#P4 Arena shows that the P3 gang still have their persona's

[almoststedytimetravel]

It's honestly so fucking funny how dead Trinity Soul is. Almost every single piece of Persona media released since has been dedicated to making that poor twink noncannonical.

[characteroulette]

Hey PQ was pretty good!

so I’m having trouble getting into PQ2 because of several factors, so I thought I’d write a half-think piece, half-essay on why I think the first PQ gets more flak than it deserves. So here’s that.

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I genuinely don't understand why, when talking about Persona Q, people are always saying things along the lines of, "The gameplay was good, but the characters were trite and the story wasn't that great." Like, as a fan of the Persona series, I genuinely don't understand that assessment.

Not saying PQ is flawless, oh no. There are PLENTY of things in PQ that I have an axe to grind with (the small door scene with the P4 gang, for one), but the overall story? The characters? They're both fine. Good, even, dare I say. And here's my argument as to why:

The returning Persona series characters (from 3 and 4) in PQ do a good job of representing their games and their own personalities, even if a little more light-hearted than their source material,

AND

The story is genuinely in-line with the rest of the Persona/SMT series, even if it ultimately doesn't matter due to time shenanigans (and I'm okay with that).

These are my two points. Just those two. Because these are the two most contested parts of PQ, as far as I can hear, since we all agree that the gameplay is the real breadwinner here hahaha

Anyway.

First, let's talk about the returning characters, since they seem to be the ones who matter most. The P4 cast are generally less griped about (save Chie and Teddie) and I believe this is largely due to the brighter, more hopeful tone of P4 as a whole. (Aaand, in my opinion, they're done a MUCH BIGGER disservice in the Arena games, but no one ever talks about that so let's not bother with those right now.)

P4 was a game about making friends, the hijinx that come from that, and finding the truth about a string of murders and confronting the worst parts of yourself in a harsher world in the process! And it executes this with the appropriate amount of balance between serious moments and comedic relief. The theme colour for the whole game is bright yellow/gold, a happier and more friendly colour which helps remind you that this game is all in good fun.

(Side note here: I honestly think that P5 really failed in this respect, despite my liking its tone slightly more. I just personally like darker-themed games, but P5 was a little too dark and oppressive right out the gate, with hardly a friendly face, which helps make your gradually growing group of friends much more appreciated but also a harder atmosphere for jokes to really land well. Most of the 'funny' sequences felt very undeserved and really dragged because uh guys we literally just fought a rapist, an abusive father figure, and some other fucked-up shit. Can we please acknowledge that a bit more instead of pretending it never happened by laughing at the expense of Ann's autonomy of her body? Especially when she was a target of said rapist??) But that's its own discussion for later.

Really, the fact that most of the P4 gang get out of this with little criticism shows how accepted their caricatures have become. I guess? At least, except for Teddie and Chie.

Teddie being a wannabe Casanova must've been a huge hit with the Japanese audience, because it's just the hill he's going to die on for the writers. There was more to Teddie than his hitting on the girls in P4, believe it or not! (And there's a whole thing about it being brought on by him mimicking the type of behaviour he saw Yukiko's shadow exhibiting, which has a lot of really interesting undertones, but it makes him more swappable with Junpei, so whatever, I guess.) Meanwhile, Chie's not as meat-crazy, either, but I guess it's a better trait for them to roll with than her (cut in the translation) glossed-over sexism.

Both work fine, however, and aren't really too annoying enough to be that egregious. (Though they both go right up to the line sometimes. Teddie more so, but none of the girls playing along really helps show how gross his actions are. Most of the time.)

No, the real complaints I see directed at the characters being 'too cartoonish' are usually reserved for the P3 gang.

P3 is, really, such a bizarre game to go back to now when compared to its two successors. It's dark and hopeless, like P5, but formulaic and mystery, like P4. It's actually a natural progression when looking at its two/three older siblings (both P2s are bleak. As. Hell!), but, at least to me, it's the odd duck of the bunch, being the first to implement this winning formula of being caught in a time limit of a school year and managing spending time exploring this other world. It adds Social Links and social stats with this new time limit and this idea that the Persona and Shadows you fight don't just happen out on the streets in 'normal' circumstances for everyone to see. It pretty much went from an RPG to a management game with RPG elements.

And its emotional, impactful story, like P5, had a lot of tonal whiplash due to the attempts at comedy!

