Shin Megami Tensei Persona

Most of my PSP-playin’ time occurs during my long, wretched train commute. In fact, if you have a sizable commute, I’d strongly recommend picking up a PSP, as it makes the time go by much more quickly. (Note: If you drive to work, please do not heed this advice.) I won’t say the time exactly flies, but it’s surely better than staring out the window at the wastelands of Long Island.

Anyway, yesterday, on my morning commute, I noticed that one of the train regulars was playing his PSP, as he sometimes does. We’ve even made small talk about the games we’re currently playing. Yesterday morning, mere moments after I shut my machine down out of frustration with Persona, I noticed that my fellow commuter was playing the very same game. So, like any good commuter, I glanced across the aisle and over his shoulder to watch his progress. He was clearly further along in the game than I was, so I paid close attention to see how the game changes and develops in its later stages. I was unsurprised to find that the level of development was precisely Zero. He was dutifully wading through the same boring crap that I had to wade through in the game’s early stages. Me, I decided to read a magazine instead.

Man, Persona is a tedious game. Allow me to explain this tedium.

First, the story makes no flippin’ sense. (Perhaps this is a problem endemic to entities entitled Persona. The same-named 1966 Bergman film doesn’t cohere narratively, either; but, then, that was the whole point. This game is hardly calling upon its players to question the very nature of story and narration; here, the incoherence is a hindrance.) There’s this weird trait common to the several Japanese role-playing games that I know: gussying up really standard gameplay with some sort of highfalutin, incomprehensible, ill-explained jargon concerning “Deep” topics such as the nature of reality or identity. The characters in Persona (and other games) refer to otherworldly phenomena that are never defined or explained, mostly as a way to lend the gameplay some sort of “seriousness.” (In the case of Persona, the situation is exacerbated by the fact that the whole game – dialogue and all – seems to have been designed by pouty, clove-smoking Emo Kids: the Atlus Corporation’s idea of graphic “edginess.”) Frankly, it all plays out like those hazy late-night dorm-room discussions from your freshman year: dull, rambling, and pointless.

I guess this is the latest entry in an established game series, so you may already know (but I didn’t) that, in this game, the characters invoke “personae” to fight their battles for them. These personae can acquire skills and traits that you can combine and recombine for effective battling. Or something. I don’t know. The personae add nothing to the game. Merely, at times, you’re an Emo Kid; at other times, you’re a wingèd wraith that can cast spells or something. The only qualitative difference is that one avatar is marginally less pouty than the other.

Another bit of the tedium comes in navigating your characters around the buildings and city that comprise the playing arena. Even with the little map in the corner, moving around the insides of buildings is massively confusing and boring. Just hallways and doors – that’s it. Same for moving through the streets of the city. You can move north, south, east, and west, shown from a bird’s-eye view. OK.

The real frustration sets in when, in the course of moving through a building or city, you are interrupted every fifteen seconds (no joke) because you have to do battle with some group of demons that escaped from the 27th dimension or something. The game touts its micro-scale control over your characters’ abilities, and this is no lie: in your roving band of four or five emo kids, you can (and must) select exactly how each of them will act when confronted with emo-demons. You can invoke a persona, you can throw an emo-javelin at them, you can run, or you can converse and negotiate with them. Which is all fine, if you are a micromanaging kind of person. For me, though, choosing the options for each damn character became very tiresome very quickly. You’ll spend a couple minutes sifting through menu options, and then the battle – over which you have no control, once you pick your options – occurs in about ten seconds. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. I couldn’t be arsed to further micromanage the distribution of skills and abilities.

Mercifully, there is a “replay” option, which has your characters do again whatever they did in the previous battle. I chose this option a lot, especially since I began to take a certain pleasure in seeing the emo kids suffer at the hands of equally cranky demons.

In short, I found the game monotonous and frustrating, and very early on stopped caring about whether I would succeed at it or not. This would seem to me to be a mark of a lousy game.

I can only hope that my commuting buddy disagrees with my opinion. He did seem to be pretty wrapped up in the game – and he did reach a higher level – so he must like it more than I did. Which, really, isn’t saying much.

The deluxe edition of Persona comes, by the way, with two CDs (!!) of music featured in the game. The only reason I can imagine that one might shell out extra cash for this bonus feature is if you happen to be in the business of torture. (Perhaps you’re a freelance operative for some shadow government, I don’t know and don’t want to know what you people do.) If you are, pick up the deluxe edition of Persona right away. If ever you want to extract information from an enemy without violating the Geneva Conventions, pop these discs into your stereo and let ‘er rip. Even the stubbornest, most iron-willed Green Beret would cough up his most valuable national secrets after four or five spins on “Repeat.” I shudder at the very thought.

Which is why, after the first hour or so, I played this game with the volume turned all the way down.