Persona 4 is the spiritual successor, or sibling, or cousin, or something of the Megami Tensei series, developed and published by Atlus. There are about a half dozen games in the Megami Tensei series, and apparently at least three other ones in the Persona series, of which I own one (Persona 3) that I haven't played yet. If each Final Fantasy game is the same spirit (chocobos, cactuars, cure, curaga, etc.) in a different body, then Persona 4 is Shin Megami's soul and body in a new set of clothes. They may be very fancy clothes, very different from what's come before, but the soul, the sinew, the muscle, and the mind are all the same. Which means that I am destined to hate Persona 4.

The game got some extremely high marks on the review circuit, though, so I figured, hey, what the hell, why learn from my mistakes? Why not try something I'll probably hate? And, really, I probably should have hated Persona 4 right off the bat. During the first three or four hours of the "game", I think I interacted with the controller two dozen times. I made a few fairly inconsequential dialog choices, hit X to continue, saved my game a few times, and at one point I even got to run for ten seconds down a path and then fight a meaningless battle! On the wrong night, the game would have been in the case and back on the shelf after that. On a typical night, I would have been fuming that point, and about an hour away from doing the same. I guess I was in the right (wrong?) state, though, and perhaps even in the mood for a movie (which is basically what I got), because I actually enjoyed it.

It does help immensely that the game's plot is actually interesting. The first and most crucial component is the setting - Persona 4 is a Japanese RPG set in modern day Japan. Let me reiterate and rephrase that for emphasis: Persona 4 is a Japanese RPG not set in a fantasy or sci-fi world. That is just... wow. Fucking mind blowing. The game has something of a horror feel - you move from the city to a small town in the sticks, where you board up with your uncle, a police detective. As soon as you arrive, a woman is found dead and apparently murdered in bizarre fashion on a foggy day, cause of death and culprit unknown. Another body follows hers, and at that point you discover that you can step through televisions into a bizarre mirror world where the dark side of one's soul becomes physically manifest. You realize that this other world is connected to the murders, and furthermore, that you (and your friends) are in possession of the unique abilities required to rescue would-be victims and, ultimately, stop the murders. The execution of the story does help quite a bit in making it arresting. The writing is actually pretty good, and even includes the use of a few well placed and appropriate curse words (still surprising to me). The voice acting is all pretty quality, and virtually all of the plot-related text is voice acted.

Where some of the Megami Tensei games started in modern day Japan and quickly moved into a surrealist-fantasy-horror setting, this one remains mainly in Japan with trips into the surrealist-fantasy-horror dream world. You actually participate in daily Japanese high school life, and it affects your abilities in combat. You join clubs, form bonds with fellow students, take part time jobs to make money, and study or read or practice. These things play into various aspects of the game, and are a nice, fun break from the tension and combat-filled plot sections. Fog comes after a few days of steady rain, and people die when the fog comes, so as long as you keep an eye on the weather forecast, you can spend your time between here and there improving your character in whatever fashion you choose.

The game has a really bold aesthetic, too. The main colors are bright yellow and chalkboard black, and the interface often involves stripes of color from all across the spectrum. It matches the setting in being extremely different from the norm, and is quite modern, really. It's the kind of thing that could look absolutely terrible, but is pulled off expertly, and is quite striking. It adds a lot to the game in general, as the art style is carried throughout. I hope whoever came up with the look and feel and color scheme was paid well, because he or she certainly deserves it. The music is also pretty different; it typically features vocals, and is more along the lines of hip-hop and pop. It's not stuff that I'd listen to my own - though that is the case for 99% of video game music - but it is pretty good, and it's very refreshing to hear something different.


So, hey, so far so good, right? Everything about the game is awesome and original and unique and creative? Well, all that's really left to discuss is the meat of the gameplay. Combat, and the things that surround it. And this is where things start to fall apart.

Persona 4 really, truly is Megami Tensei with some new clothes on. The demons from that series have been renamed Persona, and have some updated graphics, but otherwise it would appear that all are present. They have the same names, the same abilities, and I'd bet they have the same elemental weaknesses and strengths. You combine them, just like you did before, and I suspect the combination grid is the same, too. Combat has essentially the same "get fucked and you get fucked even harder" approach; the same punishing, ridiculously frustrating set of rules.

