4/5
A few questionable design choices holds Metal Gear Solid V back from being a stellar experience.

I never would have thought that one day I’d complain about the lack of story in a Metal Gear game. But an achingly spare narrative along with tedious progression mechanics prevents Metal Gear Solid V from being the near-perfect game it could have been.

Don’t get me wrong – the stealth action is some of the best you can find in any video game. The inclusion of large, traversable conflict zones, a marking system, a buddy system and dynamic enemy AI are all welcome additions to what will likely be Hideo Kojima’s last Metal Gear game. I was offered many creative problem solving opportunities that kept me engaged in the game, from planning my infiltration, to adapting to unforeseen guard responses on the fly, to sneaking away from danger when things got too hairy. My excitement piqued in the early stages of the game when I was confronted by a world of opportunity as well as some gripping cinematography and storytelling. But by the time I was in the mid to late game, my feelings were very different. Tedium, repetition, and lack of narrative left me feeling disappointed in the lead-up to the ending.

The Phantom Pain takes place after the events of Ground Zeroes. You are Big Boss, legendary super soldier of the Metal Gear world. The year is 1984 and you’ve just awoken from a nine-year coma after an attack that destroyed your private army, lost you an arm and left you with permanent shrapnel in your skull. The game begins with an impressive display of storytelling that blurs the line between what is imagined and what is real. And the prologue of Metal Gear Solid V is more than an exposé of common coma after-effects. Anyone who remembers the trailer from VGA 2012 knows what to expect: an extended allusion to the great American epic revenge tale, Moby Dick. Kojima succeeds in cross-referencing the tale of Captain Ahab with Big Boss’s own quest, without forcing it on his audience in large dumps of information or hiding its impact under a fleeting, cute remark. The Prologue of Metal Gear Solid V offers surprisingly good storytelling for a video game. Unfortunately, it all goes downhill from there.

We know Kojima is a troll. Once famous for creating convoluted messes of stories (which were at least always charming at their core), he has now chosen to withhold many of those much-desired story beats from his audience. Live action codec transmissions have been replaced with pre-recorded cassette tapes, twenty-minute cut-scenes have been trimmed down to two. And remember those info dumps about The Patriots, the ones with graphs and long history lessons? Well, they’re gone. I was hoping to at least hear some great voice work from Keifer Sutherland. Yes, you’ll get a lot of him in the prologue, but not much after that. Forget about the David Hayter dilemma, the real Metal Gear voice actor controversy is about how the new high-budget Hollywood voice actor is a near-mute for most of the game. It’s hard to ignore the feeling that Keifer Sutherland’s talent has been stifled.

I should be clear: this is not a critique of spare storytelling. It is a critique of Metal Gear Solid V’s inability to successfully employ spare storytelling. The frugal narrative style is as legitimate a style as any, and I for one was glad that Kojima tried something new to keep the franchise fresh. But far too much is left in the air. I was puzzled rather than mystified, and left wanting to know more about why characters behaved the way they did and what forces were really at work in the world. And no, it didn’t “all make sense in the end.” Somewhere underneath Kojima’s shell of a narrative there are complex themes begging to be explored. Big Boss is well known as the arch-villain of the Metal Gear universe. Metal Gear Solid V is a story of revenge and the making of a villain, which leaves plenty of room for complex characters and ambiguities between good and evil. Kojima also takes the concept of war into much darker territories than what one might expect from a video game. He explores issues such as torture, child soldier enlistment, massacre and PTSD, all without casting value statements on the subject matter, which is commendably artistic of him. But the story lacks a clear sense of direction and the ending is unsatisfying, not because it’s happy or sad, but because it doesn’t resolve or thoughtfully develop the storylines of the game’s characters. Spare storytelling can be a great way to express much with little. And Metal Gear Solid V is not a game without gravitas. It takes a serious balancing act to keep the player involved while revealing as little story as possible, and Kojima has tipped the scale too far in one direction.

