(no subject)

[felis_ultharus]

I promised a review of the Persona 4 game awhile ago, seeing as I'd just beat it. The only problem was that I hadn't. A long story, explained below.

For those who haven't played it, Persona 4 could best be described as a combination of Final Fantasy, Silent Hill, and The Sims. It's the story of a serial killer whose weapon of choice is the repressed emotions of their victims. The killer hurls his victims into a world inside the TV, where everything a person hates about themselves takes physical form and kills them on a reality TV show. And everybody's watching.

• Whoever came up with the tree of multiple endings was evil. Pure evil. Most games with multiple endings have two possibilities hinged on a clear and definite moral choice. Persona 3 worked this way. Persona 4 tricks you into thinking it works that way, but it really doesn't.
  
  
• Even after you've seen the worst endings, you can be fooled into thinking you won. The second-best ending especially really goes all-out to trick you into thinking you got the best one. It even mocks you for thinking there's something more. It took me three tries and a guide to finally get there.
  
  
• This game has plot twists. It has big plot twists that force you to re-evaluate what you were seeing in every goddamn scene. It got to the point where I thought that the puppetmaster-behind-the-scenes was Keyser Soze, Tyler Durden, and Bruce Willis from The Sixth Sense -- all of them armed with a sled called Rosebud. It was done rather well, too, up until the last twist. Credibility broke at that point.
  
  
• I've played that scene twice now, and I still don't know how I feel about the infamous Kanji Tatsumi stuff. I can forgive that the Steamy Bathhouse of Internalized Homophobia was over-the-top homophobic, because it represents Kanji's own fears. But after ascending 11 floors of Fred Phelps' secret wet dream, I can't help but feel that the leaving Kanji's sexuality ambiguous was more than a cop-out -- it was downright homophobic. Instead of having him come out, the is-he-or-isn't-he just gets played for laughs, and pretty nasty and homophobic laughs at that. I also notice that he gaybashes his own shadow.
  
  
• Rinse, lather, and repeat for the vaguely-raised trans issues in another sequence. But if I say anything more about that, it'll lead to larger spoilers.
  
  
• The Carl-Jung based combat is back, and so are the social links. I like the social links. I like how you have to navigate complex, well-scripted relationships, trying to find the right balance between supporting a friend and challenging them when they're doing something they shouldn't. I think it's a conspiracy to get geeks to form human relationships, the way Dance Dance Revolution was a conspiracy to get them to exercise.
  
  
• Still, the social link stuff always makes me think of that early Simpsons episode where the other kids are in the arcade playing games based on Terminator and Aliens, and über-geek Martin is playing the My Dinner With André video game. His options include "Trenchant Insight," "Bon Mot, and "Tell Me More," and Martin is button-mashing on "Tell Me More." With the Persona games, we finally have that game in home version.
  
  
• I don't usually like self-referential humour -- it's so overdone now -- but one I do like is when new video games do retro graphics. The scenes where the party is "in a video game" -- and an 8-bit one styled to look like Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy 1 -- are some of the funniest parts of the game.

I tend to focus on the negative in my reviews, but except for the points mentioned above, it's a very solid game, and yet another entry in the video-games-as-art tally.

That's a rapidly-growing category, but there's barely a word about that in mainstream media. In newspapers, TV, and radio, video games are portrayed the way novels were three hundred years ago -- anywhere from frivolous to a threat.