Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5's Social Links' Need for Phantom Thief Intervention

Social Links definitely number among my favorite parts of the SMT Persona series, as I’ve mentioned before.  They help immerse the player in the setting and culture of the game, exemplify and explore the games’ Tarot theme, and tell some compelling, moving stories of human nature, drama, and our connections to one another.  Some of the best moments of this series have been during the Social Link side-stories; hell, some of my best moments with RPGs, period, have been provided by these personal, poignant vignettes.  With that said, they’re not all winners.  Plenty of Social Links are boring, or tell a very cliched story that doesn’t really mean very much, or are tonally contradictory to their characters or game...hell, a few are just outright bad stories altogether.  And interestingly, in Persona 5, there’s a flaw in the overall approach that the game takes to resolving the Social Links’ conflicts, which lessens their quality overall.

While each Social Link is its own entity in SMT Persona 5, there’s a commonality to almost all of the ones for characters who are not a part of the Phantom Thieves: sooner or later, there comes a point at which main character Ren has to use his powers to induce a change of heart in someone who’s causing problems for the Social Link’s star (or, in Mishima’s case, induce that change in the story’s central figure himself).  This event, which happens late in the Social Link, is required for the tale to progress to its conclusion, and is used as a way of revealing Ren’s superhero identity to his friends, as they realize that only a Phantom Thief could have forced the one tormenting them to back down, and that only Ren knew knew the situation well enough to be that Thief.  The 1 exception to this rule is Tora of The Sun Arcana, whose Social Link progresses to its end without such an intervention.

But having this nearly universal requirement for Phantom Thief intervention to solve the problems of those Links who aren’t already a part of the group is ultimately detrimental.  Okay, sure, it’s refreshing to some degree to see it acknowledged in a JRPG that determination all on its own doesn’t always solve everything, but at the same time, making it clear that their problems couldn’t have been solved without cognitive superheroes swooping in to save the day weakens the stories of several individuals by taking the agency of their own tale out of their hands.  Now, this is fine enough for, say, Ohya’s story, where she’s genuinely an active, working participant in her tale who’s proactively resisted capitulating for as long as she can, but individuals like Chihaya and Sojiro, for example, seem less like they’ve been able to change by their own merit for the better, and more that they’ve simply been lucky enough to have Ren around to hold their hand and fight their battles for them.

I was really thrown for a loop at the point in Kawakami’s story in which she confronts the parents who have been emotionally (and also in the normal sense) blackmailing her, full of determination and conviction to pull herself out of this hell she’s been trapped in...and then they just completely shut her down, and she backs off with a whimper.  It feels like a weird narrative bait-and-switch, and inconsistent with the personal story of growth that Kawakami’s been going through in this Link, as well as contrary to the support Ren’s given to her on this matter.  The situation’s just a transparent and jarring bending of the narrative to allow Ren to settle the matter as a Phantom Thief, and the fact that he has to do so after Kawakami utterly failed to take charge of her own life within her own story cheapens that tale, as well as her development and resolution, because for all the nice sentiments and feel-good confidence in her future that comes later, at the end of the day, this Social Link is now a story in which its protagonist was tested, and she broke under that trial.  It doesn’t feel like a win that Ren helped Kawakami achieve, but a win that he handed to her because plot convenience stole her autonomy from her.

It’s not like I want Ren to be a non-participant in these Social Links, of course.  That’s just as harmful to these vignettes; the whole idea of these things is that the connections that the protagonist makes and the facets of the human experience that he observes and participates in broaden his horizons, empowering him by developing the psyche (which is the source of Persona abilities).  So Ren shouldn’t just sit there like a lump while stuff goes on around him.  But he should be the vital support in his friend’s life, a key to the confidant making positive changes for themselves and growing, NOT the crutch that they tangibly couldn’t have made it without.

In addition to robbing several characters of the agency that would fulfill their development and appropriately progress their stories, this approach is also mildly counter to a major theme of the overall game, too.  It is, after all, demonstrating these characters’ inability to successfully stand tall and solve their problems as individuals, necessitating the intervention of a conveniently benevolent acquaintance.  And yeah, normally there’s absolutely nothing wrong with demonstrating that the individual has limitations and that there’s no shame, only potential success, in allowing others who care for you to share your burdens and help you with them...but Persona 5 is an unflinching, staunch proponent of the value of the individual, arguing time after time against the knee-jerk collectivist instinct of its culture to dismiss, shun, or even punish those who stand for themselves.  And yet this game that glorifies its heroes as individuals who could be pushed no further by the injustices of the world and decided to stand against the ills of their society in spite of the meek compliance that was expected of them, insists on neutering roughly a third of its Social Link cast by having a superhero swoop in to save them from their problems, ruining their ability to embody the game’s message as they clearly should have.  It’s quite perplexing.

Not to mention, it also lessens the feeling of authenticity and uniqueness to make the Social Links so formulaic.  It’s not nearly as bad as the Rank 11s in the DLC, but still.

And what’s gained by doing this, anyway?  What benefit is there in having Ren constantly change the hearts of his friends’ tormentors?  Certainly we don’t need, by the point that you can reach anyone’s later Social Link stages, any further proof of Ren’s being a defender of justice and the weak.  We absolutely weren’t lacking for mini-boss experiences on the gameplay side.  Yeah, okay, it provides a clue to each Social Link character through which they glean Ren’s identity as a Phantom Thief, but surely there were other ways to accomplish this, at least for some individuals!  Kawakami’s had enough proximity to the events with Kamoshida that it’d be believable for her to put 2 and 2 together, Hifumi is, if not the genius she had thought she was, at least still a smart enough strategist that she could credibly figure it out herself, Ren’s pretenses for needing Tae’s services are so flimsy that it’d be less believable for her not to deduce his identity, Sojiro finds out during the main plot anyway...hell, while I actually think that Ohya and Shinya did legitimately need Ren’s intervention, she’s an investigative journalist and Shinya already knows Ren is personally tied to the Phantom Thieves, so they’d have no problem surmising his secret, either.  As Tora’s having inferred Ren’s secret all on his own shows, there’s really no need for this formulaic taking away of characters’ agency just because we want everyone in Ren’s life to know who he really is.

...Hell, with the shocking lack of effort that most of the team puts into protecting their anonymity, it’s almost surprising that it takes Ren’s acquaintances as long as it does to glean his secret identity.  Each of them is really just 1 inconveniently timed call away from hearing Ryuji hollering at Ren over the phone what the location, date, time, dress code, and parking validation policies are for their next Phantom Thief meeting.

Anyway, that’s essentially all I got on this.  It’s not a huge flaw, I suppose, but all the same, forcing Ren’s intervention to be the only viable solution to so many of the Social Links’ conflicts really takes the agency of the Links’ stars away from them, and as a result weakens what should have been their inspiring stories of growth and betterment.  I certainly think it’s safe to say that Tae, Chihaya, Iwai, Hifumi, and especially Sojiro and Kawakami,* would all have had better, more meaningful personal tales if Ren’s assistance had been moral support and advice, as previous Persona protagonists were generally restricted to, and they had been allowed to find the courage and determination to solve their own dilemmas.















* And honestly, even if the Phantom Thief intervention does seem warranted for Ohya and Mishima, an alternative for each, like Ohya finding a loophole and Mishima being reasoned out of his unhealthy mindset, would still probably have been better.

Shinya I’ll at least fully allow for the change of heart being necessary, though.  It’s a tough place to be the kid of a Karen, and it’s more believable that he needed a savior to mind-zap his mom back to normalcy than that he could convince her himself.

CrossCode's Downloadable Content

Today’s gonna be a nice, quick, short rant, which is a real thing that can actually happen, because we’re going to be looking at the DLC for the minor hit Indie RPG, CrossCode!



A New Home: And the reason it’s gonna be a short rant today is because, predictably, CrossCode’s downloadable content package is a good, solid piece of work.  More Lea, more words for Lea to say, more story to the Crossworlds experience as the game-within-the-game is finally completed, more actual plot with Lea as Evotars are eased into a new existence, more exploration and involvement of major characters like Shizuna, the Evotar Schneider, and C’Tron, more dungeon-racing with Emilie, more expertly-crafted puzzles that I respect and hate, more dueling with Apollo, and, of course, more Lea-hugs.  A New Home is very much what a fan wants from an RPG, a true-to-form continuation of the world, characters, and adventures that they liked in the first game.  At a price of $9, A New Home fairly charges for the amount of play-time you’ll get out of it, and it’s a good time overall.  Recommended!

...

Yup, that’s it.  That’s all I got.  Short rant today; I told you as much just a couple paragraphs ago.  Go on, now.

...

...

Well
I mean
I guess I sort of have a minor gripe I could talk about.

Okay, A New Home is good and all, right?  Just want to make sure that’s clear.  It’s good and I like it and it’s a good deal if you like CrossCode, which most people do.

Buuuuut, it does kind of feel like maybe the developer shortchanged the main game a little bit with the intention of selling that content later in this DLC.

I mean...a ton of A New Home is basically just completing the unfinished business and tying up the loose threads of the main story of CrossCode, most of which didn’t need to be delayed.  I mean, sure, the in-game developers’ completion of the Crossworlds adventure conveniently and elegantly fits into the after-game timeframe, but it could have fit just fine into the main story of CrossCode, with the Crossworlds adventure just being complete from the start, or even having its final parts released during the main game’s course.  Likewise, C’tron’s secret could have been revealed and worked through in the game proper without over-stuffing the main narrative (particularly with the extra time potentially provided by adding the final parts of Crossworlds).

Or, well, he could’ve just been on the level, a dorky player who was a good friend to Lea and Emilie.  Certainly nothing about C’tron’s plot twist feels like it’s necessary, nor does it develop the villain it involves to any meaningful degree.  So little would really have been lost had the entire secret nature of C’tron been cut, that, when I think about it, it starts feeling like a hasty addition created specifically as a tease to entice players to purchase the DLC, rather than a strong story beat genuinely intended to be a part of the plot’s course.  Hell, I feel like the type of human drama that C’tron’s story invokes is close enough to that of Evotar Lukas’s that all the DLC really needed would’ve been a better exploration of the latter,* and Evotar Lukas’s story actually did have in-story reason to be delayed until a post-game adventure.

Most significantly, it kinda feels like the developer decided to hold the ending of CrossCode ransom with the DLC.  Sure, CrossCode HAS an ending, but that ending’s basically just a placeholder--the villain’s been stopped, the adventure’s done, but the consequences of the adventure are left up in the air, as Lea’s put to sleep and her friends prepare to bring the existence and question of Evotars to the executives in charge of Crossworlds.  If you didn’t follow through on the right sidequests, then you can see the bad ending no problem, but if you did everything you should have, then the only way to see the fate of Lea and her kind is to buy the DLC.  Otherwise, what happens with Lea and the Evotars, the most important character and arguably the biggest issue in the game, is left up in the air.