For as much as Persona 4 is modern in most ways, the combat portion of the game - like Megami Tensei - is stuck in a bygone era. The era of 8 bit and 16 bit games, the era of arbitrary punishment, of game-overs that set you back a half an hour or hour of play time, of "go kill 4,000 slimes until you're high level enough" boss design, of all that frustrating, pointless, un-fun bullshit that has since been wisely moved out of the genre and video games in general.

In Persona 4, if your main character dies, it is game fucking over. Do no restart combat, do no restart at the beginning of this level, do not restart at the nearest save point, do not even get so much as a fucking load screen. Back to the title screen with you, and if you just spent an hour leveling up, well, sorry, but it's gone. This makes it particularly infuriating when you are destroyed instantly. The game has a number of instant death spells, and while the chances of them hitting are low, all they need to do is connect once on your main character and - whoops! - the last half hour of your life was for naught! I know from previous experience that this will happen at some point in the game. Megami Tensei taught me as much. If that weren't enough, I ran into a lone enemy in a random encounter early on in the game who managed to wipe out my entire party with one spell. They were at about 90% health each, and all three died in one move. How is that something I could have prevented? How is that fun? In another encounter, I decided to cast a wind spell against an enemy with my main character. Unbeknownst to me (since I'd never seen the enemy before), it reflected damage of that element (and all others for that matter), and thus my main character instantly died. Great! What glee!

The days of Shadowgate's "pick one of these three doors at random, and if you pick the wrong one, game over!" are well behind us, as they should be. For everyone but Megami Tensei and Persona, that is. There is nothing fun about having your house flattened by a tornado or your car rear-ended at a stop light. Arbitrarily occurring bad shit is not fun in any setting or any incarnation. Russian Roulette is a game for morons, and I feel like I must be some small portion of a moron for playing a game in which every random enemy encounter is like playing Russian Roulette with the time I've spent between here and the last save point.

Thankfully Persona 4 has save points just before (some) boss fights, because otherwise I'd likely have quit the game by now. My first mini-boss fight was fucking rough, no doubt. I tapped out my supply of certain critical, expensive healing items, but I made it through. I made my way to the first genuine boss, destroying the random encounters in my path pretty handily, by and large. When I fought the boss, however, I got fucking obliterated. Changing tactics and knowing what to expect helped not at all. Thus I spent an hour leveling up in order to better face the boss. When I went back, however, I still got soundly spanked. I made progress, and got the boss down to a quarter of its life, but at that point, it goes into ass-kicking mode, and I was fucking destroyed quite thoroughly.

Look, I don't want to be forced to wander in circles for two fucking hours just so that I can beat the boss and progress the storyline. I want to have that option, but I don't want to be forced to do it. That is Final Fantasy 1 and Dragon Warrior 1 style bullshit. If I wanted to grind, I'd be playing fucking World of Warcraft. They do a much better job of it, and I can talk to people and listen to whatever music I want while I grind. An RPG is a plot-driven game; if you do the plot well - which Person 4 has - I will want to know what happens next, and I'll be playing through the (hopefully fun) combat to keep the story moving. Forcing me to level up (for fucking hours, no less) in order to keep things moving is like turning the page in a book and finding a notice that says "run ten laps around the block in order to open the next chapter." It is frustrating. If your gameplay is incredible, I'll fool around and level up on my own. Mandating it sucks the fun out of it.

If that weren't enough, the game's "fucking begats fucking" combat system lends even more arbitrariness to all fights, particularly this boss one. What that means is that I can fight once and kick the boss down to 25% life over ten minutes, while the next attempt is over with my brutal death in one or two. As with Megami Tensei, if you - or the enemy - lands a critical hit or nails you with the element you're weak to, they get another attack. It is a rich-get-richer system, which is so thoroughly frustrating if you're poor. On one turn, the boss hit one character with a spell she was weak to, killing her and granting the boss another turn. With that extra turn, the boss attacked another character, critically hitting him and wiping him out as well. The critical yielded another turn, with which it attacked my last remaining character - thankfully (I guess) my main, else I would have been back at the title screen by then - leaving him on the verge of death. Wonderful. Great. One lucky strike and I go from great shape to completely fucked without being able to react. How incredibly fun.

