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Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh: The Persona School Of Life Lessons

Published Mon, 13 Aug 2012 14:00:01 -0500

Adi Tantimedh writes for Bleeding Cool;

Spent the weekend fiddling with PERSONA 4 ARENA, a fighting game spinoff from the popular Japanese Role-Playing Game PERSONA 4. For a fighting game, the story is pretty ambitious, walled off in a separate mode for players who want to follow the plot rather than just go through an endless Arcade mode of memorising moves and combos to up their game.

There's a reason some players actually want to follow the story. The SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI: PERSONA games are hugely popular in Japan and have a sizable following in the West. They're unique for a number of reasons: they're not just a dungeon-crawling RPG, they're set in present day Japan and are essentially a Japanese Teen Life Social Simulation game (when you're not fighting demons), and loaded with Jungian symbolism and redemptive life lessons. They also seem to be games designed to be social engineering lessons in teaching its teen audience how to be functional social beings, a message advocated by the majority of other Japanese games, manga and anime. I've said before that a country's pop culture is how the society would like to see itself, and the PERSONA series has that in spades.

While the majority of us in the West would rather forget about our high school days, including when we were still in high school, Japanese pop culture tends to celebrate school life as the first place kids learn to social, make friends, become empowered together and establish social stability in a microcosm of what they will take to adulthood. The PERSONA games go to great lengths to walk the player through the day-to-day rhythms of teenage life: school assembly, choosing which friends to hang out with, which afterschool clubs to join, whether to study or go to the mall, before the next instance when you have to go out with your friends at night to fight supernatural threats around the city.

What sets the PERSONA games apart from other RPGs is the way the story elements remove the barriers of symbolic you find in medieval fantasy settings by having it take place in a present-day Japan and deal directly with dark emotional issues that kids and people might experience: low self-esteem, depression, feelings of hopelessness, loss, grief and even suicide. The heroes of PERSONA 3 activate their powers by pointing a gun-like device at their heads and pulling the trigger.

Unlike Western superhero stories, Japanese heroes have their powers come from within, and PERSONA 3 and 4 feature teenagers who gain powers from coming to terms with their shadow selves, the parts of themselves they hate or fear and try to repress. Upon coming to terms, their personas become giant warrior avatars they use to fight shadow creatures that are the demonic manifestations of people's dark emotions. Unlike the heroes of Western shooting games or superhero stories, the heroes of PERSONA fight to save their people from an existential death that would lead to real death. They're not even fighting bad guys on the physical plane. They're literally fighting for people's souls. And the heroes and heroines become stronger when their social and emotional bonds with each other become stronger. It's as if these games want to be a lesson in basic Jungian psychotherapy.

Even the plot of PERSONA 4 ARENA keeps all the same elements from the previous RPG games and deal with the same themes, and ultimately the heroes, in a crossover event where characters from PERSONA 3 and 4 meet for the first time, end up fighting not to triumph over bad guys or each other (even though that's the objective), but to save and redeem a robot with a soul. For what some people might dismiss as a button-mashing fighting game, PERSONA 4 ARENA has one of the most heartbreaking stories I've ever read about a robot's awakening humanity I've ever read. It illustrates the typical Japanese brand of Buddhist humanism in its belief that anything with a heart is worth saving.

That's not to say it's all po-faced and somber. For all its earnestness and adolescent intensity, the series has a strong sense of its own silliness and constantly makes fun of itself with absurd humour. It's filled with pop culture conventions that have ruled over Japanese manga and anime for at least 50 years: the empowered teens who form a secret society of do-gooders like Encyclopedia Brown or The Scooby Gang, the conspiracies bubbling away under normal society, murder mysteries, superpower fantasies. Each member of the gang also represents a specific personality type: the stoic leader, the wise-cracking best friend, the cute mascot, the tomboy, the aloof rich girl, the modern samurai, the brawler struggling with his homosexuality, the teen celebrity pop idol, even the teenage genius detective who occasionally helps out the police (who in this case is really a girl in disguise). Its humanised robots are also part of the Japanese fascination with robots and the notion of robots as proxies for humanity and the possibility of robots attaining humanity, a theme Japan is obsessed with far more than any other culture on Earth, even America. It's not surprising that the robot characters are female, since emotions and empathy are associated with femininity and these characters allow male fans to explore their own emotional sides.

The PERSONA series is another lesson in how to design a pop franchise for a big fan following. In Japan, there are the usual toys and merchandise spinoffs, but also faithful manga and anime adaptations, stage adaptations, prose novels and even an entire monthly PERSONA magazine devoted to the series. As ever, the Japanese media industry has been more adept at a coordinated transmedia business model of the type that US movie studios and comics companies are still getting the hang of. While the makers of the PERSONA games might be in their 30s are approaching middle age, they seem to have a tighter finger on the pulse of what teen audiences are into than US comics and games companies are, creating a space for fans to explore their own emotions and identities in.

The original PERSONA 3 and 4 games are still available on Playstation 2. PERSONA 3 is also available as a downloadable game on the Playstation 3 and in a PSP port. Artbooks for both PERSONA 3 and PERSONA 4 are available from amazon. PERSONA 4 GOLDEN is a new Playstation Vita port coming out in October. PERSONA 4 ARENA just came out for the Xbox 360 and PS3. The anime adaptation of PERSONA 4 is currently streaming online and will be out on DVD and Blu-Ray in the Autumn. An anime adaptation of PERSONA 3 has been announced.

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Look! It Moves! © Adisakdi Tantimedh

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