I dreamt I was a butterfly
I couldn’t tell I was dreaming
but when I woke, I was I
and not a butterfly.
Was I dreaming that I was the
butterfly, or was the butterfly
dreaming that it was me?
Even if there’s a difference
between the butterfly and I,
the distinction isn’t absolute.
And there is no relationship
of cause and effect……
-Zhuangzi
In pursuit of an urban legend, a group of teenagers decide to spend their free time playing an occult game called “Persona”. This game is said to give a glimpse of the future to all those who play it, however, unexpected occurrences take place once the game is complete. To the amusement of those skeptical, the ghost of a small child makes a sudden appearance, bringing with her a barrage of lighting that knocks down a number of those in the room. Knocked out from the shock, a number of those in the room share a dream about becoming a butterfly and meeting a strange figure named Philemon, who grants them the power of Persona, the embodiment of their everyday personalities. Following their wake, they realize that they are going to need these powers to survive the mysterious events that would unfold…
Shin Megami Tensei ‘If…’ is about as humble as any beginning could get for a franchise, being itself an experimental entry for a well-established franchise that would go on to become a spinoff of its own, experimenting further with the ideas that it could bring to the table unrestricted by the baggage of its name. This chain of experimentation leads us to the birth of “Persona”, a series born from simplicity and sustained by continued support from its developers and its very dedicated fanbase.
Judging by the reception of its most recent entry, it seems like Persona has finally grown out of its shell and become one of the leading franchises of today, even competing with what seemed once like the towering juggernaut of Final Fantasy. Nevertheless, Persona doesn’t quite mean the same thing for every person. It is a franchise that continues to shed its skin time and time again with multiple iterations that embrace radically different ideas from each other, resulting in an ever changing identity that suits whatever generation its audience first came into contact with. In that regard, there is a surprising generational gap between those who enjoy the most recent offerings of the franchise and those who continue to appreciate its older entries.
Frankly, the contrast between Persona’s debut entry and its most recent installment is staggering. It is often understated how much a franchise can change within the span of two decades, adopting ideas, changing them, transforming them, and letting go of them. There are many elements of the early Persona games that are not evident in the slightest with the newer games. Early entries in this franchise are unique in their own presentation of a reflective and surreal trip down the psyches of teenagers and young adults alike, each with their own flaws, insecurities and complexes. The foundation of the series lies within the risks the development team took to ensure that Persona would stand alone as unique from anything that was out at the time,
Though they may clash in tone and spirit, newer Persona games still utilize some ideas that this first game originated. The most important of these is the decision to set Persona on the modern backdrop of a public high school, which was influenced by the well-received setting of Shin Megami Tensei If. This was very uncommon for the time, as the genre was dominated by backdrops of fantasy or Sci-Fi which were different from the mix of familiarity, mundaneness and abstraction that Persona brought to the table. This decision has been long standing not only because of the changing qualities of the genre, but also because of the unique and detailed lengths that the team went through to establish the setting of their game, giving the high school and its surrounding city more than enough lore, backstory, style and place to make it an immersive location for the player to immerse themselves into.
Along with the setting of Persona comes its distinct focus on youth as the principal element of its narrative. Following their more mature and adult oriented outings in the form of the Shin Megami Tensei series, the development team at ATLUS decided to aim towards a younger audience by presenting a story centered around their lifestyle, struggles, personalities and inner growth. This focus really sets Persona apart from other franchises, since it decides to take a more analytical view of such a crucial part of human development while also showcasing the kind of lifestyle that teenagers enjoy, such as their relationships with others, their school life and their pastimes.
The youth lifestyle of Persona is also closely connected to urban life and culture. Its characters are closely tied to their lives in the city and form parts of the trends that surround it. Contrasting the urban however is the supernatural element of Persona, which does not end with the urban legend that kick starts the plot. A certain air of occultic mysticism and magical realism surrounds the events of Persona, making the events of the story feel like a realization of the kind of urban legend culture that is easily believable by teens.
Persona also introduces a very specific kind of approach to its more magical elements, which would come to be one of its most groundbreaking and long-lasting introductions to the scene. In what can only be described as magical psychology, Persona decides to explore and analyze facets of the human mind through its fantasy, illustrating the complex nature of the unconscious desires of the heart and mind in its story and world, creating a surreal experience that borders the line between reality and fiction, dream and actuality.
