Review: Persona
Megami Ibunroku: Persona is the hardest video game I have ever played. Ninja Gaiden Black is difficult, but it's beatable. The venerated Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne might be a descent into madness and corruption, but it only took me two attempts to crush what I believe might be the most satisfying final boss of all time. It's not even the main course of the game that's a hellish meatgrinder, though that's still a significant criticism.
Persona is a first-person dungeon crawler in the vein of earlier Shin Megami Tensei titles, a common through-point of each spinoff of the series. For example, the Persona and Devil Summoner series might have gone in wildly different directions from the Shin Megami Tensei mainline series, but the early entries in both of these spinoffs retained much of the series mainstays: negotiating with demons in order to strengthen the player's party, heavy emphasis on spellcasting, dark moral decisions, and imagery of a ruined Tokyo sprinkled throughout.
Fusion Accident
Fusion Accident
Negotiation is one of the more entertaining aspects of Persona; in previous Shin Megami Tensei titles, players were given a choice between being "friendly" or "threatening" to demons when initiating dialogue, then going down a small dialogue path before either recruiting the demon into the party, gaining an item, or receiving money. Money and items are still available as dialogue choices in Persona, but one of the biggest differences is that the original Shin Megami Tensei featured between one and three human party members while the rest of the party would need to be filled with recruited demons. Lower-level demons could be discarded by fusing two or three together, resulting in a constant flow of new allies with new abilities and stronger stats.
Since Persona has a full party at most times, demons themselves can't be fused but rather give the party a card of themselves which can be fused with other cards and turned into a new Persona. While a few demons can be created from fused cards, most of the equippable Personae are unique as deities and concepts from world religions; unlike demons, a Persona is a manifestation of the user's will, so stronger Persona users evoke godlike beings as their Persona.
To be frank, this system is worse than Shin Megami Tensei in multiple facets. The benefit of a successful negotiation is not tangible or immediate; rather, the player will have to wait until they find a Velvet Room--the Persona series version of the Cathedral of Shadows--and fuse Persona from the cards gathered. Cards and held Personae are highly limited, and to add to the frustration the game is very strict on who can equip which Persona. Each character is aligned with several tarot arcana which in turn dictates which newly-fused Persona can be equipped; additionally, each character will have certain affinity with each arcana, which ranks as worst-bad-good-best. Characters like Reiji only have one or two arcana aligned with good affinity, while only one is considered best and the rest are unusable. The protagonist, on the other hand, carries affinity with most arcana and is more versatile as a result.
Aside from the annoyance of being forced to create a small pool of Personae narrowed down to align with the cast's best affinities, each Persona has a very small skill pool considering they're fused from demons with a set amount of skills. In other Shin Megami Tensei titles, demons could be tailor-made to carry lineages of skill sets to create unstoppable monsters by the end of the game--look no further than the legendary Nocturne Daisoujou recipe to behold what truly nightmarish combinations can come about from tinkering around with demon fusion in specific circumstances. Even though the game is renowned for its difficulty, I fused a Daisoujou roughly halfway through Nocturne and it carried me all the way to the end of the game with the skills I fused for it then.
Persona is not as deep or satisfying in large part due to how narrowly-focused the fusion mechanic has become. Because MAX-level Personae can only be returned for new fusion totems or items, no skill lineage can be created throughout the course of the game; for the most part, this means a Persona will only have a mish-mash of skills from their parent demons and will never, ever be able to pass on whatever skills it may learn. In most cases, a Persona will be fused for two or three skills while it learns new spells that completely outclass the ones it begins with. It's almost baffling that a game with such strong ancestry would make a decision this poor, and to think it might have been the blueprint for the rest of the series is a bit mind-boggling.
Spellcasting is almost universally required for combat due in large part to the game's completely mishandled positioning system; while the ingredients for a neat combat system were all in place, Persona very often misses the mark. Characters and demons form a grid when starting a battle with each side composing a five-by-five square. Each attack type then targets specific points on the opposing side; for instance, Masao attacks in a sort of "W" pattern, with his direct front attacking the first two blocks in front of him, the attacks on either side taking only one block, and the furthest blocks on either side taking two blocks again. Reiji only attacks the front row, while Maki can attack the entire enemy formation--so long as she's in the back, in which case her gun can't be fired.
The characters' strengths and weaknesses do make the battles engaging as positioning becomes a concern later in the game, but by the end each encounter becomes increasingly more difficult to the point of lunacy. Having to keep in mind each formation for each selection of enemies is horribly tedious and makes the final few dungeons incredibly difficult. In a series known for punishing the player for every little mistake, the final dungeon in particular can be a true nightmare. Spellcasting is a godsend as it allows players to attack any target from any position without worrying about positioning. Although spells cost a significant amount of magic to cast, the developers seemed to know that this would be the preferred method of attacking anyway as characters are fully healed upon leveling up. Furthermore, characters have an entirely different level for equipping Personae compared to their natural character level--for example, a character who throws around spells constantly might be two or three Persona levels higher than their character level, which will allow them to equip a Persona which might be higher than their natural level. Of course, this only applies to characters who have been using spells with regularity, so those who aren't using their Persona at all times might not be able to equip a Persona they have best affinity for because their Persona level is too low.
