Bloggin my angry feelings about a nearly ten year old RPG! LETS GO

Previous Hater’s Review: Bioshock Infinite

(tw: light discussion of the suicide imagery in Persona 3)

I always find it a little surprising when I’m reminded of how popular Persona 5 is. And I’m not just talking about sales, though it has sold extremely well (Persona is almost as important to Sega as Sonic). What really freaks me out is how it’s become “The Standard RPG” in peoples’ minds.

If you read anyone talk about any RPG you’ll inevitably get some kind of Persona comparison. If there’s any kind of system where you get stat bonuses for talking to people, it’s Persona. Turn based combat? Just like Persona. Urban setting with a stylish presentation? You better believe that’s a Persona.

I don’t like this, partly because it means I have to think about Persona 5 more than I want to, but mostly because Persona really lives in its own genre cul-de-sac. The only games that are like Persona are other Persona games (and Metaphor, kinda). Persona 3 in particular is full of deep, unique quirks. Seeing these ideas spread outward and become genericized makes me feel like I’m slowly going mad. Persona is Persona and nothing else feels like it.

I think to explain why I feel this way, and why I need to write a haters review of Persona 5, I have to go back to why makes Persona 3 what it is and why turning that into a blockbuster game is such a bad idea.

(I haven’t played the PS1 Persona games. I’m not that cool.)

Misanthropy Mechanics

Why do the characters in Persona 3 keep shooting themselves in the head? The game doesn’t make it super explicit what that’s about (unless I missed something!) other than it being attention grabbing. For me, it’s a reflection of how it feels to interact with characters in Persona 3.

(Note: Persona games have a system where non-protagonist characters can essentially take their own turns, instead of you choosing what they do. This has been slowly pared back and isn’t the default anymore, but in the original Persona 3 it was the only way your party members could act. I think this is kind of important for the vibes of the game.)

When people talk about social links in Persona 3, it sometimes gets phrased as an empowering thing where you get to choose who to date or something. In actuality, it’s mostly about chance meetings, and then pandering to whatever they want. You can never really get anyone else to do what you want them to do, but you can power up yourself through being a mirror for them.

This feeling Persona 3 social links give, where you’re both caught in the flow and one step above it, continues into dungeon crawling. Due to the flexibility of changing Personas, you are much more powerful than your party members, but you still need them to an extent. This creates tension due to the fact that you can’t tell them exactly what to do. While people will continuously complain about when their party members make a mistake, they do normally do things right. But its still extremely weird to not have that control.

Persona 3 has a lot of systems where things aren’t under your control. Time passes by, people do weird things, and you have to figure out how to work with an RPG party that just gets more and more absurd as more members join. Something I really appreciate about the Persona 3 cast is how often main characters just don’t get along. They’re prickly, not really friends, and trying to get through the situation they’re stuck in. And while it’s never unpleasant to play, you can see how some situations would make you want to blow your brains out. I feel like it's an expression of misanthropy, and stirs up the same feelings in the player. It can feel very pointless.

But if you keep going in Persona 3, you come out of the struggle with something resembling a purpose to everything you went through. For how cynical it starts out with, there’s something genuinely sweet about the whole package. It’s a coming of age story. It’s still demonic to an extent, as this is still Shin Megami Tensei, but it works. They probably should have left it there!

A Short Section About Persona 4

I don’t really have a ton to say about Persona 4. They took the things people liked about 3, and skipped the things that turned people off. The characters genuinely like one another, the game hooks you with the themes faster instead of slow burning it, the mystery structure is much easier to get invested in. You get dungeons where you learn more about a specific character, that’s fun! And there’s deeply uncomfortable implications about queer people. That’s about it.

What is Persona 5 Meant To Be?

Due to the success of Persona 4, it’s clear that Persona 5 was officially meant to be a flagship title. At the same time, instead of just repeating what made 4 work, they chose a set of thorny themes of the type that Persona 4 wouldn’t have touched. It’s not a game where you’re forced together due to a threat, or making mystery solving buddies. It’s a game about deciding to have an impact on the world and finding people to help you. It’s a game about gaining comrades.

That’s a really interesting idea for using the misanthropy mechanics of Persona 3. Like in 3, these characters are tools are much as people. Conflict between characters could get really uncomfortable under this kind of system, lord knows I’ve had conflicts with comrades.

