can be a challenge to explain why the Persona games are so engrossing to someone who has never played one. How they consume your life. How they turn a grocery store jingle or the sound of rain on a window into Pavlovian cues, a reminder you could be playing right now.
On the surface, a Persona game sounds rather dull. For starters, they're dungeon-crawling role-playing games, a genre about slowly and methodically making your way through monster-filled corridors, steadily growing stronger over dozens of hours. These are games that require patience. But that's only half of the ingredients. What makes the series unique is how it stirs the fundamentals of a role-playing game into what I can only describe as a "teenage life simulator." In addition to saving the world, you also have to perform the role of a typical high school student, studying for exams, making friends, and working part-time jobs. Think of it like Buffy the Vampire Slayer crossed with Final Fantasy, and you're nearly there.
This delicious recipe — spiced with a stylistic swagger and some stellar writing — has turned the series into something of a cult phenomenon. After breaking out in the West with the release of Persona 3 in 2006, it has continued to grow with another main entry, and a handful of spinoffs. Persona 5, the first main entry in the series in nearly a decade, continues a tradition of refinement. It retains the essentials — style, story, and an impossible to pin blend of genres — but carefully streamlines and improves them. Which is to say: it takes something special and makes it better.
Much like in its predecessors, Persona 5 stars a quiet teenage boy who has just arrived in a new town. A morally muddy run-in with the law sends him from his home to the attic of a Tokyo cafe. It's not an ideal setup — everyone at school thinks he's a criminal, including his suspicious new guardian. His goal is to spend a year in the big city and prove to the adults in his life — teachers, employers, the police — he can live a clean, crime-free existence. That isn't really how things progress. A couple hours into the 100-hour story (yes, really), the young man, who you name, becomes the leader of a group called the Phantom Thieves. They steal hearts.
It's a fairly convoluted setup that raises more questions than it answers, so I'll keep this simple and concise: the protagonist and a steadily growing band of friends have the ability to venture into a parallel world called the "metaverse" that's created by the "distorted desires" of troubled individuals. They decide to use this power for the public good, delving into the realm with the help of a magical smartphone app. While in the metaverse, they "steal the hearts" of the wicked by breaking into their unique dungeons that literalize how each villain perceives the world. A lecherous gym coach, for example, is the king of a castle filled with cruel machines that torture and sexually humiliate his pupils. By stealing a heart in the metaverse, the evildoer typically has change of heart in the real world, and they voluntarily confess their crimes — without ever knowing what caused them to do so, Inception-style.
The villains start out relatively small, but over time the thieves become part of an internationally sized story, fighting prominent hacking groups and getting mixed up with corrupt political leaders. As with the rest of the series, Persona 5 is structured around a calendar. You go through your virtual life one day at a time, and different events and obligations transpire depending on the date. A typical weekday will start with you taking the train to school, eavesdropping on the latest gossip in the hallway, answering a question in history class, and then heading off to explore the metaverse after the bell rings. Many of these moments play as short vignettes; you simply watch and listen as a your guardian teaches you about coffee beans, or you grab a burger with friends in Shibuya. Sometimes you have control over what happens and when, but often you're simply going with the flow. When exams come up, you have no choice but to sit through them. I always found myself looking forward to Sunday, the one school-free day of the week in Japan.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét