High school memories: A series of Persona 4 letters

Quintin,

Wait, are we role-playing again? You really have to give me a heads up before you start these things. We have talked about this. This is not how we're supposed to do our letter series.

It's actually very apt, though. What you have decided to do is provide a brisk, funny opening intended to explain to people what Persona 4 is, in case they don't know. Yet it's totally dishonest; we played P4 together in New York this past winter, you on the PS2 and me on the Vita. It's also silly you expected anyone to believe I, a known JRPG junkie, would need you, a board game geek, to tell me what Persona 4 is.

You're putting on a performance in order to achieve an objective. And, that, on a macro-level, is actually one of the themes of these games. That our inner selves have some link to the broader mysteries of the universe, and that the ways we present ourselves in the world create a system that lends us growth and strength.

In P4, your social links make your various personas stronger. You could look at this as a really inspirational "battle system" — oh, cool, you don't get stronger by lining up in a three-row in the woods and killing mushrooms; you do it through the love and support of the people in your life. Isn't that nice!

Except I always thought the subtext was a little sinister. The persona is "the mask you wear to face life's hardships." It's not about being your true self, but about being who you have to be. What's your "true self," anyway? In P4, people's refusal to acknowledge that there are many different sides to themselves actually threatens their lives.

You advance your social links with these kind of difficult, troubled people by telling them what they want to hear, not by confronting them or challenging them to self-examine. There is a "right answer" in every interaction; it takes human bonding and makes it feel like a rather ruthless game.

That's the interesting conversation to have about Persona 4, I think, although of course I agree with you that taking the role-playing game at least partially out of the dungeon and into the hip, culturally-novel high school is exactly the fresh approach the genre needs. People thought the JRPG was dead, and then here comes Persona 3 and 4. People love it. It's probably one of the most viable brands from Japan right now.

Quintin,

You are a mean, anti-JRPG bully. I am erasing your name from the insole of my shoe. It now says "AI EBIHARA." Ai doesn't like contrarians; she likes nice boys who do what she wants, so I don't think you have a shot.

To some extent, I can agree with you about why JRPG conventions — grinding, random encounters, sitting through long, non-interactive scenes cluttered with melodrama, tropes or awkward humor, shallow dialogue — are problematic. I think you exaggerate when you say Persona 4's exposition is 10 hours (I count it 'til the first dungeon; you are counting until you have exposure to all the systems), but you are right; it is still too long before it gives you the game.

The JRPG has had problems sustaining its appeal because it's actually a modular little cluster of elements that need to be working well together to feel good. Further, the "correct" balance will appeal to different audiences. Some people hate grinding; I like it — and it's even more granular than that.

I don't think you can blanket-dismiss the complicated appeal even janky, kinda poor JRPGs can have for genre fans. You've played board games that have elements you often dislike, yet enjoyed the game on the whole.

That being said, people are definitely as excited as they are about Persona 4 because it spends most of its attention innovating on the system rather than obeying it. There's nothing nostalgic about it — it feels incredibly modern, and that's what makes it powerful. All our lives we've played games where a boy leaves a town, has adventures in the world, and ends up facing down a demon-god, but this is a game about the town. If RPGs are fundamentally about journeys of maturation, what better setting than the high school?

Persona 4 finds you a city boy in rural Inaba, acclimating to school life and simple daily rituals. You have to balance liminal goals — a menial little job, tedious studies, the choreography of lunch with people you're attracted to — with the essential task of developing your inner world, of delving into yourself and learning to understand others.

Quinns,

I was going to make you assemble a model robot in order to receive this final letter from me, but we're way over deadline, so you lucked out.

No, Ai was not about the personas. It was because I like difficult people. I find them to be a meaningful challenge. And Ai is sort of difficult to win over; you have to accept all kinds of abuse from her if you want to be closer to her; when she first offers you the opportunity to be closer, you have to initially reject it. She is, for me, the only character that approximates the difficulty in real systems of human interaction; they're opaque, they're based on guesses, and you can't undo your impression on someone once it's made.

You like Chie because she learns the endless level-grind to nowhere is less important than what you do with the strength you've amassed. You relate to that, I think. So now that we've done all this talking and dissecting, you ask me, what takeaway can we offer game designers?

I don't think systems are as unimportant or as intrusive as you think, but I'll strike a compromise: If designers can learn anything from Persona 4, it's to re-evaluate the way the system serves the story it's designed to tell.

As I said, the RPG is about leaving the familiar from the unknown, and growing stronger along the way. Previously we've seen this done in massive, inhospitable fantasy worlds, where you start out with a Cloth Shirt and end up with the Divine Armor; you start out in Home Village and end up in the God Dimension, or something.

Persona 4's velvet revolution was to say, OK: If this system is about growth and self-discovery, why don't we genuinely ground it in a story about the self? Instead of doing sidequests where you bet on slot machines or race animals, why don't you do sidequests where you feed a local cat or help a girl write a love letter to her crush — you know, real things that are closely correlated to the story of a personal journey?

It took the story this system of mechanics has always tried to convey, and grounded it in the way real, modern life works. I mean, aside from the whole fact where there is a "world inside your TV" or weird ghosts that pick you up in a blue limousine, but. Close.

It's fascinating to think of what other systems — including those yet to be discovered, since you're eager to do away with JRPG as a genre bound by these certain design conventions you hate — could do if they simply recontextualized themselves in this way.

If a strategy game is about managing variables in different centers of power, how could that be more intimate than a map of some foreign war? If a MOBA is about the community among different units as they try to outthink another team, what other meaningful life situations are about clusters of ideals and variables in spiritual opposition? Look how Portal took the omnipresent, saturated concept of solving a problem by pointing a gun at it, and recontextualized that.

Like you, I'm not desperately attached to genre conventions. But before we blow the systems away entirely, I'm curious to see what else we can do with them.

Folding this little note into your locker, now. You feel your relationship will grow stronger, soon.

Best,

— Leigh