Adding five thousand fucking points to Persona 4's dumbshitfail score is the inability to skip dialog scenes. That is a mistake in any game, but in this one, it's an outright fucking crime. In a game that has copious dialog and frequently subjects you to arbitrary deaths that send you back to the title screen, not having the ability to skip non-participatory dialog is fucking idiocy in the most impressive fashion. Did no one fucking play this game before it was released? It should become obvious after your first game over - which will inevitably occur on the first boss - that hitting circle sixty times to fast forward through the ten minutes of dialog that you've already heard is a horrible fucking idea. I was unfortunate enough to actually get wiped out in one fight that sent me back through a half hour's worth of dialog. I nearly quit the game at that point. Let me skip the dialog. Remove all the cutscenes, body animations, and voice-acting, and just send me to the next fucking point where I have input. It's not hard to do, and it will keep people from snapping the game disc in half. With a game as prone to ending in "Game Over" as Persona 4, it is absolutely astounding that there's no quick way to bypass conversation you've already seen before.


I am struggling mightily to love the overall whole of Persona 4. I do love the visuals, and the music, and the plot, and the characters, and the setting, and the style. But goddamn is the combat ever just a bag of frustration and anger and piss and shit. This is exacerbated by the fact that I've been there and done that before, and none of the things I've had issues with have really changed. I think it's essentially a game that you have to be in the right frame of mind for - expect long cutscenes with little interaction, and expect to be killed frequently. If you can adjust to those things and even enjoy them, Persona 4 is pretty fucking awesome. I'm just not sure that I can.

Well, I was enjoying Mana Khemia immensely, and I was about halfway through the game, maybe more. Unfortunately, however, my save file became corrupted, which means that that is the end of that. Perhaps the biggest bitch about it was that I still had the ability to run around and attempt to save my game after I'd been told that the save file was corrupt, and saving failed - I knew that as soon as I turned off the machine, my game was gone. There was no way to tell it to start a new Mana Khemia save file, no way to put a new memory card in (since it's the PS3), and I couldn't even try another save slot on the same Mana Khemia save file. Completely fucked.

I'm not sure exactly who to blame here. The fact that it's a PS3 playing a PS2 game might mean something, but I've done that plenty of times and had no trouble up till now. I actually almost lost my save file once before - the slots all came up blank on saving, despite that not being the case, which is what happened when I lost it. I'm guessing this is Mana Khemia's fault, but I suppose it doesn't matter much in the end. I'd really like to play more, but there's no way that I'm starting over after 30 hours of effort. Shame.

I should have made this post yesterday, but I was too busy playing this damn game. Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al-Revis, is the spiritual successor of the Atelier Iris series, a set of three Japanese RPGs for the PS2. They're anime-styled, low-budget, pseudo-3D, and the two I played (1 & 2, with 3 on my shelf and waiting) were... Well, critically speaking, pretty sub-par. Not horrible, but lacking in a lot of ways. I enjoyed them far more than they really deserved, though, and that is for one reason and one reason only: the alchemy system.

The majority of an Atelier game was standard RPG fare: get a party of ragtag misfits, explore areas, fight monsters, get loot, level up, advance a melodramatic crappy plot. The game contained an item creation and modification system, though, that had far more character and intrigue and ingenuity than the rest of the game put together. You could collect recipes, and then substitute rare, interesting, or customized items for the common ones in the recipes. Sometimes this would make a more powerful item, sometimes it would make a new one altogether. I often found myself wishing that that was all there was to the game, and that they would just ditch the lame RPG shit and go full on with the alchemy.

Thankfully someone at Gust must have come to that realization as well, as that's basically what they've done with Mana Khemia. The game revolves around alchemy, from plot to leveling up, and it is fucking crack to me as a result. I probably put in 12 hours over the weekend and have throw another 8 on top so far this week. It's actually kind of horrible, and the coming arrival of a sequel later this year has me both excited and worried. I cannot heartily recommend this game to all people, as it's very niche, but goddamn does it ever do something ever so right for me. I fucking love to craft. Call me crazy, but that is one of my favorite aspects of World of Warcraft, and this is like a game built around that. Only the crafting is far, far better.

