Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4's Use of Its Setting

Major thanks, as is often the case, to good Ecclesiastes for his help with both the brainstorming for this rant, and for looking it over to make sure it’s vaguely coherent.  You’re a right proper gent, sir.



Hey, here’s a question for the universe: Why did Atlus decide to make Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 set in rural Japan?

I mean, don’t misunderstand me, here.  I’m not against the idea of setting a Persona title somewhere other than the big city.  In fact, I fully respect the idea.  The Persona subseries (at least, from 3 onward) has a major interest in showing and reveling in the life, culture, mentality, and rebellion of late adolescence, and while it’s easy and obvious to match Persona’s fast-paced, cutting-edge aesthetic style to an urban environment, the singular experience of those years spent on the brink of adulthood is no less felt and grappled with by teens in small communities, too.  The youth of pastoral Japan are just as deserving of a Persona highlighting and immersing itself within their experience and the culture that surrounds them as the youths of the city.

But that’s...not really what they got with SMT Persona 4, is it?  At least, I don’t think so.  Because when I step back and look at the game, it seems to me that Persona 4 hasn’t the slightest idea of what to do with its setting, how to make life in Inaba authentic and how to highlight the kind of lifestyle and aspirations of the kids who live in tiny towns like it.

Let’s look at the main cast, for a start.  Have you ever noticed that half of the Investigation Team are effectively outsiders to Inaba?  We won’t count Teddie for obvious reasons, but Yu, Yosuke, and Naoto are all newcomers to Inaba who have lived their lives elsewhere until roughly the time of the game’s events.*  And if we’re being reasonable, we really have to count Rise as an outsider, too.  Inaba may be her hometown, but she’s lived away from it for long enough, in an influential enough capacity, that the primary components of Rise’s character and personality make her functionally more of an urbanite than any of them.  Not to mention that after the game’s end, Rise’s gonna go back to the idol biz, so this stint in Inaba really is just a mega-star taking a small mental health vacation, and nothing more.

And as a bonus, 1 of the remaining cast who are actually authentic, born-and-raised inhabitants of Inaba, is Yukiko.  Yukiko, whose initial personal crisis, and a good chunk of whose character development from that point on, revolves around her wanting to get the hell out of this podunk little town, and eventually coming to accept her future in Inaba.  She’s not even the first character to use this as an opener to her character development; Yosuke’s conflict with his shadow was also largely based on the fact that he dislikes being stuck in a small backwoods town!  There is, thankfully, a lot more to Yosuke’s character than just that, and a little more to Yukiko’s as well, but that still doesn’t change the fact that of the 7 human characters in this game, 4 are complete outsiders to the setting, and of the remaining 3 honest townies, 1’s most memorable and defining character trait is the desire to get the hell out!

If Persona 4 is so fucking hot for rustic Japan, why does it need to import half of the main characters to get the team it wants?  Why does it need to have multiple residents of the town regard it as a prison?  You know how many characters in Persona 5 are newcomers who just moved to the city from a smaller community?  0 to 1, depending on where Ren comes from--and that's me being very generous, because our momentary glimpse into his past sure makes it look like he's from a developed area himself.  And it's pretty much a flat 0 for Persona 3; there's close to no chance Minato and Kotone aren't city slickers .  You know how many times I can recall a party member from either game talk about how sick they were of living in the city and how much they wanted to get out of the concrete jungle and live in the beauty of the country?  Another big fat 0.

It’s not even like they HAD to do this for most of the characters.  I mean, why imply that Yu comes from a larger, busier community?  He could have functioned just as well as the newcomer to town if he’d moved to Inaba from a similar sleepy little town--making the lateral shift from 1 city environment to another certainly doesn’t get in the way of Ren being an outside oddity of note in SMTP5’s community.  Naoto could just as easily have been a local kid detective hero getting more and more involved in the cases as the game progresses; her history and all significant parts of her personality would have remained comfortably intact.