I mean, I’m not crazy that this is a problem, right?  Surely it can’t just be me.  Like, if a major game publisher tried this--oh what am I saying, when major game publishers have tried this--you can expect a sizable public outcry, with customers and prominent Youtube gaming journalist personalities pointing out that this isn’t fair to the consumer who paid full price for an incomplete product, justly decrying the act as paywalling the ending of the game behind microtransactions.  But CrossCode is an Indie RPG, and very likable, and the DLC is enjoyable and satisfying, so...what, we’re just okay with it, then?  Not going to point out the fault in something we’d be crying for blood over had the crime been committed by the usual suspects?  I am, and long have been, inclined to treat Indie RPGs with kiddie gloves, but that’s far away from just giving it a free pass when a game pulls something that you’d expect from Activision-Blizzard or Ubisoft.

So I’m just gonna say it.  I think this DLC is scummy.  I think that the developer for CrossCode made a scummy, greedy decision that took advantage of its customers when it paywalled an adequate ending to the game.  A New World is satisfying, engaging, on-brand fun at a reasonable price, and it’s scummy.  CrossCode is pretty universally loved, so that’s probably quite a hot take, but it won’t exactly be my first, and this is how I see it.  Good work on the great DLC, Radical Fish Games, and in the same breath, shame on you.














* I feel like Evotar Schneider’s existential quandary is fixed weirdly quickly in A New Home, and it’s even weirder how all his friends seem to prioritize the fun of finishing the raid over helping him deal with it.  Like, yeah, Luke, could you put a pin in that whole thing of grappling with the horror of existing as a computer program when all your memories are that of a physical being until we’re done with our Leroy Jenkins reenactment?  You’re bringing the mood down!  So inconsiderate.

Septerra Core's Connor's Death Scene

What was the point?

Really.  Seriously.  What purpose did the scene in Septerra Core in which Connor finally meets his end actually serve for the game’s narrative?

Alright, so, because Septerra Core came out in 1999, most of you who have played the game could most likely use a quick Previously On X-Men refresher on the subject of today’s rant.  And if you’ve only just finished playing the game a couple days ago, like me, you could still probably use a reminder, because I’m sorry but this game does not leave much of an impression in the modern age.  Here’s the deal: our protagonist Maya and her crew have found their way into Marduk’s lost city, and navigated its bland, nigh-featureless dungeon expanse filled to the damn brim with bland, nigh-featureless disposable enemies, because Septerra Core loves grinding more than a lesbian pepper mill doing skateboard tricks while eating a hoagie and listening to punk/heavy metal hybrids.  Maya’s taken this stroll down Slow, Clunky EXP Fodder Avenue in the hopes of gaining entrance to the temple in which legendary hero Marduk enshrined his 2 daemon swords, because they’re the only way to counter main villain Daskias’s special glowy ultra-sword, in spite of the fact that Maya’s standard armament is an automatic rifle, which is already more than a match for Daskias’s ultimate unstoppable blade because it’s a fucking gun.

Anyway, she’s been warned against committing any act of violence inside the temple, because that would be sacrilegious and whatnot.*  So she finds the place, goes in, sees the swords, and suddenly her buddy Lobo runs in to warn her that he’s detected the pirate warlord Connor** in the area.  Right after he finishes telling her, and I do mean 2 seconds afterward, Connor arrives and demands the swords.  Why even have Lobo show up at all?  2 seconds’ lead time doesn’t give Maya any chance to formulate a plan, nor does it allow any narrative benefit of rising tension.  All it does is take a little away from whatever potential surprise there is in Connor’s showing up, and put Lobo on the scene, which does absolutely nothing because Lobo does and says nothing that anyone else couldn’t have.  I get that Lobo and Connor are personal foes, but that individual enmity has no effect whatsoever on how this scene plays out.

So Maya and company invoke the law of Finders Keepers, Connor keeps threatening, Lobo warns him that they’re not supposed to fight in the temple, and Connor makes it clear that he doesn’t buy into all that mumbo-jumbo, which doesn’t pan out for him when a holy spirit thing shows up a moment later and explodes him.  Yeah, you show’im, ghost guy!  A temple dedicated to housing weapons that demands absolutely no violence within its premises and enforces that law of pacifism by causing a guy who merely spoke threateningly to literally explode--absolutely nothing confusing about that message, no sirree!

Why is Connor the first guy the ghost of Megumin targets in this scene, for that matter?  Yeah, sure, he’s the aggressor here, but Lobo’s the one who keeps taking aggressive steps towards Connor and forcing him to keep backing away in this situation.  Not to mention that of everyone in this room, Lobo’s the only one who’s perpetually got his giant sci-fi rifle up and at the ready like he’s trapped in a 90s Image Comics cover.  If I were an anti-violence demolitions phantom first responder, my initial instinct would be to neutralize the guy whose finger is literally on the trigger.

More importantly: why is this scene happening, really?  What purpose is served to the story of Septerra Core, its characters, its plot, its themes, player immersion, anything?  First of all, why make this the moment that Connor meets his fate?  Connor wasn’t a big or dangerous enough villain to require a splashy deus ex machina death.  The guy can only barely be considered a secondary villain, and he’s had his ass kicked twice before this moment, so it’s not like the player is under the impression that Maya and company aren’t capable of defeating him by their own efforts.  Frankly, the last time we saw him was recently, and the way the fight ended seemed laughably stupid--once Connor had been stomped adequately, his escape from the situation was basically just to quietly exit the room, which required him to stroll right past the heroes on his way out, as they just wordlessly watched him do so.***  Adding Connor to the scene here doesn’t really raise the stakes or tension because he’s not a major threat, and even if he were, the whole affair is over and done with so fast that there’s still no benefit to having a villain present to challenge the no violence edict.  Neither Lobo nor Maya give any indication that seeing Connor’s end is particularly cathartic or otherwise emotionally significant, and if the player has any strong feelings about Connor getting his comeuppance, then he or she would almost surely have been more satisfied with simply having disposed of the nuisance by their own efforts in their previous encounter, rather than simply seeing Connor magically exploded because The Plot Someone On The Development Team Demanded It.

There’s no player involvement, so it’s not like this is some test of the player’s memory or commitment to heroism.  Connor’s arrival and demands, Lobo and Maya’s refusal, and finally Connor’s death, it’s all done via cutscene.  It’s not like the player has some agency in choosing to do the “right” thing and not attack in combat, like Cecil vs. Dark Cecil in Final Fantasy 4, or choosing pacifist combat approaches in Undertale.

There’s no lasting lesson that Maya takes from this scene about the dangers of resorting to violence too hastily.  The lore isn’t expanded from the temple being a Nanako No Fighting Zone.  Since it’s wrapped up immediately thereafter, Connor’s arrival and threat presents no wrinkle to the plot.  Nonviolent conflict resolution isn’t a theme of Septerra Core by any stretch of the imagination, at least no more than it might be for virtually any other RPG.  None of the heroes have the slightest difficulty adhering to the temple’s rule (Lobo’s constantly being prepared to shoot a hole in the roof notwithstanding), so there’s no character development here.

This is just a scene that happens, and it’s done, and you go about your business as if nothing had occurred.  Maya could easily have just gotten the swords and been good to go, and nothing about the game going forward would have been changed whatsoever.  What was the point?

















* Which, by the way, seems a little strange to me.  There’s no violence permitted in the temple that specifically serves as the shrine and home to a couple of swords?  Swords are notorious for being linked to violence, and very, very little else.  They’re weapons, they are made explicitly and entirely with violence in mind!  That’s like having a holy cathedral dedicated to housing the ultimate stapler, while also possessing the viewpoint that the act of collating paper is an unforgivable sin against God.


** Look, I have tried to train myself in the last decade to not make fun of names because it’s ultimately a completely arbitrary matter, but all the same, I have to ask: how the fuck am I supposed to take someone seriously as an evil, murderous pirate when he’s named fucking Connor?


*** The Septerra Core cast has a really, really bad habit of just letting bad guys wander off after battle.  Like, I get that sometimes you need the heroes to win a fight, but you’re also not done with the villain in your story just yet, but there are ways to believably extricate your baddie from the situation!  Maya and company just silently, motionlessly gawk as foe after foe hop along on their merry way after a fight, and it starts to get annoying before long.  Finish’em off or attempt to detain them, guys, just stop STANDING there and watching the pirate warlord slowly make his way out the very door you came in through, practically bumping into you as he goes!  I’m almost surprised that Maya didn’t politely give him the “after you” motion!

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5's Haru Sure Does Get the Shaft

Man, Haru kinda gets screwed by Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5’s writers, doesn’t she?

I mean, to start with, there’s the most obvious and glaring way that the game fails her: she’s only recruited about halfway through the game’s story--and that’s only if you include the post-game adventure with Maruki that the rerelease adds.  That’s not necessarily an insurmountable hurdle for a character to overcome when trying to fit into a group’s dynamic and endear themselves to the player, but in a game which is so strongly motivated by and reliant upon its main cast and their personalities to stay in motion and invest the player, it’s a tough obstacle.  Being introduced at something like 2/3rds of the way through the main game means that Haru’s having to break into an established friendly group dynamic more than be adopted into it, and she doesn’t have the shared history of the rest of the party that provides opportunities for in-jokes and friendly banter.  Hell, she even suffers for this timing as a romantic option; practically half the love interest scenes in the main game occur before Haru's even present to be romanced.

Now, the timing of Haru’s recruitment is an almost universally agreed-upon weakness of Persona 5, so this isn’t news, but I do want to point out something that I don’t see mentioned too often when people complain about this failing: it’s not just the lack of time and opportunity she has to become a part of the team dynamic and establish her character to the player.  It’s also the nature of this lacking period of time.  The time remaining to Persona 5’s main narrative after Haru’s introduction is not like that which has preceded it--the following arcs of the game are those of Sae, Shido, and the dumb Holy Grail thing.  Essentially, immediately following Haru’s joining the team, the main story suddenly comes a-knocking, things start heating up, and the Phantom Thieves’ efforts are dedicated to events and threats whose stakes are ever-increasing.  The arc of stopping Haru’s father is the last business-as-usual chapter of the game, and the tension and focus on the Thieves’ surviving the traps laid for them, discovering and overcoming their true enemy, and facing off against some superfluous supernatural mastermind semi-deity keeps the party too busy, too focused on the necessary here and now, for the same kind of character-building moments and asides that the rest of the cast benefited from earlier in the game.*  Not only is Haru given very limited time to really establish herself as a true part of the Phantom Thieves, but the quality of that time provided to her is unsuitable for that purpose--the time for establishing the cast has clearly just expired at that point, and the game is expecting the player to be fully engrossed in the major events of the plot’s climax.