To be totally fair, the heal upon gaining a new level mechanic gives the game a very brisk pace allowing players to just constantly throw themselves against enemy crowds since levels are fairly easy to come by; rather than forcing themselves to run back to a healing fountain earlier in a dungeon, it's usually more feasible to use items and power through to the next level. The only thing I want to ask is this: if the developers intended the characters to be played almost exclusively as spellcasters and reward those who go down this path, why even bother with the convoluted grid? I can't say I hate combat outright in Persona, but forcing unnecessary changes is a misstep that hinders a system that could have been perfectly serviceable in a very good dungeon crawler.
Moral "Choices"
While the previous Shin Megami Tensei games focused on the player's conflict with their internal alignment, Persona merely punishes players who make wrong dialogue choices. It's interesting to see the ways in which the game tries to incorporate elements from the mainline series, but the presentation for these choices is weak at best.
Shin Megami Tensei typically offers moral choices when the player comes across decisions that fall under "lawful" or "chaotic" alignments; lawful characters believe in absolute order and helping the weak, but without a failsafe in check this can lead to fascist systems in which those under the law are punished for stepping out of bounds in the least. So basically, college campuses. Chaos, on the other hand, favors absolute power and freedom over all else. Naturally, the weak are crushed in this environment while the powerful thrive. So basically, the current Presidential Administration.
The choices given in Persona don't have much weight and are instead focused on forcing the player to stand true to their convictions when faced with difficult situations. It allows the protagonist to feel like a true leader at points, but the story and gameplay benefits are entirely too weak; answering correctly for most dialogue choices only allows the player to fuse decent mid-level Personae via special totems, though by the time I reached the end of the game I was still too underleveled to even equip them. Oh, but I'll get to that.
In one situation near the mid-point of the game, the player is forced to make a series of dialogue choices to help out a plot-crucial NPC. If the player answers all three questions incorrectly (each question has three answers, by the way) the player will then be given the bad ending--several hours later, well after their old save data has been overwritten. It's a needlessly cruel way to punish players for an ambiguous round of questions and I would personally not blame anyone for dropping the game if they got this ending; Shin Megami Tensei has always focused on "not evil, but not necessarily right," though some players will obviously lean toward one alignment or the other. Grey morality as a system thrives in the franchise, and having the neutral route as a secret surprise for players who don't become too embroiled in the extremes of either side is icing on the cake. Persona has no grey morality and the choices will come back to haunt players who didn't pick the correct options, but even if the player picks a choice they feel is right the plot continues as if nothing happened and later shames the player for picking that choice.
"Ruined" Tokyo
The franchise-standard imagery of a destroyed major city appears in a bizarre turn in Persona, though the concept of ruination is vague. Near the beginning of the game, the characters play an occult game called Persona which awakens them to their own ability to summon a Persona. After visiting their terminally ill friend Maki in a hospital, the characters are dragged into a strange version of their town where hospitals are replaced by forests and old houses were never demolished for business offices. The town is under the rule of local business owner Kandori, who is attempting to pull elements from a twisted version of reality into the real world in order to rule as a god.
The real standout character is Maki, the terminally ill student whose personal conflict becomes the main driving force behind the story. Psychology and spirituality are mixed and implemented to stunning degree as the characters race to save the town from Kandori and Maki's inner demons. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is somewhat rote in comparison; the protagonist is a standard silent hero who the party simply follows because he has the best hair, while the other two main party members Nanjo and Masao are often only used to fill in the plot. Nanjo is an analytical and haughty rich kid who feeds backstory to the player, assembling the plot in his head as he learns more information. Masao, on the other hand, is the free-natured punk with a heart of gold. You can guess exactly what these characters will say when they need to say it.
One of the interesting elements of the party dynamic is the fifth member, a student who also took part in the Persona game. After entering the twisted town and rescuing Masao, the player can accept help from one of the other characters who will accompany the party for the remainder of the game; these party members are typically background noise and only really help as additional damage during combat, but one of the final party members adds a significant amount of new dialogue and context to the Kandori subplot.
Reiji is the definition of a secret Easter Egg as the character requires an unreasonable amount of hoops to jump through in order to unlock him as a party member. He also demands the player deny help from every last one of the final members until he's finally unlocked, and if the player missed any requirements for Reiji they'll be stuck with one of the weakest and most bland characters in the game. Reiji isn't even worth it for much of the game; aside from having the worst affinity set in the game, he can only attack the front row and his ultimate Persona is weak against the final boss. He makes up for this in raw power and the interesting plot details he adds to the story, but you'd think he'd be an instant win button for all the trouble it takes to unlock him.
