Persona 5 Music-core

Up (2009)
Director: Pete Docter
Requested by SuperAsdke (!req Up 2009 [8:30 --image-url https(://)i(.)imgur(.)com/U5nypl5(.)png --image-size 1.4 --image-position 17,3] --color 50 --brightness -20 --contrast 100 --sharpness 50) (16 hours ago)

Incredible.

FFXIV got a small update a few days ago. Nothing huge; they basically added a few side stories they didn’t add in May because they didn’t want them to distract from the main story update. But I really love the side stories they added. My favorite of them has the protagonist taking a former villain to meet minor characters from the Endwalker story. I’ll be discussing it here, so expect spoilers for Endwalker and for the new update.
For reasons that make sense in context but would take…too much time to explain, the villain wants to understand how these characters have managed to persist in the face of the tragedies that befell them in Endwalker. Each expansion has a sidequest like this, which revisits events from that expansion’s story through the eyes of minor characters. This one, though, made me more genuinely emotional than the others. Endwalker’s an interesting case, because its story’s probably not quite as good as Shadowbringers, but is able to use the hours of investment in the rest of the story to evoke real despair and hope in the player. It poses a meaningful question in the era of covid, climate disaster, rising fascism, etc: is a hope felt only to stave off despair a false emotion? Is acknowledging that possibility – that we may actually be lying to ourselves just so we do not feel despair – a form of despair in itself?

It feels silly to talk about a video game story this way, but I still feel raw after Endwalker’s November release. It affected me on a level I’m not used to from fiction, and I champion fiction specifically for its power to affect us. Sometimes I still picture the burning jungle of Thavnair, the stone pool where I had to rescue two people, and my chest tightens. I’ll randomly remember Gra'ha’s line asking whether he is still himself after his environment has forced him to change every aspect of his being from who he once was, and my throat catches. I think a lot of this is down to Endwalker being the right story at the right time: this is a story about covid, and we’re living through covid. It asks questions that I think many of us could feel but didn’t have the words for. I wrote an essay for a graduate class in which I simply described the central conflict of Endwalker, and apparently that alone left my professor thinking about it for several days. There’s something disturbing but also cathartic in stories like this.

This new story wasn’t long, but was still impactful. At one point we asked a background character how he had managed to go on after the death of his son. It must have been instinct, the former villain theorized, but the man corrected him, saying something on the order of “all my instincts were driving me to give up, to let death take me. It was my emotional attachment, to the memory of my son and to those around me, that got me to this point.” For those we have lost, for those we can yet save.

At the end, the former villain says he had always assumed that human emotions were something like a superpower allowing humans to transcend their limitations; they’re certainly treated as such at many points throughout FFXIV. What his time speaking to survivors taught him, though, is that emotions are simply our responses to stimuli. Whether we transcend our limitations or not is up to a number of factors beyond our control, and our ability or inability to do so is less a sign of individual strength or weakness than it is a product of chance. Because humans are weak, they depend on each other, and that support helps increase those odds.

It was a meaningful and cathartic cap on an already meaningful and cathartic story, and I’ll probably randomly think back on it for months to come.

So I've basically finished Pokemon Legends: Arceus. To do the last post-game quest you need to have completed the pokedex, and I'm about 30 away, but the only legendary I haven't caught yet only appears if you have a save file from a game I don't own, so I think I'm about as close to done as I can get. It's...fine? It's incredibly ugly, which wouldn't be as big a problem if The Pokemon Company wasn't a multi-billion dollar company that can absolutely afford to fix the amateurish issues with the graphics. I think it's wrong to give them a pass for that. This game was published by two huge corporations, broke sales records across the board, and they didn't bother making it look better than a decent fangame. Any time and money they didn't put into the game translates into extra profit down the line, and I don't like rewarding that kind of behavior by brushing over it. Still, I'm gonna set that aside and write on its game design philosophy, what I think works, what I think doesn't, and the ways I worry about the directions they're taking the series. Obviously, mileage varies on this, and since this is a spinoff, it's possible none of its changes will make their way into the main games, but considering much of its design philosophy were improvements on concepts from the Let's Go games, these are still clearly things that are going to be in the ether going forward, especially given how big the game's launch has been.

