One of the film scenes I always seemed to find myself watching over and over again growing up was Renton’s withdrawl scene in the original Trainspotting. No I’m not talking about the dead upside down baby with the backwards head, but the scene earlier in the film where he has to lock himself in his room with several different combinations of food, drink, medication and *ahem* pornography in order to successfully stay off of heroin for several days. Although this is essentially a pointless tangent to serve as an introduction, it always really put me off of taking drugs (I know, well done me). The whole idea of addiction, something that you just had to keep doing and that your body basically ceases to function without always deeply troubled me. However, I believe I recently experienced this first-hand when I finally completed my hundredth hour of Persona 4 Golden.
Now I know this is a huge over exaggeration (it’s mainly just for comic effect), but I decided to write this in order to try and convey a feeling that I’ve never felt in my life. Now for those who don’t know, Persona is a Japanese role playing series that started in the PS1 era. It is the most popular spin-off of another long-running JRPG series, Shin Megami Tensei. In the most recent games, gameplay is essentially split into two different sections. The first is the real world where you usually take the role of a high schooler where you must manage your time between spending time with your friends (these are known as Social Links, improving them allows you to craft more powerful Persona’s) and improving your own stats (e.g knowledge, courage). The second section is spent in dungeons, here you and your party of fellow high schoolers run about fighting Demons or Shadows with the power of your Persona, essentially a magical power that is specific to each individuals own personality. These take different forms in each of the games from multiple different dungeons based on each persons insecurities to a never-ending tower which reaches into the sky called Tartarus. Anyway apart from that simple synopsis, another key aspect of the Persona games (especially the newer ones) is that they are incredibly long. By the time I got to the end of my playthrough of Persona 4 Golden (P4G) I was clocking in at almost exactly 100 hours. This is an insane amount of time to spend in one world with one set of characters. Over the course of my many, many hours spent with this game I formed a very deep connection with the games cast of likeable characters. I went from finding Yosuke and Chie (your first two companions) a little grating to forming a genuine friendship with them both. Then there’s Teddy, a talking bear who loves puns and lives inside a world inside a TV, he’s got a surprising amount of character development considering he’s basically just supposed to be a cute sidekick. Next is Kanji, the punk with a heart of gold, needless to say he’s definetly my favourite male character (i.e I’d definetly date him if that was possible). This is mainly due to Troy Baker’s silky, smooth vocals, which I am a massive fan of. Finally onto one of the main attractions of Persona for many people, the romantic relationships. I guess I had three different partners over the course of the story. First was Yukiko who I kind of grew to loath by the end of the game. She was an interesting character but she does become quite bland in contrast to the others by the end. Next was Rise, who was a very enjoyable character, seeing both sides of her persona: being the always energetic idol and her more relatable normal self made her far more three dimensional than her type of character would be in another game. Although it was not meant to be. Above all, the person I finally decided to settle down with was Noato. She was smart, attractive and definetly the least annoying out of the any of the characters. I felt a genuine connection with her, and although I still find it kind of creepy I understand how people could begin to grow so attached to these fictional characters that they become attracted to them. With the likes of Noato and Kanji, I felt genuinely upset when I finally had to let them go, after the hours and months I had spent with them. I can only point to one other time in my life when I felt a similar (although much less impactlful) set of emotions. When I finished the fifth( and at the time), final season of Community. I had spent a good month or so binging each episode and I was having a blast. It seemed like there was no end in sight. But you know as they say, time flies when your having fun and everything’s eventual (well that’s kind of a mix of two sayings). Once I had finally finished the show I felt that there was a space in my heart that nothing else could fill, for a few days I sulked around in my free time with nothing else to do. I missed the characters and the setting so much that I wasn’t really sure what to do with myself, but eventually that passed. I moved onto the next game or film or TV show and the ‘loss’ of Community completely passed me by. I assumed the same thing would happen once I had finished Persona. It didn’t. I couldn’t get this feeling to go away. For the next week or two I spent the majority of my free time reading wikis, blog posts and articles about the Persona, and larger Shin Megami Tensei series. Unlike Community, Persona 4 did have several spin-offs and tie-in games which I could play/watch after I had completed the main game. However these didn’t satiate me long. Out of these there was an Anime, two fighting games (Persona 4 Arena and Persona 4 Arena: Ultimax) and a rhyme game (Persona 4: Dancing All Night). The problem for me was that, besides the first fighting game, all of these spin-offs had a largely different cast of voice actors who I don’t think brought the same realism to the characters. Some of my favourite characters like Kanji (Troy Baker was gone and replaced with someone much worse) and Naoto (who was replaced with a far less interesting voice actor) were gone. This was further hightened by the fact that no one actually knows who Noato’s original voice actress was, unlike Troy Baker who I could simply follow into his next Naughty Dog gig or at this point, basically any game under the sun, that character was gone. As I mentioned, Noato was the character I felt most connected to, so to essentially lose them and having no idea where I could follow this person’s work in the future was quite difficult. The Anime was probably the worst culprit, as it had the same voice cast (minus Noato :( ) for the first half or so and then suddenly decided to replace them all half way through. Needless to say, when I talk about this as a sort of ‘withdrawal’ from the lack of Persona in my life, it wasn’t the gameplay, or the grinding or really even the game itself that I missed so much, it was those characters who had been a large part of my life for several months that I missed. Although, the title of this does include “Renewal” after all. This story has to have a happy ending at some point. Although the whole process took much longer than my brief spat of post-Community depression, I did eventually manage to “shovel myself out of the shit” as Dr Jacoby would say. However real and important it felt to me, this was simply a game and these people were simply characters created by a team of developers and writers who have worked on several other games. Although it may not have been the most healthy choice, sometimes you just have to give in and feed the addiction. Sometimes the best way of moving on is to find something else to cling onto. Something new and different, yet still similar and welcoming. Persona is a series after all...
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authorSo this is weird. I’ve made a website, I’m not expecting anyone to read it (actually I’d rather they didn’t.) Basically I’ve been struggling to write creative things recently, every idea I come up with, no matter how much I think I believe in it, leads me nowhere. I guess you could call it writer’s block, but it’s more so that I tend to overthink and second-guess myself down to the smallest details, this means it takes me forever to make anything and once I have I’m incredibly demotivated to continue it. So, after being inspired by an Australian writer, Gabriel Bergmoser, who’s blog and podcasts I’ve been reading and listening to for the past few years I decided this would be an interesting experiment to try out. Basically I have no idea what I’m going to write, it’s unlikely to be creative or short stories, more-so this kind of string-of-consciousness opinion piece based on the things I’m thinking about at the moment. From films to television or maybe books and music. Anyway I hope you find some of this stuff interesting. Let’s hope I don’t say anything too incriminating considering my name is plastered all over this. Granted, this is something I will probably only update about four times in my life, unless I really enjoy it. It’s more so to help me be more creative and actually produce something for once.
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January 2021
CategoriesNot really sure? Opinions on the blog, mainly about entertainment. I'll also be posting some fiction or short stories eventually for your feedback and enjoyment.
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