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| Japan needs to learn to make their games with shorter titles. |
Dear Internet,
Well,
"Shin Megami Tensei: Persona" is not near as depressing as I feared
it might be. Actually I am using the
wrong title for the game I am playing and should probably call it by its
correct name, less because it is proper to call a dog a dog and more because it
is easier to spell than canine. "Revelations:
Persona" was made back in the '90s and released here in North America in
1997 for the Playstation. Do you
remember the Playstation, Internet? No,
not the ones with numbers afterwards that kept talking to you, I mean the first
one, the one that at first did not have control sticks. "Persona" is a spinoff game series from
the "Shin Megami Tensei" series, both of which are seeing a greater
fan following in recent years.
"Persona"
is a dungeon type RPG that harkens back to video game mechanics that are rarely
seen now-a-days. You move in a two
dimensional dungeon with the occasional stairway leading to a new plane. The dungeon is rendered in 3D but the player
moves along a grid track with the camera at the character's eye height. There are turn based battles where the player
chooses a set of actions that determine how the character team acts against the
monsters. Melee attacks, magic and item
usage area all there waiting for the player.
The over world is broken down in a similar method by making the player
move along a grid based map, moving one square at a time. There are a few special rooms here and there,
where the player can move in a pre-rendered environment that turns 45 degrees
to make the player move along a diamond type environment. There, the player can interact with the few
NPCs of the game and look for the occasional item.
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| As you can see, even the characters feel at odds with the 45 degree rooms. |
So,
Internet, you are probably asking what the big twist is since much of what I
have described says more about a whole genre of dungeon crawlers rather than
"Persona" specifically. Well,
it is set in the modern day world with high school students in either Japan or
the US, depending on who you ask. From
the depths of their psyche they summon spirits to fight for them as they battle
through demon filled streets and zombie filled hospitals. They use everything from scalpels and mops to
fight, until they get to use Uzis and rifles.
So far, it is a rather interesting experience to be making a rag-tag
group of teenagers using everything from police grade firearms to common gym
equipment to fight spirits wishing to create ruin upon man. You can also negotiate with the ghosts and
such, but I will get to that some other time.
In the
first four to five hours, there are a few things off the back that need to be
addressed. The most problematic is the
overworld, or the one that the player uses to get from dungeon to dungeon. There is no map to let you know where you are
or where you are supposed to go. While I
might not usually count this against the game, especially since it is coming
from a long line of games that would not even give a map to the player but
instead make the player draw it out on real paper with a pencil, the fact
remains that there is sometimes nothing for the player to go off of to find
what they are looking for. I can give
two examples of this. The first location
that the player has to navigate to is the hospital. The player is told that it is not far away
and is towards the north east direction.
What the game does not say is that the hospital is on the other side of
the map and is the farthest location from the school where you start from. The second example is when the player must go
to the local shrine. None of the
characters, when talked to, tell the player where it is, what direction it is
located towards, or even what it is near.
What happened was I wandered for the better half of an hour going in
circles looking for a place that I could not even identify if I walked past it. In fact, the only way that I could know if I
was near it was when I was walking right next to the shrine. The overworld camera gives the player very
little to be able to see. You see right
ahead, and only about five or so spaces forward. With no overworld map, you can even get
completely lost and forced to find some nearby location to find your
bearing. Again, I would not mind this
and see it as a part of the game mechanic if it were not for the fact that when
you are in a dungeon a map is generated for you to examine when playing. I cannot look over the fact that the game completely
forgets to tell you where the place you need to go is located. When you have to look for the abandoned
factory, the same thing happens with all the characters telling you to go to
there and making some great assumption that you know what they are talking
about.
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| Notice that the game tells you which direction you are facing twice in this picture. |
The
dungeons themselves do not strike me as very interesting in general. The dungeons, which the game actually labels
as such, so far are the school, hospital, police station, and abandoned
factory. All of them feel terribly
linear, minus the school which is more a hub rather than a dungeon. It is not "one long hallway with no
turnoffs" linear mind you. That is
much worse than this. The dungeons in
"Persona" are linear because there is no point in going off into dead
ends. The player is given a mini-map in
the top right corner that gives ample warning that turning off into one
direction will lead to a dead end. The
problem is that so far there is no reason to even go down those dead ends. There is almost nothing to interact with
while dungeon crawling. There are no
items scattered around or little bits of information at those dead ends. Why make dead ends if you can see them coming
and refuse to warrant exploring them? It
is only at the factory that the game finally makes a reason to explore the full
dungeon by making the player activate switches to advance. By that time, the game has conditioned the
player to not even look for anything in the dungeon other than the exit that
one might think the game is being clever to make the player forget to explore,
but I will hold my judgment about that until later.
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| This is the only thing in four hours that I had to look for that was not a door. |
I
really want to like the dungeon, too.
After going through the hospital, the first real dungeon, I was hoping
that the rest would feel as interesting.
What made me think this is most likely because as the player moves about
the hospital, terrible shrieks of people echo the hallways as the dead rise
from their slumber, attacking any who get in their way. The screams really added to the atmosphere
and make me hesitate to move since it created a sense of panic. However, as I continued to play the game, one
particular problem with the audio continued to make itself known. I can hear the character's footsteps echoing
constantly. There are only about four or
so foley sounds that the game recycles over and over. The constant sounds of footsteps are so loud
that they became annoying fast.
I'll
stop here for now, Internet. There are a
few other things that I want to cover about the game mechanics that I want to
talk about, but I will refrain from doing so because I want to keep playing
before touching upon them.
Yours in digital,
BeepBoop
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