My Thoughts on Shin Megami Tensei: Persona
Introduction
A while ago, I wrote three blogs about the Persona games in the order I played them. They were;
- Persona 5
- Persona 3
- Persona 4
I will leave links to each respective blog below if you fancy reading them. My writing style has changed a little bit since writing them but hopefully, you’ll enjoy them nonetheless.
To provide some context for this blog, a friend of mine has gone on holiday and has given me a handful of his things to look after whilst he is abroad. One of these items is a PSP, which contains the original Persona games! Well, two of them anyway, as the third one, ‘Persona 2: Eternal Punishment’ didn’t make its way onto the PSP in the UK.
So while I get round to playing Persona 2 and it’s sequel, allow me to bore you with my thoughts on ‘Shin Megami Tensei: Persona’.
A Small Bit about ‘Revelations: Persona’ & ‘Megami Ibunroku Persona’
A spin-off to the ‘Shin Megami Tensei’ franchise, titled ‘Megami Ibunroku Persona’ was released 20th September 1996 in Japan with ‘Revelations: Persona’ being released 14th December in North America that year and that port is the stuff of legends and not for entirely for good reasons.
During the 1990s, many US companies had a weird obsession to do everything within their power to make sure American kids didn’t know Japan existed. Many animes (such as the original ‘Pokemon’ series for example) had rewrites, altering any form of religious belief, violence and any mature themes. The newly formed ATLUS of USA did the same with ‘Revelations: Persona’. All the cast were made white, (except Mark, who became black). Their hair colours were changed as were many of their names to make them more westernised. Many, if not all and many forms of Japanese culture were removed (yen became dollars for example). On top of this, a large questline (that I will discuss later) was removed for reasons that no one ever seemed to have worked out.
Thirteen years later, ATLUS rereleased the game as ‘Shin Megami Tensei: Persona’ on the PSP, which was when the rest of the world could enjoy the game in its full, untampered glory. Now, I present you my thoughts of the PSP port of ‘Shin Megami Tensei: Persona’. I have never played the PS1 game and thus can’t make any comment on how that differed from the port I played.
From this point onwards, there will be MANY SPOILERS for the 22-year-old game. Consider this your warning folks!
The Blog Proper
Minutes into the game and there are many immediate differences between this game and the other Persona games I played up to this point. The game begins with you, a silent protagonist, and your/his group of friends in the fictional St. Hermelin High School in the also fictional town Mikage-cho playing the Persona Game, which is the game’s take on Bloody Mary. A ghost appears and most of the friends pass out and wake up in the Collective Unconscious and meet Philemon, some deity and neutral observer that grants the friends the power to summon reflections of their personalities, which are of course their Personas.
I liked how quickly the concept of the Personas was introduced. It wasn’t dragged out forever like it was in ‘Persona 4’ and ‘Persona 5’ and was not as abstract as ‘Persona 3’. It was also interesting seeing this take on the ‘chosen one’. Persona 3–5 presents you, the protagonist, as the saviour of the world and your friend's problems. In ‘Persona’ the party has the goal of saving the town makes them all equal in that regards. This protagonist is similar to the one of ‘Persona 3’ in that he has very little impact on the story until the very end. In ‘Persona’, you have even less say, becoming the blankest of canvases, which actually makes him incredibly forgettable.
I was also unsure of what to make of Philemon. His design was basic and yet impressive and he seems to have more power than Igor of The Velvet Room. Philemon removes his mask during one of the game’s endings and I was disappointed how average looking he was, but I am being really picky here.
He actually replaces Igor in a lot of ways, as Igor just becomes the maker of new Personas for you and your party. I always liked the eccentricity of that large-nosed man that seems to be a deity, somewhat weaker than Philemon and not seeing him in a more prominent role upset me a little. Igor has more character than Philemon, which may be why he was made more important in Persona 3–5. There is very little importance of Igor’s existence is in terms of plot in ‘Persona’, the same could be said about The Velvet Room. It is just there in shopping malls, subways and forests for the party to pop in and say hi to Igor, Belladonna and whoever it is that’s playing the piano in The Velvet Room. You can actually see them in this game!
Once you and the friends come too, you go visit this other friend of yours Maki Sonomura, who is ill and bed-ridden at the town’s hospital. This is when the game allows you to wander around its world. In the ‘dungeons’ (areas where you fight daemons) and the school, the game takes a first-person, dungeon crawler perspective. I was not used to this idea, but I didn’t mind it. There were times where I laughed when I found the button that allows the character to move with unbelievable speed, almost flying from one end of the corridor to the other in a second like an infant who had cocaine on his Coco Pops.
