At the end of the PlayStation 2 era, Atlus released Persona 3 (2007) and Persona 4 (2008) in North America, long after newer consoles had launched. These two games turned out to be some of the PS2's best surprises.
The Table of Contents
Dungeon Crawling Is Only Half the Game
Battle in these RPGs is party-based combat in standard level-grinding dungeons, but the other half of the gameplay makes Persona games unique. Each game is split almost evenly between dungeon combat and a
year in the daily life of a high school student in Japan (including occasional school quizzes).
Living a Year in a Japanese High School
The player directs the protagonist to determine how to spend free time, by spending time with friends, potential girlfriends (all playable relationships are heterosexual and only Persona 3 Portable for the PSP offers a female protagonist), or local residents, eating or going out, or taking part in activities (studying, part-time jobs, etc.).
Persona as a Social Simulation Game
This portion of the game fits a genre, more popular in Japan than in North America, known as simulation games, which simulate various aspects of real life. In Persona, the sim-game portion strategically affects combat capabilities through the signature “Social Link” mechanic. By spending time with various local residents, you level up different arcana in the Tarot deck, which represent different suits of personas—avatars who help you fight in the dungeons.
Social Links and the Arcana System
The more time you invest in a social link, the more power you can call on from that arcana of personas. In Persona 4, for example, you can level up the “Death” arcana by talking to an old woman on the riverbank preoccupied with the death of her husband, the “Hermit” arcana by helping a supernatural fox answer the prayers left at a Shinto shrine, and the “Priestess” arcana by developing a relationship with Yukiko, a classmate who fights alongside the protagonist as the game’s main healer.
How Social Links Affect Combat
Leveling up social links allows the use of higher-level personas of the relevant arcana and, in Persona 4, helps the protagonists’ teammates learn combat skills (like taking a mortal blow for the main character, thus avoiding a game over) and achieve their personas’ evolved states.
Choosing Between Story and Strategy
The connections between social simulation and RPG combat spark interesting choices. It is possible to max out all social links in one playthrough, but it is unlikely for a player not rigorously following an online
guide (I’ve always had a few links I didn’t have time to max out). A player interested in both must constantly decide whether to follow the most narratively interesting social links, the ones that will provide the greatest combat benefits according to one’s playstyle, or some combination.
Friendship as the Game’s Core Message
These connections between narrative and gameplay are reinforced by the “message” of the games, which stresses that strong social bonds are important to the protagonist overcoming godlike final enemies who represent the darker sides of human nature that, the games suggest, can be tempered by socialization.
Why Social Systems Are Hard to Design
The simulation game portions of Persona can also be compelling on their own merits. Games usually model some kind of human experience or activity, most commonly combat. Games that model social relationships are rarer, in part because it’s much harder to write programmable rules for how relationships work than it is for how swords and bullets work.
Atlus and the Challenge of Modeling Relationships
Physics has clear rules – love and friendship are murkier. Persona developer Atlus is clearly interested in taking up this challenge (not only with the Persona series, but also with the intricate, quietly successful relationship sim/block-puzzle game Catherine, originally released in 2011 and still referenced in discussions about innovative game design).
Atlus’s explorations of social models in games do some things very well. They reflect, often in detail, locations and situations from Japanese social life, making it an interesting cultural experience for d a model of real life for Japanese players. And they direct attention toward investing time in people and often portray interesting relationships.
Where Persona’s Social Model Breaks Down
Unsurprisingly, Persona’s social simulations are far from perfect – but this is part of what makes them interesting. In the games’ romantic relationships, for example, you get in trouble if you have two different girls at the “girlfriend” stage simultaneously, and they find out, which seems realistic. Yet once you max out your relationship with a girl, there are no consequences for starting a relationship with the next girl, and you never have to spend time with the first girl again, so that you keep the relationship (and arcana power) maxed.
The Problem of “True Bonds”
Once you achieve a “true bond,” a maxed social link requires zero maintenance from that point on. As a result, the game almost demands serial monogamy: it is a major strategic handicap not pursue relationships with multiple girls, because many of them are in your battle party, so leaving their arcana at low levels makes battle much harder.
Absurdity Which Sparks Reflection
This awkwardness reveals the limits of systematizing intimacy in games, but its absurdity (I tended to have 4-5 maxed romantic relationships by the end of a playthrough – sometimes involving best friends who apparently never discuss their boyfriends) made me think about how relationships really work.
Persona 4 took steps toward making this model more complex by including, for example, a potentially romantic relationship that will fail romantically (but still allow for a maxed-out ‘friends’ social link). We ranked Persona 4 as one of the top PS2 games you can play today.
If you pursue a romantic and physical relationship too soon, while the girl is still getting over another guy she liked. This relationship’s unusual middle stage and forking-path endings diverge from the game’s otherwise straightforward model, where a relationship simply gets progressively more intimate unless you make a stupid dialogue choice and set it back.
Persona 5 and Modern Character-Driven RPGs
Persona 5 (first released in 2016 in Japan, 2017 in North America on the PlayStation 3, and later updated with Persona 5 Royal on more recent platforms). Atlus continues to make games that push how I
think about narrative and mechanics. The closest comparisons I can think of would be BioWare’s character-driven RPGs in the Mass Effect and Dragon Age series, as well as Telltale Games’s The Walking Dead episodic game, though each explores character and relationship development through distinct mechanics.
Why Persona Still Matters
If you like any of those games, I recommend giving Persona a try if you’re okay with some dungeon-crawling. It’s a unique mix of RPG and simulation that still offers fresh ideas about social worlds in games and real life. The popularity of Persona 3 Reload proves that Atlus’s original social-combat formula still resonates with players today.
