Persona 4 - Playing Through the Intermission
Warning: The following contains some spoilers regarding Persona 3 and Persona 4, two role-playing games for the PS2 .

Persona 4 is an RPG of modern-era fantasy. Your character is a transfer student from the big city to a small, rural town in Japan - where a sudden string of bizarre murders rocks the small community. Your character discovers that he (it's always a he - you can change your name and customize your growth, but your character's place in society as a whole is fixed) has the ability to move himself and others between dimensions via - of all things - a television set. This isn't just a one-way effect: images from that world appear at midnight on rainy nights on televisions throughout the town in a phenomenon the kids refer to as the "midnight channel."

The midnight channel shows images of the people about to be murdered. Someone else shares the protagonist's power, and uses this dimension as a murder weapon. Townspeople are being kidnapped and thrown into this world, where they face a physical incarnation of a darker aspect of their personalities - a "shadow." Eventually, either by denying that dark side or over time when the fog leaves the TV world and enters our own, the shadow obtains independence and slays its alternate self, leaving the body shrouded in fog in the "real world."

Your character - and his friends (many of whom are rescued from this "TV world" over the course of the game) - undertake a mission to put an end to the murders, to rescue the kidnapped victims (who remember nothing of how they arrived in the alternate dimension), and bring the killer to justice.

The party of teen-aged world-hopping adventurers apparently succeed in their quest, wrapped up during summer break. They catch the suspect in the TV world, bring him out, call the police, and he offers a confession to all the murders. The case is - apparently - closed.

From a meta-gaming perspective, it's obvious that the game hasn't ended yet, and that you are simply playing through an intermission before things really heat up. The game provides plenty of hints that it's not so cut and dried - and the characters admit as much - but for now, the game is treating the story as done, but for a few loose threads and subplots.

This happened in Persona 3, too - the final full-moon boss had been destroyed, the threat to the world apparently destroyed, and the team of elite Persona-users had a party to celebrate their victory. But in that case, the Pyrrhic nature of their victory was revealed very quickly (like, that night), and the "real" threat came to light in a big scene of betrayal and... crucifixion. As if the parallels in this story to Christian theology weren't quite heavy enough...

Persona 4 handles it differently. You have days of normal gameplay, without any major plot development. Not only are you, the player, left a little aimless other than to pursue your own goals (suspicious that there is indeed something more to come), but the main character's companions must likewise adjust to life after a the climax of their great adventure, without having received a satisfactory denouement. The war ended yesterday, and these soldiers have just been sent home to try to adjust to "normal" life.

They complain. They are happy to have achieved their goals and that nobody else will die (although they cautiously note they intend to check the midnight channel just in case), but there's something missing from their lives. They lack purpose. Things like the upcoming class trip aren't just diversions during their quest to save lives, help people, and - yes, play heroes. It's all they have to look forward to.

Chie seems saddened that their table at the food court of the local shopping center is no longer their "special headquarters" where they would meet to prepare or debrief after missions. They reflect on how they cannot tell anybody about their incredible supernatural adventures, or their role in bringing the killer to justice. In spite of the fierce battle they fought and the things they have endured, they are left somehow unfulfilled.

And life must simply go on. Simply.

The game revels in it. The last day of August, the main character invites his friends to come over and enjoy a watermelon his uncle Dojima has brought home. Sitting on the back porch in the sunset, they laugh, they talk, they make plans. Later that evening, after they've left, Dojima reverses his former position on his nephew's companions, and praises him on finding such good friends.

And you keep playing. After this kind of idyllic moment, you know that that the next shoe to drop is going to be a size 20 steel-toed boot. But the game teases you with a little bit more peace and calm. Go your own way, it suggests: do your own thing, the story is over but the world and characters remain...

When I finished Oblivion and had that same sense of "what now?", I didn't feel nearly as compelled to finish sub-quests and keep exploring the world. I knew it was over. Persona 4 provides some clear hints (outside of the obvious meta-gaming knowledge that the game is supposed to take a year, and it hasn't yet been six months) that there's something more going on.

But it lets you explore what life might be like when things are truly over. You get to be normal with your friends - except for occasional excursions back to the TV realm for some practice. (During one such practice, I was very surprised to see Kanji and Teddie - two characters I'd left behind - in a room in the dungeon, apparently practicing on their own. Since the pressure was off, Kanji explained, they were just doing their own thing while the rest of us were busy.)

It's different. I'd probably go crazy if every RPG tried to pull this off. But somehow they pulled off the idea of playing through an intermission like this, and I'm enjoying it. A nice change of pace.

At least until that size 20 steel-toed boot drops.

Labels: Roleplaying Games

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 8:02 AM (Permalink)