As serious as the subject matter is, Metal Gear Solid V is not without the quirk the series has come to be known for. Carboard boxes are still in the game. In fact, they’ve been revolutionized. Now you can stand up and run in the box. You can lie down in the box. You can pop out of the box and shoot enemy guards. You can even apply decals of busty babes and Soviet soldiers to your cardboard box for added customization. You can hide in porta potties. You can employ a horse as your battlefield “Buddy” and make it poop on the road before enemy convoys arrive. You can collect posters for your cardboard boxes. You can track down the greatest hits of the ‘80s by collecting cassette tapes scattered across the two open-world regions. I appreciated this last feature. There’s nothing quite as exhilarating as sneaking into a Red Army base in Afghanistan for the sole purpose of stealing the Kids in America cassette tape that’s blasting from a boombox next to some radio communications equipment.

The main story missions in the game are distinct and memorable. You’ll be tasked with tracking targets, gathering intel, assassinating (or extracting) people, rescuing prisoners and stealing enemy assets in order to gain the upper hand against Cipher, the faction that sent you into a coma nine years prior. The missions feel organic and subject to the whims of the open world. There was one mission, for example, which required me to tail a high-ranking official en route to meet an arm’s dealer. My objective was to eliminate the arm’s dealer. It was also, however, the first time I had decided to equip some C4. Naturally I felt inclined to use it right away so I placed it along the road that my intel team had marked on my map. When the official and his armored entourage showed up I detonated the C4 and killed them all. Instead of encountering a Mission Failed screen, my intel team informed me that the arms dealer had changed his plans for the night upon learning about the official’s untimely demise. I ended up tracking him down in some far-off area of the map. This is the kind of dynamic gameplay that leaves you feeling satisfied with your manipulation of the environment. As with any open world game, there are also side missions that may or not capture your interest. Although they are usually not story-driven, the side missions offer fun tactical challenges often with as much dynamism as the main story missions. And, of course, there are always those posters and cassette tapes to collect.

The open world treatment is just what Metal Gear needed. Players can sneak behind enemy lines in Afghanistan and the Angola-Zaire border region. Both locations offer different terrain and weather that affects how players might approach the game. Soviet-occupied Afghanistan is quite literally a sandbox of mountains and deserts, forcing players to consider elevation, impassable terrain and sandstorms into their tactical decisions. It’s exciting when a sandstorm strikes and you’re faced with the decision of using the cover of the storm to make a mad dash for your target or to lay back and wait it out lest you get lost in the blowing sand or spotted by guards when the dust settles. Zaire’s jungle-oriented landscape offers rainfall that muffles footsteps, trees that provide cover and marshes for laying prone to track enemy movements. While I can’t help but feel that Zaire isn’t quite as immersive as Afghanistan (the beautiful tessellation and shading on those cliffs gets me every time), it’s nice that Kojima’s team reapplied the same kind of global scale that made Metal Gear Solid 4 such a diverse game. Both Afghanistan and Zaire offer welcome variations between the wilderness sneaking of Metal Gear Solid 3 and the urban stealth of Metal Gear Solid 4, while also including various pieces of history that will appeal to those who wish to understand more about the conflicts in those regions.

The crux of Metal Gear Solid’s stealth system hasn’t changed much over the years. There are still modes of varying escalation that determine how enemy guards will behave towards you. They might enter caution mode if they’re suspicious of your presence in the area. If they find you, they’ll go on high alert to flush you out. Evading them once caught isn’t as simple as running for the hills. Guards will use lights and mortars to flush you out of the surrounding countryside. If you can hide successfully while the guards are in alert mode, they’ll de-escalate into a search and destroy mode by performing sweeps of the area, particularly in your last known position. Not only is this type of AI behaviour smart and realistic, it also creates interesting tactical opportunities that allow you to bait guards into swarming towards one location so that you can access other locations without the overbearing security presence. But be careful not to abuse one method of engagement or the enemy AI will adapt. If you use your tranquilizer gun too often, for example, guards will wear armor and visors that make them impermeable to darts. In short, Metal Gear Solid V has successfully used the open world format to add depth to the engagement between player and AI.

