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.

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5's Window-Dressing

I love the level of stylization of the technical, moving parts of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5.  There’s a good number of RPGs which make an effort to give themselves a look and feel of their own by customizing their basic components (menu screens, text boxes, loading/transition effects, etc), to be sure, and a few have even managed to achieve a look and feel that’s iconic to them.  You always know, for example, when you’re playing a game that’s been heavily influenced by the Mother series (such as Undertale or Omori) by its mimicry of Earthbound’s simple positioning, overall structure, and appearance of the game’s menus, text boxes, and combat narration.*  

I don’t know if any game has quite so appealingly and thoroughly stylized its operations as SMTP5, though.  The game endeavors to always keep a sense of fluid action to itself, to keep its themes of the master thief in motion and the endless activity of the urban sprawl impressed upon you at all times, and it does it well.  Transitioning from point to point in an RPG’s menus usually necessarily represents a sudden hitting of the brakes to its action, but sections of Persona 5’s menus move swiftly, come at you, skew themselves at angles, with dynamic background images of Ren at work.  There’s even some transitions in the game in which Ren brings in the new section through a fast, energetic animation.  Battle menus are visually interesting as they center in on the characters and explode outward, victory screens depict the team already running to their next destination, menu color schemes put the SMT series’s stark, solid contrasts of colors to work to catch the eye but never become garish...Atlus’s developers make every effort to keep you engaged and entertained with the dashing thief motif of the game, and the result is an extremely cool, singular twist on even the most mundane elements of the RPG experience.

Equally neat are the transition screens when traveling around the city.  Whenever you go to a new section of Tokyo, the wipe from 1 area to the next is a snapshot of a subway car and its passengers, making the experience of Ren’s commute your own.  And rather than this simply being a static thing (which still would have been fun and stylized, mind you), the visuals of this transition change according to time of day and year--the lighting changes depending on whether Ren is traveling at day or evening, and his fellow riders’ clothing likewise is appropriate for the season (there’s even costumes for Halloween, and decorations for Christmas!).  When Ren’s moving about school, the transition screen is that of several student silhouettes as they pass by in the hall (sometimes you can see some of Ren’s classmates, too).  When transitioning between places within a specific area of the city, the screen changes according to the weather.

I really love the one for rain--the geometric pattern formed by the umbrellas is so pleasing to watch that I found myself having Ren exit his home on rainy days even if I didn’t actually have business out in the neighborhood, just for the chance to see the umbrella transition.  When you’ve made such an appealing loading screen that the player is actually seeking it out, you know you’ve done something right.  The stylistic bells and whistles of Ren’s day-to-day are engaging and dynamic, this time in a comforting and familiar way, selling the natural rhythm and community of city life in a way that not only keeps it an ever-present thematic setting, but also one that possesses a nostalgic feeling of home.

It’s the big things that make an RPG good or bad--story, purpose, characters, creativity, pacing, that sort of thing.  But nothing quite sells just how much a creative team cares for what it’s created, how much the creators had a sincere vision for the game from top to bottom, like great little details and window-dressing like this.  Atlus didn’t just do what it had to for the game and call it a day, it put effort into Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 5 from top to bottom, and I appreciate that a heck of a lot.










* Mind you, such little touches and details are not always beneficial--I, personally, actually don’t like the slightly choppy, never-quite-fluid input and timing of the Mother style, for example.  And I’ll be damned if I know what Saint Bomber was thinking when he made the menu cancel sound effect a woman saying “No” in the newly-released A Dragon’s ReQuest.

Fire Emblem 15's Jedah and Celica are Both Pretty Stupid

Cult leaders are not really known for making good choices.  Which isn’t surprising, of course.  Much like psychopathy and a corporate executive, or compulsive lying and the publishing head of Bethesda, poor decision-making is essentially a requirement for the job of being a cult leader; without it you pretty much won’t be in the role to start with.  But even compared to notably dumb peers like Mr. Carpainter and Confessor Cromwell, Fire Emblem 15’s Jedah is a moron.

So here’s the scene:Jedah has persuaded protagonist Celica to at least consider the option he's offering. He’s convinced her to come over to his place to talk the deal over.  The man is so, so near to achieving his goals.  Depending on Celica's Tiresome Overwrought Self-Sacrificing Girl levels, Jedah might be just minutes away from the most important success in his life. Victory is so close.

And what does he do?

He announces--gleefully announces, mind you, this clearly tickles him pink, or at least a less putrescent shade of periwinkle than usual--to Celica that since her friends happen to be around, he's gonna kill them all right in front of her before he’ll continue to pursue their diplomatic discussion.

I mean holy shit dude, could you really not have eased off on the cliched villainy for 10 minutes until you’d secured Celica’s help?  What, it would’ve killed you to just have her entourage chill in the lobby for a few, while you take Celica to your office and secure the win?  Do you somehow think that it’s going to strengthen your bargaining position to announce that you’re a psychopath whose absolute highest priority is the pleasure of killing a dozen of your business partner’s closest friends, or something?  In terms of shooting yourself in the foot, this is basically loading your foot into a fucking cannon's barrel and cheerfully lighting the fuse...

...And yet somehow still managing, through truly miraculous contrivance, to completely miss that shot.  Because in spite of Jedah arbitrarily deciding that Celica’s allies, childhood friends, and brother should all die just for shits and giggles, Celica is STILL stupid enough an hour later to sell her soul to the jackass in exchange for Alm’s safety.  Jedah seriously hit the RPG Villain Lottery with this twit.  Any other RPG protagonist would see a spontaneous self-indulgent attempt at slaughtering said protagonist’s friends as a deal-breaker, but Jedah managed to get the ONLY heroine in the entire franchise that doesn’t buy into that Friendship is Magic bunk.  Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of other RPG narratives have been specifically based around the idea that a protagonist refuses to sacrifice even a single member of their party to save the world, and meanwhile Jedah doesn’t lose an iota of bargaining leverage for trying to kill them ALL as a villainous side hustle!  Ike may fight for his friends, but Celica sure as hell ain’t gonna.

So Celica, the fact that the guy trying to convince you to do as he says because it’s for the greater good of all is the same guy who has a truly irrepressible urge to see human beings die, that doesn’t bother you, huh?  No red flags?  Nothing that doesn’t add up about the murder-enthusiast making a case about what’s in the best interests of humanity as a whole?  You don’t see any conflict of interest on that one, Celica?

The fact that she later has the shameless audacity to be shocked when Jedah betrays her trust and doesn’t keep his end of their bargain--said end being “just, like, don’t kill this 1 single guy, please”; Celica didn’t exactly haggle very hard and yet it was still more than Jedah could deliver--is mind-boggling.  Hell, even if he hadn’t attempted to murder every one of her friends in front of her as a way to kick off their diplomatic talks, her surprise would still be absurd.  Oh gosh, Celica, did the cackling yellow-eyed cult leader who regularly sacrifices women’s souls to his dark god turn out not to be trustworthy?  Well, at least you can take comfort in the fact that there was just no way to tell that he wasn’t on the up and up.

