12/27/2024
Persona 3: The PS2's Strongest Soldier
Something that saddens me greatly is how flawed the story/execution of Persona 3 is. It has a great concept overall and I was thinking Persona 3 Reload could be Atlus' chance to top Persona 5 in my book, but unfortunately, this did not happen.
Warning: major spoilers for Persona 3/P3FES/P3P/P3R/P3 manga/P3 anime/P3 live stage show ahead.
Aww, I hope Yukari has something encouraging to say ❤️
Some background: I first started Persona 3 FES shortly after beating Persona 5. I had little exposure to the game and so whenever I heard the original dorm music for the first time, my jaw was on the floor hahaha. Out of all the music I expected to hear in your home base, it was NOT that! It was a fantastic, funky surprise!!
So for anyone wanting to say "aueuhhehuhhlrhgrggg first exposure bias towards Persona 5," you are right! However, I can't be labeled a reload-only freak because I started out on FES! I played it on my very own PS2. However, I did not beat it because the hook of the story never appeared even within the first TEN HOURS of the game. (Why do games think they can get away with this, when it's almost a law to present your "story hook" within MINUTES of beginning your story???) I'm only half a "reload fan" though, since I started there and finished my first version of Persona 3 thanks to Reload though :P
One of my smaller gripes with Persona 3 is the abysmal pacing. It feels like at times nothing happens for in-game months at a time. Maybe the developers weren't sure how people would handle the in-game passing of time and gave people plenty of room to experiment?
(As an aside, let me say here that the change from regular JRPG structure in P1 and P2 to the calendar system was downright genius from a development standpoint. Whoever pitched that idea saved the company much time in being able to squeeze so much use out of the same few environments. I'm not kidding either, it's crazy that they can fit like 100 hours of gameplay into the same 20 maps and it doesn't get too boring! Tartarus does get kinda old after a while tho...)
Any other complaints like the ones above are small potatoes, though. As much as I liked the gameplay and aesthetics of the original P3 and Reload, the story is very frustrating, because it misses what it sets out as its own storytelling purpose. Let me explain.
To laud Persona 3, it does end up going down a familiar "power of friendship" route for its characters and story, but the best part about Persona 3 is the context in which it does this. Instead of eventually ending up in "yippee we saved the world, no more evil" territory, the game contextualizes the protagonist's eventual victory in sobering themes of mortality, the actions of one's consequences, the impressions you choose to leave on people and, of course, finding one's purpose in life.
However, on that last point, the game completely falls flat on its face. Your player character does indeed find their purpose in life and ends up paying for that with their life. It's a brutal conundrum they face, and especially in P3R's ending, I'm tearing up. Now I can say three video games have made me tear up, thanks Persona 3.
But wait. The protagonist finds his purpose and dies because of this. The ending has Aegis explain how she's found her purpose, in being with the MC. But only the MC dies from knowing his purpose. If the reason for the MC's death is knowing his purpose, and Aegis says she found her purpose, why does Aegis not die? Why does everyone else in their social links/episodes who say they have a renewed sense of purpose not die??????????????
The base game/story does nothing to explain this. The MC is not "the chosen one" who is the only one who can save the world. Your dorm-scientist-dad-traitor-man does not explain beforehand "oh MC btw you have a special ability to seal the incarnation of death." Ryoji/Nyx wonders at the gang's ability to stand up to death as they do, but nowhere is the MC's passing really explained.
The only way I can see the MC having his sealing ability come from is his mix-up with Nyx from Aegis first battling the deadly foe. It's like the MC got death-genes mixed in with him, so he has some way of affecting Nyx, albeit in a limited way, since it's explained that even his seal is not permanent. But... I never saw this in-game. I watched Reload's tapes. I read all the books around the dorm. Got the extra notebook dealies in Reload. This seems like a reasonable explanation, so why is it nowhere in game?????
"Well you figured it out, so the developers clearly didn't want to hold your hand on every little detail." This is one of the most crucial plot points of the game and they do NOTHING to explain why the MC can do what he does????
"They go into more depth in P3FES/Episode Aegis," I hear you say. Well, then this implicitly admits that the base story is flawed. What if Persona 3 flopped and we never got a follow up to explain more? Theoreticals aside, FES or Episode Aegis still do surprisingly little to elaborate on this. They mostly go over "MC found his purpose so he kicked the bucket."
In fact, whenever I finished the game and thought about this, I searched online for people explaining the ending and all. It's just people regurgitating what the game states, that he found his purpose, so he dies! No lore masters have stepped up to explain "uhh actually well in the SMT games there's this principle x y z and in Shintoism there's this deal where blah blah blah" NOTHING.
Is it because MC is depressed and didn't wanna go on? Why didn't Junpei magically vanish after Chidori seemed to die that one time? How come depression didn't make Mitsuru, Fuuka or Yukari magically kick the bucket? It's not because of the contract/wild card deal, otherwise Aegis would be gone!! It doesn't make any sense!!!!!!
All of this goes to seriously hinder an otherwise very compelling story. If they had added in a couple more lines here and there like "oh MC you're the only one who can stand up to Nyx 'cause of your encounter on the bridge 10 years ago" and "if someone were to seal Nyx, it might cost them their life" or something, everything would be dandy. Alas.
Fuuka break time. Editor's note: this post was made on a Fuuka Friday
Unfortunately, it doesn't end there. Persona 3 is funny that in re-inventing the Persona formula with its romance options, the game also just went ahead and basically made a canon romance option. If you don't romance Aegis, I feel like the ending would be completely robbed of its impact. Two outcasts finding love and peace on the rooftop one last time... Alright but what if you romanced Yukari. Door-kun is now a womanizer, hanging out with some robot chick while his girlfriend is blissfully unaware of him DYING upstairs? aight
On top of that, MC and Aegis' relationship is a liiiiitle weird still. The game has no scruples in presenting AND maintaining Aegis' connection towards the MC as one of "I'm programmed to love you!" (Exaggerating, but the part about being programmed to stick by him is true.) Aegis definitely questions her robot-ness, but through all her social links, up til the very end, she does nothing to question her relationship with the MC. Not even one line of "oh I was programmed to protect you, is this right? What does this mean? Well, I've found my own answer and I'm my own person now!" The game skips over that middle part and we never see Aegis wrestling about her relationship with the MC specifically. Why??? That is seriously weird!!! Again, if they had just added in a few extra moments and lines of character-building, this issue would be resolved.
All of this goes to show, I think, that Persona 3 is definitely the first attempt of a new team trying to find their footing in the JRPG landscape. I think extra sympathy has to be given to the P3 dev team, because again, despite all the above, they crafted something special. People like P3 a lot. I like it, but it's no 9/10 or 10/10 like people say because of some SERIOUS story flaws like the above ones which touch the main themes of the plot and characters. Atlus at that time managed to make a PS2 RPG that stood out amongst a veritable sea of RPGs and games on that console. Over A THOUSAND games on that system, many of those RPGs. If your dev team makes a game that stands out in such a huge crowd, then we should all applaud them - I certainly do. Just not a perfect game. A touching game, still majorly flawed.
At the end of the day though, we can all agree that Junpei and Chidori are the best characters in the Persona 3 universe. :3
Okay, between this part and P3's ending, maybe there are two parts in the game during which my eyes were watery.
P.S. if it seems like all this complaining makes me look like I hate the game... well, I'm probably not going to play it again as is my habit with most JRPGs, unlike PEAKsona 5... there's just all this buildup that is greatly hindered by all this, and I don't see other people asking these questions more. Let me know if I missed all the parts where they explain this in-game LMAO
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