I’ve already done a bit on Persona 4 in a post on Bitmob.com touching on some of the issues of sexuality, so I just wanted to focus on some of the other more “gamey” issues in this post.
I suppose I could start with the irony that in a game which wants you to take away the message that making connections with people is the only way you can succeed is an extremely isolating experience that can take anywhere from 60-100 hours to play, but that’s too easy.
I will say that the game does all it can to impart this lesson through the gameplay. Essentially, the game is a “life simulator” that wants you to balance everything from making money, studying for exams, improving your “characteristics”, spending time with your friends and running into dungeons. Each of these aspects of the game are interconnected, so you can’t ignore any of these aspects of your character’s life if you want to get the most out of the game.
So, making friends isn’t as simply as easy as just spending time with the person. You might need to have a talent for “Understanding” in order to be able to properly listen to one of your friend’s problems. Or, doing well at your exams (and you’ll write exams several times throughout the game) will impress your friends and improve your relationship with them.
You’ll also have to learn to speak to each person’s personality. For most characters, being nice is the best way to improve your relationship with them. But some people only respond to you if you are straightforward or disaffected. It’s a nice way to break up the “nice = good” equation that most games suffer from. For example, one character will tease your character by flirting with him and the fastest way to improve your relationship with her is to resist her advances.
So how does the “dating sim” part of the game line up with the actual gameplay? First and foremost, improving your relationship with your party members enables to provide several in combat bonuses and ultimately upgrade their abilities. Similarly, fusing Personas – the key to unlocking better abilities in the game – is made much easier if you have a close relationship with certain people in the game. Simply put, if you manage to improve your relationship with as many people as possible, the game becomes much easier.
Of course, the game also ties the theme of friendship into its narrative. Perhaps in a moment inspired by Super Metroid, in the final battle of the game and before you are able to strike the winning blow, the boss suddenly gains the ability to instant-kill your character. However, before the boss is able to kill you, each of your party members steps in to take the fatal blow. Of course, when all your friends are dead, there is no one left to save your character and he finally succumbs to the inevitable.
However, rather than get a game over screen, you are tossed into a cutscene. The game reminds you of all the friendships you have forged throughout the game (which seems to be procedurally generated based the actual progress you made) and you are resurrected and given one more chance to defeat the boss... which, like Samus in Super Metroid, you do with no problem.
I admit I’m not really doing the scene any justice and I was at the point in the game where I was expecting this exact ending to happen, but when it happened I did appreciate what the game was trying to do. It was a nice payoff for spending all those hours fostering your friendships with the other characters in the game and, as much as this can be said for ANY game, you really have to experience it yourself in order to appreciate the climax of the moment.
I’m starting to find that this is very much a Japanese trope in game design. There are many RPGs where you are in the middle of a battle in which agency is removed from the player in order to advance story. As I mentioned before in my FF4: TAY write-up, there are battles where you are simply meant to lose. I find it interesting that Western game design tends to go the other way – you’re locked into a certain path, but you always have some sense of control. Even in the “nuke” moment in CoD4 or the “forced” ending of Prince of Persia (2008), you’re still in control of the moment as the player.
It makes me wonder if it’s cultural. Clearly, I don’t have enough sociological knowledge of Japan (or even America, to be honest) to make anything but broad generalizations (otaku like being told what to do! Japanese people are afraid of choice!), so I won’t. It’s just interesting to see this “fork” in design philosophy, as subtle as it seems to be. I only wish I was qualified enough to attempt to draw any kind of real conclusion.
Before I begin to just ramble on too much, I just wanted to point out some examples of game design choices meant to limit the player that I noticed.
First is the SP system and it’s worth noting that this mechanic appeared in FF4: TAY as well. The game gives no real SP recovering items early in the game, forcing you to jump out of dungeons the moment you run out of SP. Of course, this becomes mostly irrelevant in the mid-to-late game as you’ll have various ways to recover SP fairly easily, but it’s still an interesting way to prevent you from endlessly grinding (which is unfortunately the natural action most people take when playing JRPGs).
Second is the fact that even after you max out their S-links and evolve their personas, Teddie and Yukiko are still weak to fire and ice respectively. Every other character develops a null or reflect to their weak element, but not the two healers. My thinking is that the designers made this decision to try to keep the boss battles interesting. The fact that your two healers could be vulnerable to death at any point in the battle forces you not to take them for granted – you could lose your healer at a critical time, which in a worst case scenario might lead to your death and a game over screen.
I’ll just conclude by saying that the biggest hook for me was the fact that it was set in contemporary Japan and not some generic fantasy world with elves and mages. Sure, there were a lot of clichés associated with teen life in Japan – onsen antics, school field trips, the school cultural festival, the o-bon festival – but seeing how a typical teenager would experience a complete school year was a nice refreshing break from the standard RPG setting. I know that I’ll definitely go back and try Persona 3: FES whenever I get bored with generic fantasy or science fiction.
