Reach Out For the Truth of My Life (Part One)
May 25, 2023
There comes a day in a man's life when he must reckon with the video games of his past. Today is such a day.
The 'video game as formative experience' narrative is as archetypal of the modern age as any other coming-of-age story. Video games, now, are how we grow up, and for every subculture, hobby, or passion that can infect a person's life, more often than not there is a video game lurking behind it. Video games are the vehicle by which teens and youth are introduced to new worlds and new concepts. They’re how we come to understand the passions that will pull us through our lives.
For some, it is the mathematics: the numbers that can be crunched and scrunched, the systems that can be analyzed and exploited. For others, it is the competitive drive: the ability to excel above others at a particular skill. For others still, it is the escape; the ability to immerse oneself in an absorbing world. For many, it is some combination of the three.
The funny thing is that, as a video game, Persona 4 did not affect me much at all. In fact, I didn't even need to play it at all for it to change my life.
That being said, let’s begin with
Persona 4 as: A Video Game
In Persona 4, the player takes control of a Japanese high-school student who has recently moved from the city to a rural town. Like the typical high-school student, one must maintain a healthy balance between maintaining a social life, keeping up with one's studies, solving a murder case, and collecting Pokemon. The hypothetical question that acts as the foundation of the game’s plot is: What if your success at collecting Pokemon determined whether other people live or die?
The crux of the game’s flow lies in time constraints. Each activity takes up a chunk of a day, and you have a limited amount of days to defeat each "dungeon." If you run out of time, the game ends. This, of course, makes defeating dungeons the priority of the game. However, you can't just spend every day in a dungeon. Trust me.
By hanging out with your friends and strengthening your relationships (referred to in-game as "Social Links"), you gain the ability to make stronger Pokemon creatures. You need strong Pokemon creatures, because the evil creatures you are fighting are also becoming stronger as the game progresses. Thus, you need to strengthen your relationships with your friends. Thus, you need to spend time hanging out with your friends.
Sometimes, your can’t strengthen your relationship with a certain friend unless you are smart, brave, or understanding enough. To become more smart, brave, or understanding, you need to read books, test your fortitude at a ramen shop, or work at a daycare, among other activities. These activities take time. Thus, you need to spend time doing these activities.
The activities allow you to strengthen relationships. Strengthening your relationships allows you to forge better Pokemon creatures. Forging better Pokemon creatures allows you to defeat the dungeons. There’s a beautiful flow to it.
Certain activities are only available on certain days of the week. Certain friends are only available to hang out on certain days of the week. The weather also plays a role. When it's raining, people will not want to go outside with you. When it's raining, a local restaurant offers a special meal that increases your bravery and understanding. When it's raining, the dungeons are also less dangerous. Each day you must ask: what should I do today?
That’s how Persona 4, the video game, works. It's an interesting video game. Every moment, the player is making decisions and strategizing, whether they are fighting monsters or making friends. On these merits alone, the game has something to interest any potential game-liker.
But a video game is not simply a mass of interconnected systems. Video games are also aesthetic experiences. That's the "video" part.
Persona 4 is, on top of and below all of these systems, an anime.
The Road To Persona 4
Before we discuss Persona 4 as an anime, I would like to take you on a short journey through the past. Anime does not exist in a vacuum. Even Gundams are eventually pulled down by the Gravity of Earth. This is becoming less and less the case as the years go on, but when I was a teenager, liking anime meant that something had gone wrong somewhere. This is not to say that anime is necessarily bad, or that liking anime is bad; it's just... look, I say this as someone who has seen and enjoyed quite a lot of anime. People get into anime, or at least they did when I was younger, because there's something missing in their life. This is true of many hobbies and passions, but anime specifically, for reasons that I can’t get into at this particular moment, is, or at least was, a hobby for outcasts.
I had seen anime as a child, of course. Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, Digimon, Shaman King, & etc. were all regular fodder for my generation. The large eyes, the spiky hair, the miscellaneous grunts, all occupied a space in my imagination. But as a child, anime is not anime - it’s just a cartoon. It's just what you watch on TV. As life moved on and high school knocked me on the head, anime became an important social marker. Watching anime became a choice. And that choice began to have a large impact on one’s ability to be normal.