The plot moves forward at a very brisk pace--my save file was around 30 hours by the end--and twists and turns in interesting ways. The game's strongest point is definitely in its dungeon design, not totally incomprehensible like mainline Shin Megami Tensei but still labyrinthine enough to force players to really consider their forward path. For what it's worth, the plot is serviceable enough.
The Final Boss.
Pandora is one of the most unbearably difficult final bosses I've ever encountered in a video game in my entire life. Her dungeon is a complete slog to navigate and even includes a pitfall which can drop the player back to the very beginning of the dungeon from a point very close to the end and one floor is entirely full of pitch-black chambers that snake around into horribly confusing pathways. The final floor is a confusing maze full of damaging tiles nearly every other step full of demons that are themselves nearly max-level with a wide coverage of elemental repel; since demons are so high-level on this floor players will have to grind out levels near the healing fountain in order to actually recruit for new cards.
The first form of Pandora is simple enough, but it begins the battle by reminding the player very quickly that this is in fact a Shin Megami Tensei title, often using turns to buff up with Tarukaja before casting party-wide attack spells. I'm not exaggerating when I say that here, in the final encounter of the game, I felt my jaw drop as soon as I realized that Pandora was going to give me an eleventh-hour kick in the asshole. The training wheels were off. I'd beaten Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse without a single game over. I cleared Nocturne on normal as my first mainline game, I was ready. Nothing would stop me.
My under-leveled Personae and woefully unprepared skill set, which actually consisted of various debuffs and high-level spells, completely crippled my chances of defeating the final boss.
I thought about how simple this game would have been had I only the option to fuse all these stupid, worthless Personae together to form one of my beloved world-ending debuff nuke demons, but this was not meant to be. I had about three of the five ultimate Personae already pre-baked, but not a single one of my characters was high-enough level to equip them. The protagonist was closest at level 57, but his ultimate Persona was level 62. Nanjo and Masao were dragging along behind the rest of the party at a dismal shared level of 46, utterly collapsing my chances of recruiting higher-level demons for fusion. Naturally, because everything about Persona needs to be as convoluted as possible the recruitment level for demons is not the highest level of the party but actually the combined average of the party; since Masao and Nanjo were at such a lower level than everyone else, my party average was no less than six levels lower than the protagonist who was nearly level 60. Yeah, no recruitment in this dungeon.
The worst part about this horrible situation? I'd been there before. I played through the entire game before on Easy Mode, before I knew about fusions and moon cycles and debuffs and Matador and ONE MORE GOD REJECTED and reaching out to the truth and crying about Tokyo Mirage Sessions. See, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona was my first game in either of these series. I'm not some wimp who comes into a franchise at the midway point even though I did exactly that with Nocturne, I'm a man dammit and I'm not about to skip some neat dungeon crawler because some loser waifu idiots wrongfully think Persona 4 is a good game.
Dungeon crawlers were one of the first game genres I was ever exposed to; watching my dad play Shining in the Darkness for the Sega Genesis was an interesting formative memory. It's a fairly little-known spinoff in the Shining Force series and replaces the series trademark tactical strategy combat for a pure first-person dungeon crawling RPG. I was always so enraptured watching him go through the town, stock up, talk to all the characters and listen to the king's plight. I loved watching him navigate through the corridors and rush some poor snakes and whatever other monsters were lurking around--in the darkness.
One of the main reasons I got into this series, and why I'm so bummed about the direction it's taken in recent years, is because I always wanted to break into this style of game. I've always had a very horrible sense of direction and something about the winding corridors of these types of games always intimidated me, but I was just so enthralled by watching my dad confidently play through Shining in the Darkness that I could never drop my fascination with the genre. At the same time, I've always been so intimidated by the style that I never knew the best place to start. I figured Persona would be a great entry point, given how widespread the series popularity has become and since by then the team had so much experience with their mechanics by this point, I was sure it would be a great jumping-in point.
The first time I played Persona, I went into the Pandora battle on easy mode with all my basic, first-level Personae equipped and no idea what debuffs even were. I was beaten so handily that I turned off the game and thought I'd never come back. With the release of Persona 5, I thought I'd come back and take a look at the game with a more weathered pair of eyes, only to constantly come up against nagging issues--specifically, the fusion system. I never thought I'd end up having trouble with it after so much experience, but yet again Pandora completely trashed my team and I was sent back to a save room half an hour away from the boss which I'd already been fighting for half an hour.
To this day, across two full playthroughs, I've had to give up on the final boss of the game. I feel like I could probably grind it out and get those beastly max-level Personae, but what's the use? I already told you about how brilliant the pacing of the game was, how I never once had to stop and grind for experience or spell cards because it's such a smooth ride throughout the game up until the very end. Even the dungeon before Avidya World is fairly difficult, but by the end it felt like the game was merely trying to destroy my spirit. And for now, while I write this review, it's still broken.