The setting for the game is essentially a university for alchemists. The plot is nothing much to speak of - just you going through life as an alchemy student, getting to know your classmates. Classes open up new aspects of alchemy, as well as new portions of the map. Everything in the game revolves around item creation, as it should, and the game does an excellent job of folding every aspect on top of another one. A new lesson means, say, the ability to harvest items from new sources, with those new sources in a new area, which means new enemies, which means new items, which means that you'll be able to create even more new items, and there's always the potential for new recipes in new areas, which means not just new items, but possibly new recipes for new items derived from those recipes, and then the stores will also stock new items and recipes, and...

Even leveling up is built around item creation. Each character essentially has an interconnected grid, and each node on the grid contains a number of upgrades to your character that you can buy with AP, which is earned in battle. One node might contain +Attack, +HP, +Defense, another +Speed, another a new skill, and so on. In order to unlock each node, you must create the item that corresponds to it. This is the only way to "level up." There is no standard experience, and fighting enemies forever will net you nothing other than an enormous stock of AP. Item creation is core.

The game is also pretty shockingly well put together. For what it is, anyway, and in the ways that matter. There are bugs - I fell through the world once (but popped right back up), and I jump and get stuck in the air very frequently. But since they have essentially the same engine as they've had for three games running, they've added plenty to it. Team attacks, taking out random encounter enemies without fighting them if they're weak enough, time of day, and a number of other aspects help make the game more interesting. The distribution of gold, items, and recipes is pretty masterful, too. You've always got enough, but not enough to get a ton of everything. Crafting one of everything doesn't tax your resources too heavily, but if you want every character to have a Straw Doll, it's probably going to cost you most of your stash. The only resource that's not balanced is AP - I lack it for new characters right after I get them, but I have a fucking shitload for those that have been around awhile.

I often find myself playing a game, saying, "this part is awesome, and this part isn't, and if I could just deal with the great part, this game would be sublime." Typically, however, sequels stick to the same formula, and some manage to even throw things in the wrong direction. Mana Khemia, however, has essentially done with Atelier Iris everything that I had hoped they would do, and the result is a fucking blast. For me, anyway. It's not for everyone, but goddamn, I cannot put this game down.

I was at an actual brick and mortar computer store this past weekend. It was like going to a playground and going down a slide - a strange, anachronistic act that both takes you back to the glory of your younger years and diminishes that glory. Once you've been out on the internet, the computer store that once seemed so very large is revealed to be but a tiny corner of a park in a city filled with plenty others. Since I was already back in time, I figured I might as well live out the experience as fully as possible, and thus I picked up a PC RPG three-pack of games that I'd mostly never heard of before for $20. I've not made such a purchase in ages. These days I check reviews, worry about DRM, and get things online. Buying on a whim seemed like a fun thing to do. It'd also turn out to be something I'd swiftly regret. I guess I needed a reminder as to why I don't just buy PC games at random anymore.

If you want the one reason that I don't buy such games at random anymore, it's DRM. I can afford to blow $20 on a shitty game, and have plenty times. Hell, with the three pack, it was basically just $7 a game, which is a minimal investment. I'll be goddamned if I'm going to let a game (especially a $7 one) fuckup my brand new $1,500 machine, though, which is built with recording and coding in mind more than gaming. Fuck DRM and its slimy tendrils worming their way into my Windows install, potentially fucking up software and hardware both. I have no desire to roll the dice on that shit.

I tried to do some research on the three-pack at the store. I looked at the box, but of course there was nothing mentioned. I hijacked an employee computer, googled it and DRM, and got nothing. In retrospect I should have googled each game and DRM, but we all know how hindsight works. I even got home, opened up the game, looked over the manuals and the discs, and saw nothing regarding DRM. I mean, what the fuck, they're fucking five year old fucking games effectively being sold for $7 a fucking pop. Who the fuck is going to bother putting DRM on that shit? I figured I was safe.