For years, I made the non-choice of not watching anime. In my mind, anime was for girls and freaks. I don't know where exactly this sentiment came from – probably the same section of the internet that injected my brain with the anti-religious, anti-vegetarian, anti-feminist views that were the default of teen males on the internet during the mid-2000s. I didn't know any religious, vegetarian, or feminist people, and I didn't know anyone who watched anime, so it was easy to listen to 20-something-year-old men with strange facial hair and/or headwear teach me the facts of the world. Again, I don't even remember them ever specifically mentioning anime. It's possible that I just imagined they wouldn't like it, and that was enough to keep me away.
I liked video games. I liked video games in a totally mindless way. I would re-play levels of shooting games over and over, never improving or even thinking about what I was doing, just repeating these same unconscious movements again and again. It was boring, and I was bored, but I couldn't think of anything else to do. I would spend summers sitting at home playing GTA on a small TV, with a larger TV next to me playing daytime television. Hundreds of episodes of Judge Judy and forgotten game shows travelled through my brain during this time, leaving no imprint at all. Eventually, podcasts replaced the television. The podcasts were about video games. The podcasts were about video games because I didn't know what else I was interested in.
It wouldn't have occurred to me at the time to speculate that I was sad and lonely. More than anything, I was bored. I was bored and I was boring, becoming ever more so with each day that slipped away with nothing to show for it.
I have always fantasized and day-dreamed. At what moment this fantasizing and day-dreaming became an unhealthy substitute for reality is hard to say. It's normal for a kid to day-dream, and imagine the life that they haven't yet had the opportunity to experience. It's also normal for a kid to think about the girl he likes at school: to imagine that she might like him too, and that one day the two of them might fall in love and get married. I guess abnormality is simply a measure of extent. What percentage of his time should a ten year-old spend thinking about the girl he likes? 90%? 95%?
I loved romantic stories, but I would never admit it to anyone, because I thought they were for girls. I remember being assigned the book Flipped in fourth or fifth grade. It's about a girl who likes a boy, but the boy doesn't like her back. He treats her unkindly. Later, he realizes that he likes her back, but she's already moved on. He tries to make her like him. It doesn't work. He tries to make her like him again, this time a little less forcefully. She decides to give him another chance.
I read this book three or four times. I read it in my room, where no one else could see. I read it at night in the dark. I loved the story. I wanted it to happen to me. There were rumours at school that there was a girl who had a crush on me. I didn’t like her back. This was the problem: I actually just didn't like her very much. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t convince myself to like her. I liked someone else. This all seemed horribly unfair to me.
So I would invent my own stories, stories that existed purely in my head, about girls who smiled at me at school, or family friends who visited from out of town. I didn't have to actually like the girl in question. Who the girl was, or what she was like, had no relevance to the situation at all. I just needed a person-shaped target at which I could direct my love. Love was something that came from me, and was thrusted upon other people.
Which leads us to
Persona 4 as: An Anime
Anime is a medium of television and film. It is the Japanese term for animation; thus, anime is Japanese animation. However, like any artistic medium, the concept ‘anime’ describes more than just a physically distinct means of telling a story or conveying a message. It also includes a complex web of conventions and tropes related to both style and narrative.
Anime is the quintessential teenage medium. Like a teenager, anime is caught between two worlds. A teenager wants to be an adult, and in many ways is most of the way there. However, a teenager is also still a child. Anime is a mature form of storytelling; it is also a cartoon. No matter how you slice it, you can not remove from anime the fact that it is a cartoon.
This is evident in the drastic tonal shifts that characterize much of TV anime. Overblown melodrama and whimsical hijinks live side by side. They don't just co-exist within a given show, but often within an individual scene - sometimes, within an individual shot. This emotional whiplash is a major factor in its being labelled immature. Like a teenager, its emotions escape only in extremes, terrifying and bewildering nearby onlookers.
Persona 4 is not just a video game with anime-inspired visuals. Persona 4's characters, pacing, story, and tone are all deeply imbued with anime DNA. Genetically speaking, it is an anime.
As I mentioned above, anime is by its very nature a teenage medium that appeals most commonly to teens, so it only makes sense that the characters within anime are often teenagers as well. Such is the case with Persona 4, which follows the journey of a group of high school students who became embroiled in a serial murder case that shocks their small town. This serial murder case ends up involving a bizarre netherworld that can be viewed on and entered into via televisions. This world is peopled by nefarious creatures named Shadows, which can take the form of mirror-world versions of people from the real world. These Shadows, however, are not simple inversions of their real-world counterparts, but instead accentuate an aspect of their self that the individual in question tries to keep hidden from others.
