Here's Hoping for a Little More Persona-ality

On August 1st, I will be heading east to settle in the Deep South, where I shall remain for two years, learning the mysterious Kung-Fu of the digital media scholar. Videogames will be the primary focus of my studies, though I suspect that I will have very little time to game and blog once the program actually commences, and I've tried to fit in as much gaming as possible in the past few weeks. Red Dead Redemption, Alien Swarm, Alan Wake, and Transformers War for Cybertron have all consumed considerable hours and you can expect to read about some of them soon, but two 'last-gen' titles have staked the greatest claim on my time: Persona 3 Portable, and Persona 4.

Awesome anime cover. It's also worth noting that the game includes a free soundtrack CD. Admittedly, most of the soundtrack is maddeningly repetitive, but it gradually wears you down to the point that you find yourself humming the tunes as you go about your day.

While Square-Enix may hold Japan's best recognized role-playing franchises, Atlus' Persona series, the most popular chapter of their Shin Megami Tensei multiverse, is the best example of the J-RPG genre, combining typical turn-based battling and world-saving with high-school dating and social drama. It's a recipe ripe for parody, but the two go together kind of like gin and tonic; a taste not everybody will appreciate, but those who do will keep on drinking till the wee hours of the morning. "So it's a game for alcoholics?" you ask, with a wry smile dripping down your face. "No smartass!" I exclaim, pounding my fist on the table. "It's a game about relationships! Whether or not relationships lead to drinking is up to you. Wino."

Persona is the most character driven series I've ever played. Not all of the characters tremendously deep, but conversing with characters and developing meaningful connections with them is the bread and butter of the series. Each potential character-relationship represents one of twelve tarot-card themed Arcana. Each of these arcana represents a division of supernatural entities called "Persona" that your characters can summon to magic and kick-ass in battle. In order to unlock more of these supernatural entities, you need to become closer to the people who represent that arcana. This little set up is referred to as the social link system, and it transforms socializing into an essential aspect of developing your character, which is really quite poetic when you think about it.

Unlike the one-shot character quests that are typical to Bioware RPGs (IE; Mass Effect 2's Loyalty Missions), you establish relationships with other characters in Persona over a period of months. Both titles gradually occur over the course of an academic school year, and each character you can hang out with has their own weekly schedule. Budgeting your time to try and fit everyone in is a huge part of the game. Word to the wise? On your first play-through, don't try to max out every social link, even if you have a guide. There are just too damn many things to keep track of, and it can turn the gameplay into a chore. Completionists need not fear, both games have New Game+ systems that will let you carry over your social link progress from prior attempts, (Though to get one special persona in P3, you really do have to max everything and everybody on your first time through. Much luck).The number of embedded narratives packed into this game are staggering, and while a few characters are obnoxious (Kenji and Bebe from P3, Ai from P4) most of them are quite likable and some are very endearing (if you feel nothing for P4's Nanako you have no soul).

The thing that I would love to see other games emulate is the gradual sense of progress in forming character relationships. I'm not saying that every game should follow Persona's daily routine model (which is not without it's faults), but the emphasis on communicating with characters' and tactfully solving their problems with something other than gunfire, magic and martial arts is incredibly refreshing. So yes, more of that please.

This is the recently released third version of Persona 3 and it is definitely the one you want to pick up; provided you have a PSP. It features two distinctive campaigns depending on which gender you pick as well as the expansion of the original game. The only thing sacrificed are moving character sprites as you walk around school and the mall.

At the same time, it would awesome to see Persona take a page from Mass Effect 2's book where dialogue interaction is concerned. Most conversations essentially boil down to you picking among three or four dialog options in hopes of making the person you're talking to like you better. I think it would be awesome to have a few social links where you debate, argue, or even mock people instead of acting nice all the goddamn time. I don't want to see a Paragon/Renegade dialectic, but I do want a few more 'colorful' dialog and interaction options. There are several cases where the game gives you the option to be a complete ass, but you find yourself playing nice to advance the link, which really feels like a missed opportunity for fun and diversity.

This brings me to my biggest complaint about Persona, which is that while the games are supposedly about developing your individual character, the narrative skews towards repression and conformity at every turn. They are about being successful and popular in high school. P4 even defines a Persona as "The mask used to overcome life's hardships." All the while, I can't help but wonder, "why wear a mask at all?" Yes, there are certain times in life where you need to put on a pretty face and say the nice thing instead of the true thing. Most of us get our fill of that in real-life. One of the great joys of playing videogames is that they let you break free from all the rules and complications of real life. There has to be some middle ground between overcoming every obstacle with superior firepower and being a model student. The shonen trope of "fighting to protect my nakama" comes on really strong and runs very thick in both P3 and P4.