So yeah, Jedah is a self-sabotaging idiot, and the only reason that he gets as far as he does in FE15’s narrative is that he luckily got matched against a protagonist who is not only really stupid, but also shockingly unconcerned with the well-being of those around her.

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3, 4, and 5 Social Link Comparison, Part 3

And here we are, the last part of this criminally self-indulgent, overlong rant!  To any brave, foolish reader who's made it this far, take heed, you're almost at the end!  By certain extremely lax definitions of the term "almost," at least.  Let's finish this thing up!



17. THE STAR
In SMTP3, The Star is represented by Mamoru, a rival athlete, for Makoto, and Akihiko, a teammate and love interest, for Kotone. In SMTP4, it's Teddie, a teammate and fucking annoying waste of programming code.  In SMTP5, it’s Hifumi, a shogi player and love interest.

Meaning
The Star is the light of hope, healing, and faith, a guide to the right path in the dark times of one's life (typically the fall represented by The Tower). By "faith," it doesn't necessarily mean religion, but faith in the more basic sense of the word...one's trust can be placed in a deity or system of belief, but it can also be in oneself, another, a lovely intangible, or whatever else can provide one with inspiration and guidance. Renewal, optimism, inspiration...The Star doesn't provide an end result to dilemmas or journeys, but it does represent the beginning of the right path to resolution.

Honestly, none of Persona 3 or 4’s Social Links seems to be very in tune with this. I mean, I guess you can say that Teddie finds the path to self-discovery thanks to his friends, but there's no really strong indication of their guidance or of faith of one kind or another being a part of it...it all just sort of comes together. Not to mention, he definitely does find resolution on who he is, so the path goes beyond the boundaries that The Star is supposed to cover.

Akihiko’s no more accurate--he, too, finds a fairly definite resolution to his problems, and while he says that it’s all thanks to Kotone’s guidance, it all feels much more like he came to several conclusions on his own, offscreen, after a lot of dilly-dallying with nothing during the actual events of the Social Link. He kind of has great faith in the ability of strength to protect the ones he loves, but that’s a real stretch, and it’s not even a particularly strong part of the story anyway.  Meanwhile, Mamoru's not too much better than Akihiko. I guess you can say that he finds a new path to his dreams of becoming an athlete that will allow him to first provide for his family with a job, or perhaps that providing for his family IS the better path he should take, but that's a somewhat shaky connection to the Arcana, and it still doesn't really involve faith in any significant capacity that I can see.

Persona 5 is more on-point with the Arcana.  While there’re some mitigating details, much of what Hifumi’s story boils down to is the matter of faith--she starts with a false faith in herself, her faith is broken when she discovers that her successes have been the result of her mother’s bribing Hifumi’s opponents to take a dive, her mother’s done so out of a plan to use shogi as a springboard for turning Hifumi into a model partly because the mother doesn’t have faith that Hifumi could find acceptable success as a competitive shogi player, and the resolution of this story involves Hifumi accepting the blow to her ego, assessing herself and what she wants, and coming back to start over as a competitive shogi player because she has faith that she CAN reach the top through her own earnest abilities and training.  While The Star doesn’t necessarily relate to a case of having one’s faith broken or reshaped as the truth of its origins is revealed (that seems much more like a Tower thing), there’s still plenty of ways this Social Link ties to the Arcana on that level.  Additionally, Hifumi’s faith at the end of the Link in her ability to earn her way to the future she wants is a case of her now treading the right path, the other major part of The Star.

Verdict: Easy win for Persona 5.

Worth
Persona 3: Akihiko’s story, while probably the most character development he’s ever had, is mostly boring, poorly paced, and only has a few parts that have any actual, meaningful character development for him, so we’ll go with Mamoru as Persona 3’s representative.  Mamoru’s story about a talented athlete learning how to prioritize the well-being of his family and mature into a responsible young man who values those around him more than his own ambitions and lives with the realities of his life instead of blaming them for what he can’t have, is a simple, straightforward, good one.  It doesn’t stand out compared to some of Persona 3’s others, but it’s a worthwhile experience, and Makoto and Mamoru’s parting as buddies as Mamoru leaves to take a new job is satisfying.
SCORE: 2 (Akihiko’s would have been 1)

Persona 4: Objectively speaking, Teddie’s story is pretty dull, and the scenes that make it up are uncoordinated and often don’t feel focused on progressing to the Link’s conclusion, a conclusion which is really only at all emotionally significant because it’s piggybacking off the main story’s events with Nanako’s near-death experience.  I guarantee you that if it weren’t intrinsically linked to the powerful scenes involving Nanako, the conclusion of Teddie’s supposed story of self-discovery would have little impact whatever  

That’s me being objective.  Subjectively speaking, I goddamn hate Teddie.  Oh my GOD what an annoying asshole he is.  Every time Teddie hits on a female--and that happens a LOT, because Persona 4’s writers seem to be under the impression that humor works the same as Stockholm Syndrome; just because you hate (what can only generously be called) a joke the first time, that doesn’t mean you won’t love it eventually if you’re forced to endure it over and over again with no escape--I want to beat him with a crowbar and tear his stomach out with a garden trowel.  Persona 5’s Akechi may be a loathsome, stupid loser, but at least he was polite enough to be a villain and die; Teddie we’re stuck with for the whole goddamn game and beyond!

Honestly, I’d love to actually penalize Persona 4 for Teddie’s existence.  Just deduct 5 points from House Persona-dor like I’m a shitty teacher in an equally shitty wizarding school book series, by reason of how absolutely infuriating this fucking bear is.  But for the sake of objectivity, we’ll stick to a good old 0 for this boring, scattered nothingburger of a Link.
SCORE: 0

Persona 5: This story works better without the romance subplot, which frankly seems pretty spontaneous and disconnected from the Link’s events as a whole, so I’m judging by the platonic version.

I can’t say that I felt a strong personal connection to or emotional response from Hifumi’s story, but it’s still a good one that builds a character of real strength out of what was before a mere facade of it, and Ren serves as both a good sounding board and a good influence for her.  There’s some inspiration in Hifumi’s ability to pick herself up from the knowledge that everything she prided herself upon was a sham, still insist on following the same dream in spite of having to start over, and refuse to follow the easy route to success that her mother had laid out for her at the cost of her integrity.  She’s a cool lady, and her story is a good one.
SCORE: 2

Tiebreaker: I find myself feeling more strongly and sympathetically for Mamoru, although I do think Hifumi and her story both quite admirable.  It’s close, but I’d say Persona 3 is just a tiny bit better than Persona 5 here.


