RPG Jamboree: Shin Megami Tensei: Persona (PSP)
While the Persona series has become better known for your strength in turn-based combat having ties to the social connections you make with your friends, initially it began as a more straightforward role-playing game but not an unambitious one. Drawing on ideas of Jungian psychology with people creating different identities for different social interactions, even this can at first seem rather underplayed in the first game in the series. Shin Megami Tensei: Persona, a remake of Revelations: Persona that stripped away some of that game’s more egregious translation changes and added in some convenient features, does eventually begin to reach its more personal story-telling approach, but it can almost be said the game itself puts on a mask early on to make you think it’s a more traditional tale of saving the world.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona begins in a high school where a male protagonist you name and his friend group have their normal lives turned upside down by the sudden appearance of demons around the city. Luckily for them, manifestations of their will known as Personas emerge during this invasion that give them the power to fight back and quite quickly the blame for this demon incursion falls at the feet of the corporation known as SEBEC. The CEO Kandori has not only opened the portal to the demon realm but has seemingly uncovered an alternate version of the city the group soon enters, but soon the story path begins to spend some time examining new ideas beyond just this effort to take down an evil corporation. The group encounters a figure known as the Harem Queen who has been corrupted by the suppressed side of her personality she kept hidden, and while taking down SEBEC remains a priority, the plot begins to look inward on some of your friends as their own insecurities and issues can have their own ways of manifesting. The game does lay hints early on that are pretty easy to pick up that there is going to be something deeper going on than just taking down a typical villain, but if you get the game’s bad ending, the plot will actually cut short while making it clear you missed out on the more involved and interesting narrative. Ending up on the right path comes down to answering a few key question properly and it’s not too hard to stay on the right path inadvertently, and when you do start to peel back the deeper layers of the story things do get far more interesting.
On this main story path you can have up to five members in your party, one being the mostly quiet lead but you’ll be joined by four other characters where the final one can actually be a small range of different characters based on who you find and speak with. Among the mandatory characters for taking down SEBEC are Nanjo and Mark. Nanjo is an intelligent and well-to-do character who can’t help but be a little haughty while Mark is a more down-to-earth and streetwise sort, the two naturally clashing as their personalities are influenced by their social status but while they bicker, Nanjo does care for and try to assist his friends and Mark seems rather sweet and caring behind his more reactionary nature. You can start to watch the two grow over the course of the adventure as they became more honest with themselves, this extending to your other party members as well like Maki who you first meet as a shy girl in the hospital only to encounter very quickly her more energetic and lively side who behaves more like who she wants to be. The game only puts a few people under the microscope for examining this dissolving differential between the perceived and true self but it is focus well applied that doesn’t leave your other characters out in the cold. One thing that helps make your core gang of characters more appealing no matter who you end up recruiting for your fifth slot is that there are many points in the adventure where you can enter a place like a room or shop and find them standing around willing to give their own quick thoughts, that gradual growth better perceived since you can routinely get a good view at where they are in their personal journey.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona also packs an entirely different story path though, one that you have little hope of coming across without some form of outside help but it still tells a unique tale and with different combat scenarios and locations. The Snow Queen route tells of a cursed play the school performed where the performer who plays the lead role always met with unfortunate accidents, and while the SEBEC story will have you moving all around the city, this one takes place in the school exclusively as it is frozen over and twisted by the odd entity in the Snow Queen mask. The Snow Queen route is designed as a more challenging alternate tale with things like timed dungeons to clear and points where your abilities are restricted, but the actual plot of it feels like it embraces the psychological story-telling more readily and often than the main route but also sacrifices a lot of the character work for it. It does flesh out the other people at your school a bit more, but you’ll also encounter the various people who once portrayed the Snow Queen. Through their dungeons you’ll see how their life and mindset allowed them to be twisted into the character who now aims to fight you similar in a way to the Harem Queen, but the Snow Queen story uses a different set of playable characters and unfortunately they’re fairly stagnant. Ayase is a self-absorbed teenage girl and Brown tries hard to be cool and while lip service is paid to them having hidden depths, they don’t really deviate from these mostly negative or false personas on this story path. In fact, the whole group can sometimes seem outright mean to people who clearly have issues that need resolving with something more than being told to get over themselves. The antagonistic threat doesn’t have a deeper connection to the protagonists either so it’s mostly a tour of a few characters you meet and defeat, but since it is intended as an alternate route it doesn’t really weigh on the experience too much since the SEBEC story is the game’s intended and superior experience with this seeming to lean more into being a challenging second story.