The Port
Two versions of Persona exist: the original Playstation Megami Ibunroku: Persona and the PSP remaster Shin Megami Tensei: Persona. Everything about the PSP version is better, and for players who buy the game digitally they can actually play it on a Vita or Playstation TV. It seems redundant to play a game remade for portable systems on a TV, but the spritework and level design looks brilliant on a nice television.
The Playstation version of Persona, released in the West as Revelations: Persona, is less easy on the eyes and I feel much of the reworked visuals went a long way in helping me to enjoy the portable remaster. The city of the original game is a huge, ugly 3D map which requires the player to constantly rotate and double-check locations on a minimap to discern where anything is; the PSP remaster, on the other hand, features a beautifully-drawn 2D map segmented into portions which allow for very simple navigation. Moreover, the Revelations release featured some very odd changes: the town was relocated to a generic American city and all character names were changed to reflect the setting.
Nanjo became Nate, Reiji became Chris (which caused some very major confusion the brief time I spent with this version of the game), and while other characters suffered some strange sprite alteration no character was hit harder than Masao. Poor, oafish Masao became Mark and was completely changed into a black kid. The horrifying realization that this was likely done because his initial Persona is dressed in tribal attire and the character's negotiation skill is "dancing crazy" is sobering and, while very hilarious, somewhat uncomfortable. Not only this, but the game's difficulty was tweaked by lowering the encounter rate and increasing experience values across the board. It's a pretty horrid way to play an already middling game, though the minute-to-minute dungeon crawling is still just as good as the PSP version. There's also a completely optional side route--not side quest, a full-blown secret campaign hidden from the player--that was completely removed from the Playstation release, though the PSP remaster naturally restores it.
The biggest drawback to playing on the PSP is honestly a rather big one: Megami Ibunroku featured an absolutely stellar soundtrack, a tense and lively mixture of hard rock and unsettling industrial music. It seriously helps set the tone for an eerie trek across a nightmare world and contains some of my favorite music tracks of the Playstation library. The PSP remaster, on the other hand, has replaced nearly all music with annoying, loud, ear-grating J-Pop that actually sounds like it came from the Persona 4 soundtrack. Seriously, at one point I had to stop playing the game to look up a similar track and make sure it wasn't just lifted from the later game. It utterly destroys the atmosphere of the game and every single time I hear "leave dis berry memly" I want to shut the fucking game off and refund the two copies of the game I bought because I can't help but love it.
No seriously, listen to this crap.
To make matters far worse (and funnier), the singer utterly obliterates the pronunciation of the lyrics. I know it's very gauche to make fun of an ESL, but the lyrics are botched to such a ridiculous degree that it's nearly impossible to discern what's actually being conveyed. Just look at the first verse of the song:
Leave this buried memory
This fear-ridden self-consciousness
I'm just a lone prayer
The first line is sang decently with the exception of the obvious Engrish errors, but with the second the entire song collapses in on itself. "This" has been almost entirely skipped past, causing the reading to sound more like "s'fear-ridden" which sounds more like a contraction of "it's." "Ridden" in "fear-ridden" is almost entirely skipped because of the enunciation, while "self" takes two syllables to pronounce. "Consciousness" is fine, if not bizarrely slurred. Rather than "This fear-ridden self-consciousness," it sounds like the singer is shouting S'FEAR-RIN SEH-ELF CONSCIOUSNESS. And that's just silly. Where things take a very dramatic turn for the worst, and the point the song cannot possibly hope to pick itself up over, is the final line where the singer completely forgets the sentence article "a," so rather than the singer telling the listener she is "a lone prayer," which doesn't make any sense, she's telling the listener "I'm just lone prayer." This signifies that she herself is identified as "Lone Prayer," which just makes no sense at all. Hell, the first time I heard the song I thought the lyrics were pure gibberish, then eventually I convinced myself it was:
Leave this valid memory,
Spirits of consciousness
I'm just one player
It still doesn't make much sense, but at least it doesn't sound like garbage.
This is the first verse of the stupid battle song which the player is going to hear with almost permanent frequency, especially in later stages of the game where every three or four steps will cause a random battle to occur. Even if the player nukes the enemy field in one spell, it's almost impossible to skip the first verse of the song. That's disregarding the weird chorus which throws around Japanese lyrics with reckless abandon. In short, the music is a complete mess which makes no grammatical sense and shatters the tone of the game. In a word, it sucks. And don't get me started on the abysmal world map theme which is plagued with poor enunciation, weird grammatical errors, and just a very poor melody. The only good song in the game, and ironically the only one I'd consider great, is the final boss theme. It's even better than the original soundtrack, strangely enough.