Wrong. Of course. I installed Loki, some game I've never heard of that's years old and, again, being sold for next to nothing. I took the DVD out after install and put it away since, after all, who the fuck is going to require the DVD when you're selling a value pack of a years-old game? SecuROM then informed me that I didn't have the DVD in the drive, and thus couldn't play. I was, to understate, livid. And still am. I saw no mention of SecuROM or other DRM anywhere. I have heard numerous reports of how it can fuck your computer up. The absence of its mention - which should have not just been there, but been prominent in my opinion - is dishonest at best and criminal at worst. Fuck Dreamcatcher games. Fuck them forever. I will never buy another product of theirs.

Since I was already fucked, I decided to put a few hours into the game. It will never get a fair shake from me because of the SecuROM issue, but I don't really give a shit. Also, it doesn't matter, because the game is a sub-par Diablo 2 clone anyway. The plot is almost non-existent and what's there sucks, there's no tutorial or anything else to help you along, the controls are less than wonderful, the gameplay feels off, the maps are pretty boring, the UI isn't that great, and the menu screen takes too long to load for no reason other than misguided artistic presentation. The pathing is laughably fucking atrocious - I love watching enemies run straight toward me, only to get stuck on a rock that's in between us. Were they capable of anything other than straight lines, it wouldn't be an issue. The game is also bug-ridden, despite an enormous patch - as an archer, a good portion (probably 10%) of my attacks just disappear, either hitting terrain that doesn't really exist or simply never occuring.

All told, I don't just want my money back, I want to be paid for the trouble that I will shortly be undergoing to remove SecuROM from my machine. A process that, like uninstalling anything with Windows, will never be 100% complete without a reformat. I was not given any warning or choice regarding SecuROM when I bought or installed the game. This is why I don't buy PC games anymore.

On the recommendation of a friend, I borrowed and started playing around with Jade Cocoon, a lesser know (well, as far as I can remember) RPG from the Playstation 1 era. It's not exactly a Pokemon clone, but it was released a few years after the first Pokemon video game and certainly draws a lot from it. The main game mechanic involves capturing the monsters that you fight and then merging them to create new, unique creatures that have attributes of the two parents. As far as I can tell, the merging is all done procedurally, from statistics to elements to abilities to, most impressively for a game of this era, character models. There's no preset list of what you can combine and what it yields; everything is fair game.

The next most striking aspect of the game is its puzzlingly close resemblance to the Miyazaki film Nausicaa. The opening cutscene and the character portraits look like they're straight out of a Miyazaki film. The plot involves a small village that lives on the edge of a huge forest populated by dangerous creatures. A previous civilization was wiped out by the beings from the forest, and your quest is kicked off by a swarm of them approaching your village.

The similarities to Nausicaa were pretty fucking puzzling - if the game was a collaboration with Miyazaki, it's rather odd that he ripped his own material so hard without actually using it. If it wasn't done by Miyazaki, it's surprising that someone managed to rip both his plot and his art style without getting sued into oblivion. Also, I found it odd that for all the worship Miyazaki gets, I've never heard of Jade Cocoon before, much less in conjuntion with his name. From what I can tell, the fact of the matter is somewhere in between: some members of Studio Ghibli did side work for the game, including character design and animation, as both a favor and a way to get some extra training on the transition from cel to digital animation.

The game is also fully voice acted, which is something of a surprise for its time, though, unsurprisingly for its time, I often wonder if it would not have been better off without the voice overs. The plot is pretty so-so, and is marred in my estimation by a classic silent protagonist who, most damningly, goes along with one of the most hilariously obviously horrible plans I've been presented with in a video game. On the upside, you kick off the game by getting married so that you can ask your new bride to help you purify your captured creatures, which slowly and painfully kills her. Oh, the joys of nuptiala!

I was afraid going back a full two generations would be a rather painful experience, but it's not nearly as bad in this case as I feared it would be. It's not painless, but the game is surely playable, and I had a bit of fun merging creatures when I got the hang of the ability. Still, the game's appeal hinges almost entirely on that mechanic; once it gets old - which it has for me at this point - there's not much reason to play the game.