Greg and Adam continue their trudge through Persona 5— and Adam finishes it. Sydney and Greg keep playing through Fire Emblem games: Shadows of Valentia for Greg and Revelations for Sydney. And Deanna, despite running a video game podcast, didn’t play any new games. We also decide what candies we’d be. Some of us have an easier time of it than others.
Our E3 predictions will be the topic of next week’s podcast. E3 coverage will start at 3PM EST on June 13, after Nintendo’s Special Direct. It’s going to be an all-afternoon stream picking apart what we liked and what we didn’t about each conference. Our full streaming schedule can be found on Twitter and Facebook, and is also the offline image on our Twitch channel.
Chances are if you’re living in the United States and your school year hasn’t just started, it’ll be starting in the upcoming week. As schools around the country begin to go back into session, I think now is a great time to remind everyone why Shin Megami Tensei’s beloved Persona series is the ultimate back-to-school series.
For anyone unfamiliar with the Persona series, its one of the many–and arguably most popular–series in the Shin Megami Tensei franchise owned by Atlus. Shin Megami Tensei contains many series that, although usually not in the same universe, contain similar themes, enemies, combat, etc. such as demons, religion, very in-depth psychology, and they’re all either turn-based or strategy JRPGs. It’s very similar to the Final Fantasy franchise in this respect: There are multiple games and series that are under the umbrella of the same franchise by certain themes and gameplay. Like the Final Fantasy games, you don’t have to play any of the games in a specific order. Some of the more well-known series are the main Shin Megami Tensei series, Devil Survivor, Digital Devil Saga, and of course, Persona.
The first Persona game–Revelations Persona–was first released on the PS1 in the States in 1996, however the Persona series wasn’t very well-known until the release of Persona 3 on the PS2 in 2007. Persona 3 was almost an overnight success thanks to its improved combat, memorable characters, and the introduction of the social link system that would become a trademark of the Persona games. If Persona 3 is what put Persona on the gaming map, then Persona 4 is what made Persona its own country. Although the gameplay remained almost entirely unchanged from 3, thanks to the engaging story, critically acclaimed writing, and lovable characters, people couldn’t get enough of the award winning game. Atlus took notice and gave it a Vita port, two different anime series (and some movies for Persona 3), two fighting games, and even a rhythm game. Suffice to say, Persona 4 became a hit not just among JRPG fans, but gamers in general. But what about this series makes it the ultimate back-to-school series?
Is it because they’re (mostly) excellent games? No.
Is it because they just happen to have the player in their school a lot? No.
Is it because they all have a portable port of some kind that’ll allow you to enjoy them even at school? No.
Although all those things are true, the main reasons that the Persona franchise is the ultimate back-to-school series is its history and unique take on managing your school life.
via giantbomb.com
In 1994, Atlus released Shin Megami Tensei If… (henceforth SMTI.) Only released in Japan, SMTI was meant to be a spin-off game for the main Shin Megami Tensei series. The main focus of the game was to focus on a smaller, more intimate environment than that of the main Shin Megami Tensei games: Therefore, unlike the rest of the Shin Megami Tensei games, it was set in a high school. Critics enjoyed the new setting, and rather than make more SMTI games, Atlus decided to instead make an entirely separate Shin Megami Tensei series that would take place in high schools: Thus, the first Persona franchise was made all because Atlus wanted to continue setting Shin Megami Tensei games in high schools.
The high school setting would be fully realized in Persona 3 when managing your time between school, friends, hobbies, jobs, fighting, etc. would become one of the most major gameplay mechanics in the entire game. The game has a calendar in its corner, and you choose how you’ll spend each day. There’s a plethora of options, but the one thing that’s not optional is going to school. After school, however, you’re free to do whatever you want–even stay at the school for things like clubs, student council, studying, and hanging out with friends. Even though time management doesn’t sound like fun, it’s one of the best parts of Persona 3 and 4.
Since it’s unavoidable and sometimes even dictates what some of your friends will want to do–or even if some of them will be available–school will be one of the biggest parts of your protagonist’s life, just like it is for regular students. Or is it? Yes, you can choose to not study, you can choose to never join a club or hang out with your friends at school or make new friends, but to do so is pretty unwise since you simply won’t be able to get the full experience of this game–not to mention the social links. Regardless of how you treat it though, school will be a big part of the protagonist’s life–a life that you, the player, are now managing. It’ll take up time, yes, but it’ll affect your friendships and social links and even get you new ones. Plus it’ll often have ways to boost your stats–particularly knowledge. It’ll often help guide the story along, as well.
via firsthour.net
Just as school is a major part of life for any student, it is in Persona. Because of the day-by-day calendar this series works off of, school will become a major part of your life in Persona. It’ll help earn and strengthen social links, up stats, and sometimes it’ll even guide the story. Because of its extreme amounts of influence in what the player does in Persona–in addition to the fact that the franchise was made for the sake of being a Shin Megami Tensei series that took place in a school–Persona is truly the ultimate back-to-school series. It treats school life in a realistic-yet-enjoyable way that no other game ever has–probably because that’s the whole idea around which the series was made. Part of the appeal of the Persona games is their immersion–immersion which the school setting helps create more than any other element in this game.