This approach lays the groundwork for the very specific concepts that Persona utilizes to bring its psychology to concrete terms, which are heavily based on the theories and philosophy of psychiatrist Carl Jung. Jungian theories are the basis for the elements of Persona’s world such as the titular powers that each main character holds, the Jungian archetypes that some characters come to embody and the focus on the inner personalities of the unconscious as an element of the game’s story. The mystical element of Jung’s fundamental theories adds to Persona’s own elements of magic and surrealism, complementing the general atmosphere and nature of the work.
Part of what separates Megami Ibunroku Persona from the later games of its franchise however is its presentation, which is defined by the visual and sound design. In all fairness, the 3D environments and 2D sprites of the game don’t stand out for the standards of its time, except perhaps the extensive animation of player battle sprites. The game only truly stands out in the visual side when it ventures towards more surreal, gloomy and psychedelic environments and images, cementing a very particular look for this first installment.
The game’s persona and demon designs, courtesy of Kazuma Kaneko, are by far the most interesting aspect of the game’s visual design. By incorporating elements from different cultures alongside imagery of masks, shackles and religion, Kaneko can establish a singular look for the game’s titular mystical beings. These embody a certain divine and otherworldly presence that perfectly captures the occult-like tone of the game as well as tarot theme of the character’s personality types. Kaneko’s character designs are also interesting, looking distinct while maintaining the uniformity of their high school clothes. Their choice of accessory makes them look grounded and believable while still remaining unique and memorable. Only drawback to the designs is the way that they are presented in-game, either through small sprites that don’t quite show the extent or the full detail of the original artwork or through shoddy portraits that cut off awkwardly or don’t look quite as polished in relation to the rest of the digital artwork in the game.
In regards to the specific upgrades, the PSP remake of the game also overhauls the User Interface in a way that greatly improves upon the original’s awkward, slow and dated look and feel. This new interface takes the kind of principles of interface design that the newer games exercise, such as a special attention to color design or aesthetic cohesion to theme and manages to translate it to the tone and feeling of the original game, creating something that looks sleek and stylish while also feeling inherently like Persona.
Megami Ibunroku Persona’s sound direction, the soundtrack in particular, is particularly at odds with the design of the newer games. While it still decides to take cues from pop and contemporary music in certain tracks, its aim is to create a more experimental and often psychedelic sound, offering a great variety of sound that fit the game’s atmosphere perfectly. It’s a shame that the PSP remake completely disregards this design in an attempt to modernize the soundtrack and bring it closer to newer entries, completely ruining the sound design in the process. Although each track is tolerable on its own right, the constant repetition of their brief melody both within a scene and throughout the game becomes easily grating.
Not only that, but the drastic change in tone of the new tracks almost completely shatter the atmosphere of the original game, even going as far as cutting down on the number of tracks from the original soundtrack, lending to a more limited range of tunes that not only contributes to the aforementioned repetition, but also strips away the emotion from important scenes. The tracks that aren’t a complete change in tone are just easily forgettable and mediocre since they lack any of the flair, tone or experimentation of the original, thus lending to a sound experience that feels monotonous, repetitive and hollow.
All of these differences and similarities aside, one of the important things to note about Megami Ibunroku Persona is that relies heavily on the mere concept of the ideas that I mentioned before. The specific execution didn’t matter much to the team this time around, taking a cue from earlier Shin Megami Tensei games in presenting these ideas with a minimalist presentation that did not distract from the illustration of complex concepts; at least, that’s what it seems like it tried to do. The first Persona game relies far too heavily on the novelty of its own concepts, and in doing so, it denies itself from having a more complex and engaging storyline that can be remembered on its own right.
The irony of Persona, and its most dated quality by far, is that in relying so heavily on concepts and ideas that were novel, innovative, or even groundbreaking at the time, it leaves a lot of room to set itself apart and truly express a timeless story. Without any of the depth or character that would become characteristic of its immediate sequel, Persona is left in a limbo of engagement where the qualities that were once innovative and groundbreaking are now passé due to the way later entries would normalize them. The game needed a stronger support from its story and cast to realize its own ideas, yet it doesn’t quite achieve that and instead forms what is now a very monotonous and unremarkable experience.
The biggest shock of playing Megami Ibunroku Persona today is just how dull its cast of characters is, an issue that its immediate sequel and adaptation manga sought to correct. In all the lines of dialogue that these characters have, they present a minimum amount of defining characteristics that only slightly evolve along the course of the story, relegating their role in the story as a medium to deliver exposition and limited commentary or perspective that the silent protagonist cannot. Without any stronger engagement with the game’s cast of characters, the interest that the player can hold in them is as limited as their few lines worth of backstory.
