Persona 4

Each character is a tragic hero, and yet, they are at their core nothing more than ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. Because of this, we can relate to them, progress with them, live the adventure that is Persona through them.

Eleven years ago, I wrote those words as part of the opening to the official GameFan strategy guide for a quirky new RPG brought to the United States by Atlus called Revelations: Persona. It is funny that they would then end up being at their most relevant nearly a decade later at the release of the franchise's third official chapter, Persona 3.

Persona 3 was the game that changed things for me. Truth be told, I hadn't been so happy with the Japanese RPG genre over recent years; a genre I came to love from the 8-bit days of Phantasy Star and Dragon Warrior, and a genre I watched fall into stagnation as generations passed but each new title did little to progress itself over its forefathers. P3 may not have been the phoenix rising from the ashes of outdated ideas and cliches that I longed to see, but it was the game to stand up and challenge us to look at things in a whole new perspective, just as the original Persona had done so long ago.

And it was this love for the game that gave me back my faith that made me wonder if I had made a horrible mistake in pushing so hard to have Persona 4 be our cover story for the December 2008 issue.

The first person in Persona 4 to officially join our protagonist in his adventures is a young lad by the name of Yosuke. Like you, Yosuke is originally from the big city, brought to the sleepy Japanese town of Inaba due to his father's managerial position at the recently-opened mega store Junes. (Junes is the Wal-mart of the gaming world: the "evil" big-box retailer who comes in with little concern for the fate of those smaller local stores that have existed for as long as one can remember.) Yosuke's awakening to the power of persona–those inner selves of ours that give us strength beyond what we normally can achieve–doesn't come as it has come before, which typically amounts to a trumpet of fanfare and a "here kid, here's your persona, now go save the world" for good measure. Instead, it comes in a scene where Yosuke is forced to not only face those feelings and emotions he has kept bottled up inside of him, but fight that inner self after initially refusing to acknowledge that other self as his own. This would be the way all of the main characters in P4 (save our protagonist) would be awarded their power, and it's a subtle change that ends up really setting the stage for where the game intends to take you.

I mention this facet of Persona 4 here now because it is key to what I myself had to come to understand, and what those out there who were fans of Persona 3 will have to face in themselves. As excited and enthusiastic as I was going in, an hour or so into P4, I wasn't enjoying it, and that's because the true feeling I had buried in my heart that I refused to accept was that I didn't want to like it better than P3. Had this been a completely new project, different in detail and design from its previous chapter, I could have left those feelings for P3 where they lay, and enjoyed P4 without any of that comparison going on in my mind. The truth is, P4 is indeed, as some have labeled it, "Persona 3.5". It is not a revolutionary project that will leave you with the same feelings of wonder and surprise that you felt with P3 (unless you haven't played P3); it is instead the progression of what was started in that rebirth of the Persona series, and what was built upon in FES.

I had loved Persona 3, and I always will, and that's okay. At some point, though, I had to let it go, and I had to accept Persona 4 for what it was without wanting it to be something it wasn't.

What I can now say with confidence is that while Persona 4 may be a better technical game (in most respects) than Persona 3, what is far more important is that it is a better experience. While there are many reasons for this, the absolute biggest contributor is the strength of the cast we have been given here, a strength nowhere displayed as brilliantly as it is in Chie Satonaka. Chie is quite possibly is one of the best characters ever to come from Atlus, Megami Tensei series or otherwise, and if she doesn't go on to become a fan favorite in the category of female RPG characters, it will be proof that there is no justice in this world. From the moment I met her, I fell in love with Chie as a character–not because the game was trying with all of its might to convince me that I liked her, as P3 struggled to do with Yukari, but because she simply works so amazingly well. She is, at her core, nothing more than your average girl, a person that you could actually bump into one day while browsing VHS tapes of kung-fu movies recorded from Chinese TV on the shelf of some poorly-lit Asian video store somewhere. Chie has no tragic flaw waiting to show itself, no dark secret past soon to surface; she is just a girl who can be strong, but is never invincible; who can be weak, but is never breakable; who can be a dork, but is never dumb. When it came time to decide which I wanted to pursue her as–either a love interest or a close friend, a new option you're given in P4 for the major female characters instead of just automatically trying to get your groove on with all of them–because I had so grown to respect her as a comrade and a friend, and didn't want to cheapen that by feeling forced to switch her over to romance status. (Well, that, and my eye was instead on a certain red-haired ex-idol.)

What Persona 4 does in Chie, and in the entire rest of the cast, is allow the characters to simply be, for lack of a better word, "normal". P3's cast, as much as I loved them, each held in themselves classic stereotypes from the world of Japanese gaming and anime: the goofy slacker, the mature older girl, the cool upperclassman all the students look up to, the shy, frail girl who has trouble fitting in. Those characters, throughout the course of P3, had to be given opportunities to show that there was more to them than just those cookie-cutter positions. The people you'll come to know in P4 aren't tragic heroes pushed into a situation they never wanted to be in, they're down to earth high schoolers who are eager to use their powers to save those around them, yet who are also perfectly capable of forgetting their troubles when the opportunity to have fun arises. In stripping away that desperation of having the entire world balance on their shoulders, these heros and heroines have become far more relatable, and in turn, also more endearing.

(cont...)

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