There's rumor of a fan patch which replaces almost all of the shitty J-Pop with the wonderful soundtrack of the Playstation game, but I'm not here reviewing a fan fix. If you really want to play the game and don't mind getting your hands dirty--and I want to point out that I suffered through the PSP music so you should too--I recommend at least looking into that.
Given the slew of improvements to the PSP release it's obviously stupid to ever assume the Playstation version is better in any capacity other than music. I always thought of a game's soundtrack as being one of the least important aspects of game design until I played Persona on PSP, but after comparing the two I'm almost stunned that anyone at Atlus thought this was a good idea. If you have to play Persona, I'm sorry that your only option is the musical equivalent to someone spraying diarrhea on a wall and proclaiming it as art.
Verdict
For the majority of its run, Persona is a great dungeon crawler that runs at a brisk pace through some of the best-designed first-person dungeons in the industry. Not overly complex like Strange Journey or mindlessly stupid like Persona 4, Persona has the makings of a great entry into the dungeon crawler genre. That said, the finale of the game utterly destroys the masterful pacing set up in the game's narrative and core mechanics, then spits in the player's face by offering a final boss seemingly lifted from a different game entirely. It's broken my spirit for now, but I don't think I've given up yet--watching the ending on Youtube just doesn't have the same impact. I won't review Persona 2 until I beat Pandora on my own though, so you better hope I get my ass in gear.
Aside from the annoyance of being forced to create a small pool of Personae narrowed down to align with the cast's best affinities, each Persona has a very small skill pool considering they're fused from demons with a set amount of skills. In other Shin Megami Tensei titles, demons could be tailor-made to carry lineages of skill sets to create unstoppable monsters by the end of the game--look no further than the legendary Nocturne Daisoujou recipe to behold what truly nightmarish combinations can come about from tinkering around with demon fusion in specific circumstances. Even though the game is renowned for its difficulty, I fused a Daisoujou roughly halfway through Nocturne and it carried me all the way to the end of the game with the skills I fused for it then.
Persona is not as deep or satisfying in large part due to how narrowly-focused the fusion mechanic has become. Because MAX-level Personae can only be returned for new fusion totems or items, no skill lineage can be created throughout the course of the game; for the most part, this means a Persona will only have a mish-mash of skills from their parent demons and will never, ever be able to pass on whatever skills it may learn. In most cases, a Persona will be fused for two or three skills while it learns new spells that completely outclass the ones it begins with. It's almost baffling that a game with such strong ancestry would make a decision this poor, and to think it might have been the blueprint for the rest of the series is a bit mind-boggling.
Spellcasting is almost universally required for combat due in large part to the game's completely mishandled positioning system; while the ingredients for a neat combat system were all in place, Persona very often misses the mark. Characters and demons form a grid when starting a battle with each side composing a five-by-five square. Each attack type then targets specific points on the opposing side; for instance, Masao attacks in a sort of "W" pattern, with his direct front attacking the first two blocks in front of him, the attacks on either side taking only one block, and the furthest blocks on either side taking two blocks again. Reiji only attacks the front row, while Maki can attack the entire enemy formation--so long as she's in the back, in which case her gun can't be fired.
The characters' strengths and weaknesses do make the battles engaging as positioning becomes a concern later in the game, but by the end each encounter becomes increasingly more difficult to the point of lunacy. Having to keep in mind each formation for each selection of enemies is horribly tedious and makes the final few dungeons incredibly difficult. In a series known for punishing the player for every little mistake, the final dungeon in particular can be a true nightmare. Spellcasting is a godsend as it allows players to attack any target from any position without worrying about positioning. Although spells cost a significant amount of magic to cast, the developers seemed to know that this would be the preferred method of attacking anyway as characters are fully healed upon leveling up. Furthermore, characters have an entirely different level for equipping Personae compared to their natural character level--for example, a character who throws around spells constantly might be two or three Persona levels higher than their character level, which will allow them to equip a Persona which might be higher than their natural level. Of course, this only applies to characters who have been using spells with regularity, so those who aren't using their Persona at all times might not be able to equip a Persona they have best affinity for because their Persona level is too low.
To be totally fair, the heal upon gaining a new level mechanic gives the game a very brisk pace allowing players to just constantly throw themselves against enemy crowds since levels are fairly easy to come by; rather than forcing themselves to run back to a healing fountain earlier in a dungeon, it's usually more feasible to use items and power through to the next level. The only thing I want to ask is this: if the developers intended the characters to be played almost exclusively as spellcasters and reward those who go down this path, why even bother with the convoluted grid? I can't say I hate combat outright in Persona, but forcing unnecessary changes is a misstep that hinders a system that could have been perfectly serviceable in a very good dungeon crawler.
Moral "Choices"
While the previous Shin Megami Tensei games focused on the player's conflict with their internal alignment, Persona merely punishes players who make wrong dialogue choices. It's interesting to see the ways in which the game tries to incorporate elements from the mainline series, but the presentation for these choices is weak at best.