18. THE MOON
In SMTP3, The Moon is represented by Nozomi, a classmate, for Makoto, and Shinjiro, a teammate and love interest, for Kotone. In SMTP4, it's Ai, a classmate and love interest.  In SMTP5, it’s Mishima, a classmate and administrator of the Phan-site.

Meaning
Illusions, mirages, deceptions...The Moon is the Arcana of false appearances. For better or worse, what you see isn't what you get.

Nozomi works well enough with this idea--he gives the appearance of being a food-obsessed glutton, but it turns out that his monstrous appetite is a way of running away from memories of his dead brother and thoughts of his own self-worth. His enjoyment is an illusion; he eats to escape only. It's only after he realizes this about himself that he begins to truly enjoy the food he eats. He also runs a small scam cult, which appears to be promising salvation but really is just about making some quick cash. Thus, the Social Link has the chubby little Scientologist showing us false appearances twice over.

Shinjiro’s Social Link is also a good example of The Moon, showing us that much of Shinji’s apathetic exterior hides a young man who worries over the health and well-being of his comrades, meaning that much of Shinji’s regular behavior is not necessarily the truth about him. Additionally, he tries until the very end of the Link to keep Kotone at an emotional distance, claiming that a person as lowly as he isn’t what she wants/needs--so essentially, he’s trying (albeit somewhat poorly) to hide his true feelings for her. This Social Link shows us what a deception Shinjiro puts forth for the sake of others.

Mishima’s got some deception going on, too.  He runs the Phan-site and points the Phantom Thieves toward promising targets, acting as a selfless ally to heroes of justice...but the reality of the situation is, he’s using his position as site admin to boost his sense of self-importance, and even trying to use the Phantom Thieves to settle some personal grudges.  In fairness, this deception is also layered, because Mishima’s also deluding himself into believing that he deserves to be a big shot for helping the Phantom Thieves, and fooling himself into thinking that he’s still acting justly--even if he does know deep down that his attitude about being the Phan-site administrator is wrong, on the conscious level he’s convinced himself that he’s not in the wrong, so you’ve got a few different examples of The Moon’s illusions happening, if admittedly not as strong a case either time as Nozomi’s was with his double-dose.

With that said, none of’em have anything on SMTP4’s take on The Moon.  First of all, Ai’s story is equally about the idea of appearances being deceiving as anything Nozomi, Shinji, or Mishima can put forth...Ai has become so caught up in superficial things like appearance and what's popular and supposedly likable, that she's forgotten who she really is, and has to have Yu's caring patience remind her that it's what lies beneath the surface that matters. She also briefly has an ill-fated crush on a classmate because she's mistaken the idea of wanting to be in love for actually being in love--which is, in a way, another case of being tricked by an illusion, this time the illusion of being in love with love rather than in love with the person. So she's got the theme twice over, just as strongly as the others do.

But the very way you, the player, go through Ai's Social Link is actually a third connection to The Moon's idea--halfway through, you get the option to become romantically involved with Ai, but if you choose this, then later on she'll break up with Yu because she realizes that it's just another false appearance, not true love, and she doesn't want to hurt him by pretending. But if Yu initially rejects her, knowing that she doesn't really know what she wants at that moment, the Link continues with the 2 of them becoming closer friends.  Ai gradually comes to understand herself, while her feelings for Yu become something real, so that by the end, she gives Yu a true confession of love. Whether or not you have Yu accept it is irrelevant--the important thing is that the Social Link itself is giving you, halfway through, a false offer of romance, an illusion, that you have to be too wise to fall for. Heck, there's even a little reference at the end of Ai's Link where she says that from now on, she'll depend on the faces of people who care about her to determine how good a person she is--just as the moon reflects light, so will they reflect her worth, which is just one more tie to The Moon's symbolism. Now THAT'S going all out to portray the Tarot card's meaning!

Verdict: Too easy an answer.  Persona 4’s portrayal of The Moon is not only perfectly orchestrated, it’s bordering on brilliant.  This may very well be the best-crafted Social Link of the series in terms of accuracy to its Arcana.  If by the end of this tally there happens to be a tie for which game is best at capturing the Tarot’s meaning, then Ai is absolutely going to be used as the tie-breaker.

Worth
Persona 3: Nozomi's Social Link's story is decent enough, but it’s a bit hard to follow at times, and pretty weird. Shinji’s is better in every way, so he’ll be Persona 3’s representative.

Shinji shows us an interesting and surprising look into his character in this Link, really expanding it and giving him far more depth and appeal. There are several really good parts to it, too. I like how Shinji approaches cooking--unlike the cliched cooking crap we got back with Fuuka in The Priestess’s Social Link, the cooking in Shinji’s actually serves a clear and interesting purpose for him, that being that it showcases his affections for his teammates in a way that he’s not comfortable expressing in more traditional ways. At first, his interest in his team’s nutrition shows us his concern for his friends, and later, the dinner he puts together for them is his way of trying to make sure that they have a happy memory for the difficult times ahead. Speaking of which, the dinner scene is really great, reminding me greatly of the Citadel DLC for Mass Effect 3--it’s showing everyone together, as friends and comrades, in a fun, heartwarming, and fulfilling manner. The romance with Shinji kinda feels tacked on (like most of them in these games), but at any rate, Shinji’s Social Link is quite good.
SCORE: 3 (Nozomi’s would have been 1)

Persona 4: This story works better with the romance subplot (the real one, not the false early one), so I’m judging by the romantic version.

It’s a real tribute to the moving emotional power of Naoki’s Link for The Hanged Man that Ai’s not the absolute best side story that SMTP4 has to offer.  The pacing and flow of her story is good, her character's depth is surprising but logical, her dilemma and self-understanding are realistic and interesting.  Her development is substantial, clear, and a good collaboration between Yu’s being a positive guide to her improvement and own capacity to be a better person.  And while I respect the decoy choice for a romance early in the Link being a creative way to portray The Moon’s theme of deception, it’s an equally clever move by the writers to emphasize the story of Ai’s growth and entrap those who care only for their own gratification rather than considering the real purpose and best interests of Ai and her story.  Though to be clear, even as a wrong choice, choosing to court Ai too early still leads to a very interesting variation of her Social Link’s tale that has great merit as a character piece.  Honestly, if the true romance with her wasn’t legitimately great, I’d probably actually advocate for the bait-and-switch, just because it’s a great and on-point version of her character story.