While the rest of this review shall primarily be referring to the intended main route, both SEBEC and Snow Queen stories utilize the same core mechanics. When exploring building interiors and dungeons, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona has you navigate in first-person, the maze-like halls of the locations you visit easy enough to sprint through as you try to find areas of interest. Entering a room will let you walk around and speak with characters, buy items, or open treasure chests, but while you are walking through the corridors that comprise the story locations, there will be a chance a random battle with demons can begin. Also possibly appearing while moving around the city map that is navigated in a bird’s eye view, these random fights comprise much of the Persona experience. Your five party members (or fewer since the group size can change at times) are positioned on a grid while the monsters you face stand in their own grid, the ability to hit targets determined by the positions of both you and your foes. Someone wielding a blade for example can’t slice at someone in the far back but a gun or magic skill can cover different areas of the battlefield. While this will determine how you place your characters and can allow an ability to hit multiple targets, it’s not a feature you need to fiddle with too often unless something deliberately disruptive has occurred like an ambush that reverses the placement of your party members.
When you encounter some demons, you have many options for how to approach them. Your characters have an equipped traditional weapon and a gun each, neither too strong but having their moments of utility still. Your Personas will be your most useful tool in a fight, each character able to have a special spectral companion set that is often based on some real world mythical figure. Each Persona has its own set of skills as well as different synergies, the character using that Persona able to gain things like a full resistance to ice magic or even heal from fire if their Persona allows. There are some less traditional element types like Nuclear so this system already isn’t totally basic, but things get more interesting when how Personas are used and acquired comes up. A Persona’s skill must be gradually unlocked while they’re equipped, the player not only earning experience for their characters’ skill growth but their ability to harness Personas in general. Using a specific Persona not only increases the user’s Persona level but that Persona’s rank which helps them gradually reach their full potential. Personas can use attacking skills, healing magic, and inflict statuses, their different abilities all having different ranges on the grid but interestingly enough, all skills for a single Persona cost the same amount of SP. Spirit Power is tied to the Persona’s general power rather than the usefulness of the skills they harness. This can mean a Persona has both a single target skill and one that hits every possible target and it can feel odd to ever use the single target one, but since enemies can have resistances or heal from certain elements as well, it’s not entirely pointless. Your group is given a generous amount of SP to work with too so even in the simplest skirmishes you can utilize Persona skills with almost no fear, especially since leveling up also comes frequently enough so that will refill all your SP much faster than the slow passive recovery that happens during exploration.
The approach to SP is where Persona’s battle system achieves its biggest appeal, the player always able to whip out interesting spells even against weaker foes. The lesser battles won’t often be so involved that you’ll grow weary, but the ones you encounter along the story’s path do a good job of training you up so you remain competitive while the demons can still have certain edges you’ll need to work harder to overcome. Unfortunately this does change near the end of the game, a sudden jump in expected power making the final boss nearly impossible unless you put in some devoted time just to strengthen your group, but the majority of the adventure strikes a good balance in having battles where there’s value in picking how to utilize a range of skills rather than blindly bashing anything that isn’t a boss. Something that gives the Persona skill system even more appealing layers is how exactly you acquire new Personas. A character can have three Personas set to them, mid-battle swapping possible to give you access to a different range of skills if need be. Already training up your Persona to unlock all of its abilities incentivizes using their powers even more, but you can create new Personas at the Velvet Room. To do so involves another layer to the battle system, that being the Contact system.
In a battle that isn’t against normal humans or a boss, you can try to reach out to the demons you’re fighting and try to make them like you. The demons aren’t usually that horrific, something like a Jack Frost is just a silly jester snowman, but even a more gruesome or mean looking creature can often have a pretty strange personality once you get them talking. Be it a ghost in a toilet, a minotaur, or an actual angel, your different party members can try to curry their favor by speaking to them in certain ways. Not everything wants to be treated kindly, something like a Slime might revel in being condescended to due to its low opinion of itself while a fairy might find your dancing and singing amusing. If you end up angering a demon it can end up attacking you before you get a chance to put in your own attack inputs, making one happy can lead to it giving you a free item or behaving differently in battle, and making it sad can make it flee from the fight. Eagerness is the main target when it comes to Persona construction though as a monster that’s eager will give you a spell card provided you are strong enough. From there, you can mix two demon cards in the Velvet Room to get different Personas, and by adding items to the mix you can guarantee they get certain attacks or healing spells. Contact can be a great way to end a battle you don’t want to fight or get resources that will pay off in getting your group stronger assistance, even the most basic encounters getting another helpful layer of interactivity to help keep Shin Megami Tensei: Persona fresh.