With that in mind, each character is oddly devoid of conflict that is visibly apparent or developed along the course of the game. For a franchise that was created to tackle youth conflicts and life experiences, the main cast of characters in Persona have very few issues of their own that they must overcome or any kind of character arc, backstory or detail that would make their presence more dynamic within the story. Most development or conflict that occurs within the game’s entire cast is alien to its own main party, which is either ahead of the conflict or unempathetic towards it, making them a hardly relatable troupe that is not very interesting to follow on both thematic and emotional grounds.
In fact, their lack of dimensionality when it comes to responding to situations, coupled with their own negative human qualities makes the cast of characters border the line on being completely unlikable to the player. Characters like Ayase have little to no redeeming qualities, constantly acting in the same negative manner with no development or conflict, making them not only boring companions, but actively annoying ones as well. Though negative qualities are important in developing a character, the cast of Persona doesn’t develop them further than their basic traits and drags them along the journey without feeling deserving of forming part of the cast of heroes, and without any visible payoff to it as well.
That is not to say that they have absolutely nothing to offer as
characters, or that they are absolutely devoid of defining character. There are interesting aspects to their characters and also unique elements to the general design of their personalities as well such as the dual nature of our characters, who use insincerity and strong personalities to mask their own true selves. When it comes to actually exploring or developing these elements that seem interesting however, the game swiftly drops them to continue along the plot, thus ignoring any sort of important, thematic or otherwise, that they could have received.
Of course, characters don’t have a necessity to be complex in order to function well in a story. They could be very simple, but highly entertaining in their own right due to the way their strong personality plays off of other characters, or is utilized for certain effect within the story. Sadly, Persona lacks any kind of interesting team dynamic, and each character seems oddly individual in their thoughts and separate from the team due to the way the team is composed, offering a number of optional members that can be recruited individually into the last remaining spot in the player’s party. With such a modular and non-committal approach to party making, the team can’t quite have the tight-knit banter that it needed to be more interesting or at the very least entertaining.
If Persona cannot rely on its characters, then at least it could have a story that is complex and profound enough to sustain interest from the player, and all in all, that’s close to the truth when it comes to this game. Megami Ibunroku Persona is not a game lacking in ideas, or even lacking the execution of these ideas, which are in their own right complex and even groundbreaking. However, the game leaves a lot to be desired, leaving more than plenty of room for improvement or missing potential. It’s not exactly a gripping plot, and it’s not exactly very interesting, but it’s serviceable at the very least.
Persona has some solid ideas throughout its story, building a creative world and a narrative with just the right amount of well thought out twists and turns to make it interesting on a conceptual level. The parallels the game brings up to Jungian psychology are its most interesting parts, as we come to learn something about them and about the psychology of our characters through the few allusions that the game presents to the player. It’s a dive into the mind and heart of the human being, and in all the little ways that Persona tries to make that work, it is worth giving merit to.
What is not worth giving merit to however, is the way in which the game constructs the rest of its narrative. The story of Megami Ibunroku Persona is presented as if little thought or effort went into constructing its themes and overall message. There are moments when the game brings up thematic concepts or key developments without any kind of proper build up and with minimal payoff. Its handling of existentialist themes is a great example of this, being so brief and to the point that it comes off as shallow and underwritten. Its general handling of the ideas present in the story sticks close to the same level of execution, appearing one after the other with little attention or proper development to really make them work within the story.
The way the plot is constructed also leaves a lot of room for improvement, as it is not exactly smooth. Pacing and structure is an issue with the game, as it suffers from an abundance of plot points that amount to little more than railroading or pointless excursions. The plot of Persona doesn’t exactly have a good flow to it, its main objective is too broad and the road to reaching that objective is full of stops that contribute little to it. Not only that, but very little of note happens throughout the middle of the story until the last stretch of the game dumps most of the story of the game to fulfill its conclusion, making the pacing feel very uneven.
It’s a hard thing to admit, considering the Persona franchise is as successful as it is and owes almost everything to this first game, but at the end of the day Megami Ibunroku Persona is just a very boring game. There is a reason Megami Ibunroku Persona isn’t fondly remembered or even recognized by many fans, and it’s because there’s hardly anything to latch onto in a permanent way. As innovative as it may have been at one point, besides simple surface level compliments there is hardly anything about Persona that stands out. It doesn’t have much to offer, as its story is not truly compelling or interesting unless it’s from a conceptual standpoint and its gameplay mechanics are less than tolerable.
