Here at the Backlog, you know it's mostly coke parties and Gangnam-style dancing. That's why we missed a pair of updates in the last month or so. But, with a vacation on the horizon for both myself and my erstwhile writing partner, I suppose our update schedule will be a little more reliable. You know, now that I think about it, I might be confusing us with IGN. But either way, the point is, more posts, and more Korean dancing.
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| Oppa Backlog Style. |
Case in point, before the latest time crunch began for me, I wrapped up
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4. The game was recently remade/upgraded for the PSVita, no doubt following the success of their last remake for the PSP,
Persona 3 Portable. I've mentioned in the past that the P3 is one of my all-time favorite games, and I was assured by several people upon embarking upon this fourth entry in the series that it eclipses its predecessor. I'm pleased to report that they were not lying. However, after writing about how
Xenogears narrative-heavy style and extremely linear storytelling made it less enjoyable in today's interaction-heavy era of gaming, it feels hypocritical to talk about
Persona 4 as being great. So I should point out some of the similarities as well as the differences before I get into the meat of my post.
This game is about 80% cutscene, 15% dungeon crawling, and the rest of the time is split up into running to and from cutscenes or dungeons. Like Xenogears, this game has a lot of talking. A lot of talking. The script for
Persona 4 has to be e-freaking-normous. You begin as a transfer student in April of 2011, and every few actions causes the day to move forward until the finale on Christmas Day. Each "day" is essentially a new cutscene, or sometimes several cutscenes, where a lot of the time you'll find you have very little control over what happens. My girlfriend observed me playing this a few different times over a 3-day period, culminating in her asking "So, do you ever DO anything in this game?"
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| "What do you mean? Can't you see I'm fighting giant strippers? Honey? H-honey?" |
But that's the thing - going through those scenes IS playing the game. It's what you play the game FOR. In
Xenogears, I played the game expecting a standard RPG that included some giant robots, and instead I got a sci-fi novella with amazing potential, ultimately letting me down because of its glaring flaws. With
Persona, I went in knowing that I was going to be spending a lot of time talking to people, and that was what I wanted. Someone once described this set of games to me as "a visual novel, not a game," and for the most part I agree. The difference is that he meant it to deride
Persona 4, whereas I find it
fascinating.
Xenogears featured a lot of talking and lack of character control because that's what happens when you tell your programming team to build a Sphinx and then take all their slaves over to work on Pyramid #36.
The nose was supposed to be on Disc 2.
Persona 4 is a game where the fighting and dungeon crawling is just a consequence of all the awesome talking you get to do. I'm going to take some time now to describe how this works so well for the game, so grab a snack and prepare to hit the X button a lot as we delve into the world of Social Links.
