Persona 1&2

The Persona franchise began as a spin-off of Shin Megami Tensei, a series of games I never bothered with, since I am not a fan of horror. Persona had its share of occult and creepy monsters, but it was also a JRPG with lots of mix and match of magic attacks to keep me going.

The first game was extremely hard to get into. Partly crude-looking polygons and partly low-frame spite animations, took me over a week to tolerate its ugliness. It was mostly because of the first person perspective when walking through monster-infested areas. There was no point in that feature. It made it hard to move around, you never saw any monsters that way, and because of the zooming, the mapping of the walls looked horribly pixelated.

Also, there was not much character charisma, since everyone was an archetype with a simple personality and backdrop. The main character doesn’t even have that, since he’s a bland self-insert silent protagonist. The only exception is Maki, the main girl in the team, and only because she is unknowingly the cause of the conflict.

The thing it had for grabbing you was the occult theme, and if you invested enough time, the cool concept of imagination affecting reality. It’s basically about a bunch of chuuni teenagers thinking they are Jojo and getting stands, with which they transfer to other realities and fight demons summoned by an evil corporation run by adults. Sounds like the worst type of escapism you can find in a light novel, doesn’t it? In this case it’s not, because getting what you want easily with magic, only proved how little value it had when not struggling to achieve it. In fact, the bad guys who used demons for manifesting their desires, ended up wishing for the whole world to be destroyed. So in a way it’s about anti-escapism, since the message is “if you get what you want without any effort, you will only get depressed with how hollow your life is”.

Another somewhat memorable thing, is the option to negotiate with the monsters you are fighting. You are given a set of options, and if you press the right ones, you get a reward. It was gimmicky, but it still gave you the option to win without fighting all the time.

So, do I recommend playing this game? No, because the next Persona is the exact same thing, only ten times better. The visuals didn’t improve that much, but at least they took out the first person view. The plot is the exact same as the one in the first game, only this time everyone is behind the cause of the conflict. Heroes and villains are far more fleshed out, and thus more memorable, and the concept of imagination affecting reality became part of the gameplay instead of background lore limited to the narrative. You are allowed to spread rumors around the city, which are magically becoming a reality if enough people believe in them, opening up new shops and altering a bit the plot depending on your choices.

Basically, in Persona 2 everyone was a chuuni, and no, it was not a crappy empowerment fantasy for introvert teenagers, since it ended up backfiring when the bad guys used the same trick for spreading their own nasty rumors. The final boss was Hitler and an army of cyborg Nazis, all because of a rumor. This was so crazy it made it impossible for the game to be localized for almost two decades. I had to play a fan-made translation since I couldn’t find an official release, even during the Playstation 2 era.

The great thing about Persona 2 is that they liked the concept so much to the point they made a sequel to it. For all I care this was the thematic pinnacle of the entire franchise. The new heroes were facing the consequences of the mistake the previous heroes made. Plus, for the first and only time, the characters were not teenagers spending most of their time in a high school. Everyone was an adult and had his own job, making it ten times more interesting than done-to-death teenagers and schools. I loved it and I highly recommend everyone to check it out.

Oh, and I might as well add how the basic plot is the same as Madoka Magica, only a thousand times better written. What, you actually thought Urobutcher can write original stories without ripping them off from earlier, superior works, and not making a complete mess out of them? Of course not you idiots; the same concept was done better during the 90s and Urobutcher did nothing but turn everything he touched into a pretentious pile of edgelord garbage. Retro always wins!