking parts. Animations in the non-gameplay scenes are understated and kind of stiff, and would be more fitting with PS1 types of 3d animations than they are with the PS2. The story is really text heavy, though, and the strength of the writing is really what saves it. The music and the quality of voice acting also go a long way towards injecting a sense of energy into what are otherwise static and still scenes. You do get the occasional anime cutscene injected in there. They’re few and far between, as, you know, budgets used to be a thing that games tended to stick to before the HD era, but when they are, they tend to be pretty striking. The visual animation of those are really on point. Sound balancing leaves a lot to be desired, but they also tend to portray a lot of the most visually well-designed moment.

This is also where the series established another constant of giving each game a theme color. In this case, a light blue (unless you’re playing the FemC in the PSP version, in which case you get pink) covers every gameplay element there, from your HUD to your menus to your battle selection, both adding a cool and eerie component to your visuals as well as complementing the melancholy and trauma you’re often facing. Every bit of the daytime scenes are designed around this, as this blue is almost omnipresent, and your locations and characters are all either designed full of cool colors that complement this, or given the direct contrasts in a poppy red or orange to make them sharply stand out. This switches in the dark hour, though, in which a sickly green replaces the blue and invades everything, with a muted green filter being placed over the visuals while contrasting dark red bloodstains appears over everything. It’s stunning how constant this palette is over the 80 hour game without being overwhelming, and I really have to say, Persona 3 uses its coloration better than most any other game or piece of work I’ve seen, giving much more thoughtfullness to it than the “Orange and blue and call it a day” that would pervade the later years. The idea of having a theme color was so strong that the persona series would retroactively add it to rereleases of the previous games, giving the original Persona a deep steely gray theme and the Persona 2 duology a dark, muted red.

So art style is good. I’m glad for that. Because the graphics aren’t going to knock your socks off. Unless you’re not wearing socks. They might shift them in your drawer a little bit. They’re perfectly functional. They carry the strong art design smoothly, they make the visuals very understandable, and they’re never in the way. But they don’t go super far, either. This is not a graphically impressive game. It’s not bad at graphics. They’re just there. They’re OK.

What’s made the Persona series very distinct is that it takes place in modern times, in a familiar Japanese city. The visuals do carry it over well, here. The environments in Tatsumi Port Island are very detailed. Well, the school’s a little bland, which is a shame, because you’ll be spending a lot of time there, but maybe Japanese schools are bland in the first place. I don’t know. I’ve never been to one in meatspace. Out on the town is full of details. Train stations are busy and packed places, the mall is full of distinct stores, your dorm is very personal, the place looks to be very lived-in.

And, of course, there’s the music to talk about. So let’s talk about the music. Music in games can be a weird thing. It’s not going to make you have a good time if the game is at its core not great. And a great game with bad music can still be great. Music isn’t going to make or break your game. And yet, it can make or break your overall experience. Music is emotion. It’s drive. It’s energy. One of the big challenges with any artistic medium is making the viewer feel a part of it. Making them feel what’s going on on screen, or on stage, or whatever. The right music has the power to connect with that more directly than most anything else. It will make the emotional roller coaster reach greater highs and lower drops. It will hit you with the adrenaline of those cool action scenes. It will help you care about those characters, even if they’re facing things you never have and never will need to deal with in life. Music will not deliver something that’s not already there, but it will make what is hit you like a brick.

And the music in Persona 3 is top notch. In yet another series-setting trend, the Persona 3 soundtrack is so decidedly modern, in keeping with its modern setting. Other RPGs work their orchestral soundtracks, give you beautifully composed multilayered songs, make their string instruments weep for you. Nah, Persona 3 gives you Lotus Juice rapping his way through half the game. It’s hip hoppy, it’s modern, and it really adds a lot to the sense and tone of the game. It’s not all vocal tracks, of course, there’s plenty of the more orchestral stuff in there too, and they are really rather strong. But it’s the Jpop and hip hop tracks that really seem to add the most atmosphere and distinctness to the game. The music is fantastic, and I’ve been known to have the soundtrack on repeat as I’m going throughout my day. Some of the songs are truly touching. Memories of You still brings me big sexy manly tears whenever I hear it in context, and the fact that later releases insist on remixing and changing it is one of the few things that makes me nerdrage.