Exploring around the school and talking to the students allowed for some pleasant world-building, and the necessary dialogues to obtain Reiji, the most broken party member in the game and the questline that was removed in ‘Revelations: Persona’.
The first battle of the game begins just after speaking to Maki and it wasn’t all that different from the other Persona games I played. It is one of the standout moments in the whole game as the entire party awakens their personas and wipes the floor with the daemons (not Shadows like in future games).
The battles operate on a turn-based combat idea, with each monster you face having a different set of weaknesses. How it differs from later Persona games is that it operates on a grid-based system where each attack can potentially hit so many enemies. For example, any magic/Persona skill you use will most likely hit all the enemies, but any physical attacks could hit just one or two enemies in front of you.
Just like in ‘Persona 5’, you can negotiate with your daemon foes, finding ways of either making them happy, angry, eager or scared to make them give you a spell card, which is a version of themselves you can take to Igor who will fuse it with other spell cards to make bigger and better personas. Knowing this was a feature in the original Persona as well as ‘Persona 5’, it made me wonder why this was removed in Persona 3 & 4, but put back in for it’s most recent entry.
Whilst simple enough to navigate and understand the menus and where everything was during a fight, what becomes a problem later on in the game is it’s pacing. Some of the animations for attacks last more than 10 seconds, meaning that each round can take minutes at a time. It is possible to hold down a button to speed up the animations or turn it off completely, but it just felt wrong for me to do that. I felt that enemies did not give a lot of experience points (exp) either, which mean that grinding became a real chore.
The game also presents one of many moral choices you can make throughout the game, starting at the end of the hospital level/dungeon as you can either save or leave a nurse trapped under a vending machine to the wrath of the daemons, which immediately hinted to me that there are multiple endings. I can confirm to you that ‘Persona’ has four endings, that I will briefly expand upon later on. Moral choices like the one previously mentioned felt particularly weak as you were either cunt or a saint that doesn’t really add much of an interesting narrative. That being said, my research does tell me that certain answers may add or remove potential boss fights as well making some easier/harder.
You flee the hospital (without Maki because of story reasons) and you discover that the town is indeed filled with daemons. The party is told by Maki’s mother, an engineer working for a large corporation called SEBEC, that the culprit behind the incident is a Takahisa Kandori, president of the company who wants to create a reality where he is a god. You take Maki’s mother back to the school, as that is the only safe place now (apparently), and more of the story unfolds, causing your party to split up. Maki arrives looking healthier than before, with some subtle changes in her personality and altered previous knowledge of herself. Nanjo comes back through a hole in the wall in the school’s courtyard with guns. Not the replica guns of ‘Persona 5’ or The Evokers of ‘Persona 3’, but actual assault rifles and pistols! It makes perfect sense as swords and magic is quite a backwards thing now, but it was a very anime moment that just made me laugh.
I went into the game with the knowledge that the game has two completely different narrative paths that can take place from this point onwards. If you decide to go after Kandori, it’ll start the SEBEC Route proper which is the main storyline for the game. Alternatively, you can investigate a series of incidents that occurred in the school that begins the Snow Queen Route, an alternate storyline unrelated to the SEBEC incident. This was the questline that was removed from ‘Revelations: Persona’.
Each route has one good and one bad ending and has cutscenes that hint towards the other route once you reach specific points in either route.
SEBEC Route
You leave school and visit a police station overrun by daemons to rescue two of your friends locked up in jail. Mark, Kanjo and Maiki all remain as party members throughout the game, and you can choose to have Brown as party member number five, but it won’t be long that you are given the chance to replace him. You head to an Abandoned Factory and find Ayase and if you don’t recruit her, that is the last time you will see her. Likewise, if you replace Brown with her, he too will be omitted from the rest of the game’s plot. ‘Persona’ is very weird in how it deals with its party members. They simply stop existing if they are not recruited. They don’t die, as the cutscene in the good ending reveals this, but they just disappear and have nothing left to do with the narrative. It would have been nice to see a stronger narrative that included all of the potential party members in some way, either that they followed you around and can be switched out at any given point (like any other RPG of this nature) or perhaps as another party that you would bump into every now and then.
The Persona games are known for their strong emphasis on the characters and their personal problems, and not to see much of that here is a shame, but given that this is the first in the series, it is understandable that everything is not fantastic as it will become.
