Persona 4: Not Much To Say, It Turns Out

Well, that last thing didn't turn out so great. Let's hope for something a little less... grotesquely malformed this time around. Persona 4 is what prompted me to return to very bad games writing, after all, yet here I see nothing about Persona 4 yet posted on the blog. Don't think it has been a lack of trying on my part -- well, it has largely been due to a lack of trying, but half a dozen attempts have been made to untangle this particularly unwieldy ball of twine. Sadly, the inexorable passage of time has somewhat dulled and fuzzed  any perceptive insights I might've once had on the product, and there is little chance I can contrast those illusive insights into something that is not a fever dream.

So this is what I have to say about Persona 4:

Persona 4 is a lot of things, but before anything else, it is a staggeringly competent product. In a world run by a kind and just God, this wouldn't be such a big deal. However, considering the state of the Japanese RPG in the world of 2011, seeing a JRPG that:

1. Has a sure sense of itself, of what it is attempting to do, of pace and plotting, of basic gameplay mechanics - in short, a raison d'etre 
2. Was released on time and on budget
3. Is mostly (...mostly) lacking in the kind of abhorrent moe fan service plaguing the Japanese development scene 

...well, that's just short of a miracle.  

One day, I'll get back to it. (No I won't).

"Bully!" - Theodore Roosevelt

- THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN EDITED SLIGHTLY SINCE ITS INAUGURAL POSTING.

Bully, the 2006 Rockstar Vancouver PS2 game, is so very close to an unqualified success. At the time of its release, no Rockstar product was even close to Bully in those nebulous and subjective categories at the bottom of, like, an IGN review. It looked better, sounded better, played better, felt more cohesive. It was less self-congratulatory. Yet the experience of playing the thing can be - nay, must be - extraordinarily infuriating, because an open-world game, by definition, is one wherein the game's narrative and the player narrative's can diverge grotesquely, with no consequences. The ludo-narrative dissonance has only grown more pronounced in the aftermath of Grand Theft Auto III, and this, I cannot cotton to.

Bully is set in this idyllic little resort town, one built over the dilapidated remnants of some bustling 19th Century factory town or iron works. The school itself is both highly exclusive academy that caters to the inbred sons and daughters of business tycoons and Senators and reform school for 50's greasers unstuck in time.

Searching for consistency at Bullworth Academy is a lot like looking for a bus stop in a city where you aren't sure if there's a bus line.

So this is kind of where everything begins to crumble. Like, Groton does not share a campus with some Hardass Military Reform School. For every articulate line of dialogue or genuinely moving storytelling beat, there are five incest jokes that are not funny, not original, and not well delivered. For all the refined and clever twists on familiar open world bullshit story mission tropes, there's still all those mandatory races these damn games cram awkwardly between more interesting moments. Each gem of an idea is isolated in a barren, somewhat disjointed simulacrum of adolescence. There is no firmament to bind this place together, to bind all the disparate gamey bits, all the cut scenes, all the absolutely immaculate Danny Elfman-esque soundtrack cues, all the interminable bike races, all the dodgeball games, all that is interesting about it together. Instead, there's a Qix minigame one must master to improve their ability to woo young women. Or there's the sub-Contender (Contender being a little remembered and very awful PS1 boxing game released in 1999) boxing minigame one must master to progress beyond the first quarter of the game's narrative.

While no one has any genuine use for A Separate Peace made manifest in a world of video games, I would have liked to see it woven throughout Bully. If Bully had been A Separate Peace without all that gay subtext and crew team stuff I feel confident I would hate the game much more. Let's face it. That's a horrible idea. Even so, at least A Separate Peace would have generated an active, interested kind of hate. Instead, it's all so "meh"  Bully has a lot of genuine things to say about adolescence, about what is just in an environment that respects violence above all, and there's a genuinely unexpected and resonant twist near the end of the story.

The road traveled to that conclusion, all thirty-five hours of it, is largely filled with bike riding and savage beatings -- beatings Jimmy is only tangentially involved in starting, but once shit gets real, there's a lot of knees to the balls and cricket-bat whackings. Jimmy is presented as a bit of a simpleton, willing to go along with almost any preposterous scheme if it involves vandalism or protecting his staggeringly incompetent, drunken English Teacher from a deserved firing. All high school problems can be solved with violence. Girl problems are a little different, and even easier to solve. Flatter, give flowers, and prepare for make-out central. If a girl you've made out with sees you making out with another girl, they'll fight, but they'll forget all about it the next time the roses get broken out.

There's no memory here. Everything is ephemeral, and pointless. Unlike the other high school game I'm going to contrast this with one of these days, swear to God, Persona 4, each day's event's are isolated little vignettes that build a larger narrative like a late period Godard film, or if everyone in Groundhog Day retained some kind of Jungian collective unconscious.