That said, there are a few problems with their implementation. The orchestral songs are mostly solid, but it seems they didn’t have as much experience with handling the vocals. Some hit really well. Some are just oddly placed. Biggest example is the one that’s playing when you’re hanging out in your dorm. It’s a relaxing place. You chat with your party, watch some tv, maybe work on some homework, there’s no danger, no rush, no pressure there. You’d expect a similarly chill and low pressure take. Instead, you get a song with a driving, sharp beat and harsh deep rapping. Likewise, there’s Mass Destruction, also known as BABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABY, the battle theme and therefore the song BABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABY you’re going to be hearing most often in that game BABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABY. And frankly, it can do without the BABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABY intro. It’s jarring, and frankly gets annoying with its frequency, given how much it pops up. With game music, you want something that can stay in the background of your mind, generally, and vocals grab your attention much more than instrumentals do (which is why the game’s vocals are in English, to give the Japanese players this benefit, but that’s not going to help us on this side of the language barrier). If lead-in to the song had been instrumental, I feel it would have been a smoother transition and jumping into a fight wouldn’t have felt so harsh, but as is, you will get tired of hearing that BABYBABYBABYBABYBABYBABY long before it’s done with you.

But those are really just nitpicks. Overall, the soundtrack is really fantastic. It’s well composed, breaks a lot of new grounds, combines orchestral composition with rap with jazz instrumentation, and adds an immeasurable amount to the game’s proceedings. It hits hard in what’s usually just the right ways.

Shadows of Mass Destruction. The Persona 3 Retrospective, Part 2-Gameplay

Posted by Aether on December 20, 2019

Part 1-Intro

Part 3-Presentation

Part 4-Setting

At this point in the Persona series, gameplay has truly become only part of the full experience. Persona 1 and 2 had plots too, and a lot of characterization, but they were still as much gameplay delivery engines as any other game out there. Starting in Persona 3, they put a lot more depth and content into their plots and characters, to the point where the gameplay is not the only selling point they have. And for a lot of people, the gameplay is not even the main reason they get into the game.

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Yet, no matter how good your story, setting, characters, etc. are, if the game side of your, you know, game, isn’t up to snuff, the game as a whole won’t be good. It’s been tried, and good plot really doesn’t make up for bad gameplay. So even with the Persona series running head-first into the story-based wall, let’s start by taking a look at where you’re actually going to be spending most of your time when you’re actually playing the game.

By this point, we’ve already had two, but three, but really two, games in the Persona canon. That’s enough to establish a pattern, right? Although both of those games are rather distinct from each other, there’s still some common design elements that we can pull out here.

So, what is makes a Persona game, and how do those elements relate to Persona 3? Well, thus far, to make a Persona, you take the typical for the time Shin Megami Tensei design, strip out a bunch of the more unique to the franchise and complicated features to simplify gameplay a bit and make it more accessible to the typical JRPG fan. And then you come up with some crazy and experimental features that few if any other games in the genre are doing and make them absolutely central to the whole experience. And then, of course, there’s the whole plot and themes making heavy use of Jungian Psychology personified, and the main characters with the variable stats and ability loadouts, the butterfly motifs, the vast sum of humanity summoning their own demise, multiple endings but not really, etc. Etc. There’s lots of stuff in the recipe for a Persona, and it all carries through to this game.

And I suppose this is a good time to mention, for pretty much this entire retrospective, I’m going to be basing it off the FES version of the game. For those not in the know, there was the original Persona 3, then, less than a year later in the US, Persona 3 FES which was basically Persona 3 with a bunch of DLC before DLC was a thing that you had to pay for, including a separate playable epilogue that we won’t get into here just yet. Then, years later, there came Persona 3 Portable, which incorporated all the gameplay updates from Persona 4 into Persona 3, gave you a choice in the gender of your protagonist and with that vastly increased the amount of content, at turning a lot of segments from more directly interactive bits into visual novel scenes in order to fit it all on the PSP disc. There’s a lot of discussion on which is better. I roll with the FES version because… well, that’s just the one I have. As much as the games industry obviously hates me for it with the remakes and rereleases and updates and Hyper Fighting Championship Editions Turbos they’re putting out, I make a practice of not buying games that I already own. So, sorry, P3P fans. Just going by what I have available to me.