Category Archives: Persona 3

Party System


It’s that “too many games to play” time of year. I don’t deal with it well. I’m pretty poor at multitasking, in fact — I like to concentrate on one game at a time, and if it grabs me such that I feel like finishing it, I’m compelled to do so before I start anything else. Of course, I can take diversions into downloadable action games, or take one disc out of the Xbox 360 so that my friends can do that multiplayer deathmatch whatever thing they love to do in Reach, but mostly I’m a one-thing-at-a-time kind of gamer.

Actually, sometimes I get so overwhelmed I don’t really play anything at all. I celebrated my birthday by partying a lot and going to a lot of music festival bands (fortunately, my result was a lot better than this), and in terms of gaming all I really did was beat Persona 3 Portable. You know, basically the game I already beat a while back when it was out on PlayStation 2.

Actually, it felt quite a lot different this time. Although it changed really nothing about the gameplay (although making those P4-style tweaks to the battle system was much, much needed), the gender swap changed lots about the narrative for me and the way I related to the characters. Remember that Kotaku article I wrote about that?

RPGs are kind of tough that way. On one hand, it’s a “role-playing game”; it’s meant to be the story of a character’s journey, and any good story allows different people to get different things out of it. On the other hand, the gameplay is most central, and in most cases there is an “optimal” way to do everything. Story-driven decisions can sometimes be directly at odds with the decisions you “should” be making to optimize your character’s strength or progress.

For example, in the case of Persona 3, your character starts dating another character and you’d rather they spend every possible day together — but because your “rank” with the game’s characters affects your power to create the Personas you summon in battle, it makes more sense to distribute your time equally among other characters, even those you’re disinterested in. In fact, it’s essential.

The conflict between what you’d like to do to create your story and what’s ideal for the gameplay is probably the primary problem with RPGs. That’s why open-world RPGs like Fallout 3 are so good; their format makes great strides toward alleviating that friction. By the way, I’m almost relieved New Vegas is so buggy — “oh, I’m waiting for a patch, that’s not out yet, is it, I dunno, I haven’t looked” takes some of the pressure off my queue of games to play by the end of the year.

The other main issue, particularly in the Japanese RPG format, is that you can make a million different character classes for the player to choose from, and each one still has an optimal set of equipment and attributes that renders all others useless. It’s puzzled me since the ’90s: You go to a new town and the shops offer a whole raft of equipment, but one is the best, period. Why not just buy that one? Oh, can’t afford it? If not for “better stuff”, then what are you grinding for, anyway? Go kill some whatevers until you get some more currency, solved problem.

It’s made that whole customizing and outfitting process seem very pointless, some kind of tacked-on relic that’s no longer relevant. I go through those motions and sigh, “oh, so this is one of the things they mean when they always say ‘Japanese design doesn’t know how to get up to date.’”

Not that I really believe that, of course. The Persona games could never have come out of the West, for example. And in fact, it’s a completely traditionalist JRPG franchise that’s taken the first approach to characterization and customizing that I really like, the first marriage of party system and leveling mechanics that I’m having a ton of fun with.

I dunno why I just assumed I wasn’t going to like Dragon Quest IX. I haven’t played a Dragon Quest game since I was a child, and that’s because I just assumed I’d have to be killing a million slimes in an endless dungeon and being all super old-school and shit. But I decided to give it a try, mainly just to do due-diligence, and am finding DQIX completely enchanting. With the Final Fantasy series having lost its way so badly lately, DQIX demonstrates a real opportunity for the brand to become the quintessential must-have fantasy RPG.

You have a main character, a Chrono Trigger-style silent protagonist, and the central story arc blooms neatly into many smaller side-threads that feel organic — something that I think Western RPGs lack, as you often find yourself feeling as if you’re fulfilling tacked-on errands for a character you have no narrative reason to support or be interested in.

And you generate your party as your own custom characters that you can swap in and out at any time, with no limitations to how many you can create within a given class (they cap how many characters in total you can create, but it’s a pretty generous number). You create their look and name them — which basically means you’re free to imagine whatever you want about who they are and why they’re with you.