Then there are the progression mechanics. In a world where every game wants to be an RPG, Metal Gear Solid V would have done best to resist the temptation. In order to compete with Cipher, you need to build up Mother Base, a large offshore facility that serves as home for you and your soldiers. In order to do this, you collect GMP by completing missions and collecting resources in the game world. You also need to recruit soldiers to work for you. This is where the Fulton Recovery System comes in.

The fulton recovery system is fast, efficient and funny. You whip an air balloon out of your back pocket, attach it to an item or an unconscious soldier, then watch them launch up into the air, the beginning of their long flight back to Mother Base. It feels great to hunt for high-ranking soldiers in-between and during missions. Yes, you’re basically kidnapping enemy soldiers and forcing them to change sides so they can fight for you. But it provides an incentive for players to employ non-lethal combat strategies, which are much more fun and rewarding than going in guns blazing.

Once you acquire these soldiers, they are divided into several categories (R&D, Support, Intel, etc.) based on their skill levels. The ranking of these different categories, along with the resources you collect on the battlefield, determine which weapons and items you can unlock. You can then Fulton these weapons and items to your location as a kind of express delivery service, letting you adapt to different combat situations with ease.

On paper, the weapon and item upgrade system works. The idea is that you can choose whichever items you wish to invest in without breaking the game by becoming too powerful. It also helps inspire a sense of creativity in problem-solving. Tranq darts are bouncing off the guards’ shields and visors? Well I can research this thing called a “Decoy” which might distract them, allowing me to come up from behind and choke them out. Or maybe I should get the sonar feature for my mechanical arm. It might help me see the guards better so I can slip past without having to deal with them at all.

And so on and so forth. There are many options for strategy that keeps the game interesting and adds to its replay value. But there is at least one particuarly annoying pitfall about the upgrade ladder design in Metal Gear Solid V that can rear its ugly head if you chose to ignore the progression mechanics (and they are easy to ignore).

This happened to me at one point when I was facing The Parasite Unit, a quartet of superhuman soldiers who can zip around the battlefield with great speed. Few things are more adrenaline-killing than realizing mid-boss battle that you never bothered to upgrade your rocket launcher and you need the upgrades for this fight. So you now have to spend 20 minutes reshuffling your employees into different categories that will give you the R&D level you need to build the rocket launcher. But wait, you will probably need to buy two rocket launcher upgrades. This boss is especially tough (there are four of them and only one of you, after all). Each launcher takes twenty-two minutes to research, and you’re not exactly sure if you have enough resources or staff to research the second launcher. You call your chopper to pick you up and fly you to another conflict region, so you can continue “grinding” (as they say in the RPG world) for more resources and manpower. Nevermind The Parasite Unit, you told them you’d be right back. They understand.

It’s easy to overlook the importance of the upgrade system in Metal Gear Solid V. There aren’t many prompts that force you to keep upgrading so you can avoid these types of situations. Something in the vein of “you can’t play this mission until you’re at this development level” would go a long way in saving the player the annoyance of having to put the real game on pause in order to play the staff management simulator that exists as the awkward underlying structure of the game. Call it handholding if you want, but without the right guidance from the game, it’s easy to let these kinds of management mechanics vanish into the background. But even if the game succeeded in helping me avoid such a situation, the RPG elements of Metal Gear Solid V felt far too out of place to give me any real sense of satisfaction from progression. I found the upgrade ladder, staff management and all other base-building mechanics to be the most boring part the game. It’s true that whatever you invest in your base can be used online in Metal Gear Solid V’s Forward Operating Base mode, so there’s that. You can pit yourself against players around the world in a game of attacking and defending. There’s a surprising amount of depth and customization involved, but the more advanced features of this mode are behind a paywall, which makes the whole thing feel exploitative. I imagine few people would buy Metal Gear Solid V solely for its multiplayer. Single Player is, of course, the game’s stronger suit and the bottom line is that it’s fun to use air balloons to steal containers and kidnap sleeping soldiers. But it’s not very fun to manage them all afterwards.