This would also be a good point to mention that social links/confidants are not a feature in the game, which was a nice breath of fresh air. I got very annoyed with all of the previous Persona games I played previously at the fact that you are the only one in existence who can help them get their shit together. It was one of my biggest gripes with ‘Persona 5’, and ‘Persona 3’ did the whole social link thing the best (in my opinion), but it was nice to have friends that didn’t need you to sort their problems out. You are not their guardian angel. That being said, I was unsure how close the friends were as Nanjo often refers to Mark as a monkey, probably because he is black which is by the way INCREDIBLY RACIST! The racism only gets worse as one of the antagonists Aki often makes monkey noises at him. These were…uncomfortable moments, to say the least as it gave some insight as to why Mark was made black in ‘Revelations: Persona’.
You meet Kandori after a long dungeon and discover he is a Persona too before buggering off to be a dick and have a boss fight with his goons. Whilst not particularly engaging, the music that plays here did a decent job of making me realise that the fight was more important than the previous ones. The cue was very much of its time, with angsty distorted guitars and aggressive female vocals, forming this edgy rock track. You can just smell the early 2000s on this one!
On the topic of the music, Shoji Meguro is the main composer for the game as well as the director for the PSP port of the game and I am not a huge fan of the soundtrack here as well as the implementation. There are some rather tense moments in the game, but there is not enough variety in the game to compensate for the changes in mood. Sound effects are rather lacking too. I am only being harsh with soundtrack here has the music in later games would be so good and I foolishly expected the music to be as great as the other Persona game soundtracks I own and adore.
Two cues I particularly enjoy are ‘School Days’ and ‘Dream of Butterfly’
Returning back to the story, you corner Kandoria inside the DEVA System, which is some big ol’ machine. Aki appears and knocks the party unconscious. When they awake, they find themselves in school. I initially thought it was going be some time-travel mechanic which made me just as worried as excited, as time-travel narratives are either really shit or really good. What actually happens is that the party has been sent to a duplicate, idealized version of their world which is where the plot becomes a tad confusing, prodding at the idea that there are multiple worlds being created by the sick Maki (the one you saw at the hospital some hours prior), with Aki and the ghost girl you saw at the beginning, called Mai, being good and bad versions of Maki, with the Maki in your party existing simply because. It is never really explained how the real sick Maki is able to do this or why, but the rest of the game’s narrative is simple enough to be somewhat engaging.
After some more dungeon navigating you end up on the other side of the town and have to find the Harem Queen, who has that portion of residents under some sort of spell. To reach her, you must venture through the Karma Palace, the dungeon I found most confusing to navigate. This is vitally important to note because when you reach said queen, who turns out to be one of your classmates, she sends you back to the very beginning of the dungeon, forcing you to go through it all over again. ‘What a brilliantly evil idea!’ I laughed to myself until I remember that there was no quick way of getting back to where she was.
I will skip over the plot here as none of it is particularly interesting or memorable for me to praise or complain about. I will mention that the final showdown with Kandori is incredibly underwhelming. Having become a god of his description, he becomes all depressed and bored because now he has nothing better to do, thus losing all-purpose to carry on. I’m not kidding by the way. There is no grand climax to this encounter It just deflates suddenly, accompanied by a mediocre boss fight. Aki is a better villain than Kandori is at this point, as she has done more to interfere with the party.
Something that I thought was particularly dark was the fact that the party actually kills Kandori and the vast majority of bosses prior. They don’t have a change of heart of collapse like in other Persona games, they are legitimately killed by some magical school students…and their assault rifles.
The Snow Queen Route
I will admit that I have yet to play this and the reasons are simple. Once you complete the main game with either good or bad ending, you have to start all over again. I imagine this mechanic would piss off a lot of players as there is one dialogue option during the first encounter with Mai that guarantees you the bad ending and there is little you can do about it. The Snow Queen route is supposed to be much harder than the base game and I don’t intend to do it based on that reason alone.
All I can say is that I thought this was a very interesting idea to have two different stories that are both considered canon.
Coda
It is pretty sad to think that the whole game’s plot exists because of a sick dying girl living out her fantasy, but it is only after playing the game and thinking more about it that I realise how poorly the game does in making me feel anything beyond ‘let’s get to the end and see what happens’.
I went into this game being as open-minded as possible, as I knew it was likely going to be worse than the other Persona games. It is my least favourite Persona game to date, which is not to say it was a bad game. It was an average experience at best, both in gameplay and narrative. The most interesting part of it is the existence of ‘Revelations: Persona’ as it is an interesting time-capsule about how the US viewed Japan. I would only recommend this game to someone like me who is interested in how the Persona franchise started and not as a game to blow their tiny minds.
If I was rate this game out of 10, I would rate it Erusaer Tsymmon/10, as that is just as helpful as a proper out of 10 score.
What do you think of this game? Have you completed the infamous Snow Queen quest? If so, what is it like? Did you use the O.P Reiji as I did? Who is your favourite party member? Mine is Mark.
Let’s start a conversation, people!