You know what? Go read Tom Bissel's piece on LA Noire at Grantland.com. That's my problem with barely keeping a blog about videogames, a topic I'm not sure I much enjoy right now anyway. Tom Bissel and Chris Dahen and Michael Abbot are just super good at it, and they don't need to make lame jokes like I do.

and for no reason, here's a picture of God Hand.

You know what? Just go play God Hand. That needs to be placed into the western canon, alongside Paradise Lost and Joyce's Ulysses.

Fuck, that didn't turn out at all how I hoped it would. Tough cookies, all 12 of you who read this.   

Bully, Persona 4, High School, & The Perils of the Open World: Introduction

Consider the high school. While the advent of the institution as we think of it today is less than a century old, its tendrils have burrowed so completely into our consciousness it seems to have existed forever, outside of time. It is something mandatory, something we view with a mixture of contempt, romance, and bewilderment in our adulthoods. Everything was the most important thing to ever have happened for about 20 minutes, replaced by the next greatest event. After Jimmy Stewart and Robert Michum died, every movie was either set in a high school or calibrated to appear as though everyone in it was in the arrested emotional state of a 10th grader.

High school was a thing that did not exist for most of the medium's history. River City had one, of course. It even organized sporting events. The Garden in Final Fantasy VIII was kind of like high school, for orphaned killing machines. Otherwise, nothing. 

Nothing, save Atlus's Persona series. An offshoot of the Shin Megami Tensi franchise, Persona has overtaken its parent and straddles the Japanese RPG world like a colossus. 

I started playing Persona 4 shortly after it came out Winter ‘08, smugly assuming I would discover all of its mysteries and defeat the major antagonists well before April 11th, 2011. That was some crazy future-day. A special one, to be sure, the day this sickly, bespectacled teenager (I named him Chris, because that is my name) from the big city was to arrive in a quaint little resort town for the school year, knowing not what terror lay ahead for he to thwart.



Well, I beat Persona 4 a handful of days ago - I do wish I'd have done it on April 10th 2011, because of my largely fictional OCD. The game clock reads 103 hours. That’s, let’s see, about 9 minutes a day of linking my socials and fusing my Jack Frosts with other Jack Frosts. It wasn’t a perfect game - Pac Man Championship Edition CX is the only perfect game - but it brought  all the things I adore in the frequently maligned Japanese Role-Playing Game genre into a high school setting.

Persona 4 is not the only game set in a high school that I've randomly played recently. There is also Rockstar Vancouver’s Bully. Released in 2006 for the PS2, this game must have sold well, because I don’t think any secondary marketplace - your Gamestops, your pawn shops - has fewer than 90 copies of it lying around. Like, there’s more copies of Bully than all the Madden games put together.

Let me be upfront: I have huge, irrational problems with Rockstar and their games. I’ve hated their sophomoric jokey tone and their functionally broken camera and aiming mechanics. I've hated the dissonance between the open world, let’s fuck around sandbox aspects and the mainline story missions. I’ve hated the number of those story missions that are simply janky races on ill-defined courses. I’ve hated the half dozen or so impossible roadblock objectives where you have to pilot a goddamn remote control helicopter or whatever that no reasonable person can be expected to satisfactorily complete, but which must be finished to unlock more of the entertaining sandbox stuff, and I’ve hated how smug their entire enterprise reads to a guy who mostly just wants to see dudes with anime haircuts hit each other with swords, be it an RPG, a fighting game, or that dubious moniker “character action”: the Devil May Crys, the Bayonettas, and the like.

Rockstar has started to win me over - Red Dead Redemption told a story worth telling, although in typical Rockstar fashion, our protagonist was required to sometimes act heinously on the behalf of some vile yokel in direct violation of his redeemed character. The wild west setting kept that ludo-narrative dissonance from bothering me as much as it does in Grand Theft Auto. LA Noire sounds pretty neat, and Ken Cosgrove and Peter Bishop are in it.



These Rockstar games are all open world games, promising you the freedom to do all sorts of fun things. Because games should be fun. Fun fun fun free fun. Persona 4 comes from different stock - the dreaded “linear” “Japanese” school of game design. In this case, “freedom” is the hobgoblin of small minds. Outside of Nethack, the games designed by Yasumi Matsuno, Clint Hocking, and that fellow what made Minecraft, Persona 4 gave the illusion that there were more opportunities to push the limits of a game’s systems and mechanics than the stereotypical JRPG, and invested me in its world more successfully than I can readily recall. Bully... well...

NEXT: A LOOK AT BULLY

Holding Pattern

We are coming up on a year since words have appeared here at A New Sku, an ostensible resource for C.P. Ervin themed commentary on games and their intersection with video, design, and alarmingly ill-conceived meta humor.

Is this most marginal of blogs offline forever? Not at all. In fact, I hope to have a few pretty neat things posting here in the next three months, assuming I can wrangle my mess of notes, asides, jokes and silly ideas into a coherent argument. It can be rough to extract cogent thought from a 15,000 word Google Doc about high schools in videogames, I've learned.

Now the promise is out there. I can't welsh on the 2 of you who still have this in your RSS readers.