Another problematic angle to this lack of development time: Haru has a singular style and personality, but that great character is subtle in almost all facets, and needs time for it to really shine.  You can’t immediately tell that her personality’s seemingly plain exterior is hiding a hardcore warrior goddess with just the faintest touch of bloodlust that she has fully in control, nor appreciate her being an earnest, real-life heroine who wants to share the bounties of this world with all its people.  While most of the cast’s shticks and personalities are overt and easily recognizable, Haru’s qualities and persona are less forward, subtle.  Spinoffs like Q2 and Strikers have thankfully provided the extra time that a lighter touch character like Haru needs, and helped audiences realize after the fact just how cool she is, but the original game gives barely any time to really get a feel for her, and of the entire cast, she’s the one who most needs that time!

Worsening this problem is the fact that what parts of SMT Persona 5’s narrative ARE dedicated to Haru, frequently treat her as an afterthought.  I mean, look at the way she enters into the game’s narrative and joins the Phantom Thieves!  Yusuke, Futaba, Makoto, each of their introduction arcs had a clear and undiluted focus on them--who they were, why they were Phantom Thief material, how they awoke to their spirit of justice and rebellion against the ills of society, what made them tick.  From the start of the Madarame portion of the story to its finish, there’s never a doubt that the emotional and spiritual lynchpin character is Yusuke.  Makoto’s internal war between the docility expected of her in response to the impossible expectations the world makes of her and her burning need to see right done is the only major relevant character development during the events with Kaneshiro.  And the entirety of the Medjed arc is dedicated to establishing and exploring Futaba’s character (not to mention much of the intermission that follows it).

But Haru?  Haru has to share her introduction to the Phantom Thieves with Morgana’s pity-party arc.  And “share” is a generous way of putting it, because Morgana’s little hissy-fit** is the primary motivating factor for the Phantom Thieves’ entry into the Okumura part of the story; Haru’s first introduction is basically as a tool that Morgana’s using as a way of flaunting how little he needs his former comrades!  Yes, to be sure, past the early phase of the Okumura arc, it’s Haru whose character is (rightly) the focus as the team works to correct her father’s evil ways...but that introduction of a character as a rebel for justice is a pivotal, crucial moment for each Phantom Thief, and Haru’s had to play second fiddle to an entirely different character’s development, one who’s already had the entire game’s time to establish and advance himself!***  Haru’s introduction, induction, and awakening are rushed through, sideshows to Morgana’s Self Esteem bit.  The writers treat Haru as an afterthought in the introduction of her own main arc of the story!

And then there’s her Social Link.  While it’s not a 1:1 copy or anything, and it’s fine enough in its own right I guess, it’s kind of hard to not to notice, as I’ve mentioned previously, that Haru’s Social Link’s story has the same foundations as Persona 3’s Mitsuru.  It’s a tale of a high-class woman out to experience new things, stressing out about what her and her company’s future will be, engaged for political reasons to a self-important asshole, who will learn the self-confidence she needs to take her future in her own hands and ditch her shitty fiance thanks to the protagonist’s encouragement--sound familiar?  Persona 5’s writers thankfully didn’t just do a copy-paste, at least, Haru takes this in a different direction than Mitsuru and with a different perspective, but there’s no denying that even if they didn’t completely plagiarize themselves, Atlus did, at the very least, reuse the same narrative template for Haru as they had used for Mitsuru.

And not for nothing, but this whole timing situation kind of sucks for her even from an in-universe perspective.  Because man, did Haru ever miss out on the fun days of being a Phantom Thief.  I mean, the poor woman’s experience with being a crusader of underground justice has been finding out that her father is 1 of the more evil people on the planet, with an overlap of her being sold off as sexual property solely to further his own interests, then watching her father die horribly on national television in what should have been her first big moment of victory as a Phantom Thief.  She then becomes Public Enemy #1 along with the rest of her new friends after having been promised that everyone in the world would think she’s awesome, because she just so happened to join up with the gang at the moment that public opinion swings a hard fucking left on the Phantom Thieves.  

Yeah, so after finding out that her parent’s a monster and her existence was designed solely to be used for his benefit, Haru gets to split her shifts at the Stress Factory between being terrified that she got into the Phantom Thieves just in the nick of time to be arrested and put on trial, and being forced to learn on her feet how to lead a multinational corporation while completely changing it to the point that it’s actually ethical.  Ryuji’s over here complaining a few chapters ago about having to do some homework when he’s trying to concentrate on being a loved pop-culture phenomenon, and meanwhile Haru’s trying to juggle 80% of the shitty parts of being Batman!  Dammit, all the girl wanted was to get to dress up like a fancy tea-time musketeer while she put some good into the world!  

This is the shit that makes supervillains.  I legit would completely understand and even forgive Haru if she’d turned full-on evil just as a result of how shitty her life became the moment she tried out fighting for justice.

Just...damn, Persona 5 writers, what is your deal with this girl?












* And for the record, the extra time in the rerelease’s post-game adventure doesn’t help all that much, either.  It, too, is largely fixated on the events and ramifications of Maruki’s bid to (benevolently) control the world, and what time it has for focusing on characters and interrelationships is largely given to Yoshizawa and, unfathomably, fucking Akechi of all people.


** Goddamit I’m so masterfully clever.


*** And, for that matter, isn’t even all that interesting to begin with.  Look, I’m sorry, I like the guy and he does, to be sure, serve a very important function to the heart and atmosphere of Persona 5, but...Morgana is a pretty mid character, at best.

General RPGs' Shelter Items

You know those items in RPGs like Shelters, Tents, Cottages, etc.?  The ones that fully restore your entire party so long as you’re at a save point?  When you get down to it, they’re kind of a dumb waste of time.

Oh, sure, your knee-jerk reaction is that I’m being an idiot.  The utility of these items seems obvious!  After you’ve been slogging through a dungeon full of random encounters, wearing down your characters’ health and magic, you absolutely want to be able to restore your weary adventurers to their peak fighting capacity before the next boss, or even just a new branch of the dungeon.  And who the heck wants to take the time to use a dozen or more curative potions to achieve that?  Not to mention that those things can be needed in difficult battles, so you may not want to waste them.  A save point restorative seems the perfect tool for extended, thorough, and safe dungeon exploration.

And sure, that all makes sense.  While some RPGs are designed without such options, presumably either with the intent of creating an economy of careful resource budgeting or just because they were created before the feature had even been invented (or, in a few cases like Live-A-Live and the Loathing and Romancing SaGa series, because the party’s HP is fully restored after combat anyway), generally speaking, the capacity to fully heal up at significant intermissions and turning points in a dungeon is a pretty important feature.  Knowing you’ll be able to do so at a certain point during your exploration means that you feel comfortable with using at least some of your special abilities during regular battles, which makes combat substantially less boring than it has to be, you don’t have to grind money to afford an ocean of jarred elixir before you feel comfortable about your chances of making it through the next combat zone alive, and having your fighters at full capacity means you can go all-out against bosses.  Without the ability to heal up at save points, you’re looking at an RPG where 90% of your battles may just be using Attack over and over, and you’re either starving for every coin to fill your inventory with mana potions, or your crew can only ever give a fraction of their all to boss encounters, lowering what dramatic weight the conflicts have.  Save point healing is definitely a positive and important function of the average RPG.

But ever since I first played Grandia 1 and enjoyed the benefits of those delightful little rainbow cone save points, I’ve wondered: what is the damn point of Shelter items when you can just have the save point itself heal the heroes?

I mean, think about it.  If the developers wanted the option to fully restore the party while in a dungeon to be on the table at all, then why add the extra steps of having to purchase a Tent, and then open up the item menu and use it?  Sure, it’s not some great inconvenience, but it’s still a step that’s entirely unnecessary when games like Grandia, Undertale, and Final Fantasy 10 prove that the save point can just do the healing itself.  Hell, Ys, 1 of the oldest RPG series in existence, proved this before Shelter-type items even existed!  You’re just adding the extra steps of purchasing and then using an item to do what could just be included in the save point’s function.  It may only be a very tiny inconvenience, but it IS a tiny inconvenience that doesn’t have to be there at all.

I suppose you could try to make the point that budgeting for healing is a part of the overall economy of RPG gameplay, and thus having to purchase/find Shelter-type items contributes to that.  But that argument doesn’t really hold much water--it’s pretty rare that such items have a high enough price tag at a merchant that they affect the economy of playing the game at all.  About the only time in an RPG where your buying choices might be affected by the cost of having a Tent or 2 on hand would be right at the beginning, when you have the smallest capital flow, and that, ironically, is the time in the game where you usually will need such an item the least, since you don’t have much HP and MP to restore to begin with (making basic potions an easy option), and have fewer MP-draining skills and spells to utilize in combat anyway.  By the point at which you’ve got enough HP, MP, and battle options that the Shelter family is indispensable, you’ll also have enough money that keeping a tidy 10 of the things in your inventory at all times won’t have any noticeable effect on your wallet.  If the developers’ aim was to make 1 of money’s uses in their game the capacity for save point healing, then a system like what you often find in Shin Megami Tensei would be a better method, in which the cost of the healing increases according to just how much HP and MP need to be recovered.  This kind of system is still generally outpaced pretty easily by adventuring income even as the costs get more substantial, but it’s at least a way better attempt at creating a heals-for-cash economy than just charging 150G for a Shelter in a game where you can be making more than that in a single battle less than a quarter of the way through the adventure.

And I know that these items ain’t there for the sake of immersion.  Exactly how realistic is it that in the middle of a military facility within the enemy capitol, one filled with enemy soldiers, hostile robots, guard dogs, and violent mutants, the heroes can just pitch a tent in the middle of a random room, crawl inside, and every single foe will politely tiptoe around them so they can get a healthy, recommended 8 undisturbed hours of rest?  Are you going to make the case that it’s believable for an other-dimensional horror of teeth and claws and teeth with claws floating in the midst of a temple built to worship a god of torment and destruction to happen across the 4 heroes trying to kill its boss as they’ve snuggled up for a nap, and choose to let them be simply because it’s too shy to unzip the tent flap?  Lemme tell you, the giant, hulking, vicious razor-horned Behemoths of Final Fantasy became a hell of a lot less intimidating when I realized that they were powerless before a Do Not Disturb sign!

Not to mention cases where the overnight stay that a Tent item implies should actually just outright kill the heroes in and of itself.  I’m pretty sure that if you decided to conk out for the night in the heart of an active volcano next to a pool of magma, snoring in 1 lungful of volcanic aerosols and ash after another, you’d be waking considerably less healthy than when you went to sleep.

Also, exactly how realistic is it that these things are consumable, single-use items?  Look, I don’t know which Dick’s Sporting Goods the developers of Cris Tales have been shopping at, but tents are not tissue papers; you’re supposed to be able to pitch it up more than once before you pitch it out.  Who is the absolute madman in the party of Final Fantasy 4 who is purchasing and then throwing entire COTTAGES in the trash after a single nap!?

