Self-acceptance and ‘Persona 2: Innocent Sin’

Twelve years ago, Atlus released the first half of a two-part sequel to PERSONA, which was itself a cousin in the SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI universe.

That game didn’t hold up to Sony’s 1999 localization standards. Something about using guns in schools after the Columbine incident. And zombie Hitler. We can’t forget about zombie Hitler.

But I’ve probably mentioned this on three or more episodes of The Jurassic Hour. The point is that, twelve years later, the game finally has an official North American release, thanks to a PSP remake and a more desensitized audience of gamers.

The following article is going to have two parts. First is my semi-formal review of the game. After that, we’ll be exploring the recurring theme of self-acceptance as it appears throughout the series and as it has come up in my own life.

PART I – REVIEW

My friend John McCarroll, who recently rose to the level of editor-in-chief at RPGFan, summed up his sentiments on P2IS by saying “this game would have been great twelve years ago.” I think that’s a great way to think about this game. I wanted to enjoy this game for what it is, but instead I found I could only enjoy it for what it was. It was more a history lesson than a game worth playing. In other words, if I didn’t have strong ties to the series, there’s no way I’d pick this game up and play it when I have so many actually-new games to play.

You know that definition of what makes something a “classic,” right? It stands the test of time. games like SUPER METROID and CHRONO TRIGGER stand the test of time. Innocent Sin? Not so much.

But let’s talk about those few things that did age well before I tear into the game’s flaws.

Though it’s very slow at the start, the plot arc is fantastic. This is a great, trippy story about manipulated memories, how rumors become truth, and how the aliens who allegedly helped Mayans and Egyptians build advanced structures also have some connection with the Third Reich. Conspiracy theories are just really big, intricate rumors after all.

But the game takes place in Japan, a few years after the events of the first Persona, and in a different town. Various characters from the first game make cameos; one of them is even a playable character for most of the game.

You take the role of a character with a name. Yeah… almost every Persona has no default protagonist name, but this one has one. And I like that. His name is Tatsuya Suou. He’s got red hair, and he goes to the Seven Sisters high school. Right from the start, the supernatural is accepted as normal. People are selling their souls (essentially) to some entity known as “The Joker” so that their dreams can come true. However, if they don’t have the willpower to attain their dreams, they turn into shadowmen. That’s not quite like P3′s apathy syndrome, because these people are actually just shadows. All those who remembered them now forget them, and only your party (and other Persona-users) can see and talk to them.

Tatsuya’s girlfriend, his rival at a neighboring school, and two older chicks join up with him when they find out that they can all use Personas. They are occasionally transported to the crazy mindscape-world where Philemon, a character whose role is replaced in P3 and P4 by Igor (who goes from just “I’ll help you fuse Persona” to “I’ll help you fuse Persona and tell you what you need to do in life”). And then buildings explode and a cult shows up and eventually there is zombie Hitler. It gets so absurd, one cannot help but love it.

Seriously, this is part of what makes the game good. And the turning points for the characters? Well, we’ll get to that in part two.

Also good is the traditional battle system with the strong emphasis on strengths and weaknesses. It’s all there: elemental, physical damage types, reflection vs block vs strong vs normal vs weak. It’s great. And then you can keep multiple Persona in reserve so any of your characters can switch to have different resistances in place. Always a good time.

The battles also have something that I don’t think is in any of the other Persona titles: a “fusion” system. Basically, these are combo attacks that you stumble upon with various Personas using the right attacks in succession. Once learned, they remain “known” and the combat menu is great for looking all this stuff up. It’ll highlight the ones you can currently activate with equipped Persona, and then grayed-out are ones you’ve unlocked before but you don’t have the right Personas equipped to use them.

Let’s see, what else is fun? Oh! There’s a difficulty setting that you can change at any time. Normally I’m a proponent of “set your difficulty at the beginning of the game and then LOCK THAT MOTHER IN.” That’s the best way to do it, in most cases. Because I didn’t want to tear my hair out, though, I started on Easy. Which turned out to be just a little too easy. Like, I can walk away and auto-battle through enemies many levels higher than me without worry. So then I switched to Normal and it didn’t feel like I was cheating anymore.

Okay, I’ve said all the super nice things I wanted to say.

The music really let me down. This might sound ridiculous, since I have a review of the original two disc soundtrack to P2IS sitting on RPGFan and I review it rather favorably. Two points in response to this apparent inconsistency. Point 1: see John McCarroll’s quote above. Point 2: while the original music is still available, Shoji Meguro did a “remake” soundtrack for the PSP version. And it is, in my opinion, a flop.