So firstly, the battle system is heavily simplified. Obviously, held items and abilities have been removed, but a lot of changes have been made to speed up battles and make them easier to win. Many weaker moves have had their power increased and stronger moves have had their power decreased, tightening the window of possible damage output. Similar tweaks have been made to max PP of moves such as Ancient Power/ Ominous Wind etc. Moves that used to not do damage but had unique strategic effects have been removed or made into damaging moves, like stealth rocks and spikes. Any move that raises a stat instead raises both the special and physical versions of that stat at once, making moves like calm mind and bulk up both identical and considerably better. Stat raises also don't seem to stack, though I'm not 100% on that one. The accuracy and evasion stats have been removed and replaced with a two-turn evasion buff effect. Confuse, Sleep, Freeze, and Toxic Poison have been removed, and status effects that do damage over time now do 1/8 instead of 1/16 of max HP each turn. There are no longer EV caps, and it is possible to max out EVs on every stat on every pokemon, which means strategic builds aren't a thing in this game - which I predict means that any training you do for a pokemon in this game won't carry over to other games once transferring is implemented in the Fall. They've also modified how damage is calculated more generally, so that lower-level pokemon can more easily defeat higher-level ones, and it seems to me to have increased the strength of moves at 60-100 power across the board. I haven't looked into whether stats have been tweaked yet, but considering how much damage my Chansey does I wouldn't be surprised if those have been altered too, to make less damage-oriented pokemon do and take more damage. Moves that take two turns, like Dig and Fly, have been removed. The only one remaining that I could find is Shadow Force, which now adds the evasion effect instead.

When I first picked up the game and saw the new, FFX-style turn order system and Bravely Default-style Speed and Power system, I was pretty thrilled that they'd been willing to add so much more complexity to an already pretty complex battle system. The more I played, however, the clearer it was that they added this because the other changes they'd made left the system so oversimplified that it needed some strategic element added back in. It seems that all these changes were made because in the open world stealth game they had made, battles function as a punishment for failure, rather than serving as the core purpose of the game. In my 50ish hours of play, I've had easily less than 15 trainer battles total (against unique trainers; there are three repeated trainers who have a chance of showing up randomly every 3-5 outings or so). I've been caught unaware by a trainer battle with level 60 pokemon and still decimated it with a team of level 23s I was leveling. In this game, battles are primarily a tool to slow down players who do poorly at the stealth and action components, and as a result they have been made as quick and easy to complete as possible, so the punishment doesn't last overlong and frustrate stealth and action players. My first time blacking out in this game was 40 hours in, and it was from accidentally fat-fingering and switching to riding a bear while flying. I haven't lost a battle yet. The battle system is almost vestigial, at this point, and I can't help but wonder if some of the overwhelming jank and ugliness of this game is because resources went into the battle system when they simply shouldn't have. I think this game should have been a reimagining of the old Pokemon Rangers spinoff series, where the pokemon in your party afford you advantages without acting as battling partners. The Zelda-style boss encounters in this game are already absolutely updated versions of the Rangers encounters.

My main disagreement with this game, philosophically, is on the way it handles catching. Legends approaches catching the way especially Go and to a lesser extent the Let's Go games did, by encouraging players to catch as many pokemon as possible and chunk the duplicates for training items. This was unavoidable in Go, as it was a mobile game and was designed around a mobile gameplay loop. This was counter to the point of Let's Go, to the point that I refused to buy either of those games on principle. Here...it makes more sense than Let's Go, but it still feels kinda gross? I never deleted my first file in Pokemon Blue. Ditto for Sapphire and Platinum. I only started reaching a point where I could say goodbye to the pokemon I'd run through a game with in Gen 5. This always felt like...the point? You're supposed to get attached to the pokemon you play with, not as a collection of lists of numbers with a cute design, but as individual beings who went on an adventure with you. It's why each individual pokemon has slightly unique stat spreads, why they gain EVs from the battles they're in, why you can transfer pokemon from game-to-game, and gen-to-gen, why they added shinies and forms and eviolite. It's the main theme of the television show, and (I'd assumed) why so many people have wanted the return of pokemon following you outside of battles (which Legends doesn't do and I find a little unacceptable). You watch so many characters in this game befriend a pokemon and become attached to it. There are nearly a hundred sidequests, about half of which involve catching a pokemon for someone so they can use it as a tool, and over the course of the game those pokemon evolve and grow while their trainers become attached to them. This is supposed to be a game about befriending pets and surviving hardships with them, and the fact that I go to the storage system after each outing, peruse the stat spreads of 15 sneasels, and grind all but the best one into EVs feels like we took a wrong turn somewhere.