If these games wanted to realistically employ the idea of a Shelter item, they’d do it like Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.  In those games, you can bunker down for the night in an active danger zone with the camping equipment that your party carries and doesn’t throw out, so long as you have the space to set it up, and there’s an entire game mechanic devoted to determining whether the sentries you post to watch over the camp will be able to keep the rest of the party safe from the enemies in the area as they sleep.  It still requires a good bit of suspension of disbelief to accept that’d be enough to allow for a decent night’s sleep in the middle of the war zone of a demon invasion, but they’re at least trying a hell of a lot harder than the developer who thought it’d be totally reasonable for a Shelter to guarantee complete, unbroken safety for over half a dozen hours in the middle of Magus’s Lair.

So these items don’t provide any real effect on the ebb and flow of money in the game, and they sure as hell don’t add to the immersion.  Well, if Shelters have no secondary meta-function, and their primary function can be accomplished exactly as well by simply programming save points with the ability to heal your party,* then what purpose is served by these items besides just wasting the cumulative time it takes to acquire them and navigate menus to use them?   Save point restoration items are dumb.












* Hell, this actually provides the creators better potential control over how the game is played.  Some RPGs have 2 different kinds of save points, ones that just save your game and others that can both save AND heal you, allowing the developers better options for balancing their dungeons and bosses the way they want to, since they have the option to provide or deny the player full restoration, and thus create situations and dungeons of MP-budgeting and adoption of endurance tactics.

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 Stray Thoughts: Characters

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 is pretty awesome, and as you may have noticed, I have a lot of thoughts about it.  Thus far I've been sharing the more developed ones, but there are plenty of little minor reactions to and considerations of the game that I had as I played, and "lucky" for all of you, I basically used poor Ecclesiastes as a notebook/cruelly abused test subject for all these stray thoughts as I played, so I've still got pretty much all my notions and perceptions, clever or distinctly otherwise, on hand to share.  And share we're going to--more than once, in fact, because there's way more of these things than can or should reasonably fit into a single rant.  So for today, we're doing a themed Stray Thoughts rant, about the characters of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5!



THE HOMIES

- I like the fact that Ren actually has something of a character in this game.  I mean, sure, the guy suffers the same stunted growth as a human being that all silent protagonists do, and obviously shouldn’t be one.  That’s pretty standard.  But there are a few moments, here and there, where Ren betrays a humanity that Yu, Makoto, and Kotone lacked, like when he has a little ‘Nam flashback at hearing Shido’s voice at the hotel elevator, and these moments make him feel a hell of a lot more real.

I don’t know why game developers think that blank slate silent protagonists are somehow more easily relatable or help immerse the audience in spite of literal thousands of years of cultural evidence to the contrary.  I like the fact that Ren’s internal monologue occasionally betrays character depth!  Like, whilst Morgana's pulling his little running-away-from-home stint, if you sit on Ren's thinkin' couch, he'll thought-bubble, "Why didn't I notice something was bothering Morgana?" That's a simple and normal thought for a character to have, but the fact that the silent and aloof Persona protagonist is having this regretful self-critique somehow just means volumes to me.  SMTP3’s Makoto might be able to just barely manage to make the aloof silent protagonist thing work thanks to his symbolic role as a Messiah figure reinforcing his position as The Fool, but similar mild, subtle characterization certainly wouldn’t have hurt him at all.  And Yu needed it.


- For the record, I tried very hard not to burst out laughing when I saw what Makoto's evolved Persona looked like.


- I did not extend that same courtesy to Akechi's Phantom Thief outfit.  The man looks like a mosquito decided he wanted to lead a marching band during Mardi Gras.


- You know what?  Seeing Yoshizawa catch that kid’s balloon during her initial Social Link scene was a dozen times more cool and impressive an introduction to her skills than that entire try-hard, embarrassingly over-the-top fight sequence that we see in the game’s opening.  Seriously, creators, it’s not the 1970s any more, the world has grown past thinking that effortlessly beating a handful of hench-goons is some impressive feat.  This chick just leapt 8 feet straight up and had the casual gall to tell Ren that it was just a simple acrobatics maneuver that anyone could do!  Atlus’s writers really assume I’m gonna pump my fist and gasp in delighted shock that half a dozen literally faceless minions got their asses kicked, but then just brush off the fact that this high school freshman is actually a Super Mario?


- Why do the others give Ryuji shit for not bringing enough stuff with him for the Hawaii vacation, when the backpack he’s carrying is larger than any of their suitcases?


- Let's be honest, most of the designs for the team's individual Personas are pretty bad...but MAN, Haru's second one is just something else.  All the goofy abstracts you've encountered before it can't quite prepare you for the moment you realize that Haru's new, upgraded Persona is some croissant-headed chick stuck to a Mexican candy skull.

When I saw it, I actually began second-guessing my decision to choose Haru to be Ren's girlfriend, just based on how incredibly stupid her Persona was.  Makoto, Hifumi, Yoshizawa, hell, I even momentarily considered Futaba as an alternative paramour, just so Ren wouldn't have to go to Persona-User parties and be like, "Yeah my arm candy tonight's the actual fucking candy."


- Speaking of, I am both delighted, and utterly repulsed, to announce that after over a decade of searching, I have finally found the perfect, iconic poster couple for Since We're Not Related It'll Be Okay Syndrome.  So thank you and fuck you, Persona 5, in equal measure, for allowing Ren to romance Futaba, the girl that Ren even outright acknowledges in 1 scene (a meetup with Iwai) is, and I quote, "Basically my sister."  Jesus Christ, I am somehow way, way more comfortable with Fire Emblem obsessing over actual, biological siblings fucking than I am with what's possible in this game.

And as if her social and emotional dependence on Ren precluding them from ever being peers and thus creating an inherent power dynamic between them that's extremely unhealthy for a romantic relationship wasn't enough...I love the fact that Sojiro, their shared adoptive father, outright and in no uncertain terms requests that Ren avoid hooking up with Futaba.  That's about as close to a cry for help to the tune of "Corporate forced us to make your sister a romance option, we didn't want to do it, WE know it's icky, too, it's not our fault we swear!" as you're likely to find from a group of writers.



THE LINKS

- Much though I do like the man, I really hope Persona 5 didn’t actually want me to take Sojiro’s posturing and attempts to talk big about being a ladies’ man seriously.  I mean, my God, man, look at yourself.  You’re out here bitching about the notion of having a man in your passenger seat when your idea of an out-on-the-town outfit is what a 90s direct-to-VHS movie would’ve dressed a pimp in as a joke.  Yeah, I’m sure you’re just fucking slaying pussy all day long, Sojiro, dressed like you’re just getting off the ferry from Nantucket in your search for a worthy croquet rival.  No doubt the ladies are just stacking themselves like a fucking Jenga tower on that passenger seat normally.

I really wanted a scene following this implication of how much action Sojiro’s getting with passenger-seat floozies, where Ren opens the door of the car and a cascade of dust comes pouring out, like the cocaine from Joey’s car in that 1 scene from Mafia.  I wanted Ren to sit down, realize something felt off, look down, and see Indiana Jones hunched down under the floor mat, searching for long-lost artifacts.


- “There are two possibilities: either you’ve simply been trying to confuse me with your lies...
...Or everything you’ve stated is true.”

Very good, Sae!  Yes, you’re right, that IS the case with literally everything anyone says, ever!

Man, I just can’t imagine how mobsters like Kaneshiro have managed to evade the law when we’ve got sharp, insightful prosecutors like Sae protecting Japan.


- By the time of the school trip to Hawaii, Mishima's obsession with the Phantom Thieves has reached a point at which Ren's having to room with him feels unsafe.  It's like, Jesus, dude, just hurry up, cut off a lock of Ren's hair, and be done with it so we can move on to the stage where Ren finally gets some fucking rest because you want to stay up all night and watch him in his sleep.  To quote the good Sir Ecclesiastes, "It's not for no reason that you can treat Mishima like a piece of shit and it will not hinder the Link's progress; guy is a five star parasocial creep, which is remarkable given that he's a real life acquaintance."


- Seriously, though, Akechi's metaverse outfit looks like he got confused while getting dressed and couldn't remember whether he was going to a costume party hosted by a bored middle-aged suburbanite in her backyard, or tryouts for a local just-for-fun figure skating club.


- So, Ohya, let me get this straight.  Someone accuses you of pursuing a separate investigation, rather than working the assignment you were given...and the defense you choose to go with is, "No, no, I wasn't working on the wrong story for my job!  I was IGNORING my job altogether!  So that I could date a minor!"

Brilliant.  Fuck those losers over in Suikoden; Ohya's clearly the true master tactician.


- Of all the Social Link characters to give Ren a boost to his Kindness stat from hanging out with them, Atlus chose Shinya.  Oh, yeah, sure, checks out.  You bet.  I mean, nothing will hone your empathy and magnanimity toward others better than engaging with a cursing preteen Call of Duty player who feels you're not contributing your proper share to the team, right?

Maybe hanging out with Shinya is teaching Kindness to Ren in the sense that he's not lifting the little shit up and drop-kicking him into the crane machine, so Ren's benevolence muscle MUST be getting a hell of a workout.



THE BADDIES

- Madarame is kind of small potatoes in the plot as a whole, essentially just existing as an initial practice run for the established Phantom Thieves and as a way to work Yusuke into the story...but I gotta say, in a petty, personal way, he’s a more twisted and compelling villain than even Shido himself.  You wouldn’t think that a mere plagiarist could really stand shoulder-to-shoulder with bad guys like extortionists, rapists, mass-murdering conspiracists, and worst of all, corporate CEOs, but Madarame manages it.  The thefts he makes are of the creativity and talent of students who look up to him as both a teacher and a parental figure, trusting him until the moment that it’s too late and their capacity to convey beauty and truth through their craft is forever tainted by the betrayal.  The truth of the Sayuri genuinely impressed me with just what an evil bastard Madrame truly was.  Sure, Shido eliminating everyone in his way and seeking to corrupt his nation into his own twisted view of an elitist paradise is a grander form of evil that creates far more misery by quantity of those harmed by him.  But Shido’s atrocities don’t feel as viciously, personally vile as Madarame’s letting a woman die in front of him rather than getting her help, so that he could deface her masterpiece expressing her love as a mother, claim and sell it as his own work, and take her son to raise as his own, just in case the son inherited any talents Madarame could someday take advantage of.  What a sick fuck.


- I like the moment in the game in which Kaneshiro tells the gang (at the time consisting of Ren, Ann, Ryuji, Yusuke, and Makoto) that they can beg their mommies and daddies for the money he wants from them.  Dude, you have no idea how ineffective that strategy will be with this bunch; they don’t have a complete mother-father set present between the 5 of them.


- And yet somehow Akechi's true outfit manages, shockingly, to be even dumber than his first one.  Guy looks like he was so excited about his cosplay that even though he's changed into his jammies, he still wants to wear the helmet to bed and keep pretending that he's Final Fantasy 4's Kain.