I used to be turned off by these kinds of systems; I’d rather have a party of story-based and well-realized characters working together, than view my heroes as interchangeable dummies, the sum of their abilities and nothing more. But the world is rich enough that you want to make little people you believe could exist there, and it solves the “only one optimal choice” problem in a neat way.

Say you decide to make a Priest for your party; you conceptualize a little bit what you want that character to look like. But outfit them in the items that provide the best bonuses to their strength and defense and suddenly my floppy-haired staff and robe character looks awkward in the same kind of armor that another character is wearing. They don’t look like the character I’ve visualized; they don’t look like they’re going to be playing the role of healer in my party.

For the first time, I start choosing stuff that’s less-than-optimal from a stats standpoint because it just looks cool on the character; it makes them look how I want them to look. I want my Mage in a dress and heels, dammit, and if it makes her weaker — aren’t the magic users supposed to be more sensitive to damage than the hero is, anyway? I can deal.

It breaks the boring “upgrade to new equipment, sell the old equipment, repeat” cycle in a way that enhances my concept of my characters at the same time. I find myself hanging on to all the cute little robes and hats and armor plates and outfits there are, because I might want to use them on a new character. Seeing what kinds of new characters I can make up and add to my hero’s journey becomes a big part of the game’s fun. They all look so cute!

Also cute: NEW KITTEN. I decided on naming her Yorda. Shh, we can make fun of me later.

Cathy

If you don’t recognize SVGL’s new banner, get up to date! I’m more excited about Catherine than I’ve been about any other “well, I don’t know too much about it but this seems awesome” title in some time, so I’m very psyched at the Catherine banner made for me by Cristopher Boyer.

Nice work, eh? Cristopher is Detroit’s IGDA coordinator, and is CEO and co-founder of media development company Variant. His work involves helping nurture and support new game development, web and tech businesses in Michigan — “It’s all about the new economies here right now,” he tells me. Good lookin’ out, Cristopher, and thanks so much for the banner.

As always, past banners by me and by wonderful generous gift artists can be seen at the official Sexy Videogameland banner gallery!

A little while back, fellow Atlus fan Colette Bennett wrote at Gamasutra about why she’s looking forward to the game so much and the kinds of themes and interactions she thinks have the potential to emerge. Check it out.

What I’ve done regarding Catherine is, uh. Despite having an embarrassment of riches in my “to play” pile, I have been diligently aiming to finish Persona 3 Portable, and when I encountered Vincent’s little cameo in the game…

Okay. I don’t know what’s lamer. That I made a YTMND, that I am showing everyone, or that I keep loading it up so that I can laugh at the thing. That I made. Yeah. Well, here you go.

All Work, A Little Play

At Gamasutra we’ve been so busy with coverage of GDC Europe and GamesCom that I’ve hardly had time to eat, let alone blog! But if you’re at all interested in what game designers did in Europe all last week, we’ve got lots of coverage for you, so check out: my interview with Mattias Myllyrinne and Avni Yerli on the Euro scene, plus our Day 1, and Day 2-3 roundups for everything you need.

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews and things myself, lately. I just talked to Crystal Dynamics’ GM Darrell Gallagher about Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, the new co-op game for downloadable platforms (there’s a full, AI-less single-player mode, too). This game is extremely rad. Studio obviously knows what it’s doing in that space — and that’s not really a facile observation to make in emerging markets, even for a studio with that pedigree. For their first outing of a major IP on downloadable, I think they knocked it out of the park.

Another thing we’ve published lately worth noticing is that a number of the prominent indies whose games you love would like you — well, “us”, really, the critics — to stop weighing a game on how long it is or isn’t, and instead to look at it as a holistic experience. It is understandable that consumers are concerned about “value per dollar”, but why is value being measured in minutes? I’ve gotta say, I’m very much behind their sentiments, so you should read this editorial from Klei’s Jamie Cheng and the numerous essays published simultaneously from other devs linked in the piece.

Terminal Reality seems to have come out of nowhere as a powerhouse on the game engine scene. It’s the Ghostbusters engine, and it’s only been publicly available for licensing since then — but they already have some 25 games in development on the Infernal Engine. VP Joe Kreiner explains to me how they quietly ramped up, and tells me they have a Kinect project in house. I think I have a good idea what it is.