Tedium rises to high levels later in the game, not just from managing Mother Base, but from the repeat missions you are forced to play in order to unlock the grand finale. Here the story is as spare as ever and the only incentive that keeps you going is some vague hope that eventually a cut scene will play that will tie up all the loose threads. You have to spend hours on side missions and story missions you’ve already played in order for the “ending” to trickle through in pieces. It was very frustrating.

I have to admit that when the cutscenes do come, whether they are late in the game or earlier on, they are entertaining to watch. Kojima offers some dramatic cinematography and lighting, in the same impressive real-time rendering we’ve come to expect from the series. The game engine runs at 1080p and 60 frames per second without any hiccups, which makes for a very responsive stealth experience. And there is plenty of stealth to be had. It took me around 60 hours to beat Metal Gear Solid V, and there are dozens more hours for those who wish to play all the side missions and reach 100% completion. If only so many of those hours weren’t lost in tedium, I would have been much happier by the time I finished the game.

The post A Way-Too-Late Review of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain for PlayStation 4 appeared first on O.B. Chip's Writing Tips.

A fourteen-hour learning curve was all it took for me to figure out that I love Persona 4 Golden.

I’m someone who doesn’t really like numbers in video games. I don’t like it when weapons have stats. I’m not too huge on armor with HP bonuses. I don’t like XP. I don’t like unlockable guns, swords or laser sights. And I don’t like fighting the same opponents over and over again just to “level up”. This is why I keep away from most role-playing games.

But there have been exceptions in my life. Pokémon Yellow, for example. This was the only Japanese role-playing game I ever bothered to finish, mainly because it was the late 1990s and I was a Pokémon mega fan. Also, I didn’t realize that it was a JRPG. For nine-year-old me, it was just a way of simulating Ash Ketchum’s adventures on my Gameboy Color.

Flash forward several handheld generations later. It’s 2013 and I’ve just bought a PlayStation Vita. I’m late to the party and I need to find out what the Vita community thinks is the best game on the platform. I go to the internet. One game keeps sweeping headlines, a title I’m only vaguely familiar with. Forumites and Amazon user reviewers ascribe monumental qualities to this game, citing it as PlayStation’s answer to Pokémon and the lone justification for purchasing a PS Vita.

I never thought I could feel so involved with characters in a video game.

Make no mistake, I’ve never had buyer’s remorse after purchasing my Vita. I was just baffled by the unanimous praise that Persona 4 Golden enjoyed. Yes, it was a Vita exclusive, but it was also a remake of a PlayStation 2 game – not exactly flagship material for a newer platform. But forget about surprise. Fear is what I was really feeling. I knew that, as a fan and supporter of the Vita, I would have no choice but to play this outwardly stereotypical JRPG. This was scary to me. I like real-time combat in video games. I’m even happy to play RPGs as long as they fulfill this requirement. But turn-based Japanese role-playing games? I wasn’t sure if I could deal with far-fetched anime storylines and weird hair that defied the laws of physics.

And grinding. What’s so great about grinding? You run back and forth in a dungeon fighting the same opponents over and over again in order to increase your stats and prepare yourself for high level opponents and bosses. In a world of short attention spans, the logic behind grinding seems crazy. Why fight the same monsters you’ve already fought? Why keep playing in the same environment? It’s like the developers are putting the story and the exploratory features of the game on pause to force the player to undergo a series of mindless repetitions. And for some reason we are okay with this.

But there were things I was aware of at the back of my mind. Were my assumptions about JRPGs based on unfair snap judgements? Yes. Did I make fun of my friends who favored Final Fantasy over Metal Gear Solid? Yes. Have I ever given a conventional JRPG (with all the typical tropes, story beats and progression mechanics) an honest shot? No. I realized I had no real excuse to avoid Persona 4 Golden. I decided it was time to change my ways.

