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31 – The Answer 2 | Table of Contents | Final Thoughts: (Gameplay & Details)

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Welcome to the Final Thoughts of Persona 3 Portable--right on time for the internet to go abuzz with rumors of yet another fucking remake of this stupid-ass game. What would this one be, the third one? Will it ever truly die and be allowed to rest?

Well, before we get into that, we do actually have one more thing we need to do...

[picture source: taffyteamfinalhacks, Youtube, “Persona 3 Portable – Shinjiro Ending”]

> …?
> You hear the familiar voice of your most precious friend…
> It sounds like…

> Shinjiro
> I don’t know…

> It’s Shinjiro’s voice…
> He’s out of breath. It seems he rushed here before everyone else...

"Chris..."

“It’s pretty pathetic of me to forget the way I did… But even then, my feelings for you were the same as always. Haha… I got one thick skull, huh?”

“The girl I saw in my dreams… It was you… You were crying and laughing like usual… Haha…”

> Shinjiro embraced you tightly…

“Yeah… This ain’t a dream… You’re really here…”

> You can hear footsteps and several familiar voices drawing near…

“Haha… Man, those guys sure know how to ruin a moment…”

> In the bright sunlight and the warmth of your loved one’s arms…
> You’re getting sleepier…
> Your eyelids feel heavy…

> Close your eyes.
> ……

[The screen fades out to white, Shinjiro’s voice audible after]

“I’m glad I met you.”

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Chris: Welp. Those are tears. Yep.

That was the scene I wanted, but didn’t have the patience to spend another playthrough earning, so thank you taffyteamfinalhacks, for that video of this ending and your open permission to use its content.

And what a beautiful ending it is. At only one point is Shinjiro anything less than a warm smile, and that’s what counts. Sure, the base problem is still there—it has to be, considering this is a new game plus choice. But, no use in repeating it.
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So, the story of Persona 3, which involves re-releases FES and Persona 3 Portable. How does it all come together?

Well, regarding first only the Journey, like a goddamn trainwreck. Truth be told, a lot of this reads like Baby’s First Published Work, with the amount of cliches and tropes that were overdone even in 2006 making me dizzy at times and a distinct scent of ‘not properly edited’. The central plot points were often in conflict with one another, and it bears the very strong mark of having been written with an endpoint in mind but little attempt to change or correct interim material, hence Nyx’s dual origin stories. If the plot is the skeleton of a work, then this one has quite a few bones missing. Elements that should be “organic”, like the antagonists and the romance subplots, are shoved in and don’t support their own weight, with little attempt to justify anything at all.

Also “sublety” is the word of the day, and if I could beat Katsura Hashino over the head with a dictionary, I’d have to first rewrite every last page to include nothing but the word “subtlety” before he could get it. And even then, you wouldn’t have even close to the violent, ceaseless beating over the head he gave me with the game’s over-arching theme:

DEATH IS INEVITABLE, FINAL SCORE: 100

Lots of games have overarching themes that drive the direction of their story. Some of them come off as life messages to players, some of them don’t, but it did in this case. No one can escape death. Everyone dies, and we have to accept that that’s part of life. That’s the lesson in this game.

And could they have picked a more juvenile theme if they’d tried?

“No one can escape death” is something about a hundred percent of people learn when they’re children. Not teens, children. It’s the theme of the oldest work of fiction in goddamn history. Trying to create an entire RPG with a heavy-handed story around this theme was destined to fail.

Ignoring that fact, Atlus went on to fumble its theme further. They did this by trying to get us to believe two things at once: that most of humanity simultaneously 1) are afraid of death and avoid it and 2) have lost the meanings to their lives and crave death, becoming what was not-so-subtly but possibly unintentionally (somehow) an entire race of suicidals, and calling down Nyx, who’s also a recent mad science experiment in addition to an ancient death god, simultaneously.

Yeah, this story is fucked. Fucked in every hole, from pretty much all angles.

Polishing shit just gets you shiny shit. If you start off with an unimpressive concept, all the effort in the world won’t make it good in the long run. I don’t believe either angle of the story’s take on the majority of humanity because neither one is even possible (most humans learn that death is a fact early on, and a race that’s made up of suicidals would be unsustainable). I know Atlus wants me to believe that they just meant that people crave death subconsciously to excuse calling Nyx, and aren’t actually suicidal—but that fails just as hard because as I’ve already detailed before, at the core of the subconscious a human brain is directing all efforts toward staying alive and enduring, not dying.