But the true romance with Ai IS great, which is more than I can say for any other romantic interest in the game--even Rise's was only passable. But with Ai, you have a story where Yu is not only there to help her find herself and become connected to her, but one where he knows and cares about her enough not to let her rush into something with him, instead waiting until she understands him enough that her love is genuine before letting them be together. That’s honestly really touching, and makes it feel so much more real a thing when it does happen.  Even her Social Link's conclusion at the end of the game is the best of the romantic ones for Persona 4--rather than just hoping they can someday begin their relationship anew because Yu's going away, like Yukiko slightly implies, or just not really mentioning it at all like Rise and Chie, or even seeming to imply that it might be fully over like Yumi, Ai is willing to work to maintain her relationship with Yu, saying she's patient and ready for a long-distance relationship, and talking of visiting him on Spring Break.*  Just as Yu cared genuinely enough for Ai to wait until she was emotionally ready to have something real with him, so too does Ai care genuinely enough for Yu that she won’t let circumstance end what they have and fully plans to put in the work to keep him.

Anyway, enough blathering.  Ai’s Social Link is great, and mad respect to the writers who put it together.
SCORE: 4

Persona 5: Look, Mishima is already basically a walking punchline for parasocial hangers-on and simping chat mods during the main story of the game, and his Social Link isn’t doing him any favors in this department.  It’s not a bad story, he’s not a bad character, there’s some decent things to take from it, but this is not gonna be the Social Link that stays with you once it wraps up.
SCORE: 1


19. THE SUN
In SMTP3, The Sun is represented by Akinari, a young man. In SMTP4, it's Ayane or Yumi, depending on which club you join. Both are classmates and love interests.  In SMTP5, it’s Toranosuke, a politician.

Meaning
The Sun has a few meanings and symbols. It represents light and life coming back after a period of darkness, as well as the idea that no matter how bad things are, the sun will rise with the morning--life will go on. Naturally, this also makes unshakable reliability another thing this card symbolizes. In fact, The Sun can have quite a few meanings--coming joy, happiness, vitality, stability, prosperity, and especially success and completion. Regardless of what the meaning happens to be in any reading, though, it's pretty much always a positive symbol, and is most strongly associated with a successful, positive conclusion to one thing that heralds the beginning of another.

Which means...that most of the Social Links in these games would work just fine for The Sun. I mean, most of them conclude with a positive note that's the successful end of a journey of self-discovery, in one way or another, with this new understanding of self clearly being the starting point of a new part of life for the Social Links' characters. Persona 4's Ayane and Yumi work fine for The Sun, neither better nor worse than I'd expect from any Social Link--I kind of feel like their stories might have been tossed into The Sun's category just because the developers had the ideas for each but didn't really have another Arcana to classify them under. Persona 3's Sun Social Link is, I think, maybe a slightly more focused representation of The Sun, but that could be personal interpretation more than unbiased observation--I feel like the joy and success of Akinari finding meaning for his life after his long period of pain and confusion is a stronger story of personal success and joy than Ayane's or Yumi's, but your mileage may vary.

With that said, Toranosuke in Persona 5 does feel more specifically tailored to the meaning of this Arcana.  After the scandal of his younger days, his political career has gone through the period of darkness that precedes The Sun, and this pre-existing darkness, rather than the conflict of the Link coming up during the Link’s course, makes it feel far more like it was consciously designed with The Sun’s ideas in mind.  The story of the Social Link is that of the infamous, washed-up “No-Good Tora” finally reclaiming his relevance in the political landscape, a wiser, but no less passionate, man, thanks to his dogged persistence and the faith of his assistant.  It’s a strong story that believes the good times can return even after long, wearying disaster just as the sun comes to shine a new day, and the fact that Toranosuke keeps his integrity and regains political standing without having to compromise his ethics likewise connects to The Sun’s theme of unshakeable reliability.  Even the way the Link ends is also a good match to The Sun--you see Toranosuke at the beginning of his second chance at politics, the perfect point of a successful conclusion to his struggle back to significance and good standing, which heralds a promising, bright beginning to his new journey to success.

Verdict: SMTP5 takes the win here, and with little competition.  The story of No-Good Tora’s perseverance and second chance is a great fit to The Sun.

Worth
Persona 3: Akinari's Social Link in this game is...amazing. Persona 3's Sun Link is, without any doubt in my mind, one of the most incredible pieces of soulful, emotive, and philosophical writing that I have ever seen in any RPG (and by logical extension, any video game (and by further logical extension, anything else)). It's the best part of a game that's already excellent, and truly a work of emotional art. I’ve seen it half a dozen times now, and each and every time it’s brought tears, and lots of’em, to my eyes. To not cry when watching this, you’d pretty much have to be an inanimate object. It's utterly amazing, plain and simple.
SCORE: 5

Persona 4: Both stories work better without the romance subplots, so I’m judging by the platonic versions.

Ayane's story is bland, sugar-coated crap that reminds me of Persona 3's Saori and, worse still, Chihiro--Ayane's actually a bit more annoying and cliched, but her ambitions are considerably nobler, so it evens out for me. The fact that Ayane looks and acts like she's 10 years old does not ingratiate her to me, either.

So what about Yumi, then?  Well, Yumi's Social Link is good, creating a reasonably distinctive character and a nicely touching story of her reconciling with her father before losing him, and in doing so, finding a part of herself that she had denied for a long time. It’s not a stand-out story, but it’s good nonetheless.
SCORE: 2 (Ayane’s would have been 0)

Persona 5: Toranosuke’s Social Link doesn’t play on the heart the way that Yumi and Akinari’s stories aim to, but it’s a satisfying and interesting tale of both persistence and moral steadfastness being rewarded with a renewed opportunity, and Tora himself is a likable character for his commitment to succeeding for the right reasons this time.  It’s gratifying at the end to see Ren and Tora part ways, each knowing that the other is a comrade in fighting to change minds and hearts to make the world better.
SCORE: 2


20. JUDGMENT
In SMTP3, Judgment is represented by SEES after they’ve rebranded to the Nyx Annihilation Team, during their final mission to save the world. In SMTP4, it's the Investigation Team, as they finally deduce their foe's identity and defeat him.  In SMTP5, it’s Sae, the prosecutor, and Makoto’s sister.

Meaning
Death and The Tower represented the end of something old to make way for something new--the way all of creation in life works, essentially, changing one thing into another. Judgment represents the physically impossible--rebirth and creation without destruction. Judgment is tied with spiritual rebirth, karma--but not like Justice was, where it was physical results for one's actions, but spiritual results, where your actions determine what you'll do from now on and how your spirit will develop--a clean slate, cleansing, and acknowledging past actions and beliefs, good or bad, as you go into the future (but not being hindered by them). The Fool is at the end of his journey, looking back, and reviewing that which he has done and learned, where he went right and wrong, whether it was worth it and what to take from the experience for the next adventure. Naturally, the concept of Judgment Day, found in many religions, is tied strongly to the Judgment Arcana.