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5's Moments of Crappy Cliched Comedy

As I’ve mentioned before and will doubtless say again, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 is, in many regards, an excellent refinement of the methods and qualities of its predecessors, Persona 3 and 4.  In general, Persona 5 takes what worked for its forebears, and leaves or improves upon that which didn’t, to create a tighter, better product.

In general.

But there are still some (ironically) noticeable blind spots in the Persona formula present in this title, and probably the most outright annoying is a certain, sadly familiar style of humor that still pops up now and then.  Because while Persona 5 is leaps and bounds ahead of its immediate predecessor in this regard, there are nonetheless times in which its comedy is the same kind of brainless, dead-on-arrival tasteless try-hard cliches that plagued Persona 4’s attempts at humor again and again.

If you’ve played a few JRPGs or watched an anime or 2, you’ve definitely encountered this kind of stupidity before.  Whenever a talentless writer needs to inject some comedy into their creation but lacks the capacity to actually write a joke, they reach for any the following 4 sacred tenets of anime humor:

1. Males have sexual urges
2. Females can be pressured into being sexual*
3. Homosexuals were created by God to entertain us; that’s all we know, Rick
4. A woman who can’t cook is an abomination that should be ostracized, exiled, and possibly drawn and quartered

And so, because a few incompetent jerks in the formative days of manga decided that they wanted toxic masculinity to be the comical backbone of their art form, lazy “writers” have been able for decades to just hastily slap any of those 4 ideas onto their work and pretend it’s a punchline.  If you’ve played a few JRPGs, chances are that you’ve encountered at least 1 kind of this stupidity before.  Maybe you’ve noticed Fire Emblem’s love for reducing entire interpersonal character arcs down to Number 4 on that list, or you rolled your eyes with impatience at the “amusing” gay merchants of Shadow Hearts born from Number 3.  Hell, I know you’ve encountered 1 of those godawful hot spring scenes at some point inspired by Point 1 up there.

And if you’ve played Persona 4, well, you’ve encountered the whole gamut, multiple times, because between things like Yosuke’s recurring need to diminish Kanji with wisecracks about being gay, and Teddie trying to be the world’s first restraining order collector, SMTP4 is just choking itself on cheap, stale gags.  In fact, Persona 4 contains within it the Holy Grail of anime non-humor comedy: an episode of the story which crams all 4 anti-jokes together into 1 distasteful, humor-murdering miracle.  The school camping trip in Persona 4 manages to combine Kanji getting beaten up while trying to prove he’s not gay, the girls being shitty cooks, Yosuke demanding that women wear swimsuits for him, and the girls actually unhappily doing so out of some feeling of debt for having cooked badly. The total tetrad of terrible tenets tied into 1 tidy, staid sack of trash.  And to think they even managed to work in a vomit gag to garnish it!  Truly masters at their fucking craft, the writers of Persona 4.

But even though it never reaches anywhere near the same quantity or extreme of unfunny, off-putting indignity that it did in Persona 4, the use of this style of crappy cliche non-humor is even more grating when it does occasionally arise in Persona 5.  How, you might wonder?  Because even by the metric of the kind of mentally listless loser who laughs at “guys liek boobeez and grls has them” because he’s been told it’s a punchline, these dull shenanigans are completely unnecessary!  Though it’s hardly an excuse, let’s face it, SMT Persona 4 really just didn’t HAVE much else it could fall back on for comedy beyond these sad tropes; there’s only so much mileage you can get from Adachi being hapless and unmotivated, Yukiko’s laughing fits are so fucking cringe it should be considered a sin, and Jesus, Yosuke, just fucking hold it IN already.  But by contrast, Persona 5 is, most of the time, actually really good at creating levity!

The overall conversations and group dynamics of the Phantom Thieves are entertaining and naturally lend themselves to chuckle-worthy banter and scenarios.  Persona 5 doesn’t need to resort to using gay people as punching bags, or fixating on a high school girl being pressured into nude modeling, or reminding us that teenage boys have hormones as they Doordash a maid fetish, or any of the other “humor” of idiot perverts who both never grew out of the, and are currently in their, 80s!  The game already naturally finds its appealing comedy groove with Ann and Ryuji’s back-and-forth partner-in-crime banter, Sojiro’s delusions of suaveness, the disaster that is Yusuke’s finances, Yoshizawa’s athlete appetite, and much more.  The game can already seemingly effortlessly create dialogues and situations in which it’s the actions, personalities, and quirks of its characters from which the comedy is created; it doesn’t NEED to resort to generic “hurr hurr” jokes clumsily pasted onto it!

Great example: at a certain point in the story, the Phantom Thieves are visiting Shinjuku, as a step in their efforts against Kaneshiro.  During this scene, a couple of gay stereotype NPCs show up, and it goes something like this:

“Oh look, a couple of people whose sexual proclivities differ from those of the writer!  Surely they exist only to be wacky clowns for our entertainment.  Let us simply walk off, and leave our friend Ryuji alone with them so that they may effect their Gay upon him, to his great dismay!  What truly ribald jocularity!”

It’s an off-putting joke with no payoff, but more than that, it’s made superfluous by the basic, natural humor and comical chemistry that the game already has in play!  At the beginning of this section, you’re able to, in the course of Morgana’s posturing as he tells Ren about Shinjuku, select an option to casually tell the uppity cat that he can be Ren’s escort.  It sends Morgana mentally scrambling to figure out how Ren even knows about that sort of thing, and boom, there you go, a little moment of levity born from the natural back-and-forth between the game’s characters!  Mission accomplished, chuckle had!  There’s even the bonus guffaw of Ryuji having come to explore the red light district without changing out of his school uniform!  The comedy checkmark was already there for this brief arc, with no need for some try-hard, grandiose gesture of cliched comedy that comes out of nowhere and has no connection whatever to anything else.  Honestly, it’s just baffling that the writers think that they have to throw in this shit, when they’re already doing a great job of entertaining the player with the moments of mirth that organically exist in the story and its cast.

And to be clear, SMTP5’s actual, genuine comedy chops aren’t just limited to dialogue-based quips and bits.  You might assume that the game only resorts to the crappy anime cliches as a way of rounding its levity out to include situational humor in motion, but no, it’s perfectly capable of being quite funny with its setups and events in its own right.  When investigating Futaba, for example, there’s a scene in which the lights go out, and Makoto, startled, panics and begs Ren to hold her hand for reassurance.  And Ren just stands there, all “Sorry babe, I’m just too cool to take my hands out of my pockets, can’t help you.”  Makoto’s losing her goddamn mind here, and the absolute most this Arms Akimbo motherfucker’s willing to do is offer her a goddamn elbow to cling to, and she hangs onto that thing like she’s on a subway train being driven by Mr. Magoo at rush hour.  Whether you’re chuckling at the calm and collected Makoto having a meltdown over the mildest spooky situation ever, or, more likely, at Ren’s adamant refusal to compromise his aloof anime vibe, it’s a great example of Persona 5 being able to have a funny situation with humor in motion.  So again, the game’s clearly capable of hitting its comedy quota without lowering itself to the shitty tropes.

Using this kind of anime cliche comedy is also stupidly contradictory to the story and spirit of the game.  Isn’t the biggest, most major purpose of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 to sharply criticize the crippling culture of cultish collectivism that curses the country of Japan?  The story of Persona 5 takes pains to show how wrong, unfair, and damaging it is to look down on others simply for being outside the norm in some way again and again.  Ren as a supposed delinquent on probation, Sojiro as an adoptive guardian to Futaba instead of a biological family member, Ryuji as a problem student, Futaba as a person whose trauma and anxiety necessitate special considerations, Ann having few meaningful relationships in her life because of her visibly different ethnicity...the game provides many examples of admirable people who suffer because of a society that dismisses, shuns, or outright punishes them for being different from what’s expected.  They’re judged on what they are instead of who they are, their potential determined by scorn of their difference instead of measure of their character, and the intense, burning wrongness of this mindset is held up again and again by Persona 5 in its passionate plea for a change.

And yet, in the midst of this noble ambition, even as the writers deftly prove their point with other characters...they resort to a cheap, lazy, mindless gag about gay stereotypes!  The game has introduced a couple of NPCs whose only, single purpose is to play up a shallow view that those with a sexuality outside the norm are defined solely by that trait, weird and undesirable to be around, and if they get you alone they’ll try to turn YOU gay, omg ewwwww amirite lol???  This moronic comedy trope is obviously, violently counter to possibly the biggest theme of the entire game!

And when these stupid comedy cliches don’t contradict Persona 5’s ideals, they clash with its characters, story, and direction.  Why exactly is the game telling us to giggle over the idea of Ann being put into an uncomfortable situation regarding being a nude model?  Isn’t the major, instigating injustice inflicted on Ann a matter of sexual harassment?  Isn’t the most defining quality of Ann’s heroism the anguish she’s experienced over the sexual abuse that her Shiho suffered?  Why the actual FUCK are we making a JOKE of sexualizing the character whose greatest motivation is the lingering trauma and tragedy of SEXUAL ABUSE!?

Thankfully--so goddamn thankfully--these shitty comedy tropes make far fewer incursions into Persona 5’s narrative than they did into 4’s.  SMTP5 is a diverting, amusing game rich with quips and jokes, but most of its comedy is born of the characters and situations organic to its narrative course, rather than manufactured and clumsily tacked on for a cheap supposed laugh.  Sure, not EVERY joke lands, and some of the recurring ones do get overplayed, but by and large, SMT Persona 5’s comedy scene is a huge improvement over its immediate predecessor’s.  Still, the game does sprinkle in some of these exhausted, unfunny, braindead tropes here and there, clearly out of unthinking reflex, and it’s annoying, because they’re totally unneeded in a game that’s already got enough real, fitting humor, and they often ignore or even undermine the game’s better content.










   




* Caveat: Unless they’re uggos, then of course they’re too sexually forward for comfort, because it’s just so fucking funny.

CrossCode's Puzzles

A worthwhile RPG by virtue of its characters and story, CrossCode is also a solid game in just about every facet of its gameplay.  It’s 1 of those Indie RPGs that shows off the fact that games made by smaller developers can be just as tight, polished, and multi-faceted mechanically as those made by any larger game studio--considerably more so, in fact, given what the modern-day so-called AAA RPG experience looks like, with sloppy, embarrassing garbage like Starfield and Babylon’s Fall as representatives.  And of special note among these gameplay virtues are CrossCode’s puzzles, enough that I’d like to take a moment to just appreciate them with today’s rant.