Shin Megami Tensei typically offers moral choices when the player comes across decisions that fall under "lawful" or "chaotic" alignments; lawful characters believe in absolute order and helping the weak, but without a failsafe in check this can lead to fascist systems in which those under the law are punished for stepping out of bounds in the least. So basically, college campuses. Chaos, on the other hand, favors absolute power and freedom over all else. Naturally, the weak are crushed in this environment while the powerful thrive. So basically, the current Presidential Administration.
The choices given in Persona don't have much weight and are instead focused on forcing the player to stand true to their convictions when faced with difficult situations. It allows the protagonist to feel like a true leader at points, but the story and gameplay benefits are entirely too weak; answering correctly for most dialogue choices only allows the player to fuse decent mid-level Personae via special totems, though by the time I reached the end of the game I was still too underleveled to even equip them. Oh, but I'll get to that.
In one situation near the mid-point of the game, the player is forced to make a series of dialogue choices to help out a plot-crucial NPC. If the player answers all three questions incorrectly (each question has three answers, by the way) the player will then be given the bad ending--several hours later, well after their old save data has been overwritten. It's a needlessly cruel way to punish players for an ambiguous round of questions and I would personally not blame anyone for dropping the game if they got this ending; Shin Megami Tensei has always focused on "not evil, but not necessarily right," though some players will obviously lean toward one alignment or the other. Grey morality as a system thrives in the franchise, and having the neutral route as a secret surprise for players who don't become too embroiled in the extremes of either side is icing on the cake. Persona has no grey morality and the choices will come back to haunt players who didn't pick the correct options, but even if the player picks a choice they feel is right the plot continues as if nothing happened and later shames the player for picking that choice.
"Ruined" Tokyo
The franchise-standard imagery of a destroyed major city appears in a bizarre turn in Persona, though the concept of ruination is vague. Near the beginning of the game, the characters play an occult game called Persona which awakens them to their own ability to summon a Persona. After visiting their terminally ill friend Maki in a hospital, the characters are dragged into a strange version of their town where hospitals are replaced by forests and old houses were never demolished for business offices. The town is under the rule of local business owner Kandori, who is attempting to pull elements from a twisted version of reality into the real world in order to rule as a god.
The real standout character is Maki, the terminally ill student whose personal conflict becomes the main driving force behind the story. Psychology and spirituality are mixed and implemented to stunning degree as the characters race to save the town from Kandori and Maki's inner demons. Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is somewhat rote in comparison; the protagonist is a standard silent hero who the party simply follows because he has the best hair, while the other two main party members Nanjo and Masao are often only used to fill in the plot. Nanjo is an analytical and haughty rich kid who feeds backstory to the player, assembling the plot in his head as he learns more information. Masao, on the other hand, is the free-natured punk with a heart of gold. You can guess exactly what these characters will say when they need to say it.
One of the interesting elements of the party dynamic is the fifth member, a student who also took part in the Persona game. After entering the twisted town and rescuing Masao, the player can accept help from one of the other characters who will accompany the party for the remainder of the game; these party members are typically background noise and only really help as additional damage during combat, but one of the final party members adds a significant amount of new dialogue and context to the Kandori subplot.
Reiji is the definition of a secret Easter Egg as the character requires an unreasonable amount of hoops to jump through in order to unlock him as a party member. He also demands the player deny help from every last one of the final members until he's finally unlocked, and if the player missed any requirements for Reiji they'll be stuck with one of the weakest and most bland characters in the game. Reiji isn't even worth it for much of the game; aside from having the worst affinity set in the game, he can only attack the front row and his ultimate Persona is weak against the final boss. He makes up for this in raw power and the interesting plot details he adds to the story, but you'd think he'd be an instant win button for all the trouble it takes to unlock him.
The plot moves forward at a very brisk pace--my save file was around 30 hours by the end--and twists and turns in interesting ways. The game's strongest point is definitely in its dungeon design, not totally incomprehensible like mainline Shin Megami Tensei but still labyrinthine enough to force players to really consider their forward path. For what it's worth, the plot is serviceable enough.
The Final Boss.
Pandora is one of the most unbearably difficult final bosses I've ever encountered in a video game in my entire life. Her dungeon is a complete slog to navigate and even includes a pitfall which can drop the player back to the very beginning of the dungeon from a point very close to the end and one floor is entirely full of pitch-black chambers that snake around into horribly confusing pathways. The final floor is a confusing maze full of damaging tiles nearly every other step full of demons that are themselves nearly max-level with a wide coverage of elemental repel; since demons are so high-level on this floor players will have to grind out levels near the healing fountain in order to actually recruit for new cards.
The first form of Pandora is simple enough, but it begins the battle by reminding the player very quickly that this is in fact a Shin Megami Tensei title, often using turns to buff up with Tarukaja before casting party-wide attack spells. I'm not exaggerating when I say that here, in the final encounter of the game, I felt my jaw drop as soon as I realized that Pandora was going to give me an eleventh-hour kick in the asshole. The training wheels were off. I'd beaten Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse without a single game over. I cleared Nocturne on normal as my first mainline game, I was ready. Nothing would stop me.
