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.

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