First of all, the puzzles in CrossCode are pleasingly creative.  While at their foundation they generally come down to either a game of billiards, hitting the right targets at the right moments with precision and careful, analyzed positions, angles, and ricochets, or simple platforming, CrossCode’s creators keep finding new ways to dress up their fundamentals to keep them fresh and different from the start of a 40-hour game right to its end.  They’re always adding and refining new objects and mechanics to the puzzles in ways that build off of the player’s hard-won practical knowledge, but also add new wrinkles and complications to it, and evolving the forms of the player’s billiards-ricochet projectiles with elemental upgrades as the game continues enhances the puzzles’ versatility again and again.  It reminds me of puzzle-heavy RPGs based around player tools, like Wild Arms 1, only unlike WA1 and most of its brethren, there never came a point when this continued introduction and exploration of new tools and mechanics started to feel overplayed or annoying.  In fact, CrossCode’s ability to offer refreshing new spins on its puzzles that walk a skillful line between overuse of the same fundamentals and annoying over-complication is so great, that my favorite puzzle device in the game turned out to be the twist introduced in the final dungeon from the post-game DLC!

But then, walking tightropes is something CrossCode excels at.  In the midst of paying homage to and incorporating aesthetics from its inspirations like classic Phantasy Star, the Playstation 1 era, Final Fantasy, Metroid, and of course several MMORPGs, plus throwing in easter eggs and references to a wide variety of geeky stuff like Hololive VTubers, Temmie-chan, and goddamn Marauder Shields, CrossCode somehow still manages to find a sweet spot of its own, strong identity.  In an era where audiences have started catching on to the fact that simply lampshading a flaw or trope isn’t any better than using that flaw/trope in earnest, CrossCode manages to design a scenario of a game-within-a-game that allows it the adequate wiggle-room to both incorporate and poke fun at the silly parts of video games.  Even its soundtrack is an exercise in finding a positive middle ground, as it incorporates signature bits and pieces of music from foundational games like Secret of Mana, Phantasy Star, and the Kirby series, but transforms them into a new musical entity as a whole.

And the second way in which CrossCode’s puzzles deserve recognition is yet another case of the game managing to hit a very difficult bullseye: their level of challenge.  Typically in an RPG, puzzles lean into an extreme on 1 side or another.  Either they’re by and large a bunch of color-coded, shape-recognition baby stuff, which makes the puzzle element of an RPG much more akin to a chore than a gameplay feature, or it’s a bunch of Alundra 1 or “Palm trees and 8” shit, which quickly becomes frustrating to such a degree that the natural instinct is to simply lose interest in the game.  Or it’s a Legend of Zelda title, and it’s somehow both extremes of ease and difficulty at the same time, with the unpleasantness of each.

Finding that key spot between too easy and the far worse too hard is tricky to pull off even a few times in an RPG...and yet CrossCode manages to do it again, and again, and again, over scores of hours, tons of quests, and more than a dozen areas and dungeons, all of whose content is predominantly made up of puzzle-solving.  Nearly every puzzle in the game held some degree of challenge to figuring out its solution, and yet I almost never felt like I was out of my depth with it.  The solution to any of CrossCode’s puzzles always seems to be within your grasp with a bit of experimental trial-and-error and rational planning, and until you grasp it, you generally never feel completely lost, but rather a sense of expectation that you’re going to be able to figure this out.*  And keep in mind, it’s not like the difficulty of the puzzle element of CrossCode stays static from start to finish; its brainteasers grow in complexity and requisite cleverness as you progress through the game.  So that means that not only does CrossCode know how to walk the line between ease and challenge, it also knows how to do so while scaling itself accurately to the player’s growing experience and ability to parse out solutions as she/he plays.

So yeah, between managing to incorporate exactly as much creativity to stay fresh without getting carried away and tiresomely over-complicated, and striking that happy balance between always being reasonably within a player’s reach but never tiringly facile, CrossCode might very well carry the distinction of being the greatest RPG I’ve ever played in terms of its puzzles.  It’s not an element of the game that I particularly care about, admittedly,** but it’s still clear just how much skill and work has gone into perfecting this part of CrossCode, and kudos to its creators for their efforts in crafting arguably the best puzzle RPG out there!











* Now, whether or not you have the skill and reflexes to actually carry the solution out, that’s sometimes a different matter.  If I ever meet any of the developers of CrossCode in person, the first thing I’m doing after shaking their hand and thanking them for a good, fun game, is slapping them across the face for that final puzzle in Vermillion Tower.


** Brutally honest truth be told, I have to admit that even CrossCode’s masterful suite of puzzles annoyed and bored me.  But that’s because I’m me, and “me” is a person who only cares about the storytelling elements of an RPG and sees all gameplay stuff, from minigames to puzzles to combat, as mostly extraneous filler.  That doesn’t mean that I can’t still recognize, objectively, when 1 of these elements is extremely well-done, even if I don’t myself enjoy it.

A Dragon's ReQuest

So, I've recently played a brand-new Indie RPG, called A Dragon’s ReQuest, which was made by 1 of my favorite developers, Large Battleship Studios (headed and predominantly populated by a gentleman going by Saint Bomber).  As expected, I loved it, and so, although the game did figure heavily in my last rant about the developer in a more general sense, I want to write a rant more specifically recommending ADRQ to you all.  

A Dragon’s ReQuest is a mostly linear adventure which uses the framework, narrative style, and tropes of 16-bit JRPGs, paying homage to the classics of that most formative of eras for the genre (as is probably obvious from the name),* but also standing as a save-the-world adventure in its own right.  This means that the game is a fairly large departure from Large Battleship Studios’s first couple offerings--Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle was a non-linear and very personal story of life, love, emotional growth, and hope for its protagonist, while Quantum Entanglement is a love story minoring in psychology set against a survival-horror.  Great games, and much of what one might expect from a dedicated Indie creator (hell, EoWC was fairly formative to the very development of the Indie RPG scene!), but certainly not the classic, save-the-world fantasy ventures signature to the RPG genre.

But happily, the best traits of Saint Bomber’s style and purpose as a creator translate well to the classic RPG style.  In fact, it transitions so well to the standard adventure format that most of what I can say to praise the game is really just a rehash of the praise I’ve given to Saint Bomber’s first couple creations.  In no small part due to his remarkable tenacity for party member banter and character development, the cast is interesting, quirky, and engaging throughout, and each member maintains relevance to the story and group dynamic through to the end just as naturally in this 40-hour-game as did the casts of LBS’s previous small ventures.  The constant tongue-in-cheek RPG humor that endears Saint Bomber’s narrative style to a genre enthusiast like myself is on full display, as always, and has only all the more material to work with in a longer adventure like this.  As ever, there’s the extremely poignant emotional moments, the involving, touching, and genuine development of friendship and romantic love, and the ever-present weight of past traumas that we all carry with us in 1 form or another, signature elements that make Saint Bomber’s casts so real and fascinating.

And throughout the game, there’s that peculiar, fascinating, haunting weight in the way that its major heroes and villains interact, which is something that seems very nearly unique to Saint Bomber’s approach to writing and describing the human condition.  Something careful and subtle in the way that his creations’ words and thoughts mingle with the feelings they show.  It’s always been hard to describe this quality of this developer’s games, because it’s a certain emotional heaviness that looms over all that transpires in the game, but it’s not simply the recurring theme of psychological trauma.  Related, perhaps, but not the same thing, not strong or clear enough.

But I think I’ve finally figured out what it is that seems to forever be present in the stories that Saint Bomber weaves, and the characters that color them.  There’s a certain moment in the show The Good Place, in which protagonist Eleanor Shellstrop describes the human condition in terms of how people carry on in the face of mortality, that has stuck with me: “All humans are aware of death.  So we’re all a little bit sad, all the time.”  And that seems like a good way to describe the characters that Saint Bomber creates, only I feel like it’s not the ever-present understanding of one’s own impermanence in this case, but rather, the sad knowledge that those around one will not be there forever.  With the smiles beneath characters’ eyes that always look ever so slightly wistful or reserved, and humor and emotional earnestness always tinged ever so slightly with the echo of hurt, Large Battleship Studios titles are stories told with that tiny little sadness present because the ones that we love will inevitably be parted from us someday.  And A Dragon’s ReQuest is no exception to this signature pervading ambiance.

So anyway, yes, A Dragon’s ReQuest is great, mostly for the same reasons that Embric of Wuflhammer’s Castle and Quantum Entanglement are great.  The transition to a more traditional long, semi-linear RPG adventure format did not hinder Saint Bomber’s style at all.  And it’s a solid RPG adventure in its own right, too, with all the world-saving fanfare, complex magical lore, plot twists and complications, obstacles to be surmounted, ancient legends and heroes and villains, and other such favorite tropes of the classic JRPG.  

The game uses these conventions as a means to be a light deconstruction of the genre, too, which I also like; it makes ADRQ feel like an homage with a purpose.  ADRQ’s actually working the technical advancement of the RPG genre from its humble beginnings 8-bit beginnings to its current state into the game and lore, with protagonist Hinoki remarking at times about how simple and unremarkable the tools and abilities of ancient heroes can seem compared to the advanced abilities and resources of present-day adventurers.  Much of the game’s background and lore is eventually revealed to be a symbolic representation of the manner in which games become larger, more complex, and more impressive by building upon the innovations of their predecessors.  A Dragon’s ReQuest is not only an homage to the early days of RPGs, it’s also a tribute and light examination of the way RPGs have grown over time, which makes it especially appealing to a long-time fan who’s watched that happen firsthand, like myself.  But it’s also done with a light enough touch that a player doesn’t have to be in her/his 40s to enjoy and appreciate the game’s many best qualities, too, so that’s another point in ADRQ’s favor.

Now, as always when recommending a Large Battleship Studios title, a heads-up is in order: A Dragon’s ReQuest contains some explicit sexual content.  But you ARE given the option at the start of the game to have that content turned off, so, as with previous titles, that shouldn’t necessarily discourage you from playing ADRQ if you’re not comfortable with such things.  With that said, although explicit stuff can be turned off, the subject of sex is very pervasive (perversive?) throughout the game, far more than it was in Quantum Entanglement and Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle--it's meant to be a part of the game's discourse. Sex is a part of the way characters express friendship, care, and love in ADRQ, as well as a way to deal with the tension and find enjoyment in the journey.

Well, why not, really? Isn’t that somewhat realistic? If we so frequently accept the ludicrous notion that all these other RPG adventuring parties go about chastely denying themselves for months on end, even as they develop crushes on each other and indulge in romance and put themselves under the most intense psychological stress of their lives, surely we can allow for a rare example of the other side of things with a much more open, and frankly probably far more healthy, embracing of sex.  Some of the most meaningful and moving scenes in ADRQ involve the characters expressing themselves sexually, in fact.  And even when the game’s being more ribald than insightful, its fanservice and indulgence usually doesn’t feel insulting or especially crass, because the characters aren’t treated like objects and it’s not being used as part of the narrative stable of tricks to entice your base human instincts into spending money.  If you ask me, an outright, explicit sex scene in A Dragon’s ReQuest just for the fun of it is still far less tawdry and demeaning to its cast and audience than some cheap PG-13 hot springs gag in a Tales of game, or the girls being harassed into putting themselves on display in bathing suits during SMT Persona 4’s camping trip, because the ADRQ girls are treated by their creator like actual human beings, who are having a good time for their own sake.