But the theme is only one part of the plot. There are other parts—like execution of said plot itself. Atlus, for maximum edge, decided to throw in “government mad science conspiracy”, “ancient deity that answers to humanity as a whole”, “secret 25^th hour at midnight”, and “secretly saving the world while in high school” all together in a plot with some dumbass Arcana motifs and centered around a Tragic Orphan Ace. If that sounds like a variety of episodes from Supernatural or some other urban fantasy or sci-fi shows, it should: because all of those plots together don’t work well for a single story, they’re the kind of plots that carry storylines on their own, individually. And there we have the other biggest catalyst of the story’s suckage: trying to juggle too many things and half-assing them all.

And because none of these plots were given room to function to their fullest, they all suffered. I didn’t sympathize with who I was directed to sympathize with. I didn’t care one iota for the supposedly tragic villains, nor was I all that moved by the time the tenth character with some backstory about their dead mom showed up. Shinjiro showed up to the party just in time to be killed off for angst points, Junpei met Chidori just in time to rush through a big failed romance, and Ryoji showed up to be utterly unconvincing in his role of “that friend you got to know and laugh with who was actually the villain the whole time” and even Ikutsuki, who was around since the beginning, failed to impress with his reveal of being an absolute lunatic. None of the various terrible points of this game had to be as terrible as they were.

But you’re not done just because you finished the Journey. No, FES introduced “The Answer”, which bears the same problem—and also a different one.

From what I understand, most people didn’t like The Answer, preferring vanilla P3’s ending ambiguity. That’s not why it’s not on Persona 3 Portable, though—the PSP didn’t have the hardware or space to include it. Which, again, begs the question of why it was designed on the PSP in the first place when Persona 4 was in production at this time on the PS2 and the PS3 had already been in production for three years.

But it not fitting on the PSP is not something I’d call the fault of the hardware. Truthfully, this has more to do with gameplay, but you can compare “the Answer” to modern day DLC packs. Look! You get extra story and even some new characters!

But the story isn’t much. It’s the worst way to “expand” on a baseline story, in that it essentially rehashes said baseline story with almost nothing changed and what little was changed feeling no better off for it because the changes weren’t necessary to begin with. The organs are still falling off the skeleton, too, with plot elements like the inter-party duels for the keys being given flimsy justifications just for the sake of having to fight party members, and the flashbacks (barring Junpei’s drunk dad detail) adding pretty much nothing to the characters or the plot and being essentially filler.

A lot of this comes as a consequence of the story being used to justify the gameplay, rather than the gameplay being integrated into the story. Persona 3’s The Answer is way, way, way longer from start to finish than it needs to be, and if you just watched the cutscenes at the beginning and end, you’d have pretty much all of the important bits—which I almost wish I’d done, but it didn’t feel honest.

It’s okay to like a character (Aigis), but the Answer screams “invented to let the player play as Aigis” rather than being a naturally-flowing continuation of the main story.

Does the plot get better with P3P? Well, no, not really, given that re-releases generally don’t allow the designers to change a storyline too heavily and this one was no different. You could ignore the Answer if you wanted, since it’s not there, but that doesn’t change its canon status. This game is one of the big reasons that I wish developers actually would use re-releases as a chance to change big things for the better (say for example, cutting down on the fetch quests in Wind Waker HD, yet they still didn’t have a Greatfish Isle dungeon). The story is probably the worst thing about Persona 3 in any incarnation, and all the worse because it’s so prominent, and was going to hang over P3P from day one with the fact that it’s the one thing that could benefit the least from a re-release.

If it were me behind the writer’s desk at Atlus, with any chance to rewrite Persona 3, I probably would’ve axed at least a few of the story elements. I might’ve allowed it to stay spooky, but the death theme definitely would’ve been left on the cutting room floor. I probably would’ve dropped the whole “ancient god that answers to humanity” bit and allowed the “government conspiracy” bit, overdone as it is, to shine the way it was meant to, since it’s fairly unique for a Persona game. If forced to keep the death god bit, I’d have definitely removed the “will of mankind” part. I’d have kept the Reaper around and made him a big focus, and made Tartarus a pit instead of a tower.