Another aspect of Perona's social link system that could use some work is having relationships affect the course of the story in more profound ways. Right now, both games have been arranged so you can be everybody's best friend if you play your cards right. I think it would be cool if being a friend to some people meant getting shit-listed by others, as that's how things tend to work out in real life. It may not please perfectionists, but it would greatly increase the game's replay value.

Speaking of value, it's a tough call as to which game is the better experience. Persona 3 Portable is the third version of Persona 3 Atlus has released, and each iteration has added hours of play time to an already considerable quest. In terms of tone, P3 is the more serious narrative. The characters are chiefly concerned with discovering the secrets behind mysterious monsters called Shadows that emerge during 'the dark hour', a hidden hour of the day that appears at midnight when most of the worlds inhabitants turn into coffins. Persona 4 is set in the same universe, though the narratives don't noticeably overlap. Persona 4's main story , has the main characters wandering into strange worlds through the television to solve a string of bizarre murders in the rural town of Inaba and it features a giant stuffed mascot character. So.. its a little harder to swallow in terms of seriousness. That said, I found the characters to be generally much more interesting and likable than P3's cast. Honestly, both titles are worth playing, but if you're having trouble deciding, go with P3P. It's always possible Atlus will make a portable version of P4.

All in all, Persona is weird little series (like the vast majority of titles from the Shin Megami Tensei brand), but it is extremely engrossing and it has a lot of charm. If you're a fan of Japanese videogames (particularly RPGs and Dating Sims), I can't recommend it highly enough.

Dreams, Madness and Obsession

Inception is an amazing spectacle. It is the most impressive, visually arresting experience Hollywood has produced since The Matrix. Cities warp, bend and crumble into the ocean. Bullets fly and cars chase only to be outclassed by runaway freight trains. An elevator rises and descends through the tormented echoes of a man's sundered family life. The roles and performances are palpably calculated, but convincing and at moments, genuinely moving. It is the stuff dreams are made of, but Inception is not a movie about dreams. Dreams are the set-up, the backdrop, the pretense, but as Stephen Totillo suggests in his review of the film, Inception is about virtual realities; virtual realities so immersive and convincing, that ‘video games should be jealous.’ This is both a good and a bad thing.

The issues associated with virtual realities, particularly those realities that are so convincing that they can be considered alternate realities, need to be addressed. People are already getting lost in fantasy worlds, obsessing over virtual possessions and personas. This movie will help people understand how we get lost and why we don’t want to be found. More importantly, this film will help people appreciate the profound, if tragic beauty, in surrendering oneself to another world. As Totillo suggests in his review, this film is a clear representation of the joys of virtual reality: wondrous new frontiers to explore with strange new rules to master. God help us all if we actually learn how to develop this tech. That would be the end of it for me, I can promise you.

At the same time, dreams have a hell of a lot more to offer than the rigidly ruled framework of Nolan’s film allows, as anyone who read Sandman well-knows. My subconscious hosts far greater horrors than throngs of orderly, humanoid projections. The idea that peoples’ intellectual property conveniently congeals in safes and vaults is also a missed opportunity; ideas themselves can be labyrinthine dungeons that people wade through. Secrets can be monsters themselves, as the film half-illustrates through Mal. Everything is a bit too clear-cut for the movie to actually be about dreams. But it’s perfect for obsession.

On Facebook I butted into a friend’s discussion about the movie, chiefly, whether it was about madness or not. Again, I would argue that the film is too organized for most manners of madness, but it is perfect for obsession; a madness forged from focus and getting lost in relentless routine. Leonardo Decaprio’s Tom Cobb is an obsessed man. His presentation of ideas as parasites is compelling, but the sort of cancerous ever-growing idea he describes specifically pertains to the ideas we obsess over, like stories, memories and what could have been or what may yet be.

I suspect that Nolan obsessed over Inception himself. The complexity of the final job sequence feels like something that was tweaked, adjusted and edited endlessly. Little logistic issues haunt the film in hindsight. Why do we end up in the dream world Cobb created if we’re in another person’s dream? If base-dreamer is ‘kicked’ out of one level, why don’t the others automatically join him or get lost in subconscious limbo permanently? None of these little questions amount to an actual hole in the plot, but the degree of engineering involved with the exposition leaves the whole film feeling a bit more mechanical than it should.