I only took my starter all the way to the end, out of a sense of obligation. I have two boxes of the about fifty pokemon who I had in my party at some point, because I feel obligated to remember them. But I switched each of them out without any remorse, or twinge of attachment. I'd already caught tens of each of them, and if you catch a pokemon with a better nature, it's laughably easy to use EV items on it and overtake the one you'd used before, since you don't earn EVs from battles anymore.

In the end, Pokemon Legends: Arceus is a fun - if ugly - game with a decently rewarding loop. I don't regret the time I put into it. But I look at the patterns it continues from previous games and those it leaves behind, and I worry that the wrong lessons are being reinforced. That worry powerfully sours an otherwise solidly enjoyable experience.

Playing the ffxiv healer role quests like

replaying FFXIV to prepare for Endwalker and uh

So a form of Build Back Better has passed the House today to thunderous applause, cut down to basically nothing, and capable of building anything pretty much in name only. Nancy Pelosi, person I hate, said of the nearly useless bill that it "will be the pillar of health and financial security in America," signaling to us all that the future will one without health or financial security. Also today was the disastrous Rittenhouse decision, which Biden just publicly said was the correct decision because of course the Crime Bill guy would be all for that decision. Maybe it's just intense cynicism in a powerfully disheartening moment, but I can't help feeling like we've crossed some kind of threshold today.

I know I've written a lot about fascism over the years, but indulge me, for a moment. Fascism is built out of two specific currents: a far-right movement and Liberal (read: capitalist) support. Fascist movements, while certainly dangerous and necessary to fight, don't necessarily bear out into fascist governments. In fact, their purpose when created wasn't to take power, but simply to find a way to garner mass support for already existing power structures at a time when it was widely believed that mass movements were always positioned against those structures. Liberal governments are generally perfectly capable of holding onto power, but it's easier to do so with a populace that accepts their position. During crises of capital, however, left-wing movements tend to crop up, because people begin to see and resent the structures that gave rise to the crisis. It's worth noting that these crises are predictable and help to hasten the flow of profit to the owning classes; they're a feature of capitalism, not a bug. Left-wing movements, however, pose a threat to the owning classes, as more and more desperate people question their right to hold power, or even the naturalness of a system that allows for these power imbalances.

This leads to the gamble that Liberal capital takes again and again; they empower far-right paramilitaries to take out these threats to their power without dirtying their own hands. This also doesn't necessarily lead to fascism, because the owning classes are generally good at holding onto their power, but occasionally they overreach and overextend, and those far-right elements are catapulted to a position of governance. The ins and outs of it all are much more complex than that, obviously. The comfort of the middle-class, primacy of race, state of education, uneasy position of overseas holdings, and more factors are all pieces of the larger picture. Still, this gamble taken by capital is the magic moment where everything can fall to fascism. It's also a gamble we see Liberals take repeatedly. Think back to post-reconstruction, McCarthyism, the violent destruction of the rainbow coalition, the crushing of Occupy under tank treads, the crushing of indigenous protesters who just wanted the land they were promised. The current of American history is this constant attempt by the ruling class to hold onto power by violently dismantling left-wing movements using state and mob power, then using propaganda to erode away any support of what was dismantled. I find myself asking increasingly often if Neoliberalism isn't simply the result of all these hundreds of gambles across the globe succeeding in not giving way to fascism and in doing so leaving behind something just as evil.

I think Trump was fascist. I...don't think he helmed a fascist government, exactly. By that, I mean I don't think America under Trump was much more fascist than America under any other recent president. When all power is neoliberal and all populist energies are right-wing and/or middle-class, how noticeable would a fascist turn even be?

I wrote during the 2020 primaries that the only way to fight back against fascism was through left-wing populism. I hope it's clear, now, why I believe that to be the case. However, capital took the gamble again, against a movement which was, after so many years of erosion, barely even left-wing. We now see the result. Far-right popular movements are given not even tacit approval, but official sanction. Liberal policy that's meant simply to pacify an increasingly demoralized populace won't even pass, as long as it means any disruption of the flow of profit.

As time passes, I find myself more and more often feeling like we're all at the edge of the precipice. Today is one such day.

Happy birthday queen

I finished the first of the Great Ace Attorney games last night and have some thoughts I want to write out. I'll be mostly avoiding spoilers.