I’m gonna try and make a decent story out of all this. Picture it: you’re part of a group of teenage Persona-users enlisted to find out the cause of Apathy Syndrome, and your sensory specialist has identified that enormous hole in the ground full of bloody cells to be where Shadows are coming from at night. You descend deeper and deeper into the prison-like pit, where you find many shadows locked up, and fight the ones that escape and attack. Along the way, a dangerous, eldritch monster in a hood and chains chases you down with greater frequency and speed the deeper you go.

When you finally reach the bottom, you find out what’s going on: a group of mad scientists there has detected a sort of “secret world behind the veil” (perhaps the Sea of Souls, or the TV world from Persona 4 that would show up later) that is shaped by the collective unconscious of human minds. Their experiments with it wound up summoning a terrifying abomination, a literal living nightmare. The madder among them suggested that since they couldn’t force it back behind the veil, they imprison it back within a human mind, where it originated. There was one among them who had wanted to avoid the experiments and, scared, wanted to go to the police or the government to let them know about the threat. Since this would result in the end of their careers and imprisonment, the more devoted scientists used him as the guinea pig, sealing the Nightmare inside him, which wound up merging the two into a powerful, but containable, form that is now the Reaper.

The experiments continued. Some did it to try and unleash a bigger, better demon that they now worshiped insanely, others hoped to be able to get behind the veil again in order to force the Reaper back and maybe the mad scientists with it, ending it once and for all. But with this in mind, the conspirators have been sucking out bits of people’s minds from the general populace. This creates ill-formed shadows, rather than the naturally-occuring ones behind the veil, and leaves the victims with Apathy Syndrome. The ones who are exposed to the mind-sucking, but have a higher level of brain functions or inherent social ability resist it, manifest Personas as masks to protect their vulnerable subconscious. The scientists are attempting to coalesce the many proto-shadows into something with enough power to tear open the fabric of the worlds again, and plan to do it when the moon is full.

It’s up to the Persona-users to stop them, and when something hideous does finally come out from the mind world, it serves as the final boss, and they beat it, whereafter it retreats back to its world and the mad scientists are shoved across the gap with it by their more sensible compatriots before it closes. Before the Persona-users can make peace with the few who thought it wise to not end the world, the complex starts to shake, and the pit is about to collapse in on itself due to too much damage sustained by the final boss. They now have to reach the top on a timer, escaping their doom by returning to the surface, but they lose said scientists to one final threat: the Reaper, who slaughters them before chasing the Persona-users up throughout the complex before they get out and seal the door behind them, locking the Reaper into the collapsing prison to die there.

That original scientist who was fused with the Nightmare to become the Reaper? What if it’s the seemingly-an-orphan protagonist’s still-living father or mother? You could even work in the whole Pharos angle, with the protagonist being visited at night by a strange apparition in the form of a man he doesn’t recognize. That apparition is the remaining sanity and good will of his father, reaching out to the son he wanted to protect by ending the project. Maxing out the Death Link with him would enable the player to fuse the Reaper as a Persona, summoning the horrifying demonic form of his own parent to protect him in battle.

You have antagonists who present both images Persona 3 wanted to present: unforgivable, easy-to-hate lunatics and more sympathetic antagonists, both working towards the same goal for different reasons. The protagonist wouldn’t die at the end, but rather than Elizabeth and Aigis spending their lives post-game trying to find a means to cure the majority of humanity of some mental problems they aren’t aware of, it’s the protagonist vowing to spend his life post-game trying to find a way to restore his father and give him his life back. An ending that’s bittersweet, yet not seemingly impossible and leaves room for an actual proper sequel.

I don’t wanna toot my own horn, but this sounds like a decent story to me. Shame—but since Atlus won’t get to use it, I’m happy doing so for some original fiction.
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Now for the characters.

Characters are probably the most important figure within the plot. As I’d really like to inform one or a thousand writers, characters are the part of the work that your audience will attach to the most, far more than a setting or goal. It’s important that your characters feel interesting and present character arcs in full, and for each character to feel like they have enough importance to the story to warrant the spotlight they’re given without it feeling forced or sue-ish.