Unlike every other game in the franchise, Persona is a first person dungeon crawler akin to every other Shin Megami Tensei game released at the time. Unlike at least half of those other games however, Persona has a definite issue with its dungeon crawling. The problem that arises with Persona’s dungeon exploration is its uninspiring and repetitive dungeon designs, which adopt a very basic mazelike layout for every dungeon with minimal to non-existent variation between dungeons. Every dungeon plays out the same way and is designed in the same way, lending directly to an experience that very soon lends itself to being very monotonous and repetitive.
The dungeons of Persona are also rather uninteresting to look at due to the way they are designed. Even though the game tends to do more interesting and psychedelic backdrops better than others, it mostly sticks to a strictly contemporary and mundane look that continues to hold the visuals of the game back. Even if the environments are particularly detailed for their time, the design of the dungeons themselves are just too simple to be interesting to explore, and the repetition of simple visual styles throughout the course of a long dungeon only makes it less and less interesting to discover.
Even if the dungeons aren’t exactly long, at least for dungeon crawler standards, they are still a chore to get through because of all the means the game uses to pad out their length and stretch them out as far as they can. Dungeons in Persona are full of forked pathways that lead to dead ends or empty rooms, most of which lack any rewards, items or extra details that would make it any rewarding for the player to fully explore these dungeons. The tried and true method of rushing to the end of every dungeon is always the best method of playing Persona, because taking your time is almost always wasteful, especially because of the overabundance of random encounters that further drag out the length of this game’s dungeons.
Random encounters are one thing, but combat is another. In
order to set itself apart from the other Megami Tensei games at the time, Persona devises two unique mechanics that are almost wholly distinct from the other’s first person and demon collecting staples. For once, Persona’s combat is viewed from the top down and each character is placed on a position along a grid which depends who they can attack depending on their attack range. The other mechanic is the persona system, based on the guardian system from Shin Megami Tensei If, where each character uses personas as a catalyst for using skills and upgrading their stats. Both of these mechanics could have been good, but they are woefully underutilized in their execution, leading to more standard RPG gameplay that does not deviate from the norm and actually works worse than its contemporaries.
The biggest issue by far with the grid system is that it’s never utilized for anything in particular. Your first impression with the game might lead you to believe that you must carefully strategize and think about the position of your characters along the grid to effectively target all points of the enemy grid, or even dodge attacks, but soon you’ll find out that this is not the case. Once the player develops their personas, physical attacks are phased out in favor of magic skills, making the grid system loses all its meaning. The game doesn’t impose any range restrictions on magical attacks which makes the best method of attack magic all the time, unless there is an enemy on the field that is completely immune to it in which case the player can always just focus on them later without changing positions. By constantly using the same type of attack because it is the most effective, the game immediately loses most of its strategy.
This would be a problem if there was some consequence to abusing magic skills; however, each character has a gross overabundance of MP; more than any other RPG of the same type that I’ve played. The player can carelessly heal and attack without any consideration to the costs involved, because the costs are very small. In general, Megami Ibunroku Persona has a tendency of being far too forgiving with the way its combat encounters are balanced. Enemy defenses pose no threat, and when they do, they are easily circumvented. Enemies also deal pathetic amounts of damage which can more than easily be healed and even if a party member is defeated, they can be immediately healed to full health once the battle is over since the game lacks a death status effect and each player has more than plenty of MP and low cost skills to fully heal them, making any consequence unimposing.
Alongside the unimposing and easy difficulty of the game and its grid system, another fault to the gameplay of Persona is its speed. Battles take a long time to get done thanks to the sheer length of attack animations that both players and enemy characters do. Even if they are very well animated, they drag out the length of combat by a long shot and become easily frustrating once the player becomes so accustomed to them. Thankfully, this issue is completely alleviated by the animation skip included on the PSP version, which completely skips animations and greatly increases the pace of combat.
However, one issue that the PSP version adds to the game is that it includes a very flexible auto-battle system, which allows for a variety of approaches to automated combat. This would be a very strange complaint on any other game; however, since battles in Persona have absolutely no strategy and the use of the exact same moves can bring success in combat a large percentage of the time, there is little reason not to use auto-battle since it greatly diminishes the amount of time spent in menus and speeds up the pace even further. Megami Ibunroku Persona is the kind of game that can very easily play itself, and even if you don’t intend to let it play itself at first, you’ll soon become tired of it due to how often random encounters force you to engage in combat.