I approached this game with the thought that this - a new AA game with completely new characters, set in an entirely different time period - would be the first entirely functional jumping-on-point the series has had since the original back in 2001. For that reason, I critiqued the game mostly through that lens: how much of this game would show newcomers the best of what the series has to offer without requiring information it doesn't provide? GAA fits the latter wonderfully. There's no Phoenix or Apollo or Athena, only minor references to other games that don't detract from this game's story in any way. Players don't need to understand spirit channeling or magician heredity or Larry Butz. This is a game a newcomer can approach and play without any long exposition on who has what relationship with whom.

However, this game simply doesn't show newcomers the best of what the series has to offer. GAA has five cases, and of those five I would consider two of them to have a satisfying resolution. Obviously, that's pretty subjective, but at the very least, Ace Attorney is known for its villains and this game has maybe one. And that one villain...doesn't get a freakout. Two of the cases feel like attempts to redo and fix the two most poorly executed cases in AA2, and they definitely succeed at doing that, but it means that the cases don't have satisfying conclusions by design. The gimmick of this game, too, feels less satisfying than previous gimmicks. The testimonies place multiple characters on the stands at once, and in theory that means the player must be scanning the other characters' faces for reactions to what is being said, but in practice the game simply makes a loud sound and gives you an icon telling you exactly which character made that sound. It's considerably less satisfying than scanning for subtle body language hints as Apollo or using your evidence to break through people's walls as Phoenix. It's too simple, and that, combined with the mostly uninteresting solutions to the cases, makes finishing each case not feel like an achievement.

This is also the first game in the series to spend a lot of time setting up plot points for future games. Every other Ace Attorney game is self-contained; it's useful to know the previous games, but every mystery brought up in a game will be solved by the end of that game. I can think of at least ten questions off the top of my head that are introduced in this game but aren't given any resolution specifically so that those mysteries can carry forward into the sequel. This probably is less of an issue in this format, where both games are in one collection, so I can just move on to the next one as soon as I'm done with this one, but it makes GAA feel like a less cohesive title. I've played five cases of this game and could tell you almost nothing about the prosecutor. There isn't a single other AA game where that's the case.

Obviously, this is just a different storytelling philosophy than the series has had in the past, but it's one at odds with the game's own theming. The character of Sherlock Holmes is very important to the plot of this game, which is delightful, and makes sense given just how much influence Holmes mysteries have had on the series as a whole. But each of Doyle's stories about Holmes was self-contained, which was why the character held such mass appeal. The writers of this game are laying claim to a pedigree from which they are simultaneously distancing themselves. Hell, in the past I've turned on old AA games on a whim and replayed old chapters out of order because generally each mystery stands on its own. I would not do that with this game. There's no reason to replay case 3, for instance, without just replaying the entire game. Case 4 spends more time dealing with the fallout of cases 2 and 3 than it does investigating its own mystery. And it looks like this trend will be continuing. I watched the opening cutscene of the second game, and its first case seems to be about answering the questions left unanswered from the first case of the previous game. That leaves me excited to play the case and learn the answers to those questions, but it also means the tutorial case for GAA isn't resolved by the end of the game. That's ludicrous when compared to any other game in the series. The closest comparison I have is the first case of AA4, in which the victim's identity, the murderer's motive, and both their relationships to the defendant are left hanging, but that's all resolved in case 4, and the act of solving the murder itself was satisfying enough that I didn't find myself worrying about those answers until I was meant to. By the end of GAA, I only know one of those details about the first case, and I spent most of the game waiting for those answers to come. Hell, in case 4, two characters I'd never seen before or since stage a conversation in front of the protagonist, and I can only assume they'll be important again in the second game. Their character models honestly shouldn't even have been in this game.

The pacing is also oddly quick, even with an extra case. We only see the prosecutor's gimmick in action once, another character out-mia-fey's mia fey with the level of disrespect in their death, and while the main themes of the series get a lot of lip-service in this game, it mostly doesn't feel earned, except in the last case. To dip my toe into spoilers for the next paragraph:
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Every AA game deals heavily with the theme of belief in one's client. The Japanese justice system is pretty fu**ed, so the games talk a lot about how a defense attorney must fully trust in their client's innocence, because literally no one else will. It's a pretty powerful motif, especially when you consider the real-world implications. In Ace Attorney, trusting in your client's innocence includes being willing to take risks by pointing out evidence that seems to hurt your client's case, because getting a fuller understanding of the truth is the only way to find the real culprit, in the end. In GAA, the protagonist's ability to trust in his clients is dashed with his very first case, so early he never had a chance to understand the importance of that trust. So his journey of trying to learn how to trust in his clients feels unearned for returning players and will probably feel entirely confusing and out-of-place for first-time players.
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Okay, that's the end of those spoilers

None of this is to say this is a bad game. It's much better than 5 or 6, and it's still probably the best jumping-on point since 1. If anyone asked me where to start the series, I'd still tell them to play the original trilogy, but this isn't a terrible place to start either. I love the characters a lot, their take on Sherlock Holmes is delightful, and the use of the turn-of-the-century time period is great. You even defend an actual historical Japanese novelist from the time, which is really a treat.

