Volume 12: Persona
Readers, I’m a Persona hater. Persona 3 was kind of a life-changing experience so far as my tastes in games are concerned, but it was the kind of formative experience that’s like opening a gate. I sought out more games like the one I had played and been amazed by, rather than making that one game my whole personality and only showing back up for Persona 4. It’s thanks to ATLUS’ spooky, high school demon summoning-slash-life management sim that I went on to discover things like the greater Megami Tensei universe, Metal Max, Etrian Odyssey, so on and so forth. But I’ve grown to resent Persona some, especially as 5 came out and became God’s Only Japanese RPG (at least until Clair Obscur came out and made that weird), and have found its cockroach-like insistence upon my figurative gaming refrigerator somewhat loathsome. But a couple things have happened recently.
One, it’s the series’ 30th anniversary. That’s a respectable milestone and worth looking at, thinking about, and engaging with. There’s a new GFUEL flavor and everything! As an aside, I’m writing this on Dragon Quest’s 40th, which is rad too. Anyway, the second is that I’ve given up a little on my ambitions and taken on a part-time job, at which most of my co-workers are roughly half my age… and they really fuckin’ love Persona. So this corrosive brand has been on my mind regardless of if I want it there or not. Gotta be sociable, you know. Small victories: I got one of them to pick up Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance, and I wish them well on their journey to the kingdom of Knowing Ballhalla. During all this, I remembered the first game is a classical DRPG, kind of, and figured it’d be a decent subject for the column. So, here we are.
A group of high school kids summon demons to fight demons – you know, the usual. The original Persona is an odd combination of turn-based combat with light positioning elements, the usual MegaTen structure of weaknesses, resistances, and demon fusion, and first-person dungeon-crawling. It’s fun to have that Wizardry-style gameplay conceit while you’re trudging through a police station fighting zombies, to say the least. Having the RPG stuff invade the modern world in a spooky fashion has always been the appeal of Persona, and seeing it hit that note from the jump is a neat way to revisit history. It’s rough around several of its edges, but as a spinoff of the bizarre thing Megami Tensei already was from the moment of its conception, it’s pretty cool. Grindy as hell, but pretty cool.
While Persona was localized back in the day on the PlayStation, it’s not a great way to check it out. The localization is dreadful, a weird mix of low resources, a fear of customers being turned off by… Japaneseness, and an entire substantive side quest just being removed for some reason. It’s a funny historical nugget though as its localized title was Revelations: Persona, a weird example of dart-toss branding and a far cry from the original Megami Ibunroku Persona. Note the lack of Tensei in either title; you could write a whole essay on ATLUS’ naming issues alone! But that’s a tangent for another day. The point is, the original North American release of Persona is compromised. Luckily, once Persona 3 took off (relatively speaking), the original was ported to the good ol’ PlayStation Portable. With a souped-up localization, restored content, and a decent widescreen-ish conversion, clearly this is the way to play, right?
Unfortunately, I forgot the PSP version of Persona is all… Personafied, and its unique charms were penetrated by Pop/Jazz inventor Shoji Meguro’s brassy little tendrils to the tune of one of the most phoned-in soundtracks in his discography (and a hideous opening cinematic also in the then-modern style). Perhaps not his fault entirely, considering the soundtrack is conspicuously smaller than usual. Either way, it’s garish, nothing really fits, and due to the small scale you hear the same boppy bullshit all over the place while you’re trying to enjoy a moody dungeon-crawler without the accursed Social Links. Luckily I’m smart, and when I identified the problem, I figured there was likely a solution. If my earlier column on Unchained Blades was secretly an ode to the 3DS, we can consider this Persona blog an ode to emulation and, specifically, ROM hackers.
If you want to play Persona, unburdened by ATLUS USA’s inept 90s localization and ATLUS Japan’s bulldozing nonsense, look no further than the Internet to deliver something special. You can find, even pre-patched if you know where to look, a version of the PSP port that is both an “undub” and has the original soundtrack painstakingly restored. Meguro’s more self-indulgent and tone-deaf new music is plastered back over with the original score, written by Hidehito Aoki, Kenichi Tsuchiya, Misaki Okibe and… ironically, Shoji Meguro. Listen, it may sound like I’m ragging on this man, but I do respect and like a lot of his music. There’s just a time and a place, and the attempt made here was a disaster in my mind. The original music has much more depth, and ranges from era-appropriate industrial goth vibes to the iconic (yes, I’m using that with sincerity here), serene pianos and haunting opera vocals of Aria of the Soul. A Meguro joint, that one. Credit where credit is due.
That’s a lot to say about just the music, but that’s why we harp on preservation here at Skybox. When you change a piece of a game to re-release it, you’re changing the game’s whole personality. And for a series so zeroed in on that Jungian idea of the self, making goofy changes for the sake of brand synergy feels like stabbing yourself in the foot with a fork in the middle of a pawn shop because you don’t understand how selling blood plasma works. Thankfully I’m not the only one who feels this way, and we have these alternative options as a result.
Happy 30th anniversary, I guess! I hate you, Persona, but I respect you too.
Until next time, dungeon delvers.