I won't say Persona 3's Judgment Social Link is inaccurate per say, as the climb through the final part of Tartarus can be seen as the SEES team going forward with the strength and lessons they've learned on their journey towards their final destiny, where they'll face off against an actual Judgement Day.  But that’s only a light touch to representing Judgment, and it’s easily outdone by Persona 4.  Judgment's Social Link is started at the final part SMTP4, as was Persona 3's, but the "judgment" it makes on the Investigation Team is an act in progress--it takes Yu and company's spiritual strength and clarity to drive the Link forward to its end, and if their spirits are not wise and strong enough to make their decisions just, the end result is the Bad Ending.

With that said, Persona 3 and 4’s Judgment Links put together still haven’t got a prayer against Persona 5’s.  Sae’s Social Link progresses as she interrogates Ren about his actions as a Phantom Thief and begins to understand the truth of his heroism and the danger she, he, and everyone is truly in.  By consequence, this means that Sae is having Ren review the course of his journey, explain his actions and intentions to be judged by both himself and a(n ostensibly) higher power.  And since the Phantom Thieves’ plan and livelihoods hinge on convincing Sae of their justice and making her understand where she’s gone astray, her review of Ren’s journey isn’t just a clever narrative device; their journey to this pivotal point being judged favorably is vitally important, the entire purpose of Ren’s undergoing this interrogative review of the story his story.

And it’s not just the fact that Ren and his higher power going over all he has done is a spot-on representation of Judgment’s incorporation of its namesake.  This Social Link’s conclusion leads into, indeed was always all done for the sake of, exactly the kind of rebirth that the Arcana symbolizes.  By winning Sae’s trust, changing her heart through talking and faith and effort, the Phantom Thieves create the crucial climax in which Akechi kills a cognitive duplicate of Ren instead of the real thing, and Ren is presumed dead by his enemies as he escapes.  Judgment found him worthy, and so the leader of the Phantom Thieves is reborn without dying--the impossible creation from nothing, rebirth without sacrifice, that this Arcana is defined by.

Verdict: No question whatsoever that Persona 5 wins this round.  I daresay that this is easily the best example of Arcana accuracy in the game!

Worth
Persona 3: This is really just a pile of nothing.  This entire Social Link is just some random stops as the team progresses up the final floors of Tartarus, with a few lines from Fuuka letting them know how far they’ve progressed to their goal.  It’s basically just the heroes climbing stairs, and if I wanted that, I could go watch Cloud, Tifa, and Barret infiltrate Shinra HQ the hard way and get better commentary along the way.
SCORE: 0

Persona 4: In and of itself, this Social Link’s collection of scenes are kinda scattered, but it’s more meant to be resuming the telling of the game’s main plot now that The Fool’s part is done, so I guess the best thing to do is to simply judge it based on the overall events of Persona 4’s late plot and main finale (not counting that extraneous nonsense with Izanami that the game dredged up out of nowhere for no good reason).  Well, while the last leg of the game’s story has much better pacing, the benefit of Adachi’s villainous presence, and overall more intelligence to the Investigation Team’s thoughts and actions, it’s still not quite enough of an improvement on the overall story of Persona 4 to earn it any better a score than The Fool did.  But hey, at least it’s something; that’s more than Persona 3 can claim for its Judgment.
SCORE: 1

Persona 5: This one’s a bit tricky to judge.  As with the previous games, this Social Link, as a part of Sae’s interrogation, is essentially telling the overall story of Persona 5.  But unlike the others, it’s doing so WHILE The Fool (and The Magician) are also still doing this, and, for that matter, Judgment surprisingly actually wraps up way before either of those do.  So I guess it’s more that this Social Link is covering a specific window of the events of Persona 5’s main plot to tell the story of Ren convincing Sae of his cause, and revealing Akechi as the true perpetrator of the mental shutdowns.  The Link scenes themselves aren’t particularly impressive, but they’re culminations representing portions of Persona 5’s overall plot, and I do like the fact that Makoto’s faith that her sister could be saved through reason rather than force is vindicated.  Still, this is more a(n admittedly sizable) snapshot of a specific angle of the game’s story more than a representation of Persona 5 as a whole the way The Fool is, so...I’ll judge it favorably, but I’m not going to give the same full credit for how great Persona 5 is as a whole a second time.
SCORE: 3


0-A + 11-A. THE JESTER + HUNGER
There is no representation of The Jester or The Hunger in SMTP3.  In SMTP4, they’re Adachi, the main villain.  There is no representation of The Jester or The Hunger in SMTP5.

Meaning
The main sources I’ve used for meanings had nothing for The Hunger or The Jester, so I've taken this from a few online sources.  Also known as Lust and Passion, the Hunger Arcana replaces Strength in some Tarot decks. Basically, Hunger is similar to Strength in that it represents mastery of one’s passions, one’s animal side, but unlike Strength, which uses higher thought emotions to subdue instincts and desires, Hunger’s mastery of them is not meant to subdue them, but to be able to fully partake in them, to indulge in them without being lost in them. Energy, vitality, a joy of life, and the ability to use these things are embodied by Hunger, but so too is the potential for abuse of power and loss of control--being a practicing master of one’s animal desires, and servant to them, are always dangerously close.  In some ways, it’s a warning like The Devil, only where The Devil warns of losing oneself to problems and vices that are relatively unique to humans (temptation, addiction, depression, etc), The Hunger warns of losing oneself to more basic, animal passions and wants.

Now, from what I can tell (and I’m no expert), The Jester is just another name for The Fool, not an actual replacement for it. The only difference in meaning that I’ve found is SMTP4’s own interpretation of it (as told by the SMT Wiki, at any rate), which is that The Jester is like The Fool in having ignorance, spontaneity, and freedom, but in a suppressed way, a person for whom these aspects misguide him/her and make him/her have difficulties working with others.  I haven’t found enough credible information elsewhere to validate or disregard this interpretation, so we’re running with it.

Adachi’s Social Link fits both Arcana pretty darned well, I think. At first, it’s listed as The Jester, and it fits the bill--Adachi’s penchant for goofing off, slacking, and cutting corners works well with The Jester’s theme. He doesn’t feel motivated to do his job well, he doesn’t want to be bothered by the old lady who’s taken a shine to him because talking to her is a pain (even though he seems to like her deep down), he advises Nanako to take the quick and easy way out of her homework...all these carefree tendencies of ignorance and careless free spirit align exactly with The Jester as described above. Hell, this doesn’t actually make a difference to the Arcana’s meaning, but the guy’s even whimsical and silly, the way you’d expect an actual jester to be. It’s also quite interesting that the only way you can keep Adachi’s Social Link as The Jester instead of it turning to Hunger is to pursue the bad ending in which Yu knowingly covers for Adachi and helps him to avoid being caught for his crimes. Essentially, Yu’s decision to do this is a betrayal of the very essence of the theme of Persona 4, him discarding all the actions of his friends and himself in pursuit of the truth in favor of perpetuating a horrible falsehood, of embracing the lie. No wonder it’s in this way that The Jester’s Social Link is continued and completed--it is the lesser, the corrupted version of The Fool. The Fool, the pursuer of truth that Yu until this moment most embodied, is no more. There is only The Jester as the story ends in failure.