At any rate, Saint Bomber once told me that, with Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, he set out to make a sexy game with heart, and wound up creating a heartful game with sex--A Dragon’s ReQuest seems to be a more successful stab at that first ratio.  It rarely bothered me while playing,** and I’d encourage an open mind because it would be a shame to limit oneself enough to miss a really good RPG, but nonetheless, you’ve been forewarned on this matter.

In a related matter, I DO have to, for the sake of fairness, also make note that most of the women involved in the game’s big, encompassing romance are, well...blood-related.  Reasonably distantly, mind you!  The protagonist’s grandmother was also the great-grandmother of 2 of her love interests, which...I mean, I can’t say I love this fact, but on the other hand, second cousins and first cousins once removed (which is what this apparently is; on the plus side, I’ve finally figured out who the fuck The Great Gatsby’s Daisy is to Nick thanks to my pre-rant research for this game) are fairly safely genetically separated.  And the romances in this game, and the way they develop the characters involved therein, are really genuine and good, more than enough to warrant some open-mindedness, I’d say.  I’ve seen far more closely-related, far less worthwhile romances from certain other RPGs, that’s for sure.  Hell, considering that the game’s a big love letter to classic RPGs stuffed with references and such, the fact that these girls are mildly related might merely be A Dragon’s ReQuest’s way of paying homage to Fire Emblem.

Still, if I’m going to make fun of FE’s absolute, insatiable need to fantasize about brothers and sisters porking and make that a part of its narrative, and beat that dead horse every time the subject comes up, it’d hardly be honest not to acknowledge that there’s a hint of incest (a hintcest?) just because I happen to like this game developer better.  It didn’t particularly bother me past an initial raised eyebrow, and again, the game and the romantic interactions contained therein are great enough that I’d continue to recommend open-mindedness, but if moderately distanced relations being in love is a line you don’t cross as an audience, then A Dragon’s ReQuest won’t be your game.

Those are the biggest caveats to my recommendation, though, and I think that they won’t be stumbling blocks for, like, 95% of RPG fans.  Really, I found the fact that the sound effect for canceling out of menus is some woman saying “No” to be way more of a distracting matter than any of the adult elements, and that’s about as tiny a nitpicky complaint as they come.  A Dragon’s ReQuest is another thoughtful, emotional, fun example of Saint Bomber’s creative talents, sure to provoke wholehearted chuckles, heartful yearnings, and teary-eyed sniffles in you, that pleasantly pays homage to and even lightly deconstructs the classics and tenets of its genre.  And it’s free, to boot!  While SquareEnix and Bethesda and their like will charge you $70 for slipshod narrative trainwrecks and lazy unexamined dumpster-fodder, Large Battleship Studios is not just offering you an RPG that’s actually really good, but cheerfully giving it away!  I heartily recommend A Dragon’s ReQuest; go grab it and give it a try!
















* Although I’ll say right now, if Saint Bomber’s aim was to pay respects to and create a game inspired by Dragon Quest, then the man failed utterly and completely.  ADRQ is an RPG whose well-written cast of memorable individuals has great and perceivable depth and development, as well as constant relevance to and interaction with the plot--a plot which is thoughtful, interesting, and fun.  I can’t think of a game less like the average Dragon Quest.


** Although the giant-climbing part felt like maybe a bit much, if I’m being honest.

General RPG Creator Large Battleship Studios's Character Writing

Large Battleship Studios is the Indie developer behind Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, Quantum Entanglement, and A Dragon’s ReQuest, all RPGs for which I have a great deal of respect.  Headed by a gentleman going by Saint Bomber, there’s a lot about the studio’s titles to like, such as thoughtful and deceptively layered storytelling, engaging and witty humor, and the masterful way that humor is used to balance, enhance, and constructively work through a recurring and penetrating theme of emotional/psychological trauma.  But by far the strongest virtue Saint Bomber possesses as a creator, in my opinion, is his capacity for writing characters.  He very well may be, in fact, one of the most consistently excellent creators in this field that I’ve come across in my experience of almost 500 RPGs!  And today, I’d like to go over why that is, and pay him some due respect for his efforts, which I’ve so thoroughly enjoyed thrice now, and anticipate savoring again in the future.

So what makes Saint Bomber so great at what he does?  Well, first and foremost, the man puts in the time and does the work, to a degree that few RPG developers can match.  As one would expect, Saint Bomber lays the foundations of his characters’ personal points of depth and development, to give them weight to the audience and provide all that good, meaty drama of the human experience.  And it’s good stuff--stories of love so great that it permeates all possible iterations of a person’s life and reality, survivors of trauma gradually finding peace and purpose in the joy they find with and give to others, devotion so great that time itself bends the knee to it, children rising above the horrors that created them to be great and dignified people...roadmaps of humanity laid out with landmarks of sorrow, joy, pain, purpose, regret, love, fear, and more, are what you can expect of the cast of a Large Battleship Studios venture.  These are well-developed entities with interesting and emotionally gripping stories.

But while the existence of Chrono Cross means that I can’t make the claim that just anyone can write a decent character, certainly it’s not a trait singular to Saint Bomber.  Wild Arms 3, Children of the Zodiarcs, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, Final Fantasy 9, Knights of the Old Republic 2, Tales of the Abyss, Final Fantasy 7, Hades 1, Dragon Age 1, and so many more RPGs all have great casts of at least comparable quality to LBS titles in terms of character depth.  I’d match the main characters of Tales of Berseria against Quantum Entanglement’s any day, and much as I enjoy Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle and A Dragon’s ReQuest, the merit of both of their casts put together can’t compete with that of Disco Elysium.  Because basically nothing can.  Suck it, Shakespeare, you had your time.

But what makes Saint Bomber stand out amongst his exceptional peers in terms of character development is that he’s never done with it.  There never seems to be a point in an LBS character’s journey at which point Saint Bomber says to himself, “Okay, that’s a wrap--she’s been characterized as far as she can be.”  There’s always a new and significant facet of his characters’ psyches that can be revealed and explored, which will influence who they are and how they interact with their friends, lovers, and/or nemeses going forward.

Take Aurellia in A Dragon’s ReQuest, for example.  With the issues of her upbringing, her trauma from being a prisoner who suffered great physical and mental torture, and her internal war between the hero she was intended to be and the monster she was crafted to become, Aurellia’s arguably the most deep and nuanced character in the game, and Saint Bomber does plenty with her throughout its course.  By the time that the heroes have arrived at Malphon’s castle, ostensibly the final dungeon of the game, Aurelia’s grown significantly as a person thanks to her experiences and more importantly her companions’ influence, and the player feels that he/she has a solid handle on her.  And yet!  If the player goes forward with the Seal Malphon ending, then he/she must choose between 3 variants of that ending, and in 2 of those, a fact is revealed about Aurellia’s feelings and her past which is massively significant to who she is, substantially rearranging how the player may view and understand Aurellia and retroactively altering how many of her issues and relationships over the game’s course can be interpreted.  Frankly, even if the player is ultimately shooting for the happier endings (which I certainly recommend), these scenes (particularly the one between Hinoki and Aurellia as they clear out monsters) are still so great and poignant that I’d say the ADRQ experience isn’t complete without witnessing them.

That’s a major piece of character development that occurs during 2 of the game’s endings, and not even the true ending,** for that matter.  And it’s not like this is some idiotic attempt to introduce some completely alien, disjointed element to the story right at the last second like those hacks at Bioware foisted on Mass Effect 3, nor is this a case of a too little, too late last ditch effort to salvage a major story entity who’s been grossly undeveloped and shallow up until this ending moment, as with Tales of Phantasia’s Dhaos and Tales of Vesperia’s Duke.  This new light being shed on Aurellia is simply another major component of a character who has been well-explored, and it’s relevant and accurate to both her character and its place in the plot.  Not every LBS character is always developing right to the last second of the game, but each one’s potential never seems to be finished in Saint Bomber’s eyes, and he’s ready and rarin’ to build a new expansion on any of his creations at any time that seems right, even to the very end.  You can’t say that about a lot of RPG writers, even really good ones.  I mean, hell, I’d call the cast of Final Fantasy 9 great, and it’s 1 of the best RPGs I’ve played, but when they finished Freya’s character arc barely a quarter of the way into the game, they were fucking done doing anything with the character.  If Saint Bomber had been on the staff of that game, we would’ve been treated to Freya’s excellent character discovering new truths about herself and staying narratively relevant for just as long as Zidane himself...and she probably would’ve ended the story with a far happier and more fulfilling romantic situation, too.

And since we’re on the subject of love, let’s look at character relationships in Large Battleship Studios games (which mostly evolve into love, hence this segue).  The “putting in the work” angle is also on positive display in terms of the cast’s group dynamics, not just with the characters as individuals.  Saint Bomber treats the relationships each party member has with one another almost like characters in themselves, growing the cast not just on the individual level, but also as an emotional collective.  Even as he develops his creations in a personal capacity, he also advances the ways they interact, who they are to each other, how they change and behave in one another’s presence.

Granted, this is something seen less in Quantum Entanglement and Embric of Wulfhammer’s Castle, because of the way those games are structured--EoWC is Catherine’s personal journey and so she’s the center of almost all of the game’s dynamic character relationships, and QE is a game about only 2 people.  But A Dragon’s ReQuest is the more traditional venture of a party of several individuals in close contact for the extended period of a long quest, and in ADRQ, each party member has living, evolving relationships with one another and with the party as a whole.  These are written and labored upon almost as entities of their own, fitting Hinoki and her comrades together as friends and family until they reach a point at which these people who know one another so intimately and have found so much of themselves thanks to each other that the idea that they could do anything but spend the rest of their lives together actually feels wrong, unnatural.

This is, of course, a natural component to RPG casts to some degree, but not a lot of games really take the time to care about every single strand that connects each character to the others in a party’s web of personal connections and treat it as important.  Take Chrono Trigger, for example.  1 of the absolute greatest RPGs of all time, CT has plenty of significant ties between its cast members, but in many cases, “allies joined by a common purpose” is as far as they go.  Crono and Marle, Crono and Lucca, Lucca and Robo, Crono and Marle and Lucca, and Frog and Magus are all relationships that are narratively significant and thus developed, but the rest of the interrelationships don’t get much attention.  And that’s fine, they don’t necessarily need to, because obviously CT is an amazing product as it stands.  But still, if Saint Bomber had been involved, there’s a good chance that you’d see moments set aside wherein Ayla and Marle are isolated and form a unique and poignant emotional bond, and Robo and Frog have a meaningful heart-to-heart one evening which ties into their respective character journeys, and Lucca and Magus find some common ground that the latter can’t find with the others, and so on.  Like I said, there are other RPGs that achieve this sort of group-connections-as-its-own-narrative-entity quality--my favorite part of Tales of Legendia is just how perfectly it creates a found family out of its cast, for example--but it’s certainly a rarity to hit this level, and Saint Bomber puts in the effort to make it happen.

