Persona 4 and the Amazing Idiot Box
I have finally finished Persona 4. For realz, this time. :) The dang thing concluded with my total time spent barely touching the triple digits. While I can't say I enjoyed every minute of it, on the whole it was a very enjoyable hundred hours. In particular, I was struck by the primary themes of the game, and its use of the television as a metaphor. Warning - this post contains some spoilers. I can't talk about this stuff without some spoilers, but I'll try and keep the details minimal and vague.

Once again, the fusion of RPG with dating sim worked very well together. It has been further enhanced in Persona 4 with the other playable characters having their own abilities enhanced as their bonds of trust improve with the main character. In general, the other characters were much more fleshed-out and believable than in the previous game, and the game mechanics were more varied and interesting (and challenging). I compare how compelling this game (and its predecessor) were for me over the more hyped, much-bigger-budget Final Fantasy XII - which I completely lost interest in after about ten hours of play - and I have to suggest that this is one of the most significant console RPGs to be released in recent years.

The Persona series breaks with jRPG convention on some fronts, but it still clings to type in many ways. Persona 4 has long, barely-interactive cut scenes, limited save locations (but more plentiful than in the last game), lots of grinding, and excruciatingly linear narratives (but at least you can pick and choose between advancing many of those relationship-based stories as you go). Oh, and it cheats. So it's far from flawless.

But in the final scene, as the main character boards the train and I endured some cheesy professions of enduring friendship from his fellow world-saving teenagers, I couldn't help but feel a level of satisfaction in the end I haven't felt with many RPGs, and a desire to return to this world and explore it a bit more. There are people there I care about. Even the annoying, living teddy bear who threatened to be a Jar-Jar Binks at the get-go.

The ("true") ending predictably concludes with the friendships you've forged pulling you back from the brink of doom and despair to become something like Neo from the Matrix, impossible to kill by your godlike arch-foe. In this case - as in the last game - your final showdown isn't against someone that you've grown to hate. Rather, you are fighting a god who feels they are actually acting according to the desires of humanity. You and your companions are standing against the passive tyranny of the majority.

In many ways, the "enemy" in this game is the television, the opiate of the masses. Yes, this is a video game that embraces its own hypocrisy and decries the boob tube. The idiot box serves as the portal into another dimension in this game - a bizarre conceit at first blush, which ends up making perfect sense in light of the theme. In Persona 4, it serves as the portal to the other world, and the proof of mankind's preference for dreams and illusion over harsh reality, and ultimately the instrument of this world's destruction,

On the supernatural "midnight channel," people find artificial connections to others. Their closet voyeurism is rewarded by what seems to be a peek into the soul of recent celebrities. But even this is only a shadow of the real thing - a sliver of their target's secret soul, a caricature portraying not what they truly are, but what the audience wants to see. Sorta like how reality shows are edited to portray participants in a very specific light, consistent with the character the producers want to sell to the audience.

The triumph of the protagonists comes from embracing truth over illusion. First, when in need of rescue and confronting their "shadow" selves, they immediately fail the test and deny that these less savory aspects of their soul are a part of them, a part that they keep hidden behind their public façade. The reinforced lie empowers the shadow to become an independent entity and kill its former host. But when they eventually embrace the truth, the victims become heroes, and their former tormentors - their shadows - become their allies in the form of personas.

Later, the party finds itself in a position to embrace the obvious solution to the mystery, goaded into action by the midnight channel itself and circumstantial evidence. Falling for this trap (which is easier than it sounds, as getting into an argument of right versus wrong can distract the player from the goal - to discover the truth) ends the game on a very unsatisfactory note. The protagonists must continue to dig deeper to learn not only the identity of the true murderer, but ultimately the being responsible.

It's only then that the loose ends start getting tied up. You learn why you (and two others) gained the ability to travel between worlds through the television prior to acquiring a Persona. You find out how the midnight channel came to be, a little more about the nature of the other world, and the goals of the entity that orchestrated the entire deal. And, in the end, you must strip away her own façade - matching that of the legend told to you by Mr. Edoki during the class trip.

(Unfortunately, that "stripping away of the façade" means the game fell into the all-too-common jRPG convention of making you fight a major boss multiple times. Because a single boss fight is too easy - you need to do multiple back-to-back boss battles! With the same dude! Yeah! Okay, I digress. )

Your ultimate victory comes down to choosing truth over illusion, and choosing your own destiny over that of a blanket solution determined by the majority (oooh, hey, insert "big government" rant here... Oh, wait, that's another major digression). The few triumph over the passive will of the many, the fog lifts in the other world revealing that what had been hidden in the hearts of men was actually something beautiful, not horrible.

All-in-all, it's a pretty powerful theme in a well-told story, in spite of the principal character having almost no voice (other than occasionally shouting out the names of his summoned personas).

I still maintain that traditional storytelling, as we've proven to have a difficult time escaping, has at best a shotgun marriage with gameplay. Japanese-style RPGs, in particular, tend to force the combination by simply alternating between the two. We get a half-hour of dramatic exposition, followed by two hours of barely related hacking and slashing, and a little bit of storytelling woven in at the end with the end-level boss exchanging angst-ridden dialog with the main characters as his health meter drops into the next quartile. If anything, the storytelling acts as a reward sequence, like those little cut-scenes every few levels in Pac-Man, writ large. Very large.

But sometimes those game developers can make it work, dang it. Especially when the payoff incorporates those choices that you made throughout the game (in this case, the relationships you maxed out). Persona 4 is rich in solid storytelling, in spite of the complications arising from the medium. The game's powerful theming takes it far beyond the cliché of it's otherwise traditional "Kill the Foozle" climax. You aren't battling an enemy, exactly, but the incarnation of a false belief.

After pleading, posturing, bragging, and declaring your doom, this final boss - the architect of all your troubles is finally brought down. The final words on her lips, before fading with the fog that has clouded a world created by the hearts and imaginations of mankind, are: "Children of men - well done!"

Well done, indeed.

Now if you'll excuse me. I feel a strange compulsion to step away from the television (and video games) and go accomplish something real for a while.

Labels: Mainstream Games, Roleplaying Games

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