As for the Hunger card, well, uh, duh. Once this Social Link turns into Hunger, it’s become inextricably ingrained in the main plot of the game, so it’s fair to use said main plot for material, and...well, c’mon, Adachi the villain is basically everything that Hunger’s meant to be; do I really have to explain it? He’s a psychopath who gets his kicks from murder, and abuses his position as a police officer to avoid capture and help him set up new attempts. And he’s too far gone in his twisted ways to be reasoned with, so much that it’s a mildly humorous annoyance to him when Yu tries--no longer able to escape the dark impulses that he abuses for their power. Yep, he fits Hunger, alright.

Verdict: I mean, there’s no actual competition, but even still, Adachi definitely fits each of this Arcana combo very, very well.

Worth
Persona 3: NA

Persona 4: Adachi’s Social Link is pretty darned cool, as well as creepy. Seeing him early in it is a bit enlightening when one views it with the knowledge of what Adachi truly is, giving a little better understanding of his character (the main plot doesn’t do enough on this point, so it’s very welcome). The later parts are great stuff--on the one hand, the ending where you become his accomplice is dark and creepy, about as bad a Bad Ending there could be. That scene in the police station is chilling. On the other hand, the true path for the later parts is also great stuff--Yu’s solo confrontation with Adachi is a very good scene, and gives us a better familiarity with his true, twisted self that truly shows just how beyond normality he really is. Good stuff, all throughout.
SCORE: 3

Persona 5: NA


1-A. THE COUNCILLOR
There is no representation of The Councillor in SMTP3.  There is no representation of The Councillor in SMTP4.  In SMTP5, it’s Dr. Maruki, a counselor and antagonist.

Meaning
The main sources I’ve used for meanings had nothing for The Councillor, so I've taken this from a few online sources...but I’ll be honest, from their similarities, I get the feeling that they’re all just going by the description that Persona 5 itself puts forth for this Arcana, so if anyone has any better information, I’d love to know it.  Going by what I have, though...also known as The Consultant, this Arcana replaces The Magician in some Tarot decks.  Like The Magician, The Councillor is represented by skill and the will to create, but far more in a psychological and social manner than the more general manner that The Magician usually denotes.  Accomplishment and creative endeavors through persuasion, diplomacy, choice, and mental well-being are what The Councillor is all about--if The Magician is the talent, capability, and creativity that will see The Fool through his journey in a literal sense, then The Councillor is the sound mind, attitude, and creativity that will see him through his journey.  The Magician would be a player solving quests through clever tools and skills, while The Councillor would be a player solving them through wisdom and persuasion checks.  If that makes any sense.

Obviously Dr. Maruki and his Social Link are very relevant representations of the ideas of this Arcana.  Even not taking his character and actions in the post-game into account, everything the man is about is one’s mental state, how your emotional state and pain affect your ability to function and actualize the world you want, and using communication with Ren to further his own research into the ability to reshape others’ cognition for their benefit.  It also works on a higher level, too, because the results of what Maruki learns in this Social Link become the foundation for his efforts to change the world in the third semester adventure--so this Social Link is serving as the foundational, creative stuff from which Maruki builds all his efforts, which is just what the first Arcana is meant to be, the “1”, the basic unit building block that everything is later formed from.

Verdict: There’s no competition anyway, but Dr. Maruki’s story certainly earns its point for a strong, on-point representation of The Councillor Arcana.

Worth
Persona 3: NA

Persona 4: NA

Persona 5: lol “councilor” =/= “counselor” instant fail git gud smt

Stupid joking aside, the biggest problem this Social Link has is that its primary purpose is to be the preamble to Dr. Maruki’s true story, the true confrontation and conflict involving him, later in the game.  As a result, not a lot actually happens here, and Maruki as an emotional being and nuanced character is only hinted at; the resolution and indeed even nature of his conflict are to be explored long after the events contained within this Social Link.

Still, even if it only amounts to a start of a story, it’s nonetheless somehow very likable.  It may amount mostly just to talks and exchanging theories, but they’re interesting and likable talks, and Maruki is similarly an interesting and likable guy.  There’s wisdom and knowledge to be had as he describes simple but compelling psychology concepts, and it’s easy to feel and take to heart his sad frustration that psychological and emotional pain, and treating it, are so overlooked and even dismissed by society.  Even if it doesn’t get resolved within the Link’s parameters, learning the story of Maruki’s ex-girlfriend, understanding her as the reason he’s so determined to learn how to save others from trauma and intuiting that he’s carrying pain of his own from that incident that he hasn’t come to terms with, is compelling drama.  Also, even if the fact that it’s meant to be a prologue to Maruki becoming the game’s last villain does inhibit it as a story in its own right, it’s worth giving this Link some credit for the fact that it DOES do a good job in setting the stage for his flawed but well-meaning actions later, showing us how he’s unknowingly grasping for the methods of the Phantom Thieves as a way to take the world’s pain away, and doing so in a way that doesn’t really give away the conflict that’s yet to come.

Lastly, I think the thing that most impressed me here was that Dr. Maruki really feels genuine.  RPG villains with a bad plan to change the world are a dime a dozen and almost always boil down to a case of an idiot throwing a tantrum while choosing an absurdly exaggerated and immoral “solution” to a problem that doesn’t really exist...but Dr. Maruki is legit, and you can tell.  He isn’t just telling himself some self-important fairy tale about wanting to better the world in order to justify atrocities--the guy genuinely wants to make the world better for people, all people (and while this is outside the purview of the Link, his method for doing so may be flawed, but it is benign and kind; he’s a villain for philosophical reasons, not ethical ones).  And while I’m no expert in the field, he speaks and feels, to me, very much like an actual counselor, not just some writer’s imagining of one.  He seems to genuinely understand matters of cognition and emotion, as a professional.  And I like that; there aren’t many characters and even fewer villains who feel like what a real person in their circumstances would be like.

So yeah.  It’s not a terrific story as a whole, but Persona 5’s Social Link for The Councillor is still pretty good for what it is.
SCORE: 2


20-A. THE AEON
In SMTP3, The Aeon is represented by Aigis, a teammate and love interest. In SMTP4, it’s Marie, Igor’s other assistant, a love interest, and secretly a piece of the main villain Izanami, sort of.  There is no representation of The Aeon in SMTP5.