Persona 3 is hit-or-miss at best with that.

The Protagonists

There’s not much to say about the main character. The male MC (the “canon” one) is visibly an emo, most frequent answer choice is “whatever”, and apparently a Jesus metaphor. Same with the female protagonist, but bubblier and more social. The best combatant in their group and pretty good at anything they’re handed. Orphans. Went on about that in the beginning.

The SEES group, on the other hand, is fairly noteworthy. To summarize, Yukari’s a popular girl with daddy issues who falls for you in vanilla and becomes your bestie as a woman, Junpei is the class clown with jealousy issues, Akihiko is the super popular jock who falls for you if you’re a woman, and Mitsuru is the uber super popular student council queen with business family-related rich girl issues. Ken is the tag-along kid character, Koromaru is the Team Pet, Fuuka is the shy nerdy girl who’s good at tech stuff, and Shinjiro is the moody thug. All very standard-issue.

I know all of that sounds fairly bitchy, but to be honest, they satisfy me. They’re characters that are rounded enough, and I’d like to praise the efforts and talents of their voice actors to high heavens. We did have some problems—and they look like this:

WISTLH, FINAL COUNT: 76

AIGIS I’M STUCK WITH YOU, FINAL COUNT: 64

ROMANTIC PLOT CANCER: 75

Junpei, Aigis, and Pharos/Ryoji warrant special mention. Junpei is very fun when done right, but unfortunately half his time pre-Chidori is spent either being a sexist pervert or a jealous dick. And post-Chidori, his whole character tanks. He truly does asphyxiate within that loop of red string, because every last inch of that disgusting romance plot only makes him less and less likable as he continues to exemplify why some people *cough*~~Katsura Hashino~~*cough* should really not try writing such plots.

Aigis is a creepy stalker. That’s really one of her two biggest flaws, with her other biggest flaw being a cliché of the highest order in that she’s a robot desiring to gain humanity—while conveniently designed after a cute teenaged girl so the writers can fantasize about a hot emotionless girl who is obsessed with them and them alone. Eurgh. It pops up incessantly, and the game won’t shut up about it, continuing to not only ensure that she’s in our faces, but increasingly present her to the fore of other SEES members.

And Pharos...him and Ryoji. Hate them both. I hate them so much. The latter especially, because of how little effort was spent integrating him to the cast, to the extent that he seems to have creepy mind control powers. Truthfully, he was wholly unnecessary, and could’ve been left out, but no, not even a week after Pharos finally disappears, he shows up again to refuse us peace. And unfortunately, the “Ryoji Problem” continued into Persona 4 and Persona 4: Golden with the characters of Teddie and especially Marie, who I despise for much the same reasons.

But not everyone can be the Persona 4 cast, I suppose. In the main, there’s nothing all that much wrong with most of them, but almost all of them have the potential to be a bit deeper than they really are. Akihiko, for example, is much more fleshed out and less flanderized than his later appearances, if less pretty to look at (boy got them pecs in Persona 4 Arena), but there’s still just a bit too much cliché in his single-minded focus on fighting and angst about his sister.

If I have any regrets beyond the ones I’ve already outlined, it’d be the sidelining of Shinjiro and the shoehorning of Aigis even after Persona 3 ended and other games came along. Shinjiro wasn’t in Persona 4: Arena, either game, or in Dancing in Moonlight, and was only in PQ and PQ2 because they took place in the exact timeslot where he was a party member and not dead. Aigis, meanwhile, has had tons of exposure and focus.

The Social Links

I understand the non-SEES social links to have been a bit annoying in the vanilla version and the MC route. Having played the female route almost entirely to avoid this, I didn’t have this problem and mostly avoided any annoyances from the unsatisfying social links, and I am very fond of Mutatsu’s in particular.

As for the SEES ones, for some reason vanilla P3 and the male MC route don’t include any for the male party members, instead giving you a bunch of similar NPCs to befriend. As for why, I can’t fathom. I don’t think it was “Social Links with the guys? But that’d be GAY—” since the male MC has male Social Links, just not in SEES. And yet that’s my only guess, since I can find no other explanation for the lack of them. But that’s not really what I’m here to comment on—I’m here to comment on the most up-to-date version of Persona 3, which is the female route.