All of these games have a portable port of some kind–all on either the PSP or Vita–so they’re all very accessible and can even be brought to school with you. This critically acclaimed series is definitely not something you should miss–even if you’re not a fan of JRPGs. It’s very hard for JRPGs to pull off a modern setting with minimal sci-fi/fantasy involved, but like similar titles like Earthbound and The World Ends With You, Persona gets it right in a way that not even they do–it values time management, self-improvement, and being social much more than most other games in general. Alongside being the ultimate back-to-school series, the Persona series–particularly 3 and 4–is one of the ultimate game series in general. If all these other reasons for being the ultimate back-to-school series so far weren’t enough for you, let it be your ultimate back-to-school series because it’ll distract you from the mundane routines of back-to-school season.
Being a huge fan of the Persona franchise, I got really excited a few days ago when Atlus gave us a more solid American release date for Persona 5 and opened preorders for the special edition called the Take Your Heart edition. Alone, Persona 5 will cost $60 on PS4, whereas the Take Your Heart Edition is $90. Given all the merchandise it comes with and how much I love Persona, an extra $30 seems like a good price to me. That’s why I decided to preorder the Take Your Heart edition. Telling a good friend of mine who’s not into gaming that I was planning on spending $90 on a video game (even if it comes with a lot of merchandise) was interesting though: She couldn’t seem to fathom why anyone would spend more than $30, let alone $90 on a video game. And that got me thinking: What’s the most expensive game I own?
I immediately thought of .hack//Quarantine. I absolutely love the .hack// games, and at Anime Boston this past year, I finally bought a copy for $150. That’s about the average price it goes for because it was released in such small quantities. Given how great its condition was, I’d say it was actually a really good price. Ones in condition this good that still have the DVD, manual, etc. generally go for closer to $200. In hindsight, what happened was like something out of a movie:
The face of bad decisions
It was Sunday, the last day of the con. I was with a group of friends (the same group of friends who write articles for this site, in fact) and the dealer’s room was only going to be open for another 15 minutes so we were doing a last minute sweep. There was a wheel-spinning game set up, and some of my friends wanted to try it. To do so, however, they had to wait in a line, and I noticed one of my favorite local game stores had a booth next door. It was taking my friends a bit longer than I thought to wait in line, so to pass the time, I decided to check out the gaming booth. Dead center of their booth when I got there was none other than .hack//Quarantine: Perhaps not quite my holy grail of rare games (that would be Earthbound) but probably the next best thing—the holy reliable water bottle that you bring everyday to school and/or work. I’d been saving up money for a year to finally buy this game at PAX a few months later, but here it was right in front of me now. Looking at me. Taunting me. I knew I wanted it, and the owners of the booth knew I wanted it, too.
“There was someone else eyeing it down earlier who said he was gonna’ come back for it once the dealer’s room started to close down,” one of the employees told me, “But he was being really rude and annoying so I really don’t want him to have it. If you wanted to buy it now, I’d let you.” The dealer’s room was closing in less than 10 minutes at this point: I had to make a decision and I had to make it fast, and in a fit of passion for wanting to complete my .hack// collection, I responded to her with the utmost joy and the utmost knowledge that I’d heavily regret what I was doing the minute it came time to go grocery shopping, “Fuck me up, fam.” And so for a mere $150 I took home .hack//Quarantine with less than 5 minutes to spare. To be honest, knowing that I own this game that I’ve wanted so much for so many years is still a little surreal.
In terms of money, .hack//Quarantine is easily the most expensive game I own. (The second and third most being .hack//G.U. Games, ironically enough.) But there are other ways in which a game can be expensive. Dictionary.com defines “expensive” as, “entailing great expense; very high-priced; costly.” Nothing is said about money. So what other games have been expensive for me? And how? What did they cost me? For my first example I’m going to take you to the very beginning of my gaming “career.”
My family got our first gaming console in 2001: The PS2. My Godparents got it for us for Christmas with a game called Okage Shadow King. I’d never touched a video game before this one, and playing it was one of the hardest things ever: A turn-based JRPG doesn’t make a good first video game for a 7-year-old like myself at the time. It was confusing. It was hard. Nothing made sense to me. I couldn’t even read some of the words—let alone understand them. I constantly asked my dad—who, at the time, had recently got his PhD—to help me and not even he knew what to do. It was a sign that this game had to go.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia
Being so inexperienced with video games (and a dumb 7-year-old) I started to think that maybe all video games were this way. Maybe video games were just much less fun than I thought they’d be. Maybe it’s just not my thing. When we finally got a few new games for the PS2—all of which were racing and BMX games—I was a little hesitant to play them because I thought they’d be like Okage again. After watching my dad play and have fun with it a few times though, I began to realize that these games were different: These games were fun.