But I worry that unless the second game is a considerable jump in quality, that this side story simply won't have the staying power of the original trilogy, 4, or investigations. I've been mad for a really long time that we only got this game 6 years after the first one released and 4 years after the second, but after having played this I'm at least glad it released packed in with the sequel, or I'd've probably been considerably more disappointed with it than I already am. Then there are other issues that come with the collection format meaning we essentially have a second tutorial halfway through the game.

In any case, once I've finished the second game I'll probably write some thoughts on that, too, and possibly rank the series.

A little wild that the writers of Great Ace Attorney were trying to find a justice system as unfair as contemporary Japan's so they settled on "turn-of-the-century Great Britain if a serial killer murdered anyone who got a Not Guilty verdict"

Not mine, but I love it too much not to share it

Hey folks, so it's not really comics related, but I made a video essay about the game Kentucky Route Zero and I'm pretty happy with how it came out, so I figured I'd put it here in case anyone's interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X72dtDqejkU

I actually have a script for a video about the Defenders comic that's about half-written so far, so once classes are done and I have a little more free time, I might finish that up and post it there, too, if there's interest.

This page stans Prometheus.

My full review of Persona 5: Scramble. Some mostly minor spoilers scattered throughout, though I try to flag them in advance.

When Persona 5: Scramble was announced, my expectations were fairly low. As it was yet another Warriors spinoff of a better-known series, I expected Hyrule Warriors but with Persona characters. I thought we’d get the P5 crew, maybe even a few from P3 or P4, maybe a villain or two, mindlessly tearing through thousands of enemies in essentially interchangeable levels, justified by a threadbare, 6-hour story. The demo, then, blew me away. It was just…the beginning of a sequel to Persona 5, maintaining the locations, presentation, and characters of the original game, but with a beat ‘em up battle system. I began thinking of Scramble as a direct sequel to literally my favorite game of all time, including everything a sequel might entail.

Having played through almost all of Persona 5: Strikers (I have started but not bothered seriously attempting New Game+ in Merciless difficulty), the game we ended up getting was halfway between those, I think. They managed to recreate the presentation of P5 impeccably, with gorgeous menus, beautiful battle effects, entertaining scene transitions, etc. However, the half of the game that isn’t dungeon-crawling is deceptively scant. The story centers around a road trip across Japan, but each city isn’t nearly as realized as P5’s Tokyo, with only about 3 rooms apiece, and some of the later ones not even getting a hub at all. The hubs really only exist to have shops, with none of the time management, minigames, or relationship building in a mainline Persona game. Still, it’s the only Persona spinoff I’ve played that has a real-life component at all, so I found it refreshing to get to wander Sendai, Okinawa, Osaka, and other towns in a game I’d initially not expected to have any towns at all.

The dungeons are where this game shines, though. They’re actual Persona 5-style dungeons, made occasionally even more dynamic with the addition of platforming and sidescrolling sections reminiscent of Nier Automata. The battle system uses the bones of the system in every warriors game, but slowly builds on it with more and more complexity until it’s not only a unique system, but is honestly one of the more engaging action battle systems I’ve played in a minute, in which you’re constantly trying to time dodges just right for extra hits, which can then open the option to either get in an extra hit with your character, which heals some SP, or switch to another character for an extra hit with them, which increases the rate at which the special gauge increases. As Joker, you have an array of Personas you can switch between on the fly, shifting your moveset, your stats, and your strategy as you go. Each of the other characters has their own gimmick that makes them unique and fun to play and sets them apart from Joker, who otherwise would have access to all their elemental attacks and stat spreads. Strategically placed objects around dungeons can be used to pull off special moves in battles, as well, letting you jump up to chandeliers and drop them on enemies or dive off of walls and tackle enemies. The battle system takes a little too long to actually become complex, but once it actually reaches that point it’s really rewarding. The bosses, too, are fun, with designs deserving of the Persona name and strategies that make full use of the environments. You can even replay them at different difficulty levels as the game goes on. I’ve never played a Koei Tecmo game with this much polish, and the battle system makes me hope the Warriors team goes to try an actual Platinum-style character action game. I think they’d knock it out of the park.