Unfortunately, between Persona 3 and 5 is 4, a game about making friends. This is no longer a spinoff of games about demons, there’s a whole new set of expectations. And oh lord I can feel the more interesting direction that this story could have gone in just get smothered by friendship over and over.

It’s been said many times that the politics of Persona 5 aren’t really up to the task of handling reality. I agree, but the game still could have been good. An RPG where you’re not making party members, you’re making comrades, is really rich ground. Something interesting could have happened, even if they're just fighting "the corrupt adults" or whatever. But god they really just end up being another mystery gang.

All of this makes the slow pace of a Persona game feels less luxurious and more… dull. It’s the same kind of tone over and over and over. You just barely get pulled along by the smoothness of it all, but there’s nothing exciting to latch on to or remember.

Vestigial Systems

The trick that Persona battles pull off is finding a sweet spot between the sharpness of a puzzle and the expressiveness of RPG combat. With the right combination of spells, battles can get solved, though there’s still a sense of excitement because you can get ambushed or gain an advantage. The randomized dungeons of Persona 3 are repetitive to be sure, but the awkwardness of the system creates interesting moments out of what could have been something dull.

The main dungeons in Persona 5 aren’t random anymore. Instead, they’re full of not particularly complex stealth mechanics. If you are halfway decent at videogames, you will always have the advantage coming in. This means that once you figure out how an encounter works, congrats! You just do that again. And again. And again.

It’s very clear that adding in this new type of dungeon delving, while not making bigger changes to how battles work, threw everything off balance. It’s an “improvement”, but doesn’t work. The way they designed party members has the same kind of vibe. They’ll all much more useful than they used to be, but that makes the main character feel less like the superstar they were in Persona 3 and 4. Because you’re relying on them so much, all the time you have to spend customizing your personas is so much less interesting. What used to be highlight is now busywork. They made a Persona game that would be better if it didn’t have personas.

Whenever Persona 5 should have made a decision between trying to something new and staying faithful to the series, they somehow decide to do both. There’s a whole second dungeon system that brings back random generation, that I think mostly exists to paper over pacing problems. They created a giant recreation of Tokyo, that you hardly ever explore because the game pushes you toward fast travel. They added in a negotiation system like Shin Megami Tensei, but made it more “Persona like” with always right and always wrong answers. The result sucks and is annoying!!!

Making Games Is Hard

I think the unwieldiness of Persona 5 is in part explained by the fact that Atlus was on the verge of disappearing during its early development. This game needed to save the studio, and that means it has to both be new and flashy and not be without anything that series fans expect. You can’t follow new ideas fully, and if something isn’t working you can’t rip it out and start again. Even though the game wouldn’t come out until three years after the Sega buyout, I think a lot of that mentality is still there in the end.

There’s a part of me very impressed that the game came out at all, and I understand why it’s the way it is. I just think it sucks!!!

What Should Persona 5 Have Been?

Something clear about Persona 5 is that it was held back by being a Persona game. They wanted to create special dungeons, but were stuck to a structure that didn’t make them really make sense. Maybe make a fantasy game with cool dungeons. In fact, the kind of positive relationships people like in Persona games might work better if it was explicitly a fantasy… Players wanted all their party members to be cool, so why not give every character some kind of customization? You know what hasn’t been tried in an Atlus game before? A job system. That’s a cool design space. And how about instead of making one city that the characters live in, they’re journeying across multiple places. Even with fast travel, people will still form relationships with the different locations if they design it right…

Look, I’m not saying that Metaphor: ReFantazio is exactly what Persona 5 should have been, but goddamn. There’s nothing that’s been more vindicating of my opinions than playing Metaphor. Key creatives from a game I was hugely disappointed in made a follow up that addresses all my concerns about everything. They even made the controls more awkward so you get ambushed in battles more often.

Meanwhile, the staff still working on Persona remade Persona 3, taking an approach that finds a middle ground between it’s quirks and the rest of the series. Could that team make a Persona 6 that’s good? Maybe? Possibly? Look I got a new Atlus series that owns in Metaphor I don’t need another good Persona game but it would be cool.

Anyway…

Once again, the hater was vindicated

Final note

Please stop comparing every RPG to Persona 5. It is not “The Standard RPG”. There is a “The Standard RPG”, it's Dragon Quest.

Okay, thank you for reading!!