Played: Persona 3
I played this at Arden’s recommendation; consequently, it’s the only JRPG I’ve ever played as an adult (and possibly the only one I will play, but more on that in a little while). I wasn’t brought up on a healthy diet of console video games - I had an unhealthy attachment to Pokémon Gold for a while, but even that passed once I started getting more and more distracted by books. (It was probably Artemis Fowl that stymied what could have ended up as an addiction, so thanks, Eoin Colfer. I still haven’t forgiven you for that Hitchhiker’s Guide sequel.) That meant that past the age of thirteen, the daily grind that comes with JRPGs was fairly alien to me. I’d forgotten quite how big they are.
So, addressing first the part that I was conflicted about, because there’s very little in this game that I found overwhelmingly negative: what makes this game so incredibly long is the central RPG mechanic - a series of dungeons that you ascend through (are they still dungeons if they’re above ground? You get my point), levelling up a cast of characters and their Personas, manifestations of your soul that take the form of monsters with different abilities. As you progress, you battle Shadows, which are like Personas, but untamed. It all gets a bit weird, but in the context of the game it makes a strange sort of sense.
You spend a lot of time doing this, and while it makes for some pretty great set-pieces - there are increasingly difficult battles every full moon, and some of the dungeon design is delightful - it can also get a little dull, especially as you return to each dungeon with no other reason than to continue grinding. The real issue is the lack of diversity - a lot of the Shadows you come into contact with are versions of Shadows you’ve already encountered, just with a different color scheme and slightly different abilities. This isn’t a problem, per se - there’s certainly value in familiarity - but it requires a certain mood to jump in with two feet.
The thing that makes the game stand out, though, is the storyline and the social link mechanic; over time, you’ll form closer bonds with your friends and a few people scattered across the city, and it’s here where the sense of discovery is really at its best. By the end, I was frantically spending as much time as I could with the cast of characters at my disposal, simply because my emotional investment in them all was worryingly strong. There’s also an impact that social links have on gameplay - a stronger social link allows for the ability to create a stronger Persona - but this almost feels secondary to the way that spending time with other characters opens up the game.
The storyline is nicely innovative, too, and contains a few twists and turns I couldn’t have predicted. Although at its core it follows the conceit of banding together your high school friends to save the world, the things it does to get there (and the way the ending plays out) are highly unusual. On the way, you encounter a doomsday cult, a number of characters who are hiding secrets, and a world that features environments that make sense for a high-schooler to inhabit. The conversations sometimes veer a little too far into the realm of existential angst - and I say that very aware that this is a game with serious existential questions at its core - but other than that, this is all really well-realised. Even the English voice cast is, by and large, perfectly serviceable.
All in all, this was pretty great. My reluctance to embark with future games comes down to a worry regarding the time investment. Persona 3 took around 60 hours to complete, and while it paid off in this instance I’m highly reluctant to pour so much time into something without a pretty decent assurance that it’s going to pay off. So. We’ll see. Maybe in a few months.