Regardless, I got so angry with Okage Shadow King that it almost ruined video games as a whole for me. I was ready (or as ready as someone as young as I was can be) to never play video games again if it was going to be that irritating. (And look at me now: JRPGs are my favorite genre. If that’s not irony I don’t know what is.) Okage Shadow King was expensive in the sense that it almost cost me my love of gaming—which I would ultimately discover months later once we got Jak & Daxter.
Here’s another one: Time. Which game has been the most expensive in consuming the precious hours of my life? In one save file, Pokemon Ruby. It was the first GameBoy game that I had and more importantly, the first game I had that was mine. Not a game that I shared with my siblings and my dad on the PS2 but just mine. Like any other child in the early 2000’s, Pokemon consumed my life. Starting the video games only made it more apparent. I found it really hard to put it down—it was (it still is) an incredible game. And the graphics were so nice. And the new Pokemon were so great. I caught every Pokemon in the dex fair and square with no cheats whatsoever except for Feebas and Milotic which still haunt me to this day. Regardless, as of right now, my save file in Pokemon Ruby has 363 hours into it. That’s the longest continuous save file I have.
Image courtesy of expertshop
Overall, I’ve probably put more time into Jak & Daxter, though. As I just mentioned, it was the game that got me into gaming. After we got it, my sister and I would do nothing but play it all day every day for months. We’d restart it, do all of our favorites tasks over, and we’d do this day in and day out starting more save files than we could count because we got through them so quickly. To this day, Jak & Daxter still remains a permanent fixture in my PS2 library which I still replay every so often. I can still 100% it no problem—in fact, these days I can beat it faster than I ever could’ve before. There’s no way for me to know how much time I’ve put into this game total, but seeing as how I’ve been playing it continuously for more than 10 years, I’m pretty confident that I’ve put more time into it overall than in my Pokemon Ruby save file.
Here’s one final (and more recent) example of another way a game has been expensive for me: There’s a game that cost me my Wii. Here’s the story: I’ve been a huge fan of One Piece for 11 years now. Back in my early One Piece fan days, its North American rights were owned by 4Kids. Some will recall it was a mess of censorship. When they got the rights to the show, they had no idea how dark it would eventually get. They omitted the entire Whiskey Peak arc, which made it really hard for them to transition into Alabasta, which was also heavily censored. It was a mess of continuity errors, contradictions, and of course, rubber knives.
This only made it a bigger deal when Funimation took the rights to One Piece out of 4Kids dying hands in 2007. Fans everywhere rejoiced—myself included. Around the same time they started showing trailers for the dub, they announced that they were bringing One Piece: Unlimited Adventure for the Wii to the United States to celebrate. This would be not only the first One Piece game to come out in the U.S. in 2 years, but honestly, the first really good One Piece to come out in the United States in general. (Although admittedly, I did sink a lot of time into Grand Adventure.) This would be the first real exposure to the Funimation dub most of us would have since the DVDs were coming out around the same time. This was a huge deal. My sister and I got a Wii for Christmas in 2007 (note: Unlimited Adventure came out January 2008) so I was beyond thrilled. Finally, a One Piece game with good voice acting and more adventure. And you know what? It lived up to the hype. I absolutely love Unlimited Adventure. I played it day in, day out. My sister didn’t really stop me since the only other game we had on it was Wii Sports and by the time I got Unlimited Adventure, we’d already got our time out of it. I got to a point where I wouldn’t even bother taking it out of the Wii when I finished playing it because I knew I’d be back to it soon. Being only a recent Wii-owner, I didn’t realize that was a problem.
Image courtesy of covershut
One day, I believe it would’ve been in March or April of that year, I tried to take the disc out. It wouldn’t come out. Maybe I didn’t push the button hard enough? I kept trying and trying, but the disc wouldn’t come out. I asked my parents for help, but nobody could get the disc out. As I learned the hard way, this was just a thing that happens to Wiis that you forget to remove your game from for more than a few days: They just won’t come out anymore. The ejector stops working. To repair it would cost more than the game itself. To get a new console was out of the question. Unlimited Adventure was stuck in there. Our Wii had just turned into an Unlimited Adventure machine. Being the only One Piece fan in my house, that didn’t sit too well with anybody else—especially my sister who never got a chance to play any good games on the Wii. It’s still there to this day, though I haven’t booted it up in years. It recently came to my attention that because it didn’t sell horribly well, Unlimited Adventure is a semi-rare game, which only makes this more disappointing. Even now, to repair my Wii would cost me more than it would for me to go out and buy a used Wii at most retailers.
After this happened I seemed to notice more and more Wii games I wanted to play: Okami, Muramasa, No More Heroes, Mad World, Punch Out, etc. I still haven’t played any of them on the Wii (though I did get to play the PS2 version of Okami and the PS3 port of No More Heroes.) Muramasa in particular mocks me to this day. All these games that I could never play all because I thought it’d save time leaving Unlimited Adventure in the Wii. Unlimited Adventure cost me my Wii and in turn, the opportunity to play other great games on the Wii. I’m sure I was grounded when this happened, too, if that counts for anything.