Meguro-san did the exact same thing with the PSP remake of P1, and in my opinion, he did a decent job. Sure, it was plenty different from the original, but it fit my expectations based on where the series was, and where the series has moved onto with people like Meguro at the helm. P2IS’s remade music was lackluster. It was just barely better in terms of synth quality. And the new vocal tracks? Totally disappointing. The opening theme made me yawn.

Graphics? There wasn’t much remake at all here. There are new cut scenes, and those are acceptable, and I think the character portraits were refined. But that’s about it. The animations are slow and clunky, especially in battle. Even with the fast-forward button (R) held down, battles take too long, and I couldn’t give a crap about what I’m seeing. For whatever reason, I could let it slide with P1 because of how old it was. But P2 was later in the PS1 era. Compare FFVII to FFIX, and you’ll see where I’m coming from. I expect better, and I really expected the remake to polish up the battle sequences. That did not happen.

And then, somehow, they made the demon negotiation system worse. The first game’s demon-negotiation was, in my opinion, a great system. They added a twist in P2. Now, to make new Persona, you just need to collect enough tarot cards of a certain major arcana. You get the cards based on the tarot alignment of the enemy you’re talking with. If you form a pact with them (by making them “Happy” instead of “Eager” in a previous encounter), you can make them “Eager” in future encounters, and they’ll give you bonus “free” cards, which can be transformed (1-to-1 ratio) into any of the 22 major arcana. That’s important, because a couple of the major arcana (including my favorite, Sun) simply don’t have representative demons roaming this rumor-ridden late ’90s Japan.

What sucks about the system is just how much negotiating you’ll have to do to make any worthwhile Persona. There’s no ingenuity to it. Persona 1 was basic but fun. Persona 3 and 4 had awesome fusion systems. But 2? You just do a boatload of talking and eventually you get to make a new pact. This, my friends, is terribly boring. Fortunately, as you move along in the game, the higher-level enemies will drop 50 to 80 tarot cards in one encounter. That’s handy. But again, you can only getting them by not fighting. So it’s a trade-off: get experience, or get cards.

The rumor system? Great concept, boring execution. In this game, rumors are somehow becoming true simply by being spread. So you can get a rumor spread that this or that shop is having a sale on this or that weapon, and sure enough, you’re good to go. A good number of JRPGs have since implemented this system, so we can credit Atlus for coming up with the idea. But in P2, it’s nigh useless. I had almost no need for it, even after increasing the difficulty level. It just wasn’t worth the effort to collect and implement the “best” rumors.

And that’s about it. The game takes about 30 hours to beat. Most people don’t want to spend 30 hours on a gaming history lesson. But it’s still a competent RPG. I could name all the things that they did basically right (see the first Persona, it’s very similar). I thought I’d just highlight the best and the worst. There’s a little too much “worst” for me. The worst of the worst is how slow the game is at first. It really does take about 10 hours before the plot and gameplay get interesting.

I went back and forth between whether I should go 2 or 3 stars. No halfsies! So I’m being brutally honest and throwing down the big 2. Atlus, I still love ya, and I’d still play Eternal Punishment if you put it on PSN for $6. But don’t bother remaking it. I just want P4 Golden, and the P4 fighter with Arc System Works, and a P5. Get to work!

Played: 35 hours
Platform(s): PSP (UMD and PSN)
Price: $39.99

PART II – RANT

The continuity of the Persona series, outside the “all religions count” mythology, comes from the apparent truth and motivator of the series developers. It should come as no surprise that it is essentially the Zeitgeist Gospel of self-acceptance.

I’ve been thinking a hell of a lot about self-acceptance, and 12 step self-help programs, in the last year. My religious and social upbringing taught me that those things were bad. The Christian Gospel has, at least on the surface, a distinct contrast to the modern self-acceptance deal. Both worldviews acknowledge people are terribly flawed. Christianity says “God found a way to forgive you, you’re in, let’s party.” Self-acceptance is just, “you need to accept you’re flawed. You can’t deal with your problems if you’re in denial.” You know, step one, admit you have a problem.

So I’m getting hit with this from three distinct places in the span of a few months. There’s the drug rehab stuff in my new favorite TV show “Breaking Bad,” there’s the “shadow” characters in Persona 2 (and 4), and there’s that hospital I visited where I had to confront my own shadow self.