The Social Links for the boys now infinitely improve the characters of both Junpei and Shinjiro, who were kind of flat before, and makes Shinjiro into someone I can truly cry for (and Junpei too, but for different reasons). All of the SEES characters feel rounded and feel like they genuinely represent their Arcana well, which is the good side to using heavy stereotypes in the design of them. Well, I say all of them are improved. In truth, all of them but one.

Ken Amada.

I normally try and avoid bashing Ken, I think we established that. But it must be said that if anyone fails to sway me with their Social Link, it’s Ken. His Arcana is the Justice Arcana, which fits well considering his drive for revenge and how Nemesis is his Persona. So of course it makes total sense for his Social Link to not reflect that at all and in fact not even mention anything past his mother dying. All it really focuses on is the fact that he’s a kid and wants to be seen as mature (and he isn’t). Ken, as displayed literally everywhere except his Social Link, has a very strong sense of justice even if it leads him to do the wrong things and make bad decisions.

It astounds me that the portion of interaction with him where we’re supposed to get to know him and, hopefully, like him a little bit more than we did in vanilla P3, would completely avoid addressing why Ken is divisive in the first place. This could even have been one of those chances to change both story and gameplay in a big way. Imagine if he opened up to you, confided in you his self-given “mission”, and in the spirit of the Justice Arcana, you convinced him to maybe try and see more than one side of things, try for a more open-minded approach. With some pressure and the right dialogue choices, you might could even have him give up his mission to kill Shinjiro at the crucial moment, instead talking it out and addressing his trauma to the person responsible for it. Maybe Takaya comes along with his gun and his cutscene power, but instead of Shinji taking two bullets, they both take one and both survive because of it.

I didn’t enjoy my time with Ken. All it ever consisted of was me taking him to restaurants for him to pick at his food and insist that he so totally was not a child and in the end, my patience was rewarded with a pedophiliac relationship upgrade opportunity and Melchizedek, a stupid-looking robot power ranger Persona whose skillset was replicated by several Personas I already had.

I am afraid I have to award that a point, because what the hell, Atlus? The Social Links might be about the characters, but they’re also gameplay features. You could’ve fixed this.

Bad Game Design: 117

The Villains

“It kinda killed me for it when he started talking about his tragic past… It isn’t cool if you have to beat somebody who didn’t want to be a bad guy. Bad guys have to be evil all the way to the core. It’s just more satisfying.”

That, amusingly, comes from the mouth of a character in this very game. It’s Junpei, in one of his early Social Link ranks, commenting on how he was disappointed by the movie he’d been excited to see. Humorously—and perhaps just a tad intentionally, I choose to believe—his comment applies very well to the game he’s in, Persona 3 Portable.

Having an antagonist or anti-villain with moral gray areas or tragic backstories to fall back on isn’t automatically deeper or more satisfying than having a simply evil villain to beat. Either one can be fucked up. We have five antagonists in this story:

Shuji Ikutsuki
Takaya Sakaki
Jin Shirato
Chidori Yoshino
Nyx/Erebus

At least two of these, four if you’re counting Takaya and Jin, have some measure of “tragedy” there to make them sympathetic or at least pitiable. Takaya, Jin, and Chidori all have their respective backstories as experiments under Kirijo, and Jin has his baseless loyalty to Takaya, and this is supposed to make the three fleshed out, in addition to Chidori’s agonizing romance with Junpei. I have my doubts about how “tragic” Atlus intended them to be collectively, but they damn sure intended Chidori to tug a few heartstrings. At a glance, they seem to have followed Junpei’s advice of otherwise making Takaya unabashedly evil, but Takaya still isn’t the final menace the heroes face or even really connected to them in any way besides being one of the experimented children, and those could’ve been anyone. They have no reason at all to antagonize the heroes except a failure of logic and communication and a seeming desire to be destructive assholes for no reason. What’s more, Chidori is the only one to be “redeemed” and through a love story, while the other two remain evil. In fact, if you removed Chidori entirely the only thing that would really change is that Junpei would be a much better character and either wouldn’t get an ascended Persona or would get it in a different way.