My under-leveled Personae and woefully unprepared skill set, which actually consisted of various debuffs and high-level spells, completely crippled my chances of defeating the final boss.
I thought about how simple this game would have been had I only the option to fuse all these stupid, worthless Personae together to form one of my beloved world-ending debuff nuke demons, but this was not meant to be. I had about three of the five ultimate Personae already pre-baked, but not a single one of my characters was high-enough level to equip them. The protagonist was closest at level 57, but his ultimate Persona was level 62. Nanjo and Masao were dragging along behind the rest of the party at a dismal shared level of 46, utterly collapsing my chances of recruiting higher-level demons for fusion. Naturally, because everything about Persona needs to be as convoluted as possible the recruitment level for demons is not the highest level of the party but actually the combined average of the party; since Masao and Nanjo were at such a lower level than everyone else, my party average was no less than six levels lower than the protagonist who was nearly level 60. Yeah, no recruitment in this dungeon.
The worst part about this horrible situation? I'd been there before. I played through the entire game before on Easy Mode, before I knew about fusions and moon cycles and debuffs and Matador and ONE MORE GOD REJECTED and reaching out to the truth and crying about Tokyo Mirage Sessions. See, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona was my first game in either of these series. I'm not some wimp who comes into a franchise at the midway point even though I did exactly that with Nocturne, I'm a man dammit and I'm not about to skip some neat dungeon crawler because some loser waifu idiots wrongfully think Persona 4 is a good game.
Dungeon crawlers were one of the first game genres I was ever exposed to; watching my dad play Shining in the Darkness for the Sega Genesis was an interesting formative memory. It's a fairly little-known spinoff in the Shining Force series and replaces the series trademark tactical strategy combat for a pure first-person dungeon crawling RPG. I was always so enraptured watching him go through the town, stock up, talk to all the characters and listen to the king's plight. I loved watching him navigate through the corridors and rush some poor snakes and whatever other monsters were lurking around--in the darkness.
One of the main reasons I got into this series, and why I'm so bummed about the direction it's taken in recent years, is because I always wanted to break into this style of game. I've always had a very horrible sense of direction and something about the winding corridors of these types of games always intimidated me, but I was just so enthralled by watching my dad confidently play through Shining in the Darkness that I could never drop my fascination with the genre. At the same time, I've always been so intimidated by the style that I never knew the best place to start. I figured Persona would be a great entry point, given how widespread the series popularity has become and since by then the team had so much experience with their mechanics by this point, I was sure it would be a great jumping-in point.
The first time I played Persona, I went into the Pandora battle on easy mode with all my basic, first-level Personae equipped and no idea what debuffs even were. I was beaten so handily that I turned off the game and thought I'd never come back. With the release of Persona 5, I thought I'd come back and take a look at the game with a more weathered pair of eyes, only to constantly come up against nagging issues--specifically, the fusion system. I never thought I'd end up having trouble with it after so much experience, but yet again Pandora completely trashed my team and I was sent back to a save room half an hour away from the boss which I'd already been fighting for half an hour.
To this day, across two full playthroughs, I've had to give up on the final boss of the game. I feel like I could probably grind it out and get those beastly max-level Personae, but what's the use? I already told you about how brilliant the pacing of the game was, how I never once had to stop and grind for experience or spell cards because it's such a smooth ride throughout the game up until the very end. Even the dungeon before Avidya World is fairly difficult, but by the end it felt like the game was merely trying to destroy my spirit. And for now, while I write this review, it's still broken.
The Port
Two versions of Persona exist: the original Playstation Megami Ibunroku: Persona and the PSP remaster Shin Megami Tensei: Persona. Everything about the PSP version is better, and for players who buy the game digitally they can actually play it on a Vita or Playstation TV. It seems redundant to play a game remade for portable systems on a TV, but the spritework and level design looks brilliant on a nice television.
The Playstation version of Persona, released in the West as Revelations: Persona, is less easy on the eyes and I feel much of the reworked visuals went a long way in helping me to enjoy the portable remaster. The city of the original game is a huge, ugly 3D map which requires the player to constantly rotate and double-check locations on a minimap to discern where anything is; the PSP remaster, on the other hand, features a beautifully-drawn 2D map segmented into portions which allow for very simple navigation. Moreover, the Revelations release featured some very odd changes: the town was relocated to a generic American city and all character names were changed to reflect the setting.
