Original Release: Playstation, 1996. Version Reviewed: PSP, 2009.
THE PLOT:
A group of Japanese high school students are visiting their friend Maki in the hospital. She is taken away to the ICU... which abruptly vanishes, just as the town is attacked by demons. The mysterious Philemon grants the power of "Persona" to the teenagers, allowing them to summon manifestations of their inner strength to battle these forces.
It's a power they will need. Kandori, an executive at SEBEC, is using the company's resources to power a reality-altering machine. Now familiar places are transformed into dungeons, crawling with increasingly powerful supernatural forces. The high school has vanished. And Maki... seems oddly connected to almost all of the events.
CHARACTERS:
Characterization is above-average for a mid-1990s Playstation game. Most of the characters are fairly one-note, but they all have distinct personalities. Nanjo (Nate in the 1990s US localization), the rich kid whose family is linked to SEBEC, is serious and decisive, and comes across more as the group's leader in the main story than the player character does; Yukino, a minor supporting character in the main story, takes on that role in the alternate Snow Queen route. Masao (Mark) is brash and constantly making jokes, but clearly has feelings for Maki (Mary). Maki, the character most linked to the plot, ironically ends up being the least interesting of the playable characters!
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| The characters go to the hospital to visit a sick friend. Madness ensues. |
GAMEPLAY:
Falls into two main elements. There are rooms and shops where your character can interact with others. In some cases, interactions unlock additional characters; in most cases, you will gain insight into both the characters and the current state of the story. A town map takes you from location to location, and the game provides regular indications of where you should go next.
The rest of the time, you will be dungeon-crawling. The first person POV takes a bit of getting used to, and I quickly realized that it was more useful to look at the mini-map to navigate the labyrinth-like dungeons than to try to do so visually. Even in the PSP remake, the halls and corridors are too featureless for visual navigation to be worthwhile.
It's a JRPG, so it's unsurprising that combat and leveling is achieved through random encounters. Combat is turn-based, with options for magic attacks, physical attacks, and a variety of guns (yes, these Japanese high school students are well enough armed for an NRA convention). The interesting curveball is that you can also choose to negotiate with demons. Any of your party members can speak, and each has multiple potential approaches. Some of these will please the demons, others will enrage or frighten them. You'll need to do a balance of both combat and negotiation: Combat for leveling up your characters and Personas, and negotiation for gaining new Personas.
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| Combat is visually dated, but surprisingly fun. |
THOUGHTS:
When games journalists rank the entries of the Persona series, they regularly rank the original game at the bottom. Consensus seems to be that the game has aged poorly, and compares negatively to pretty much all of its successors.
I was surprised at how thoroughly I enjoyed it.
To start with: Yes, it is dated. Even the PSP version, with sharper images and streamlined menus, is very clearly a game from an earlier time. The first person dungeon crawling is visually unappealing, and at times downright ugly. The third-person "character interaction" moments are from a top-down view that makes it feel like you're very far away from the characters, which can limit the sense of involvement. In the PSP version, widescreen reformatting leaves the edges of the screen as a featureless void, which is initially off-putting as well.
I will say that I got through most of the SEBEC route (the main story) without much deliberate grinding. Until the final dungeon, that is, when a sudden difficulty spike rendered my previously unstoppable party into a gang of pathetic weaklings. I ended up tromping around the game's last dungeon for hours, leveling up my characters to equip their Ultimate Personas, then grinding to level up those Personas, before I was able to face off against the game's final boss. Meanwhile, the Snow Queen route requires constant grinding for multiple bosses, then yet more grinding before facing the final boss.
Once I adjusted to the game's look and controls, however, I found myself surprisingly compelled by the narrative. Both the SEBEC and Snow Queen routes offer interesting stories, with ambitious themes about human nature and about the ways people both hide and reveal their inner selves. Its rare to find an archive video game that grapples with such subject matter, often quite successfully. Inspired in part by the work of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, who discussed how the social face we present to the world is basically a mask disguising our true natures, the script has surprising intelligence even as it presents a decidedly outlandish story.
Originally released in the West as Revelations: Persona, the game's PS1 release suffered from an ill-judged attempt to Americanize the story. The characters were renamed, as mentioned. Further, in an attempt at diversity that went horribly wrong, Masao was "blacked up" to be the streetwise Mark, whose dialogue was slathered in stereotypical slang. The PSP version sets this to rights, restoring the Japanese setting and the original character names. It also restores the Snow Queen side story, which was removed from the western PS1 release (though allusions to it remained). These changes make the PSP release the preferable version.
Even the PSP version suffers from misjudgments, however. In an attempt to force it into the mold of the later Persona games, the remake replaces the eerie original soundtrack with pop tunes, which often jar with the story's serious tone. In addition, a handful of fully-animated cutscenes have been added to portray key story points. The animation looks quite good... arguably too good, to the point that the cutscenes can feel jarring compared to the rest of the game.
Overall, however, the PSP version's good points outweigh its bad, and none of its missteps compare with the wrong-headed localization choices of the original Western release. The game itself is much better than I had been led to believe. When I started playing it, I did so as a background game - something to pick at a few minutes here and there. It quickly became a game I for which I would set aside hours-long chunks of time, however, its story and themes involving me to a far greater degree than I had anticipated.
A willingness to accept the quirks of retro-gaming is required to enjoy this. But I suspect a lot of gamers who haven't played the original might - after a couple hours of adjustment - be as surprised as I was about how engaging this title is, even close to 25 years after its initial release.
Overall Rating: 6/10.
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