Persona 3 FES - The Darkness Game

 I have never played Shin Megami Tensei Persona 3: FES sober. No significant portion anyway.

All summer long, my roommate and I would close the blinds, throw a red silk over the lamp, and light up. The deep blues and greens of the Start screen and loading menus will forever be linked to a feeling of bliss and gemütlich. There’s a photograph from this time period of my friend and I which I cherish. The camera is placed at the TV screen looking back at us. The room behind us is soaked in a dark, red light while our faces and the coffee table are illuminated a bright Persona blue. In the background you can see a couple of my smaller paintings. We look glamorous, confident, and totally at ease, like models. Which is a pretty neat trick considering how hard it is to appear flattering with a screen reflected in your glasses. Before us on the coffee table is a copy of The Joy of Cooking, a mug with a holographic Jigglypuff on it, and a small fig plant my friend’s boyfriend gave to him. They would be moving in together that winter, I knew this, so the time we spent with Persona was charged with a special quality.

I always played. It was understood that if I didn’t have the controller in my hand, my attention would drift, and the story of our protagonist (who I named Hajime) and his friends at Gekkoukan High was too important to miss. My friend had played the game before and guided me through the mechanics and structure. I had played through Persona 5 and then Persona 4 Golden before I picked up 3 FES. The later games have a lot of sharp edges rounded off them. The characters are easier to live with and the menus and systems received quite a few “quality of life” touches. But something about tackling this monster together meant that the rough parts were good. It felt good to pound my head against the randomized move outcomes in the Persona Fusion system because I knew that my friend was right there with me. His laptop was open to a fan-made fusion calculator web page. Our Bible on those long nights.

I should clarify some things about the game. Personas are psychic creatures that form from a parts of a person’s personality. They take the form of mythic archetypes and monsters. Figures of myth from Greek, Hindu, Shinto, and many other backgrounds. The protagonist begins with the persona Orpheus, appropriately enough for exploring the underworld, which is the bulk of the game. Personas function a bit like Pokemon. You receive them in battle and they can be trained and fused to create new ones. Although unlike Pokemon’s simple elemental category system, Persona uses the arcana of the Tarot to classify the types. The Justice suit has a lot of angels, the Death suit, a lot of figures associated with the afterlife, that kind of thing.

In Persona 3 you must navigate a tower labyrinth. Every night at midnight, so the story goes, time freezes for what’s called the “Dark Hour” and the tower of Tartarus appears. It’s there that we train our Personas. This training is presumably for the sake of the final battle where we end the appearance of Tartarus and the Dark Hour altogether. We return there every night, or almost every night. The in-game calendar system is pretty flexible for how you want to spend your time, but it’s really a good idea to spend it either fighting monsters or studying. Every day after school Hajime returns to the dorm and one of his fellows will greet him, and will usually suggest going to Tartarus. This became a joke for my friend and I. We know what Tartarus means, so it was endlessly amusing to text one another after long days and suggest we spend the night in hell.

But here, Hell is calming, safe, and intimate. The light is dim and the music is familiar. The walls of my labyrinth went from something akin to the halls of Hajime’s highschool to grim Geigar-esque technorganic faces, to bright gold, to dark disco fever. With every new “block” of floors changing form. This along with new takes on old enemies. The “Cowardly Mayas” come to mind, they are puddles of dark sludge with arms and masked faces emerging from them. We couldn’t help but laugh at them, intentionally pathetic as they were. Shadows, the game calls the monsters. A pretty generic monster name until you pair it with personas, archetypes, the Tarot, and the butterfly. All necessary pieces of the theme. The journey through Tartarus was not merely upward, but also inward. I took another huge rip and mused about the unconscious mind, and Jung. Who I had never read.

Sometimes I would take a break, to go outside and smoke a cigarette, or talk to my own boyfriend who calls every night at 11:30 like clockwork when he leaves his job at the TV station. He’s one of those people wearing big headphones and staring fixedly at a computer screen in the far background of a local newscast. I look up at the red and blue glow of my living room window as he tells me about the new stories, promos, coworker drama. “But, how was your day? Still in Tartarus?” he asks. My roommate and I have been at this for about a month now so my boyfriend knows what’s up.

“Oh yeah. Just pluggin’ away,” I say. I struggle through the fog to describe the weird, new developments in the plot and mechanics to him. “They finally introduced some tangible human antagonists? This guy who looks like Jesus, which, like, ok. Haha, right?” The subtleties of Takaya Sakaki, the head of a rival group who’s trying to maintain the Dark Hour, are lost. But he’s very patient with me, and needles me just a bit over the game and the weed. I remind him that Fortnite streamers should know their place when addressing the superior JRPG players. We laugh. I try not to always mention my roommate’s eventual moving in with his boyfriend or how lonely I’m afraid I’ll feel.

