The Persona Series Turns 20, Steals All Our Hearts

It’s crazy to think, but the Persona franchise can now legally drink (almost) anywhere in the world.  the series really became known outside Japan after Persona 3 collectively charmed the JRPG faithful in 2006. But its’ history as a spinoff to the Shin Megami Tensei series is much more storied.

I’m proof; I first played Revelations: Persona in 1997, without knowing a thing about its parent series, Shin Megami Tensei. I’m not going to sit here and talk about high concepts or systems; I just thought the box art was ridiculously cool. I rented it at least 4-5 times that summer, biking it home in a bag wrapped around my handlebars, and played it for hours at a time.

As you do when you’re a high school student with tons of free time.

The fact that it existed at all blew my mind; Most JRPGs on the Playstation in the late 90s leaned heavily on medieval fantasy as a setting, so a having a game set a present-day, urban fantasy-themed setting was totally unheard of. On top of all that, a plot centered around teens summoning Jungian aspects of their psyche to fight demons invading our reality, all while also dealing with the most teenage of problems was too good for me, also a teen, to pass up.

It was a change in focus and scope that fueled the creation of series spin-offs, too. Shin Megami Tensei: if  was an experiment in creating an RPG similar to Shin Megami Tensei writ large, on a smaller geographic scale, with more focus on characters. Kouji Okada, felt that the first two Megami Tensei games had made the core concepts stale, and so for the spin-off, focused on a single high school overrun by demons rather than a city. The new setting and increased focus on characters proved so popular despite the short development time that Megami Ibunroku Persona, known to us as Persona: Revelations, began development in 1994, hurriedly after If was released.

Unlike the brash, colorful post-Persona 3 games, the first two entries were definitely painted by the same brush as the mainline Shin Megami Tensei games. Persona: Revelations was a fairly dark affair, all muted color palettes, MIDI tunes, and a dark plot involving demonic summoning and the collapse of social order, with a bit of mad science thrown in for good measure. Still, the focus on characters was clearly front-and-center when compared to the gameplay focused Megami Tensei games.  

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not calling Persona: Revelations perfect. Even for the time, it was far from it. The combat was dated even by 90s RPG standards, for starters. Conversing with enemies was novel, but the effort was mostly hamstrung by the localization. Oh boy, the localization.  The first two Persona games were known here in the West for their notoriously shoddy localization. Without writing a novel about 90s English localization; anything culturally Japanese was gone from the mix. Characters’ names were completely changed. Text was directly translated and not revised at all, leading to a lot of clumsy dialog and confusing lines - like when trying to converse with demons. And, the whopper: a character was completely recoloured to appear black, and given lazily written ebonics dialog.

Despite all this, Revelations: Persona exceeded expectations in all regions, and a sequel was quickly developed after its release, doubling down on the urban fantasy of the first game.

However successful Revelations: Persona was, we wouldn’t see it in North America until 2011, on the Playstation Portable. Instead, we in North America got the second of two games, Eternal Punishment, in late 2000.

By then, localization had become more than a euphemism for “let’s culturally sanitize this entire work!” (but that’s a topic for another time) Even so, since there were direct references to Nazis in Innocent Sin, Atlus Japan was reluctant to localize it for western audiences. They moved to localize the direct sequel, Eternal Punishment, instead.

It’s not hard to see why; it’s another setting steeped in urban fantasy, and in true Persona fashion, it introduces old ideas in a novel way. Take the “Rumor” system: your characters can turn rumors into reality by paying rumormongers to spread them around Persona 2’s Sumaru City. In practise, they reveal new shops, weapons, and optional combat encounters, but presented in a novel way.

Which brings us to Persona 3, 4  and now 5; games that are credited with the modernization of the JRPG and the revitalization of the genre. And that’s true in a lot of ways, musically, artistically, graphically, and through its systems. But if you drill down, the modern Persona games have done nothing more than improve on what was already there. And that’s fine, it’s what Atlus does best.

While I absolutely love the direction the series went in with Persona 3, there’s something to be said about the quiet, melancholy tone of the first game’s opening movie. Or how completely batshit insane Innocent Sin is.

All this to say; play Persona 5. It’s fantastic.