Meaning
The main sources I’ve used for meanings had nothing for The Aeon, so I've taken this from a few online sources. The Aeon is an Arcana that replaces Judgment in some Tarot decks. Like Judgment, it's a symbol of spiritual judgment, but in a more spiritually complete way. It's the end of The Fool's journey, the point at which one looks back on all that one has thought, experienced, learned, believed, gained, lost, understood, and become. It's the summation of one's journey, and one is left to look at that journey and accept its results. The Aeon also identifies with the general act of looking at a full cycle from afar or above and finding meaning in it--things like contemplating the circle of life, or the repetition of trends in human history, which we can step back and think critically as though we were outsiders instead of participants.

In this regard, Aigis's Social Link is particularly fascinating, because in one way it's the complete opposite of what The Aeon is meant to show, and yet in a deeper way, is an exquisitely accurate representation. As a robot only now discovering emotions and humanity, Aigis doesn't really have the connection to the journey of the game's characters that The Aeon looks over--she is not a part of the experience, knowledge, and wisdom gained from the journey as a whole. Yet The Aeon prescribes seeing the entirety of a journey or a cycle from a higher perspective, elevating oneself above it to gain understanding from seeing its entirety--and is that not exactly what Aigis is doing? From her perspective as an observer who is unable to take part in many aspects of being human, she can, and does, see the big picture with extraordinary clarity. In her Social Link, she not only examines the cycle of life and death, she also determines and describes the way to find meaning, happiness, and contentment with one's limited time alive--by finding others and forging emotional bonds to them, by touching others' lives as well as one is able.

She's basically summing up the game's theme and meaning right here and now--that it's our connections to others that make our lives truly worthwhile. Since she's observing the point of the entire game, she is, of course, looking from a higher perspective on the entire journey and seeing its purpose, just as The Aeon is meant to. Her Social Link even works in a small element of judgment--if it's your bonds to others that make your life worthwhile, then it's your decisions and actions that will bring meaning or emptiness to your life, because it's how you act that will determine how deeply you're connected to others.

Marie’s story is similar in some ways to Aigis’s. She, too, is separated from the other characters of the game, having no memories and thus no humanity, as well as not being entirely human to begin with. With this perspective of an outsider, we once again experience her commentary and perspective often summarizing the game’s main themes and meaning. However, while Aigis muses over these concepts and explores them, Marie doesn’t seem to be doing anything beyond observation. I also don’t really see a connection to the themes of the cycle of life, or spiritual judgment.

Lastly, the major overall theme of Persona 4’s journey is undeniably tied with the idea of a pursuit of truth, both personal and interpersonal, yet Marie’s Social Link seems content with her settling on the memories she has now rather than continuing to try to recover her past--it’s kind of just dropped. True, the “truth” of who she is can be argued to be her present alone, but the exploration into who one truly is over who one wants to be is a kinda big part of Persona 4, so it doesn’t jive well when the character most meant to promote the understanding and wisdoms of the game’s journey is doing the exact opposite.

Verdict: Overall, Persona 4’s Marie definitely has a connection to the meaning of The Aeon, but it's not a very good one. Persona 3’s Aigis far better embodies the Arcana, so she gets the point.

Worth
Persona 3: This story works better with the romance subplot, so I’m judging by the romantic version.

If we don't count Persona 3's Social Link for The Sun (which is really in a league of its own anyway), The Aeon is my favorite Social Link in the game. Not only do we get a great and elegant summary of the game's wisdom and meaning through the words of Aigis, but we also get a wonderful, very touching story of Aigis struggling with her growing humanity and its being trapped within a mechanical body, along with her attempt to understand life and its inescapable finite nature. I also particularly love the romantic aspect of the Social Link--Aigis's feelings of devotion and love are well-established early on, and the whole thing is very touching, particularly the last few parts of the Social Link. In fact, even if I'm not counting the parts of the main game depicting Aigis's love for Makoto/Kotone that aren't direct components of the Social Link, she's still easily the one I believe loves him/her the most. This Link is great from start to finish.
SCORE: 4

Persona 4: This story works better without the romance subplot, so I’m judging by the platonic version.

Beyond clearly being tacked-on after the fact, Marie’s story is not bad.  She’s a bit annoying for a while, but eventually you start feeling for her a bit as she struggles with making sense of her lack of memories and figuring out where this leaves her as a person in her own right, and her conclusion of defining herself by the memories she can make now rather than by the ones she can’t recover is a decent ending.  On the other hand, I still can’t help but feel that the game was a better product without her, and even if I do like her Social Link, it never does quite shake that feeling like she’s only there because someone at Atlus has a thing for striped thigh socks, not because anyone on the writing team legitimately believed she belonged in the game.  I dunno.  It’s fine enough, I guess.
SCORE: 1

Persona 5: NA


?. FAITH
There is no representation of Faith in SMTP3.  There is no representation of Faith in SMTP4.  In SMTP5, it’s Yoshizawa, a teammate and love interest.

Meaning
As with the other alternative Arcanas, my main sources have no information on Faith, so I’ve taken this from a few online sources (a very few; Faith seems to be a card from a version of the Tarot deck that’s been largely lost to time so there’s not a lot to be found about it).  Faith is pretty straightforward: it’s about faith.  Faith, belief, trust, and all the facets thereof--faith in religion, sure, that’s an example, but an equally valid representation of Faith would be trust in science, or belief in others.  And just as much in outer concepts and others, Faith is also about oneself, representing self-confidence, self-assurance, the expectation that you can persevere and succeed...and the manner in which such self-belief manifests into real, positive results.  My guess is that it might have been used as an alternative to The Star, or perhaps The Hierophant, but who can say?

Persona 5 does a good job with this concept.  Ren’s involvement in the first half of the Link is to the goal of helping “Kasumi” regain her self-confidence during what she thinks is a slump, and the second half of her story is based on Sumire discovering how to be comfortable with herself on her own terms, and finding belief in her ability to succeed not by simply emulating her sister’s example, but through her own signature strengths.  There are moments in both halves of the story which encourage her to trust her instincts over anything else, and Ren’s participation is largely to encourage her with the knowledge that he believes in Sumire to succeed at her goals.  There’s also the fact that this Social Link begins with Sumire falsely believing herself to be Kasumi, and the empty self-confidence she gains from it is contrasted to the true self-belief she attains in its later stages when she accepts herself and embraces her real potential.

Verdict: Granted, there’s no competition, but all the same, Persona 5 earns its win here as it shows Faith on multiple levels.
 

Worth
Persona 3: NA

Persona 4: NA

Persona 5: Structure-wise, this is a cleverly-crafted Social Link.  The first half of it has lots of foreshadowing to build up to the revelation that “Kasumi” is actually Sumire living the lie of being her sister, and unlike Akechi’s betrayal, it’s subtle enough that you likely won’t see it coming.  Some of the lines she says, like “Don’t let go of things you like, okay?” and “The more I thought about it, the more...empty I felt.  Like I wasn’t even me anymore,” are very clever hints; well-done on that matter, Atlus!