Despite the Madden series being one of my #videogameblindspots, I am weirdly fascinated with the annual development of the product. Maybe this interview I did with the EP will shed some light on how deceptively complex it is.

My goodness, how could I forget — I was here at the New York City event when Irrational showed off the new BioShock game, BioShock Infinite. I heard a lot of “why call it BioShock if there’s no Rapture” muttering from the internet, but hopefully my event coverage and interview with the art director will help answer that question. And maybe it’ll even make you as psyched for the game as I am!

This is just a little bit of what’s been keeping my colleagues and I running lately. With so much work going on, I’ve gotta play a little, right? Oftentimes, a lot of the ways I have fun look a lot like work, but hey.

Here’s an LA Times article I just wrote about Babycastles, the fantastic indie arcade some friends of mine are setting up in the basement of a community space where I love to hang out. It’s so cool seeing an indie game scene here merging with the music scene. I wish you could all check it out for yourselves, but until then, read the piece, willya?

Finally, I am weirding out the lovely literate community at Thought Catalog with a proud chronology of my gaming history; these are some personal memories of every game console I’ve ever owned — part one of four (it’s a long chronology!) Pass it ’round if you are into it. I’m really fond of Thought Catalog and read it for fun, and you should check it out too.

Oh, yeah. And still lots and lots of Persona 3 Portable. In general I think P3 is a much weaker game than P4; halfway through, it tends to take major shortcuts on narrative trajectories that it previously explored in-depth; whereas getting to know your housemates and discovering Fuuka early on were fairly fleshed plotlines, later on it just seems to start throwing party members at you. I loved the way that in P4, every character had their own individual story; P3‘s more like “okay, I said what you wanted, S. Link level up!” I guess preference for either installment depends more on whether it’s atmosphere or individuals that motivate you as a player.


[Today’s Good Song: ‘Murder Dull Mind‘, Amen Dunes’]

Squee Mode


In a predictable state of affairs, writer Leigh Alexander swathed her entire blog in a romantic Persona 3 Portable theme, tweeted on numerous occasions about how she failed to sleep due to Persona 3 Portable, changed her desktop wallpaper from MGS3‘s final boss scene to the above image, and then stopped blogging for two weeks. Guess what she has been doing all this time.

Actually, while I have been playing a lot of Persona 3 Portable, I’ve mainly been writing a lot, once again developing bunches of stories that I can’t wait to share with you as they materialize. Lately, though, I’ve been talking to a lot of developers about the high-stress environment of the game industry. Lots of people get into game writing because they hope to “cross over” — that’s never been me. I feel like there’s nothing that could make me want to work on the other side; let’s pretend I actually did have any game design skills, which I certainly don’t. Writing for the trade I’ve learned something big: I don’t envy them, to say the least!

And having been in games writing for a while now, there are a lot of times, to be honest, that I’m terribly stressed out, too, by the challenges of covering such a specific business — and by the culture of the audience, and I know I’m not alone. And if the audience is capable of causing me so much fatigue and disillusionment sometimes, it makes me wonder what’s wrong with them, too.

I wrote Who Cheers For War last month at Kotaku because I’ve been curious about digging into the darkness I often observe in our hobby — there’s no other way of putting it. Sometimes it even feels like illness. The often unspoken pains that all three spokes of this wheel (devs, media and audience) endure was something I think it’s important to continue to call attention to and examine, and I did this at Gamasutra late last week. Please do check it out and discuss if you missed it. The discussion thread on it has grown epic.

Today at Kotaku, an article about — surprise! — Persona 3 Portable. In my last post I said I hoped to write more about how playing as a female feels different this time around, and I had the opportunity to do that in this month’s feature column. For reference, here’s how it felt for me the first time around, from the archives of my old Aberrant Gamer haunt.

You heard yesterday that GameStop bought Kongregate — Kongregate’s founder, Jim Greer, an industry veteran with whom I’ve had several conversations that make me feel he cares very much about developers, would like you to think twice before applying the “home for indies sells out” narrative to this one, or that’s the message I got from my interview with both companies about the deal.