That latter one is really important, because it was the first time I had to confront these ideas in a way that wasn’t tongue-in-cheek.

In Persona 4, your party members go through these personal transformations where they find their dark personalities: y’know, the ones you hide with a mask. Some might call this the “true” you, but it’s really just all the stuff you hide. It’s a part of the true you. The key is not to deny their existence, but to accept it. Only then does that part of you stop causing trouble for the whole world.

This is done in P4′s first few hours, but they hold it out til near the end of P2. In fact, the redeemed villain has a whole party that is essentially your party gone shadow. In shadow-party world, you’re an apathetic jerk, your girlfriend is a selfish whore, the blue-haired guy proclaims his shallowness about the fat girl who crushed on him, and Maya? Well, I can’t say anything about that. Or Yukino. Or he who shall not be named.

Oh, but this isn’t just 2 and 4. In the first Persona, you face an alternate self in the SEBEC path true ending. The subtitle for Persona, in Japan, was “Be Your True Mind.” What does that mean? I think it has something to do with the undivided self. I think that’s what the developers are pushing with these stories. Yeah, we can put on different faces in public, and they are a part of us as they are a part of the collective humanity. But the true you is the you that just happens naturally. As we see things in that natural self that others dislike, or we judge as not part of our “ideal” self, we have different ways of coping.

The worst of those ways is to ignore it, or cut it off. At least, this is the message of the self-acceptance crowd. This includes that therapist I met at the hospital, and the guy Jesse argues with in Breaking Bad, and the creators of the Persona series. This is the central message.

And it’s not “just be you.” It’s a little more complex than that. And a lot more painful.

You have to wrestle with that part of you before accepting it. That’s what happens in the Persona titles. And it certainly happens in real life. We see it play out rather strangely in Breaking Bad, when Jesse casts himself as villain. He accepts the dark side and then declares it is all he is. That’s probably not good.

So for me? I have to accept that I have a tendency to be sad for no damn reason. And in my worst moments? I don’t get to claim, as some of my religious brethren have done, that it was some demon possessing me and I was helpless. That’s part of my story now, and it’s part of who I am. If I refuse to believe that’s part of me, those parts will continue to have some sort of free reign in moments of intense stress. Only by saying “yup, that’s in there too,” can I tone it down a notch.

The freedom to not be perfect but to simply be is the thing the “good guys” in a Persona game strive for and the same thing the “bad guys” in Persona can’t accept. They’re the typical megalomaniacs who think the path forward for the universe is to stamp out the bad and even the mediocre so that something better can rise up from the ashes. That usually means some sort of otherworldly doomsday scenario.

In Persona 2, all of that is revealed in a pseudo-religious occult text called the In Lak’ech — which translates (from either ancient Mayan or made-up language) to “You Are Another Me.” The In Lak’ech is recorded in a process that vaguely resembles the origin stories for the Book of Mormon. The very title of the In Lak’ech, though, suggests that we must confront the “other” us. What we do from there is the difference between the “good” guys and the “bad” guys.

I remember reading an essay by Catholic apologist Peter Kreeft about the “perversion” of good vs bad when I was a freshman in college. I think it was a commentary on Walker Percy’s “Lost in the Cosmos.” Anyway, Kreeft lists 20 variations of society redefining goodness as x and evilness as y. Ultimately he ends with what he saw as the meaningless transcendence of Nietszche, “the goodness of evil and the evilness of good.” So here’s my current take on life and goodness, inspired by the Persona series:

No one has the market cornered on goodness and badness. This isn’t quite relativism. It’s absolutism with the acknowledged limitations of humanity. Furthermore, I suspect that the Nietszchean/nihilist villains of the Persona series and so many other JRPGs become the way they do because they hold so steadfastly to absolutism from their own perspective, and reality never matches with their expectation, that they force reality to match their expectations with their own willpower. “Der Wille zur Macht” and all that.

So if I accept the things about me that are considered “bad” by me and others, that’s a damned good starting point. I’ve heard this critiqued by anti-postmoderners as the “authenticity = perfection” school. But authenticity, or my “attempts” at authenticity, somehow helped me hide my own tendency toward inexplicable sadness from myself. What?!

For more on the absurdity of depression: if you haven’t read it yet, check out the newest blog post on Hyperbole and a Half.

So I think the Persona creators have a good thing going. I’m no longer opposed to this whole self-acceptance gospel. I’m not so sure it’s imcompatible with my religious tradition anymore.

Guess that makes me a danged liberal.

I can accept that.