And why have Yosuke be a former city kid at all?  His greatest role in the story is as Yu’s best buddy, confidant, and initial guide to Inaba as a whole.  Yosuke could’ve done all that just as well had he just BEEN a kid from Inaba, particularly the part where he’s Yu’s guide to the community early on.  It’s not like you’d have to change the Junes angle at all--there’s no reason Yosuke’s dad couldn’t just have been a local man chosen to run the new superstore.  That even would have opened up new avenues of character development for him, as he wrestles with the guilt that his family is benefiting from the destruction of his community’s economy, and it would have made the dichotomy between him and Saki Konishi, and his tormented after-the-fact feelings regarding her, so much more interesting.  Yosuke could have been an even better character without the insulating layer of being an outsider that allows him to keep the community around him at arm’s length!

And since we’re on the subject, can we also talk about the major issues that characterize Inaba as a whole?  The main story of the game is about the murder spree, and that’s fine.  But the other major issue facing Inaba as a whole is its local economy struggling to compete with the invasion of a retail titan’s superstore.  The Junes situation is essentially the only real characterization we get of the town’s happenings and conflicts beyond the mandated-by-plot murder spree.  Which means that the biggest thing that characterizes the rural setting of Persona 4 is its reaction to the intrusion of a major urban influence.

That’s the major problem with how Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 goes about utilizing its setting: the writers only seem to know or care about pastoral Japan in the context of its relationship to urban Japan.  They can barely manage to write a major character who’s not a displaced urbanite, itching to get out of the sticks, or both.  The only way they know how to characterize the town itself is in relation to the encroachment of institutions from more developed areas.  The creators of SMTP4 just can’t seem to conceive of rural Japan as a place in its own right.

Even the approach to the player’s interaction with the country town environment isn’t handled well.  Why is there so little free exploration of Inaba available?  The idea of being restricted to certain smaller areas connected by map points feels at home in SMTP3 and 5, games set in city environments where space is a premium and movement from 1 area of the burg to another is usually characterized by public transportation with specific stops.  But with the surrounding countryside and freer amount of space for public use in a small town like Inaba, it would have made way more sense to allow the player a freer method of exploring the environs than the same select-which-place-you-want-to-go method that works in SMTP3 and 5.  Inaba never feels like a place where you can stretch your legs and take in the surroundings, and that seems counterproductive for utilizing the setting’s potential to me.

You know what seems like the most telling thing about all this, to me?  The thing that best shows this mindset the game has, where it perpetually sees a small town environment like Inaba as something foreign and hasn’t the slightest idea of what it should do with the place?  The fact that the Velvet Room of SMTP4 is set inside of a limousine.  A vehicle specifically designed to separate the rider from the people and places he’s driven past.  Frankly, the fact that Igor frames this whole venture in Inaba as an obstruction to a journey feels exactly on point to the way the writers approach this setting as a whole.**

Look.  It’s not like I’m asking that every major character in SMTP4 don a straw hat, stick a stalk of grass between their teeth, and end every sentence with “a-yup.”  But you don’t have to pigeonhole townies to tell a story about them and their community.  The anime Non Non Biyori manages to create stories about the kids of a rural community--way smaller than even Inaba, I’d like to add--for multiple seasons, and not once does it feel like it’s having trouble finding authentic material for its small-town slice-of-life adventures.  The countryside of Japan and its inhabitants are duly respected and celebrated in Non Non Biyori, instead of treated as an obstacle or annoyance as they are in Persona 4.

But then, the creative force behind Non Non Biyori has, from what I understand, actual experience with living in the countryside that the show depicts.  Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4, on the other hand, I can only assume was created by a writing team whose origins were uniformly of the urban sprawl.  That’s purely speculation, of course, but honestly, I really can’t see any other rational possibility for the way the game handles small-town life.

As my good reader and better friend Ecclesiastes put it, “Inaba is a theme park more than a place.”

















* Admittedly, that’s the standard for modern Persona protagonists; Ren and Minato are also both outsiders to the setting of their games, but each are implied to simply have transferred from 1 urban environment to a new one.  Yu is likewise implied to be a city boy, though, which makes him more than just the newcomer that Minato and Ren are--it makes him an actual outsider to the setting.


** And even the limo Velvet Room feels like a place you want to leave as soon as possible.  It’s so uncomfortably claustrophobic and secluded!  How is it possible that an elevator and a prison cell have felt more spacious and inviting as Velvet Rooms than the interior of what’s supposed to be a luxury vehicle?