Content-wise, it’s...more complicated.  On the surface, yeah, this is a pretty good story of Sumire giving up on her delusions of being as great as she had perceived her sister to be, and finding the confidence and drive to be great in her own right.  It’s also a decent tale of her finding a way to come to terms with her sister’s death...although after you’ve seen Naoki’s emotionally overpowering grappling with his sister’s death in Persona 4, this seems like barely an afterthought.  But it’s a decently-paced, reasonable story of Sumire’s coming into her own that feels good to see to its conclusion.

The problem is...it’s supposed to be a story about Sumire being able to stand on her own, as herself, for her own sake, but she is leaning on Ren’s support and observation as too much of a crutch.  I get that part of her motivation to excel as herself is to have someone who she wants to see and appreciate the real her, and that’s quite fine and healthy.  But the extreme to which Sumire seems to be leaning on this need to have Ren’s eyes on her and to impress him and make him proud makes her story feel imbalanced.  She’s always yapping about how knowing he’s there watching and cheering her on is what’s motivating her and making her better, while the idea that she should find herself and succeed for her own sake is only mentioned a little.  This woman is the physical embodiment of “Notice me, Senpai;” it feels like she’s doing everything far more for Ren than for herself, and in a story that’s supposed to be all about coming into her own and succeeding on her own terms, that doesn’t work.  It’s not even good just in general--while a Social Link’s story should involve the protagonist as an important influence in its events (except, theoretically, for The Hermit), the protagonist should not be an absolute linchpin without whom everything would and will come crashing down.  These should be stories of emotional cooperation, not crippling codependency.  The observation and approval of Ren is the mortar that Sumire has laid between the bricks of her growth and new self-confidence; she feels, by the end of this Social Link, like she’s only truly learned how to be held up by another, rather than how to stand on her own.

It’s also why the love interest angle of this Social Link is so frustrating to me.  This is the 1 and ONLY time in the ENTIRETY of Persona 5 where the romance in a Social Link actually makes sense, because Sumire outright confesses an interest in Ren and has behaved almost from the start in a way that very much lines up with having a crush on him, and Ren has even had a couple of opportunities to express sentiments to her that imply an interest, too.  Even if I don’t really see a lot of lasting chemistry between their personalities, this SHOULD be the best Social Link in terms of its romantic component...but the same problem is present here as with the rest of it: Sumire is just too fixated with Ren.  While I think it’s possible to portray an obsessive love that still feels right and genuine (my favorite couple in Fire Emblem 14 was Camilla and Corrin, you may recall), as a general rule, the person you love should be someone whose support and affection lifts you to a greater state, NOT someone you’ve used to fill missing pieces of yourself just so you can stand at all, a relationship that you outright can’t function without.  I dunno, I might be reading way too much into it (big surprise), but this love story just feels like it’s built on unhealthy codependency that leaves an emotional power imbalance that can’t be reconciled.

At any rate, I have a lot of issues with how this Social Link’s story goes down, and I see a lot of its method as defeating its own purpose.  But while this makes Sumire’s story here a weak one overall, it still has moments of positivity that feel genuine, and it’s not an outright strike against Persona 5 as a whole, so...
SCORE: 1


21 + 21-A. THE WORLD + THE UNIVERSE
Although The World does show up in SMTP3 - 5, and The Universe does show up in SMTP3, each as the culmination of all Social Links together, neither has a Social Link of their own in any of the games.



FINAL TALLY
Alright, let’s see which Shin Megami Tensei: Persona best used its Social Links to represent their associated Arcana, and which told the best stories through them!

Meaning
SMTP3: 10
SMTP4: 6
SMTP5: 9

Persona 3 is the best game in terms of its Social Links accurately depicting the Tarot.

Worth
SMTP3: 51
SMTP4: 47
SMTP5: 45

Persona 3 is the best game in terms of overall quality of its Social Links’ storytelling.

Unsurprising results, truth be told.  Persona 3 is a truly terrific RPG, and 1 of its best qualities is its Social Links, both for their fresh and compelling personal stories, and how well the game incorporates its major theme of the Tarot.  And even though Persona 4 (though still a good RPG) is absolute leagues behind its brethren overall, it’s not a surprise to me that it beat out Persona 5 in terms of Social Link quality, either--Persona 5 is the best game in the series thus far, but in a reversal of Persona 3, all of SMTP5’s best qualities are attached to its overall narrative and main story, rather than its Social Links.  I was genuinely surprised while playing 5 to find that I enjoyed its Social Links, but was never truly engrossed or greatly moved by them.  Still, it’s not like there’s a drastic gap here; all the games did well as a whole, and they each have their shining moments of accuracy and excellence.  This narrow a spread of points shows that the SMT team at Atlus are RIDICULOUSLY thoughtful and dedicated regarding their games' meaning, symbolism, and general writing quality.

...when not just reducing half of the human race's identity to kitchen inmates churning out bento boxes, that is.

Lastly, just for shits and giggles:

Best Portrayal of Arcana
1. Ai (Persona 4; The Moon)
2. Sae (Persona 5; Judgment)
3. Hifumi (Persona 5; The Star)
4. Adachi (Persona 4; The Jester + Hunger)
5. Keisuke (Persona 3; Fortune)

Best Story
1. Akinari (Persona 3; The Sun) (Score: 5)
2. Naoki (Persona 4; The Hanged Man) (Score: 4)
3. Ai (Persona 4; The Moon) (Score: 4)
4. Aigis (Persona 3; The Aeon) (Score: 4)
5. Nanako (Persona 4; Justice) (Score: 4)



And there we have it. Good. GOD. This was easily the longest, most comprehensive rant I've ever done, and that was the FIRST time I did it, back when it only compared Personas 3 and 4, to say nothing of the work I’ve put into this new version.  With all the writing, contemplating, watching the games' Social Links all over again, and researching Tarot cards I did for this...I hesitate to wonder how many hours I've given to this one rant. I really hope at least a few people made it to the end here, and although I try to avoid whining for feedback in most cases, I'd really appreciate it if anyone who's gotten this far was to comment and let me know what you thought.

One last huge thanks to Ecclesiastes for reading this whole damn thing over to make sure it wasn't complete bollocks before I committed to it!  You're a damn fine gent, sir.

As is now tradition, I’ll be taking June off to recoup after the busiest part of the year at my job, but I’m sure that this rant’ll tide you over in the meantime.  See all y’all come July!













* To be fair, Naoto also makes mention of attempting to keep things going by visiting Yu after he's moved away. But as I mentioned before, her potential romance in the Fortune Social Link is pretty bad.