Are The Old Persona Games Good?
As a part-time man child, I occasionally play video games. This may not be surprising - there's a pretty good overlap in people who like D&D, and those who like vidya games, but I generally don't, not anymore at least. I used to be a more prolific gamer, but as time went on, I kind of drifted away from them and grew up a bit, something I am proud of.
But on occasion, and especially when life gets hectic, I turn towards the medium for some comfort. Maybe this is replaying an old favorite, watching some gaming content (Ssethtzeentach, and Iron Pineapple, generally. I used to be a big souls guy), or pouring myself into a new experience to numb the pain of my life and provide surefire way to escape the drudgery of everyday life. Video game addiction is real, friends.
Anyway, today's topic is Persona 2. I love the Persona series to death. It's my replacement for D&D 5e - prepackaged and kind of mediocre plot lines, pseudo-intellectual combat, and awkward dating sim elements shoved into the package. In a video game, these are all acceptable; fine, even. However, these are not my cup of tea when it comes to actual at-the-table gaming, these are completely unacceptable.
The most recent mainline games in the Persona series, all numbered from 3 onward, follow a general formula. You're a guy that transfers to a new high-school, some wacky stuff happens, and you discover that you and your new friends have magic powers, and proceed to do a bunch of stuff that culminates in fistfighting the Abrahamic God. Between your forays into various dungeons, as this series has OSR foundations for some reason, you have downtime to develop friendships with the bros, develop relationships with the hos, and develop your skills so that the former will look in your direction, often consisting of patronizing local businesses. Doing this benefits you in the dungeons, as it allows you to fuse your Pokémon together to make better Pokémon. Occasionally, the opposite is true, but that's less prevalent.
I love these games because they're just fun. It's like junk food, but like yogurt-dipped raisins - they're technically better than some other crap you can shovel in your gullet, but not by much. They have nice stories and feel like they have more to say than other JRPGs, as well as music that I still listen to on a regular basis. They're just a good set of games that are all-around just fun and enjoyable without that much headache. Of course, the community is pretty good too, all things considered. There's like 4 jokes that everyone makes, and everyone thinks everyone else's favorite game is trash, especially if it's the most recent one, so that's fun. Mine is Three :)
But we're not talking about those today. For some reason, yesterday, I decided to start playing Persona 2: Innocent Sin. I have played some of Persona 1, and I kind of liked it... It's complicated. I have never played a mainline Shin Megami Tensei game, which is the parent series of Persona. From what I gather, the first trilogy of games, Persona 1, 2: innocent sin, and 2: Eternal Punishment, have a lot in common with that series, but are slightly different - mainly because of the high-school setting. The early games take a different tactic to the latter though; these are traditional JRPGs, rather than the dating sim stuff from the latter trilogy.
The setting and story of Persona 1 are pretty compelling. The basic structure is really similar to all the others: teenagers get powers, fight some things. The tone of Persona 1 is significantly different though. Persona 1 takes place where a group of teenagers does one of those urban legend rumor things that circulate in school, called the "Persona game." This zaps them with something that makes them all pass out and get Personas - manifestations of legendary figures that cast spells. Then, there's this thing where their city gets walled off, and demons start attacking everything. I really like this hook, but the loop of the story isn't really enough to hook me. It's like "Demons are attacking everyone! Let's go to a warehouse, and get a thing, and oh there's another high schooler here, but he's bad, and then we have to go to another place." While the entire story is told to you from optional conversations with party members, some of whom are mutually exclusive. That in isolation is annoying but acceptable, I think. The incredibly high encounter rate is not. Unironically, you can't walk 6 steps without being accosted by random people. I took a break here to scrub through a walkthrough of the game (Persona fans don't play the games, lol), and there are some pretty compelling moments that I saw, which do intrigue me. But then the guy playing it would get through the normal encounters on auto and fast-forward them with the emulator. It gets really tiresome really quickly.
I have all but dropped that game, simply because it's too much of a slog. There are genuinely moments when I do enjoy it, or it seems worth sticking with it. The combat is fascinating, and has this really functional system for negotiating with monsters so that every fight isn't a 5e slap fight. The system for generating new personas is really neat, and the fact that any character can use probably any persona is as well. All of this is hindered by the fact that you have to fight dozens upon dozens of enemies. The negotiation only works if you can't level-screw yourself by avoiding combat, which means there needs to be a lot of encounters to balance both of these out. The solution is obviously: give XP for ending encounters with negotiation, but whatever. It wants to be both grindy and tactically interesting (sounds like another role-playing game I know), but ends up feeling pulled in different directions, at least to me.
Platonically, this game is amazing - captivating story, weird interesting diegetic endings, and a combat system that requires thought (on paper) - but in reality, it isn't. If this game was 10–15 hours long, and had less messy of a scope, and was worth replaying for the extra ending, then I would genuinely love this game if the encounter rate was tamped down a bit. But there's just endless wading through dungeons and Diablo-1-walking through these vignette rooms, and it gets to be a bit much.
Anyway, I started Persona 2, and it feels a lot better off the bat. I'm like 40 minutes into it, but I can immediately feel a difference. Mainly that there's a smaller cast of more developed characters, including one from Persona 1 (these first couple games are all linked). There's still a relatively high encounter rate, but the combat is less in-depth, so we're good there. It feels more enjoyable off the bat.
However, this game is still pretty long, and I think that's the biggest issue. I like games as experiences. One of my favorite memories was finishing Portal for the first time and thinking to myself "damn, I felt that." It's the kind of combination of story and game that makes you feel like you've gone through something with the characters. Xenoblade 1 (and 2 a little bit), the latter Personas, Fallout: New Vegas all felt like an experience that had that catharsis, but this one falls short. There's never a full release of tension that I've experienced, it just goes from high to a kind of conclusion, which leads to the next and so on. As it stands now, I don't really see myself playing Persona 1 again too much. We'll see how this walkthrough goes, and maybe I'll feel compelled. Persona 2 is good so far, though. This kind of proves how much I do like the roots of Persona 1, it's just that extraneous stuff that feels off.
Regardless, what I've seen of the story is so compelling, though, that I feel that the concept is rock-solid. I feel the inspiration to write something similar to it, but obviously not the exact same. Maybe you'll see that down the line.
That's really all I wanted to say. Sorry for little D&D content, I'm still going through that rough patch. I'm still around though.