I’m a little split on the story of this game. The bones of the story are good. The characters are all written perfectly, and seeing them interact again was enough that I actually teared up a bit when I first booted up the game. I enjoy the new characters, and they work well with the party. The pacing is solid and it has a good emotional core. The villains are decent for the most part, and the ending is pretty satisfying. Several of the villains directly correlate to specific party members, too, which gives us further insight into those party members, and lets us watch as they see themselves in someone else and recognize where that other person broke off from their path. The game is in part about trauma and the ways it drives individuals to lash out at a world they’ve always believed to be cold and unforgiving, which could be a powerful message if done well. In this game, though, it’s not done very well at all. The ultimate message – if this game could be said to have one – is that individuals without support networks are driven by trauma to make bad decisions. That’s not…necessarily untrue, but it’s not…necessarily true, either. This message is probably at its worst when the game gets into inadvertently ableist territory with a character near the end, who -spoilers until the end of the paragraph- tries to essentially enslave mankind because her dissociation due to trauma convinces her that she has no emotions and therefore the species as a whole should have no emotions either. It’s…frankly a really gross bookend on a game that, until that point, had managed to avoid most of the issues with male gaze and homophobia that the original game had.

Every message in this game, though, is too individual-focused to function as a real message or social commentary. It even undercuts the sharp themes in the original by showing people in similar positions of power as the original villains just…choosing not to fall to corruption and consequently avoiding all of the problems that would arise from their power discrepancy. For a spoilery example until the end of the paragraph, the villain in Persona 5 who’s a CEO is a villain because his need to make profit drives him to exploit his workers, paying them less and working them more. The villain in Strikers who’s a CEO is a villain because his father was abusive and that led him to think people must be controlled. One is a real-world problem applicable to any CEO. The other is a story that exists only in the fictional realm.

This wouldn’t be such a glaring issue if Persona games – and especially Persona 5 – weren’t known for their social commentary. That’s not limited to the main games, either. Persona 4 Dancing was a rhythm game with a story about parasocial relationships and the pressures they place on public figures. Strikers ostensibly touches on parasocial relationships, but doesn’t…really have anything to say about them.

The game does try to make a statement sometimes, but everything it tries to say is disjointed, at odds with the previous game, or inapplicable to real life. The villains’ deeds don’t really have much similarity to each other, either, unlike in 5, and it’s stated outright that several of them would not hold any power at all without the supernatural world, which both prevents their stories from saying anything about the real world, and flies in the face of the purpose of Persona as a series. The supernatural worlds in Persona games are the collective unconscious, which means that the worlds are used to give the characters and the player visual representations of abstract concepts. The Palaces in Persona 5 are not the sources of the villains’ power; that comes from regular old societal hierarchies. The characters in Persona 4 were experiencing their inner turmoil before they were sucked into the TV world, and the midnight channel only made manifest what was already there and unseen. Conversely, the first two villains in Strikers are only in the public eye because they use supernatural means to make people like them. That the supernatural means involve smart phones doesn’t say anything about technology, because that’s not how technology actually works. In a follow-up to a game that was as furious at the world and desperate for change as Persona 5 was, it’s a glaring departure for the characters to just…befriend “the good cop,” or -spoilers again- push the mayor who’s based on Margaret Fu***ng Thatcher to run again but do things the “right way” this time.

That being said, I’m not actually that upset with this game. I have a lot to say about its missteps because I have a lot to say about Persona 5, but the gameplay is legitimately fun, and I do really love seeing the characters again. I’m more bemused than upset with the game’s fumbling of…the thing that made me fall in love with Persona 5 to begin with. Part of that is because the game is still so solid and fun, and the characters are written so well that I can overlook the issues. Even deeper, though, is that the last few years has radicalized so many people that the statements made in Persona 5 are simply…more visible in the mainstream than they were when it released. Late show hosts rage about the exploitation of waged workers. Video game streamers remark on the cruel arbitrariness of the current system. Shows about cops are being pushed to justify their existence to an increasingly disillusioned public. I think if Persona 5 released today, it wouldn’t have the same impact it did in 2017. To my mind, the game no longer carries the responsibility it once did. So this game is fun and doesn’t really matter, and that’s actually okay.

But if Persona 6 isn’t a return to form, I’ll take it back.