yesterday i finished persona 4. i bought it on on my playstation 3 instead of emulating because i thought spending money to play + the prospect of playing in a big screen in high enough quality without having to mess with any cryptic pcsx2 settings would help me endure through the seventy hours. i intented on making a let’s play thread while taking screenshots but as in most things in my life inertia got the best of me. i did take pictures, though! i never finished a persona game before, although i played about twenty five hours of persona 2: eternal punishment and some fourty hours of persona 3.
i remember loving the whole setting and the characters in eternal punishment – i mean, you play as a cool twenty-something journalist lady writing an article about rumors of murders anonymously called on by phone call (for a teenager’s magazine, no less). you have a roomate and a weird mystic informant helping you. you can fight and talk and interview and flirt (?) with demons. the menus look perfect to me. i couldn’t finish it, after all, because i felt a general disconnect with the plot beats and the world with what most of my thinking was spent into (figuring out the fusion spells, trying to understand how exactly the rumor-spreading mechanic worked at times, the battle system). i was fairly young at the time, so maybe today i would have an easier time. i don’t think i’ll ever play it again, though.
as for the third one, my save file was corrupted. but i was also felt that the interesting world-developing bits were perhaps too sparse, so after not playing for two days i would go back and not remember anything about what was going on.
but!! comes persona 4, a game with pinpoint accuracy in Having Stuff Happening All The Time which i fairly enjoyed playing, given all its underlying issues! i started playing in december 8th. i now have memories of playing it on christmas day, after getting back from my where grandparents are at and of playing it two hours before going to a friend-of-a-friend's house for new year's eve. these are alright.that the story is an exciting murder mystery where the player’s agency feels like something real inside the game is pretty fun and how the dungeons showed up made planning my daily schedule (from getting better stats to advancing social links) a really straight-foward and pleasant experience to look after. i named the protagonist as a schlocky 50’s pulp fiction hero.
a bunch of characters and social links are quite boring though, to say the least. like i guess anime humor just doesn’t works with me unless i’m already really into what’s going on and i guess this wasn’t the case. i think toups and/or sleepy brought up a similar discussion somewhere re the characters but, urm, let’s see: in 2013 a bunch of videogame-people i knew were praising persona 4 to no end for being subtle in how it portrayed the characters’ strugle, /specially/ for kanji. but, like, what the hell. he’s ridiculed and feared (??) by the people around him (yosuke in particular is a jerk and i want to put his head inside a toilet and flush it) and all the time he wants to see naoto naked so he can attest whether or not he’s “a real man” and it’s mostly played for laughs or as a nuisance. somehow i think that this stuff transcends being just traditionally-gross anime humor to being, like, actively aggressive? (not that it would be anything of a compliment to be one or the other) if they just went for the bad anime shit i guess that would be a one-time thing, and that after he got his persona his sexuality wouldn’t be treated as a big deal; but in the game it’s like they keep going after this kind of joke, similarly to how apparently everyone is a sexual freak in the worst manner possible and unrelentlessly brings it up at any given moment, etc. they can’t fill in the silence, so they do that. it’s really irritating.
though i have to say some characters are really cool and their stories are heartfelt and sweet and i actaully got teary-eyed in some point later in the trombone-playing-girl social link and in the dojima one.
uuuhh, i also think combat and its relying systems are great! i played on medium, and i chose to not obsess over fusions or sidequests more than i felt like to. i grinded a bit while listening to podcasts without the underlying feeling of “i must do this or else i won’t be able to keep moving”. music owns tons, too.
actually, as i got the half-assed ending and reading about the other ones, i’m somewhat-seriously considering going through the game again to get the True Ending and completing more social links. oh, my!
okay!! here are some random pics. i didn't bother taking any that weren't text because i find the game to be rather bland-looking.