If combat is not interesting, then at least building your own persona should be. However, much like the grid system and combat in general, the persona mechanic is underutilized and under designed. The system itself is for once very derivative of the demon collecting in other Megami Tensei games, allowing you to negotiate with demons for cards that can be used in fusion to create a new member of your party. Only difference here is that you can’t actually use the personas you obtain through negotiation, just fuse them together to create the Persona you actually want.
Negotiation is at first a very enjoyable idea, since each of your five party members has four different ways to talk to the demon in question, adding up to at least twenty different ways to interact with the different personalities that any demon may have. This system really makes you think of what character and what approach to use during negotiation to get what you want out of the enemy. However, after sufficient experience with the way the system works, you’ll find out that its essentially just a matter of trial and error since any negative consequence to bad negotiation can easily be overridden by the player due to how easy combat is, making risk of failure a non-issue. Once the player finds what specific approach works, there is nothing to stop them from using the exact same command every time to increase the specific value that they want, especially among demons that have a similar personality, ruining all the strategy and variation of negotiating with demons and turning it into another one of Persona’s repetitive tasks.
Once you get sufficient spell cards, you might find out that you can’t actually do anything with them. Fusing the persona that you want is a very slow process. Not just because personas work on a rank system that requires that you use skills over and over to unlock their full skillset, but also because most of the time you try to fuse a persona, the one that is compatible with that specific character is guaranteed to either not be what you want, or of a higher level. Because of this, you either stick to the same low level persona until you reach the desired level or grind until you can actually fuse it, both which are not very satisfying processes for the amount of satisfaction that they provide.
Not like that matters a lot, because the game is so easy that you don’t even need to bother with the persona system if that’s what you wish. You can stick with the personas you have when starting the game and it wouldn’t make a large difference in gameplay or difficulty. Not only that, but the game has very few restrictions on skill inheritance which means that if you have the right items, which aren’t all that hard to obtain, you can give any persona late game skills that make it even easier to play, negating the reason why you should fuse new personas to begin with.
Only real restriction to ending battles by abusing a single skill is that then EXP is not evenly divided between party members, meaning that only one character will earn all the experience as opposed to the whole team. However, if you are abusing skills in such a way, then you probably don’t even care about playing the game with an evenly built party. The only issue with an uneven party is that you won’t meet the level requirements for negotiation, which is once again not a problem if all you care about is rushing through the game with a single overpowered build.
In the topic of experience, leveling up is not exactly satisfying because the game doesn’t open many doors for focused or specialized character builds. There are five different stat allocations, four of which actually impact the gameplay, but none of which actually feel all that satisfying to level up. All you obtain from leveling up is a slight increase in your abilities, but nothing that feels too substantial for the player because of how your persona already gives you the boost in stats you need to effectively use its skills. Trying to specialize through stats doesn’t really help either way because the increase they give to your skills is inconsequential. It’s all very skill based, but the skills have little variety between each other, even with such a large diversity of elemental affinities, which all attack and feel the same way.
With all that said, you can get a picture of why the first Persona installment isn’t exactly fun to play. But at the same time, I can’t exactly put the gameplay besides me and enjoy the game for its story because it doesn’t have a story that is interesting, gripping or even unique enough to be all that interesting, or at least worth ignoring the faults with the gameplay for. So, if the game isn’t fun or engaging, and the story isn’t interesting enough to compensate, then what is the point of the game? What is there to enjoy in Megami Ibunroku Persona?
I won’t deny that Megami Ibunroku Persona was once more interesting, perhaps even exciting. Back when it was first released, all of the ideas that the game brought to the table and represents were new, exciting and unlike anything seen at the time. Even with all its faults, the game still embodies the creative spirit of the team at ATLUS and its willingness to stray from the mainstream to create something truly unique. Yet, even while playing the game with a tinge of nostalgia, it’s not exactly worth recommending. Persona is just not enjoyable enough on its own terms to justify playing it, even for the sake of knowing where the series started.
This first Persona game is very odd, because even with all its success in creating such a long running franchise, it still pales in comparison to later installments in the franchise. It doesn’t necessarily mean the most recent entries, but also its immediate sequel and even adaptation manga, which addresses many of the issues I mentioned here. However, even with all that, I still think that the game was greatly ambitious in its own right, forging a path for later games to follow in its footsteps. In some respects, this is a game that truly represents the unique individuality and ambition that the ATLUS of the time could always deliver on. Yet at the end of the day, I can’t honestly recommend it.
Not like that’s going to stop you from playing it though.