Nanjo became Nate, Reiji became Chris (which caused some very major confusion the brief time I spent with this version of the game), and while other characters suffered some strange sprite alteration no character was hit harder than Masao. Poor, oafish Masao became Mark and was completely changed into a black kid. The horrifying realization that this was likely done because his initial Persona is dressed in tribal attire and the character's negotiation skill is "dancing crazy" is sobering and, while very hilarious, somewhat uncomfortable. Not only this, but the game's difficulty was tweaked by lowering the encounter rate and increasing experience values across the board. It's a pretty horrid way to play an already middling game, though the minute-to-minute dungeon crawling is still just as good as the PSP version. There's also a completely optional side route--not side quest, a full-blown secret campaign hidden from the player--that was completely removed from the Playstation release, though the PSP remaster naturally restores it.
The biggest drawback to playing on the PSP is honestly a rather big one: Megami Ibunroku featured an absolutely stellar soundtrack, a tense and lively mixture of hard rock and unsettling industrial music. It seriously helps set the tone for an eerie trek across a nightmare world and contains some of my favorite music tracks of the Playstation library. The PSP remaster, on the other hand, has replaced nearly all music with annoying, loud, ear-grating J-Pop that actually sounds like it came from the Persona 4 soundtrack. Seriously, at one point I had to stop playing the game to look up a similar track and make sure it wasn't just lifted from the later game. It utterly destroys the atmosphere of the game and every single time I hear "leave dis berry memly" I want to shut the fucking game off and refund the two copies of the game I bought because I can't help but love it.
No seriously, listen to this crap.
To make matters far worse (and funnier), the singer utterly obliterates the pronunciation of the lyrics. I know it's very gauche to make fun of an ESL, but the lyrics are botched to such a ridiculous degree that it's nearly impossible to discern what's actually being conveyed. Just look at the first verse of the song:
Leave this buried memory
This fear-ridden self-consciousness
I'm just a lone prayer
The first line is sang decently with the exception of the obvious Engrish errors, but with the second the entire song collapses in on itself. "This" has been almost entirely skipped past, causing the reading to sound more like "s'fear-ridden" which sounds more like a contraction of "it's." "Ridden" in "fear-ridden" is almost entirely skipped because of the enunciation, while "self" takes two syllables to pronounce. "Consciousness" is fine, if not bizarrely slurred. Rather than "This fear-ridden self-consciousness," it sounds like the singer is shouting S'FEAR-RIN SEH-ELF CONSCIOUSNESS. And that's just silly. Where things take a very dramatic turn for the worst, and the point the song cannot possibly hope to pick itself up over, is the final line where the singer completely forgets the sentence article "a," so rather than the singer telling the listener she is "a lone prayer," which doesn't make any sense, she's telling the listener "I'm just lone prayer." This signifies that she herself is identified as "Lone Prayer," which just makes no sense at all. Hell, the first time I heard the song I thought the lyrics were pure gibberish, then eventually I convinced myself it was:
Leave this valid memory,
Spirits of consciousness
I'm just one player
It still doesn't make much sense, but at least it doesn't sound like garbage.
This is the first verse of the stupid battle song which the player is going to hear with almost permanent frequency, especially in later stages of the game where every three or four steps will cause a random battle to occur. Even if the player nukes the enemy field in one spell, it's almost impossible to skip the first verse of the song. That's disregarding the weird chorus which throws around Japanese lyrics with reckless abandon. In short, the music is a complete mess which makes no grammatical sense and shatters the tone of the game. In a word, it sucks. And don't get me started on the abysmal world map theme which is plagued with poor enunciation, weird grammatical errors, and just a very poor melody. The only good song in the game, and ironically the only one I'd consider great, is the final boss theme. It's even better than the original soundtrack, strangely enough.
There's rumor of a fan patch which replaces almost all of the shitty J-Pop with the wonderful soundtrack of the Playstation game, but I'm not here reviewing a fan fix. If you really want to play the game and don't mind getting your hands dirty--and I want to point out that I suffered through the PSP music so you should too--I recommend at least looking into that.
Given the slew of improvements to the PSP release it's obviously stupid to ever assume the Playstation version is better in any capacity other than music. I always thought of a game's soundtrack as being one of the least important aspects of game design until I played Persona on PSP, but after comparing the two I'm almost stunned that anyone at Atlus thought this was a good idea. If you have to play Persona, I'm sorry that your only option is the musical equivalent to someone spraying diarrhea on a wall and proclaiming it as art.
Verdict
For the majority of its run, Persona is a great dungeon crawler that runs at a brisk pace through some of the best-designed first-person dungeons in the industry. Not overly complex like Strange Journey or mindlessly stupid like Persona 4, Persona has the makings of a great entry into the dungeon crawler genre. That said, the finale of the game utterly destroys the masterful pacing set up in the game's narrative and core mechanics, then spits in the player's face by offering a final boss seemingly lifted from a different game entirely. It's broken my spirit for now, but I don't think I've given up yet--watching the ending on Youtube just doesn't have the same impact. I won't review Persona 2 until I beat Pandora on my own though, so you better hope I get my ass in gear.