The actual dungeons themselves can sometimes be just a series of standard hallways though, and while there are some specific gimmicks like floors you can fall through or spaces that move you in a direction automatically, they do feel pretty simple since there’s often no reason to pursue dead ends that you see on the incomplete minimap shown in the corner. There are things to find in dungeons like thankfully plenty of save points so you don’t lose too much progress if you fall and even if team members die in battle, as long as one character survives or escapes they’ll be back to life and easy to heal up afterwards. Perhaps one of the better ways the samey hallways can be spiced up though is through the game’s soundtrack, many areas featuring some toe-tapping lyrical tracks that mix Japanese and English words. Even the battle music often has actual singing during the fight, and while the abundance of battles can make the generic battle theme wear thin, it’s still a memorable and well composed track despite the pronunciation of English words being off. The school theme is happy and energetic as befits an initially safe and simple space for the high school cast to hang out in while the boss battle music gets more emotion out of its performer’s varied intonations. Options like a very speedy sprint in the dungeons and the ability to skip all of the Persona summoning animations in battle help the game progress at a decent pace once you start utilizing them, so there are at least some ideas and aesthetic choices in place to help avoid the experience dragging between battles and story beats.
THE VERDICT: While it has a few problems with its alternate route and bad ending, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona’s main intended story path is able to take a good look at the personalities of its central characters while providing a battle system that emphasizes frequent interesting skill use. Your resources are abundant so you can use your powers often, your Persona’s abilities can be tailored through the demon Contacting system and Velvet Room crafting, and the enemies are positioned and resist powers in a range of ways to encourage changing up your battle tactics even once you have powerful options. Some quality background music helps make up for some plain dungeon designs, the game ultimately a layered role-playing experience that knows where to apply some helpful features to keep it progressing at a nice pace.
And so, I give Shin Megami Tensei: Persona for the PlayStation Portable…
A GOOD rating. While the first-person dungeon mazes did put the game at some risk of being too defined by walking through basic hallways, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona’s use of the minimap and speedy walking helps you move forward well. Mostly they serve as a location to host the random battles in, the progress more about how many times demons will appear rather than the actual substance of the exploration. Once you’re in battle with a band of demons though, things definitely get interesting enough to justify dungeons mostly being defined by what you encounter rather than what you’re doing in that location (although the Snow Queen route’s one clear advantage is making the dungeon navigation a bit more meaningful with its more challenging gimmicks). Where your foes are positioned, their relationship to different elements, and even their personality all are important components of the fighting system and the player is given room to embrace their range of battle options. Battles are opportunities to grow with the involvement of characters and their Personas determining how much experience they get and thus in turn your efforts are more clearly rewarded as you start unlocking new skills or gaining the ability to handle more Personas which are already the fruits of your negotiation labors and crafting efforts. Having the plot start to explore its cast more as you get deeper into the main route is certainly important in keeping this experience engaging and it is fortunate that it spreads the love even though some players in the plot get more attention than others. It’s a small band of heroes that is easy to get attached to because you can so often check in with them and see that growth (and again, Snow Queen fails because it just informs you such a thing happened without there being much visible change). The Snow Queen route definitely deserves more polish and perhaps more of a spotlight on your party rather than adversaries who come and go, but the SEBEC story removes its mask as a basic villain plot and dives into fruitful subjects that make the adventure worthwhile even if it could have done with toning down the jump in power for its final boss some.
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona definitely could could have done more to spice up the actual dungeon navigation and the pretty effective balance is tossed out near the end unfortunately, but when it has its focus set right, this remake offers a battle system that remains involved enough and entertaining because it has so many component parts without ever becoming unwieldy. So many fights let you explore the extent of your Persona’s abilities but some whip out surprises like being weak to your guns or melee strikes, and Contact is an intriguing way to engage with your enemies because of both its benefits and the personality it adds to creatures that already sometimes have intriguingly strange designs. Pursuing a new direction for the series later down the line with a greater focus on the social side was likely the right call for the Persona games, but this early installment has a strong handle on what it wished to be as well and shouldn’t be dismissed just for being a more traditional role-playing game than its descendants.