And boy what a change it was. That psychedelic intro. The hearts, the stars, the flowers, the colors. So many things I don’t understand. Igor? Margaret? Velvet Room? How are they connected to the TV world? Why is there a TV world? And how come the only inhabitant of the TV world is a giant cartoon bear named Teddy? And why does my orange-haired, headphone-wearing friend give him such a hard time? Why is my asshole homeroom teacher so concerned about the chastity of his students? To top it all off, after every narrative jump the story seemed to say, “hey don’t forget someone’s been killed, so this is actually a murder mystery game.”

What is this game?

Persona 4 takes its sweet time to introduce you to Inaba, the small town that features as the game’s setting. You take on the role of a soundless, grey-haired protagonist (this is more or less the game’s way of allowing you to project yourself onto the main character). In a nutshell, the game is part dungeon crawler, part high school simulator, part murder mystery. You make friends and maintain relationships. People get kidnapped and you travel into TVs (with your friends) to find and rescue them. Inside the TV world there are “shadows,” weird creatures of all stripes that represent the negative emotions of human beings. Shadows can

Umm… hasn’t there been a murder?

be anything from knights in shining armor to floating pairs of lips with massive tongues. You fight them with collectible “personas,” which are basically other creature-type things that you collect and fuse together to form… more creature-type things. Think of personas as another kind of shadow, except they represent the tamed and controlled emotions of human beings, channeled into some kind of benevolent resolve towards self-realization.

The most powerful shadows are the victims of the kidnappings. They figure as the end boss of each dungeon. The dungeons, I should add, are representations of their inner-most desires and anxieties, ranging from steamy bath houses to celestial kingdoms. The kidnapping victims are shadows because they refuse to accept hidden and embarrassing aspects of their true selves. Once defeated, they realize they should accept themselves for who they are. When this happens, they unlock their persona and join your team of mystery solvers/shadow fighters. Also, there’s a floating limousine in space that you can go to whenever you want to fuse or trade your personas and items. It’s called “The Velvet Room.”  

None of this made sense to me. The game stumbled along the border of fantasy and realism, discarding, for the most part, a core set of rules about how the world promised to function. That, and I just didn’t understand personas. If they are supposed to reflect a person’s resolve to be true to themselves, then why are they also an item drop that I can sometimes recover after beating a shadow?

Friendship-Based Gameplay

I couldn’t help but feel that Atlus, the development team behind Persona 4 Golden, had injected too much weirdness into the “monsters” of their universe. Then again, my only thorough experience with JRPG monsters comes from Pokémon – which are basically just animals who fight for you and say their own name. I soon learned that the persona system in Persona 4 Golden was probably for the best. As it turned out, the persona system was interesting, weird and endearing enough to keep me involved. Personas are separated into different classes called “arcana.” Each arcana is directly connected to individual characters (or a group of characters) in the game. If your relationships with these characters are strong, you will gain the ability to receive experience bonuses when you fuse personas that correspond to their arcana. This is doubly important for your core group of friends, the ones who follow you into the TV world. The stronger your relationship with them, the greater the power of their personas and the more likely they are to perform team work-related actions while in battle.

I learned that In the Persona series, your relationships are called “social links.” It’s important to maintain your social links in order to grant your personas extra skills and abilities. For this reason, my time in the game was divided between levelling up my personas in the TV world and levelling up my social links in Inaba. How do you level up your social links? Well, how do you get to know your friends in real life? You chill together, you go shopping together, you eat lunch together, you go on beach trips and so on and so forth.

When you’re hanging out with your friends, is it supposed to feel like you’re grinding in order to level up? No! It should feel like you’re having a good time with your friends. And I was very happy to see that this was exactly how I felt while working on my social links in Persona 4 Golden. Never before have I grown so attached to so many NPCs in a single game. Each time you level up a social link you are advancing the story between yourself and a specific character. By tying RPG progression mechanics so closely with actual storytelling, Persona 4 succeeded in keeping me, a grumpy anti-JRPGer, obsessively managing my social links and plotting how best to spend my time with a large network of friends. And it’s not as though you have all the time in the world to hang with your NPC friends. Each day you have to choose between fighting shadows in the TV world, participating in after-school extracurriculars, doing your homework, spending time with your little cousin, your uncle, your fellow townspeople, your classmates and more. It’s a delicate balancing act that forces you to strategize how best to spend your time and who best to spend it with. The sense of urgency that confronted me each day kept me involved in the game and made each of my decisions deliberate.