On a normal weekday after school Hajime goes directly to the mall to sing karaoke by himself for hours. This is not an exaggeration. Along with your standard RPG stats like Strength and Magic, Persona 3 has daytime stats which relate to the protagonist's personality. When you spend the afternoon alone in the karaoke bar you improve your Courage stat. The days you spend hours in a photobooth, presumably making all kinds of dashing faces, you improve your Charm stat. These statistics aren’t roll modifiers in the traditional RPG sense, but rather barriers to greater story content. Certain characters won’t talk to you if your Charm isn’t high enough. The bonuses you get for doing well on your exams (and you really should be focused on your exams) will not be conferred without a high Academics stat, even if you answer all the trivia questions in the mini game correctly. Of course, my roommate looks up the answers for us. The major driving force for me to care about these personal stats were the Social Links they unlock.

Around town there are many characters with whom you can spend time. Time is a currency in Persona 3 FES, you may only do two activities a day and once you’ve committed to something, that’s it. Things move on. Whenever you spend time with those characters you improve your relationship rank with them, or Social Link. Each Social Link tells a coherent story about that person’s life and, you grow closer, your place in it. The Social Links in Persona 3 FES are abysmal. There’s no other way to describe it. I suffered through the limp, uninspired Chihiro just so I could unlock the Justice Personas. That’s the other thing, the Social Links control, to a degree, which Personas you can create for battle, and how strong they will be. It’s like, if you had to spend months buying the Gym Leader Brock lunch before you could catch a Geodude. (To be clear, I would play that game.)

 Chihiro is positioned as cartoonishly shy and fumbling and has a particular fear of men. Of course, your anime protagonist can help. He’s dashing and silent and slowly, slowly, slowly Chihiro grews lovingly attached to you, to the point that she seems to be calling to make plans nearly everyday. Aside from being cutesy and shy she has almost nothing else going on. There’s a small subplot about her being the treasurer for the student council and getting into some hot water over missing money, but it gets smoothed out off screen when the teacher who accused her admits he just made a mistake. My roommate and I joke about her and he laughs at my exaggerated dread over having to spend my afternoons in the game with this limp noodle. When I complete Chihiro’s Social Link I can create the persona, Melchizedek, the righteous king. A dull figure in Christian mythology who appears as a purple power ranger with big metal angel wings in Persona. I use him for the rest of the game.

I did not get to expand on many of my own Social Links the summer I played Persona 3. I was working two days a week at a coffee brewery and trying desperately to make freelance designer and illustrator work as a job. I supplemented my meager income with random handyman and house painting work for a friend's family. I still had to borrow money for rent from my mother and boyfriend a couple times. I was poor but I had the freedom to stay up as late as I liked almost every night of the week. I spent my weekends with my boyfriend, my evenings with my roommate and Wednesdays with my regular tabletop group. That was it. I think I stepped into a bar maybe three times the whole summer. And one of those was my birthday.

The narrative here isn’t totally focused on the small circle of social links surrounding the protagonist. Many of the people in the world of this game live with a bizarre illness called “Apathy Syndrome.” It seems to strike at random however we soon learn that A.S. sufferers are the victims of Shadow attacks. These zombie-like characters say little to nothing and as the game progresses from beginning to end we see more and more of them filling the streets. While at first they are hospitalized and treated eventually it becomes a pandemic. A young girl in a school uniform sits dead-eyed in an alleyway by Hajime’s dorm. There really is nothing to be done for her except fight the Shadows and hope for the best.

At the end of the game your little group of Persona-users comes face to face with the driving force behind the Dark Hour and the appearance of Tartarus: Nyx. A sort of evil moon spirit who intends to end the world. Usual stuff. What’s impressive and so engrossing about the lead up to Nyx is that unlike the rest of the supernatural encounters you face in the game, she is not at all a secret. In fact a small cult which slowly grows into a religious movement forms around her. People on the street, sufferers of Apathy Syndrome, chant her name and posters and graffiti reading NYX in bold red letters appear around town. The move through a world that happily welcomes it’s oblivion and doesn’t care one bit about the protagonists’ aims, or even is actively against them, is something we definitely see repeated later in Persona 5, although perhaps with quite a bit less subtlety.

The drugs have run out and worn off at this point. I’m fully and sincerely engaged with the final climb up Tartarus. During the final battle, after the minor victories and one bittersweet betrayal, Nyx’s theme plays. “The Battle for Everyone’s Souls,” it’s frankly exhilarating. The final fight tests every single style and tactic of battle the game has had us face so far. It’s paced and executed with the panache of the best of RPGs, which typically have the weakest possible final battles. Afterwards, well, the only thing that could have possibly happened to this protagonist happens. And we say goodbye to the cast.

 
The FES part, though, adds an extra chapter to the adventure. The characters have moved on a bit and are returning to the dorm to fulfill a promise of reunion they all made. And wouldn’t you know it, a new dungeon opens up and everyone’s back to level one. Although with some tweaks to their movesets of course. I don’t think we played more than a few sessions with this new storyline before dropping it. It’s so excessive, a coda.

Persona 3 FES is like a chamber in your mind. When you think about it, after the hours and hours you spent there, it all blurs together into a velvety shadow. A blue-ish hazey room you can visit as often as you need. A sepulcher for the heart. Somewhere between dream and reality, mind and matter.