In other acquisition news, Disney spends quite a sum on third-place Facebook game developer Playdom, and one analyst thinks it’s an over-spend with unclear ROI potential (how’s that Club Penguin thing working out now, I’d like to know?). The contentious environment around social game investments, players and developers, is certainly becoming increasingly fricative, and nothing’s made this clearer than the polarizing response to Ian Bogost’s commentary game, Cow Clicker. For now, check out the heated discussion on his blog about it, and stay tuned for an in-depth follow up from me at Gamasutra coming soon. The whole issue’s fascinating, to say the least.

Speaking of social media, you will notice Blogger has kindly added buttons to allow you to tweet, FB, email and Buzz my posts directly whenever you like. Go for it!

So, also StarCraft II is, uh… something that is happening… it is a game for your computer, a lot of people are playing it, I.. yeah, I don’t know. I don’t know anything about StarCraft. Blind spot. Sorry bros. Are you into it? Lemme know in the new SVGL poll on the sidebar!

The last poll, by the way, showed that the majority of you, at 58%, are not interested in new motion control solutions. 21 percent of you are interested in PlayStation Move, 16 percent prefer Kinect, and only 4 percent of you would like to have both interfaces in your living room. Innnnnnnnteresting! I’ll have to ask you again after launch, when more titles are available…

[‘Today’s Good Song’ is actually an awesome music video! Check out Cosmetics’ ‘Soft Skin‘.]

MORE LIKE HEART-ARUS


Oh, hello, Sexy Videogameland is pink. This is because I’m in love. With a video game, naturally, because my heart is black and inaccessible to human beings.

You knew I’m a Persona person. In fact, many of you found my site because of a handful of series or genres I’ve written extensively about, and Persona 3 and 4 kind of fall into the “kinda wrote a lot about that” category. If you’ve always been curious about the games and own a PSP, there’s no better time to get into it than with Persona 3 Portable. Hell, if you like RPGs and want something different, P3P is probably worth buying a PSP for, because you’ll probably spend enough hours on it to justify the purchase.

Though readers of this site are probably the kind to know, I’m not going to assume you do: P3P Portable is a redux of P3 with several fine modifications aimed at portable platforms. Notably it’s received the same kind of streamlining to the battle system that Persona 4 did, and there are some subtle modifications to the story that make it refreshing. Most notably, you can play as either a male or female protagonist (the original version allowed for only a male-focused story arc).

I hope I get some time to write more about how experiencing the game as a female character completely changes my experience. Characters I did not like when playing Persona 3 through the lens of a male seem much more sympathetic if I’m a female, for example. My gameplay preferences and priorities are different; the things I want for my character change.

There is a very specific gameplay framework that’s capable of hooking me immediately; if you’ve heard about P3P, it’s probably about how none of your friends can put it down. There really are few other games that tick all my boxes in quite this way (Pokemon does it, and so does a well-balanced iteration of Harvest Moon, but neither are this emotionally immersive). And yet I thought that I’d always gravitate toward managing the same elements the same way.

Not so. Maybe because I’ve played through P3 and P4 and I have a ‘tactic’ down that wasn’t present when I first played P3 — but there is something subtle nagging at me that tells me that changing my character’s gender (and it’s not just a palette swap; the story around her reacts) changes everything.

Anyhow, I’m not too far into things yet, I think I’m just in the second “chapter”, so to speak, but I’m so glad to return to this game’s world in such a well-done way. Like, seriously, I don’t really write reviews these days and I don’t ever tell you guys BUY THIS but buy this, unless you know a real reason why it ain’t your thing.

SVGL’s current theme comes courtesy of the lovely Sarah Becan, who was kind enough to make the banner for me. Clearly, she’s as into Sanada as I am. Please check out her work.

Bonus Content: I was going to talk about the game’s concept of ‘personae’, and how you have to be whatever your social partners are expecting in order to advance — it gives the game a lovely, dark undertone. Then I realized I already wrote about that like three years ago. Still relevant!


[Today’s Good Song: ‘Road to Agartha‘, Herbcraft via Altered Zones]