Persona 4 Golden made me realize that maybe high school wasn’t so bad after all.

The dynamics between RPG mechanics and storytelling made for another kind of challenge, one that is far more unconventional in video games with complicated gameplay systems. The question was this: should I follow the stats of the game and pursue social links based on improving the fuseability of my persona classes? Or should I forget about the persona classes and follow my heart (to borrow the endearing terminology of the Persona series) by spending time with the characters in the game who I believe deserve the most attention from me, based on the interest I have in their lives? It was like I was stuck in a tug-of-war between conventional RPG mechanics and storytelling. Whether this was Atlus’ intention or not, it was one of my favourite aspects about the game and likely one of the reasons why I vowed to see the game through to the end.

The Story: Unbelievable but Endearing

To an outsider of JRPGs like me, Persona 4 was bizarre at first. The game was essentially an interactive story about the struggles of each character’s journey towards self-realization and friendship. I wont pretend to understand the lore of the TV world or the velvet room. Nor do I understand the link between specific characters and their arcanas. And call me a bad gamer, but I never could get to the bottom of shadows and personas. What are they, really?

It wasn’t long before I realized that these issues were irrelevant. At the heart of Persona 4, I found a diverse crew of characters faced with dilemmas that were both intriguing and worthy of my sympathy. Believable is not quite the right word to describe these characters. There is something farfetched about just how different they all are from one another and how easy it can sometimes be to get them to reveal the things that trouble them most. Plus, they fit easily into common archetypes. The martial arts loving tomboy. The tough guy who hides his soft side. The seductive high school teacher. Then again, it’s clear that realism is not something that Atlus was after when they were designing this game.

Persona 4 Golden hosts a diverse crew of characters who will actually make you treasure your friendships in real life, as unabashedly cheesy as that sounds.

Sympathy for the characters is what it boiled down to. They struggled to reconcile who they were on the inside with how others perceived them. Their problems and ruminations weren’t particularly complex, but they were always deep and heartfelt. Each character succeeded in gaining my interest and my actual commitment to be their friend.  I’m not talking about the grey-haired player character that I’m controlling. I’m talking about me, the guy holding the Vita and staring into the screen. If this were a Fallout game, I wouldn’t hesitate to attack a friendly NPC every now and then because who cares it’s a video game and I want to be an idiot. But I could never imagine doing something like this in Persona 4 Golden. I actually care about the characters! This isn’t me being a waifu enthusiast. There’s just something impressive about how so many wildly different characters can succeed in gaining my interest and my sympathy, all from a single video game.

Empathy from a Video Game?

When Persona 4 Golden actually made me wish I had done more work in my high school years to build and maintain my real life social links, that was when I knew the developers at Atlus had succeeded in doing what I’ve always believed to be near-impossible in a big budget video game: making the player feel empathy. Plenty of video games offer me the feeling of sympathy (empathy’s lightweight cousin). Yes, I can agree with the feelings of characters in a game. I can agree with the Fallout 4 player character’s sadness over losing his (my?) son, I can agree with Nathan Drake’s mission to rescue Sully (knowing full well that Nathan Drake is sort of a mass murderer) and I can even agree with Big Boss’s lust for revenge, despite having the foresight to know that he will turn into a bad guy later in Metal Gear Solid’s chronological timeline. Sympathy is easy to feel. But not empathy. Empathy goes beyond merely sharing feelings with another. To empathize with someone is to understand their feelings and to feel their feelings for yourself. In a nutshell, it is to genuinely put yourself in their shoes.