In many ways, Inception feels like it was meant for something bigger than a single movie. I wanted more time to digest the ideas in play. I wanted to see more of this technology and its possibilities. I wanted to see more of the characters as well. It would be fun to explore the thieves’ various histories, or even see if there's an actual relationship behind that kiss between Joseph Gordon Levitt and Ellen Paige. That said, I do not want to see Inception 2 in theatres three summers hence. There is no way to follow up from the film’s ending without destroying it.

In closing, I’d like to leave you with anecdote about how obsession. After seeing the movie, my friends and I were hanging out in the theater lobby, discussing the intricacies of the plot when this guy walked up to our circle and started standing there in a way that screamed "I have an opinion about the movie that I need to share." He asked what we liked about the movie. I applauded the effects, the plotting and it's use of rules. He politely acknowledged my praise and proceeded to tell us that the film stole his intellectual property, citing it's use of the number 528 in relation to music. He was Doctor Horowitz of 528love.com. Never heard of him? He promises you will (though I left his site unlinked for a reason).

Apparently, 528 is the magical musical frequency of love, one of the nine cardinal frequencies of the universe. He went on to claim that Inception was a brilliant piece of propaganda by multinational corporations owned by evil tyrants like Rupert Murdock (an evil tyrant to be sure, but one who is completely unrelated to Inception). All this from three numbers which appeared in the movie three times at most. Horowitz was so utterly taken with this concept that it completely totalized the movie. He couldn't see anything else but his frequency and its conspiracies. It was an unsettling experience. Maybe it's because I was so close to grasping the truth that those evil multinationals have been repressing all these years, but I suspect it was because I was confronted with raw fanaticism. Not the sort that has been has been cultivated throughout the years by dogma and religion, but the kind that springs up unbidden.

It was a surreal ending to an already surreal experience, and oddly ironic that an obsessed man should decry intellectual property theft in a movie about an obsessed intellectual property thief.

Very Superstitious

Let's have a chat about Supernatural! But before we get started, may I recommend some funky mood music?

Title card to season 5. So far I've only seen seasons 1-3

Those of you who brought up on Buffy and Angel may be jonesing for a show with magic, monsters and mayhem. Nothing that will scratch your itch better than Supernatural. It has one of those elegantly simple, impossibly promising premises: two brothers travel across america and hunt monsters from classic folklore. Sam and Dean Winchester are more conventional heroes than what you'll find in the Whedonverse and their relationship stays in familiar emotional territory, but they've got a dynamic that could charm the dry off a desert. I think Jensen Ackles is a better actor than Jared Padalecki, though I prefer Sam's character to Dean's.

 

Fangirlish preferences aside, the show really shines where lore is concerned. The winchester boys run through a gauntlet of unique ghouls and ghosts, especially in the first season and series creator Eric Kripke does an admirable job of modernizing the spooks while keeping them faithful to their roots. There are no sparkling vampires here. Ghosts are banished with shotguns loaded with rocksalt, demons are bound with magic circles and dark rituals are invoked at crossroads. A few episodes tap into some truly unique folklore, like faith healers, Djinns and Lucid dreaming. The show follows a  mystery formula but it has a little more variety than typical detective shows. That said, the monster of the week format makes for disposable supporting characters and very few real relationships. The few supporting characters that do endure from one episode to the next are mostly likable, but the show also adhere to some troubling Hollywood conventions, especially where minorities and women are concerned.

The first season of supernatural is a parade of distressing damsels; women who cannot fight the bad guys, or at least cannot fight them without the boys help. Okay sure, this trend is so common that it barely bears comment and it makes sense that these normal women don't know how to fight the forces of darkness. When the show finally introduces strong female characters, like the headstrong aspiring hunter Jo, she still needs the boy's protection. Worse yet are Bela Talbot and Ruby; a duplicitous self-serving thief and a demon turned good respectively. The implications are absolutely medieval: Women are only powerful when they are deceptive, or when they draw power from the devil. Then there's the dying black guy syndrome to consider: so far I've seen three seasons of supernatural, and there have been three reoccurring black characters. All of them are antagonists of some sort or another, well-intending or not, and they all end up dead. I don't want the writers to throw in characters for the sake of pandering to political correctness, but you'd think they could have one woman who doesn't draw her power from darkness and deceit and one black guy who doesn't die. 