Each member of your team, aside from the main character, are one by one confronted with these Shadow versions of themselves. These Shadows reveal the characters’ deepest insecurities to their friends, causing much embarrassment and self-denial. Finally, after overcoming their Shadow physically via a video game boss fight, the character in question comes to terms with the deeply-hidden-away aspect of their personality that the Shadow represents. They accept the Shadow as a semi-truthful representation of their self, thereby unlocking the titular spiritual power of Persona.
The mystery of the otherworldly serial murder case is the framework that keeps the narrative moving, but these self-facings and self-overcomings are what truly make up the beans-and-potatoes of the emotional tension that propels the player onward and upward. This is typical of TV anime, which is often split into "arcs," narrative arcs that generally centre around dealing with the tribulations of a specific character, whether that’s a friendly side character, a tertiary antagonist, or both. This narrative structure pairs perfectly with the dungeon-by-dungeon structure of a typical JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Game), with each boss in this case combining the emotional pay-off of showcasing mastery of the game's mechanics with the emotional pay-off of the climactic final episode of a TV anime arc.
Peppered in among these large plot events are smaller, more intimate moments in which the characters create friendly bonds. The story takes place over the course of a Japanese school year, and this is an anime, after all, so there are certain requisite episodes that need be included. These include the school festival, the new years festival, the school trip, eating a watermelon during summer vacation, etc. These are important moments in an anime character's life, and provide a simple formula for structuring the comic relief or 'filler' moments in a series. In Persona 4, these play out as extended scenes in which the player does little but watch and occasionally choose which quip the main character should say. It would be too far to say that these are wholly 'filler', because while they generally do not have much impact on the plot at hand, they serve to flesh out the characters and provide them with shared memories. In the end, anime is about friendship, and Persona 4 is no exception. If the friendship doesn't feel real, the story just won't work.
The hours spent observing these moments add to the immense length of the game. An average playthrough will take around 90 hours, which is a considerable amount of time. A 50-episode anime series, in contrast, is only about 18 or 20 hours long. You are, in essence, experiencing more than 200 episodes of Persona 4 as you play the game, and this is actually key to the power of JRPGs. The easiest way to create a bond with someone is simply to see them a lot over a long stretch of time. Even if the characters don't have a massive amount of depth, their continual presence in such a maximalized narrative forces you to make at least a begrudging acquaintance with them, which is then paid off later in the game.
A telling example is the main character's younger cousin, Nanako. During the game, the main character is living at his uncle Dojima’s house, and every day, when you return to the house, Nanako greets you with a "Welcome home, big bro!" There are a lot of days in a year, and eventually you become accustomed to her voice as a familiar and familial greeting, and the home in the game starts to feel like a real home. Late in the game, Nanako is kidnapped, and when you return home, you find it empty. The lack of a welcome makes the house feel lonesome and saddening. You realize that over the course of these 80 hours, you’ve come to care about Nanako, even if you find her a little bit annoying sometimes.
A strange consequence, however, of the Social Link system mentioned earlier, is that a certain amount of character growth and depth is contained within optional scenes that only play out if you choose to spend your leisure time with certain characters. Which means that during the course of the main story, the characters can not reference or reflect this growth. In essence, this splits each character in two: there is the Social Link version that grows and learns to accept themselves and the main character on a deep level; and then there is the cut-scene version, somewhat two-dimensional in comparison, that spouts catch-phrases and treats the main character with an animal-like overpowering affection. You can date and fall in love with a character, promising to be together forever as their Persona evolves into its highest form, and no one else will ever acknowledge it. In fact, you can date and fall in love with multiple characters, one after the other, and nobody will be any the wiser.
This incongruence makes certain moments deeply unsatisfying, in a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too sort of way.
However, wish fulfillment is as much a part of video games as it is anime, and many players find it easy to ignore these aspects, instead focusing on the imaginary ideal of returning to high school and dating all the beautiful women you could before only dream of. It is impossible to argue that this is inessential to the game's appeal, as is the case with all games in which dating plays a part. These are not dating simulations, they are dating fantasies.
Which brings us to
Persona 4 as: My High School Crush