More than anything else, though, the put-in-the-work approach that makes a Large Battleship Studios game’s cast so compelling is exemplified by the banter.  Oh that glorious, glorious banter!  Perhaps even more than the major moments of character development, the excellence of a Saint Bomber cast is formed by the fact that they are all constantly communicating and reacting to their adventure and the world around them.  Catherine, Marine, Hinoki, and their respective companions have thoughts to express on what NPCs say to them, the events unfolding before them, the settings they find themselves in, the objects that they interact with...every party member is constantly involved in what’s happening before them.  LBS games are not the (sadly common) RPG where companions only pipe up now and then to comment on what’s happening, if ever.  The banter between each game’s characters is an ever-present way of establishing and reinforcing their distinctive personalities, and growing their dynamics as allies, friends, and lovers.***  

Having cast input as a steady, continuous part of the game’s narrative and environment is a major key to the creation of characters that the audience remembers, understands, loves, and wants to spend time with.  As vital and powerful as major development scenes are as a tool, as important and compelling as the major points of depth and nuance are in defining a character, it’s the day-to-day dialogue and remarks that cement who a character is, not just what they’re about.  Interactions based simply on the everyday thoughts, feelings, and so on do more to establish and immortalize a character’s personality than their major dramatic moments in the plot.  And it also keeps the cast feeling relevant to the group and adventure as a whole, even past their time.  I may (somewhat often) criticize Final Fantasy 9 for leaving an excellent character by the wayside early on, but Freya at least still regularly engages with the rest of the party, and that makes a world of difference.  You can’t say the same for, say, half of the cast of Xenogears, who, once their small arcs of development are over, become largely mute and feel superfluous as a whole.  Freya’s still having a voice past her significance makes her an unfortunate waste of potential in a great game, while Billy, Maria, Rico, and Chu Chu’s lack of engagement past what’s strictly necessary make them embarrassing symptoms that lessen the game and highlight how terribly it’s written.

Grandia’s dinner conversations, the Tales of series’s skits, Final Fantasy 9’s Active Time Events, Legaia 2’s fireside chats...there are a lot of different tools in the chest for accomplishing this effect, and I appreciate and love them all.  But simple, constant, and direct verbal involvement of the main characters with the myriad facets of their adventure is the most obvious way to do it, if you’ve got the dedication for it.  It’s what makes Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5’s roster feel so much more real and personable than the previous couple Personas, and it’s much of what makes the player feel like he/she truly knows and cares about a Large Battleship Studios cast.

But that banter takes a hell of a lot of work, because as I said, Saint Bomber’s characters trade quips and have conversations about their situation, the people they’re talking to, props...just about anything around them that they could have thoughts about, these characters react to.  And that’s an impressive level of detail to include in even a small, 2-to-3-hour game like Quantum Entanglement, let alone the huge honkin’ standard-length RPG that is A Dragon’s ReQuest, but even right to the end of the latter, Hinoki and company are bantering like ever before.  Also impressive is the fact that Saint Bomber can manage to maintain an appealing humorous energy the whole time--a less genuinely enjoyable cast and a less amusing wit might transform so constant a level of dialogue into an overwhelming slog, but thus far I have yet to feel that way even once.

And you can tell Saint Bomber has a respect for banter as a method of character writing, because as light and fun as it often is, he never hesitates to take an opportunity to use it for a moment of vulnerability, or for two characters to get real about something that’s troubling them or to express heartfelt care for one another.  You never know whether the next flower vase or writing desk that you check out is going to lead to an aside that tickles your heartstrings, or forces upon you a moment of regretful sympathy for the villain.  All you can be sure of is that it’ll probably be in the midst of a diverting digression whose humor made the poignant little moment all the stronger.

The quality (and constancy) of LBS characters’ banter brings us to the other of the 2 most signature, major reasons that Saint Bomber is such a terrific character writer: he treats his creations as real people, and their relationships as real things.  Now look, I’m not inside the man’s head.****  I don’t KNOW what is and isn’t going on in there.  But based on playing his games, I feel like the characters that Saint Bomber creates are very much living entities to him.  It’s a well-known trope that authors claim that their creations take on a life of their own, and that’s surely true to some degree for most creators, but I do think that, in a lot of cases, this idea is somewhat exaggerated by those who make the claim.

But in the case of Saint Bomber, the sentiment that the characters have a life of their own definitely seems to be describing reality, and the banter is what shows this.  Their back-and-forth might be the biggest indication of just how much Saint Bomber truly loves the characters he creates, as real, feeling people, because he gives them every chance he can to express their thoughts, whether silly or soulful, and allows those countless little conversations to progress to a natural conclusion.  Any momentary aside can evolve into a conversation of over a half-dozen text-boxes in an LBS game.  It never feels like padding, never feels forced, as though Saint Bomber is simply doing it for the conscious sake of expanding and cementing his characters.  It instead always gives the indications of a little talk that gets sidetracked because real people are sharing themselves, and that’s how conversations work between people with personalities who are emotionally open and real with each other--the interaction evolves and moves along.

Where most RPG character interactions feel like a conscious effort by the writer to explore her/his creations and expand on the story,**** Saint Bomber’s banter is the kind of natural, flowing back-and-forth that real-life people have.  His characters feel like they speak and evolve on their own, as though he is simply a witness who chronicles these conversations and stories, rather than the one who directs them.  I legitimately could believe that Catherine, Alice, Gabby, Marine, Hinoki, Fluorine, Garnet, Aurellia, Argon, and so many more of the entities in a Large Battleship Studios title are, in fact, benign and fully alive split personalities living within Saint Bomber’s head space, growing into entities as he creates their games until it’s more a matter of his consulting them for their reactions and interactions than his consciously writing them.  I mean, I don’t actually think that’s happening, and certainly I don’t want to take anything away from the great effort he undoubtedly makes to hone his characters’ personalities through such constant application; I’m just saying that they feel real and vivid enough as people that I could believe they essentially were, and certainly Saint Bomber gives every indication of caring about them as such.  And while Large Battleship Studios isn’t the only creator who can manage such a level of realism to his characters’ personalities and a treatment of them that feels empathetic to the degree of treating them as actual people--Toby Fox is a talented peer on this matter--Saint Bomber’s certainly at the forefront of the field.

This notable talent for treating and presenting his creations as real people also affects the extended cast of his games, too.  The lives and relationships of secondary characters and minor villains are compelling, and frequently matter in greater ways than one expects.  Secondary villains Rowdy, Larceny, and Payola all have more personality and depth in ADRQ than half the RPG protagonists I’ve encountered in my time, the barely-seen Greyghast of EoWC is nonetheless a chilling, sobering monster whose presence is constantly felt in the traumatic legacy Catherine carries with her, small NPC love interests like the Nereid and Chelisera that in other games would doubtless be minor, throwaway matters are treated as legitimately valued, adored beloveds whose affections are referenced and important past their little niches in the story...and you never know when the bystander sitting in the corner is going to turn out to be the person upon which all the world hinges.  It reminds me in some regards of Disco Elysium’s approach with its smaller cast members, and any time you’re on the same page as DE, you’re probably doing something very right.  Few are the characters, even minor ones, that truly only matter for a moment in an LBS game; the secondary and minor characters are not merely cogs in a narrative machine, but rather still full people with their own stories that just didn’t happen to be the protagonists of this one.

Now, Saint Bomber has plenty of other good qualities for character writing beyond these 2 characteristics.  He’s got a talent and interest in word play, a very good sense of humor, and an appealing style of writing, among other fine traits as an author.  But I think that the 2 most signature elements to what make Large Battleship Studios characters so vividly personable and deeply memorable, the greatest draw of its games, are Saint Bomber’s ability to love his creations and their relationships as authentic human beings and impress that perspective upon his audience, and his tenacity to never stop working for them.  At the very least, they’re the qualities that make Saint Bomber number among my favorite RPG creators, and I think it’s worth calling some positive attention to them.
















* Well...2-and-a-half, I suppose.  A venture that’s purely created for the sake of comedy is kind of its own thing.


** Although the events of the True Ending also have a very significant moment of self-understanding for Aurellia, too, that resolves and crystallizes a lot of the feelings and growth she’s had during the journey, too.  The character development of a Large Battleship Studio game really is never over until the curtain drops.  And it might not even be finished then--if I understand it, 1 of his games I have yet to play will see a return of some of his previous titles’ casts, and I won’t exactly be shocked if this opportunity to continue to build and refine their characters is exploited to its fullest potential.


*** Not to mention, it also serves, as I’ve mentioned before, an extra narrative purpose in Quantum Entanglement, in which the steady stream of flippant quips and jokes is used by Marine and Gabby as a means of keeping their calm, and resisting the ever-growing anxiety and urge to panic in their situation.  Although you could also make the argument that QE is just a more immediately apparent example of what Saint Bomber does in all his games on this point, as the sense of humor that most of his characters possess is at least partially a coping mechanism for dealing with the sadnesses and traumas they’ve experienced in the past, or even during the events of the game’s plot.  Either way, it’s comedy well-utilized for an interesting purpose.


**** And trust me, I’ve tried to get in there; I’ve never met any human being so infuriatingly committed to non-committal when it comes to revealing his narrative and emotional intentions, and the inner workings of his lore.  The man would not even confirm how Hinoki Jr.’s real name is pronounced when I asked him.  I mean, look, Saint Bomber has stated on more than 1 occasion that it’s largely out of a desire to give his audience the freedom of their own interpretation, and that’s great and I do respect that, but it drives an inquisitive lore-goblin like me crazy.  Particularly when half the reason I’m asking is because I’m self-conscious about whether I’m truly understanding and getting the most out of the works I take in. I just want confirmation that I’m not Stubb from Moby Dick, stuck in that hellish intellectual limbo wherein he can recognize that there are deeper levels to what’s happening around him, but falls just short of being able to understand them, and this man just.  Isn’t.  Helping.  I have never wanted telepathy more than when trying to get a straight answer out of Saint Bomber.

Oh, and why yes, since I’m gonna invite him to read this rant when it’s finished, this IS very passive-aggressive, thanks for noticing.  Look, I think I have sung more than enough of Saint Bomber’s (very well-earned!) praises in this rant to earn the right to vent a little.


***** Not that there is ANYTHING wrong with making a conscious effort to do this, by the way.  Please do not mistake my sentiments here--I absolutely want RPG writers to feel an obligation to refine and labor upon their creations in such a way.  Unless you’re just outright terrible at your job to a Wild Arms 4 level, making that effort is only going to be beneficial to the product.  To use an example from before, SMT Persona 5 has a very healthily present level of cast interactions, and each conversation feels like a conscious choice and effort of the writers to think of the topic, how the characters will interact with it, and how they’ll drive it to its intended conclusion.  The result is still a real-feeling discussion that develops the characters’ personalities and identities, and makes them a vibrant cast that the player likes and remembers.