The show's over-arching plot is conventional but fairly well-written, gradually altering the brother's objectives and introducing new sources of tension in their relationship. As I mentioned, I haven't seen season four and five, but seasons one through three maintain a consistent level of quality, which is a hell of a lot more than can be said for some other shows. All in all, Supernatural is the best and worst about television formula writing. The conventions are easy to digest, entertaining, and charming, but also fairly shallow and at times insensitive.

Fullmetal Finale

Now that it has finally drawn to a close, I can definitively say that Fullmetal Alchemist is the best manga I have ever read. For those who have never heard of it, the comic series' follows two brothers who attempt to revive their dead mother using the art of alchemy. Their spell goes horribly wrong, and Ed, the elder brother ends up loosing his arm and his leg, while the Al younger brother loses his entire body. Ed manages to save his brother by attaching his soul to a suit of armor, and he replaces his lost limbs with robotic prostheses. The two set out to find the Philosophers Stone to recover their lost bodies. While the series' successes can't be attributed to any single element, I believe the most refreshing thing about the series is it's occidental quality; both in terms of aesthetics and narrative structure.

Edward and Alphonse Elric.

Coming from a westerner, I realize that probably seems incredibly arrogant. I'm not trying to say that all manga should strive to follow the conventions of Western fiction but there are certain elements of manga storytelling, and Shonen in particular, that are down-right hackneyed. Most Shonen heroes have no motivation beyond, "I must become stronger so I can protect those dear to me!" The hero gains enough strength to defeat whatever evil that is threatening his beloved comrades, only to run into a bigger and badder beast later on. I can't help but wonder what these school age superheroes would do with their lives if the bad guys ever stopped bothering them.This eternal dissatisfaction with oneself is extremely appealing to adolescents, who really do have to defeat waves of school work while navigating their hormones and the fucked up social conventions that dominate high school, but what do you do when you're done fighting? Shonen rarely attempts to answer those questions. 

Fullmetal Alchemist's characters all have hopes and dreams beyond defeating the bad guys. Admittedly, the bad guys themselves are flat, seeing how they're all based on the seven deadly sins. But considering that the villains are homunculi; artificial humans created by alchemy, their unidimensionality is actually quite logical. And series creator Hiromu Arakawa does a brilliant job of personifying Lust, Greed, Gluttony, Sloth, Pride, Wrath and Envy in compelling ways that make them threatening and loathsome. 

The other welcome westernization in Fullmetal Alchemist is the ending. Anime and Manga conclusions tend to feature incoherent plot twists, pathetic anticlimaxes, or an explosive, mind-fuck apotheosis. It's partially an East vs. West thing (the emphasis over there being on the journey as opposed to the destination) and it's partially a symptom of the grueling work ethic that defines Japanese culture. Sometimes, creators simply snap from the pressure, as was the case with Evangelion's original ending, which is so horrible it's hilarious. Then again, the "good" ending of Evangelion involves the birth of at least one god and the whole of humanity exploding into puddles of orange juice. This is pretty much par for the course as fas as anime endings go. The obvious explanation is that each of these endings are cultural echoes of what happened to Hiroshima, but knowing that does little to clarify what the hell is happening to the characters you have been following for 26 episodes. 

More frequently, especially when it comes to anime adaptations of ongoing manga, artists have to cobble together an ending for a series that has only just begun. This was the case with the original Fullmetal Alchemist anime, where the artists had Ed take a trip to Nazi Germany out of nowhere.

Fortunately, the recently released conclusion of the manga is everything fans could hope for. It's comprehensive, creative, moving at times, and while it lays the main adventure to rest and ties up the important subplots, it also gives readers a good idea of how the characters will live out their lives now that they have vanquished the ultimate evil. There are some over-the top moments in the final fight, but the plot moves too fast to take itself too seriously. That's another thing I love about the series; it is not mellow-dramatic or over-wrought. The plot earns whatever emotional response it desires from it's readers with compelling events. There is very little introspective whining and none of the dramatic posturing that plagues series like Dragon Ball, Bleach and Naruto.  

Behold the self-portrait of a genius mangaka. I can't wait for Hiromu Arakawa 's next manga!

That said, Fullmetal Alchemist is still very much a manga. The story has a European aesthetic but the art style is very Japanese. The humor is visual and situational as opposed to sarcastic and cynical. While the pacing of the fights are much more visceral and realistic than most manga, the violence is very highly stylized and at times so complicated that it warrants considerable exposition. If you have the slightest interest in manga, consider Fullmetal Alchemist a must read. Or if you're pressed for time, watch the new anime series, titled Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, which faithfully follows the plot of the manga at the expense of some abridgment. You can get started here now!