To give you some perspective, allow me to playback the examples of Fallout 4, Uncharted and Metal Gear Solid 5. Yes I feel sorry for this guy in the wasteland who lost his son. But I’m not feeling what he’s supposedly feeling. I don’t feel the sense of loss that the writers tried to write into the story. I knew my son for a couple of minutes during an intro sequence that I knew was just a neat little gimmick to set the grounds for me to make my own character. Great. Now that that’s done, I’m much more interested in checking out the post-Armageddon world and doing some side quests along the way.

The player dialogue options in the game ranges from the super-serious to the ultra-comical. The social link system forces you to think twice before saying something stupid just for kicks.

And yeah, Nathan Drake is concerned about Sully. Good for him for deciding to rescue his friend. But I don’t feel the urgency of knowing a close friend is in danger. I’m just going to shoot these dudes in this temple and climb some shit and maybe go on a high speed chase until I reach my objective.

Lastly, there’s Metal Gear Solid 5. Skull Face is an asshole and Big Boss deserves to get even with him. But the truth is I am way more interested in sneaking my way across Afghanistan and kidnapping high ranking soldiers than I am in making Skull Face suffer.

These are a few examples of how video games attempt to make you empathize with characters via gameplay, but fall way short. By kidnapping soldiers and disrupting Cipher’s operations in Afghanistan, you are supposedly putting yourself in Big Boss’s revenge-laden shoes. But the gameplay is far too removed from the story to truly make me feel this way. Uncharted uses cinema style transitions and pacing to keep me involved in the game, but it is awe and adrenaline that I feel when rescuing Sully – not an empathetic desire to save my friend from danger. Fallout 4 is the worst offender of the three. Here I am creating a character in my own likeness that I am supposed to be able to understand and identify with more than these other non-RPG games. Then my son gets taken away and I think “Yeah, okay, sure. Can I get out of the vault now? I want to fight a super mutant and steal a leather jacket.”

Persona 4 Golden’s attempt at empathy is far more successful. The social link mechanic keeps me directly involved in the narrative development of multiple characters. And even if I choose to follow strategic logic when increasing my persona fusion stats and party rankings, I am forced to do so through the game’s insistence on friendship-based gameplay. I am hearing about my drama club classmate’s hospitalized dad because it will increase my ability to fuse personas of the Sun arcana. I have no choice but to go along with following her story if I want to do well in the game. It’s not about numbers and increasing my stats. It’s about learning how she’s an aspiring actor, it’s about gaining her friendship and learning that there’s something serious that troubles her, and it’s about being held in a state of suspense as you seek to uncover just what it is that causes her anxiety.  The stories are interesting and succeed in pulling on your heart strings and reminding you of the angst of teenage life. Most important of all, they are tied to the game’s progression mechanics. If gameplay is the number one factor that keeps a player involved in a game, then it’s actually not very surprising that Persona 4 Golden’s story-based gameplay offers the same kind of empathetic understanding one gets when reading a novel by a favourite author. By the time the game was over, I was left in a state of sadness and bewilderment that I hadn’t felt since beating games as an 11-year-old and wishing that they hadn’t ended. That, or I just couldn’t cope with the fact that out of several narrative pathways I had somehow gotten the infamous bad ending of Persona 4 Golden.

Few games offer this level of story involvement, which is why I was able to overlook Persona 4’s JRPGness and enjoy it for its story and it’s ability to present characters who I can truly empathize with. I should point out that there’s nothing wrong with JRPGs – I’m just someone who’s not too hot on sinking 80 hours into a game without getting a decent and involving story out of it (call me crazy). This is why I am hyped for Persona 5. Sure, there will be levelling up and grinding and turn-based combat (the horror). But if Atlus’s last release in the series is an indication of what their next game will be, then grinding will be more like storytelling. And levelling up will be more than an increase in stats and numbers; it will be an increase in my involvement in the story and my empathy towards the characters. Plus I survived years of turn-based combat in my Pokémon Yellow runs. It can’t be all that bad.

The post Why I like Persona Even Though I don’t like RPGs appeared first on O.B. Chip's Writing Tips.