Then we have Ikutsuki. Persona 3 is unabashed in its portrayal of him as an absolute lunatic, although it’s very, very sudden and very jarring when he suddenly reveals himself to be a psycho doomsday cultist with no trace of the Ikutsuki we knew left behind. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; you could say it just points to how well he manipulates and plays people. But as I’ve already pointed out, his end goal—which requires the destruction of Shadows that cause Apathy Syndrome—makes no sense. And because it’s so nonsensical, his twist as a villain suffers as well. Ideally, with such a “brilliant” villain that so flawlessly played the heroes before revealing his true intentions, as Persona 3 wants to portray, we should be able to look back at the time we spent with him and notice the signs that are now obvious, but which were too subtle for us to grasp before. There’s none of that here because the only reasonable conclusion anyone would draw is that Ikutsuki was telling the truth, since the Shadows are indeed causing Apathy Syndrome and rot human minds when left unchecked. The closest thing to a forehead-smack moment is merely the part where no one bothered to fact check Ikutsuki on his revelation of how destroying the Full Moon Shadows will end the Dark Hour, or ask how he found that out.

And finally, we have Pharos/Ryoji/Nyx/Death. This one is a clusterfuck, and I’ve already ranted about why the government experiments and ancient death god origins don’t mix, twice, so I won’t go into that again. What I will go into is in how very fumbled the whole thing with trying to “get to know” Death and how dumb the “regret having to kill your friend” bullshit is. The first iteration of Death we get to know, and the one we know for the longest, is Pharos. I can’t even blame this one on rushing—there’s plenty of time, the majority of the game in fact, to see what Pharos is like, and yet he has no real personality. All he ever does is be creepy and give you repetitive notices about a full moon coming up and the end of the world. The only bit of character he has at any point is when he determines his name. It’s baffling for just how long this kid sticks around before the Death Link even kicks in, which not only ranks up without Pharos really doing or saying much, but actually skips ranks three times! There were plenty of chances to develop a real link with him instead of just saying “here, have a free Persona for putting up with this creep kid”.

Then we have Ryoji. Not satisfied with having put me through the grating presence of Pharos that had finally come to an end, we get Ryoji mid-November. He is immediately hailed as immensely attractive and flirtatious, a cool guy that everyone loves. From the moment he meets us and forever afterwards, he declares how important we are and falls in love, without us really doing anything, like some sort of reverse-Sue. More standardly Sue-ish is how everyone loves him so much, they actually invite him into the inner circle and let him come and go from the top-secret very-private SEES dorm as he likes. The guy displays mind manipulation powers that would make Renesmee the Brain Parasite proud. All this is accomplished in absolutely record-shattering time and, unlike his spiritual successor Marie, is not only canon, but is not optional either. You have to endure this. Oh yeah, and he’s the final boss.

That Persona 3 expects me to hesitate to kill this guy (or hesitate not to, given how it blatantly brushes aside its supposed moral choice in favor of telling us exactly what we need to do via the other characters) is laughable. I hate him. He came sprinting into my life out of left field at breakneck speed and is suddenly the most important thing in the world, quite literally due to being the final boss. So Sue-ish is he that he trashes Aigis, another candidate for Sue status if you ask me, without even trying.

And then Nyx/Nyx Avatar herself. I could mention Erebus too, but the two are really just decomposites of the same thing Nyx was before Erebus was written: the world’s end. So he doesn’t really matter. She, rather, could be fixed with one simple thing: following Junpei’s advice.

Nyx didn’t need to be an ancient death god that answers to humanity’s wishes. Nyx didn’t need to be a government experiment. It definitely didn’t need to be both, although either would’ve sufficed. The biggest deal is that Nyx would’ve been best used as an unfeeling, diabolical imminent end that had to be put down and nothing more. A villain that would murder the entire world because that’s just what it was born to do. Or better yet, because that’s what it wants to do. Unfeeling and impartial is better than hackneyed tragic friendships, yes, but a simple evil villain would be even better. A villain we can freely hate, and that we want to destroy, and that we can enjoy wanting to destroy as Junpei roughly puts it.

That's what Adachi from Persona 4 is, and why it feels so good to defeat him after all the harm he caused. Catharsis. Justice. Emotional impact.

That covers the characters, really. I could say more, but I don’t really think I need to. Next time you see a post from this spork (which will be soon, considering how short this one was), it’ll be on the gameplay.

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