I feel like a lot of people forget this about P3 (and maybe I think more about it because I haven't actually beaten the whole game yet myself), but the story is actually a goddamn mess of tonal confusion. You got kids shooting themselves in the heads and a Social Link dealing with a classmate's crush on his teacher. You got wacky foreign exchange student and kids taking experimental drugs to suppress their Persona and slowly poisoning themselves to death as a side effect. The protagonist is an orphan who lost his parents in a huge, plot-relevant accident... But he's able to date every single girl at the same time and be the most wish fulfillment charming guy if the player so desires.

P3 being messy isn't a bad thing. P4, P5, and even P2 and PQ are all a little messy in their own rights, too. But because P3 was a lot of fans' first in the series, and PQ is just a spin-off, it gets way more flak for this than I feel it deserves.

(I mean, hey. Both P3 and P4 have those classic anime scenes of the boys walking in on the girls while at a hot springs. All PQ's got is an awkward group date scene and the implication that Yosuke and Kanji kissed each other while getting knocked out.) (They all. Have. Problems.)

And I know a lot of this comes down to personal preference. I'm not saying you're wrong for liking P3 or P4 more than PQ. I'm just saying I feel like PQ is often wrongly accused of being worse and less well-written when, really, they're all pretty much on par with each other. (And someone on the team really doesn't understand how to handle large casts of characters sharing the same space...)

But, personally, from everything I've seen from P3, I don't like the way most of the characters get presented to me in the source material. Junpei is way more insufferable in P3 than in PQ and Yukari is way more uninteresting in P3 than in PQ. Really, PQ helped me appreciate these characters more than P3 itself did. And, yes, they're more funny when they're trying to be, too. Because PQ is set up better for comedy than the 'remember you are mortal' tone of P3.

(Which makes dramatic moments hit all the harder when they happen) HEY check that segue! It's time to talk about the story and the two original characters of the game!

So, second point: people say the story isn't very good. To which I wanna ask... "Did you stop playing before defeating the fourth Boss?" Because it really sounds like, to me, everyone who says that didn't actually finish the game and reach all that juicy character development that happens for both sides around the fourth dungeon, where all the issues they've been building up (like Yukari's issue with Mitsuru for the P3 side and Kanji and Ken's awkwardness in the P4 side) start getting resolved in a satisfying way. And it comes with a reveal for the two characters we've been getting to know, Zen and Rei, as well.

(And, from here on in, there be spoilers. You've been warned.)

The two new characters to this game are Zen and Rei, who were in this place before the P3 or P4 gangs were called to the scene. Zen is quiet and a bit unsettlingly dense, but devoted to Rei, who is bubbly and full of life, but terrified of the dungeons you have to traverse. The two have been in this place for (what's implied to be) a very long time and enlist the help of the P3 and P4 teams in order to find a way out through defeating the bosses of each Labyrinth/dungeon. Simple enough, as it also helps the P3 and P4 team's goal of getting out. With each new dungeon, it feels more and more like something about Zen and Rei aren't quite right, but the length of the dungeon and all the team chats help you put it out of your mind each time. Rei can even get kinda annoying with her loudness and big appetite if you don't find her cute (which: how dare you. But yeah, I get it).

And then, at the end of a fiery festival fourth dungeon, you find yourself in a dark tomb at the bottom level. The boss awaiting you is Rei's shadow (a nice callback to the way P4 works) whom she still doesn't accept after you defeat it.

All the locks are gone and the P3 and P4 teams can return to their worlds if they wanted. Except Rei gets kidnapped after Zen reveals that Rei has been dead all along and it was him who trapped them here. It was he who created this place and even he who called both teams here.

And this was a plot twist that I friggin' loved.

It definitely had more impact on me because Zen and Rei easily became my favourites out of the whole cast, to the point of having them on my team for the whole game, but to find out such a fucked up twist is wild! (Seriously! Go watch the cutscene and tell me it isn't super fucked up!) You can say the P3 and P4 twists were shocking (or P5s I guess), but for my money, this is the best reversal of expectations I'd ever seen in a Persona game. In any game, really!

Zen was, in effect, the villain the whole time. His true identity as Chronos, God of time, makes sense with displacing the teams from their own times and the time here being erased once you reach the end. His own power that he sealed away growing impatient and taking matters into its own hands by drawing the teams to this haven displaced from time also makes perfect sense! And the entire climb through the last dungeon is his redemption arc and it makes for a super emotionally investing final dungeon all the way. (Which is great, because I hate every single one of the enemies that appear in this god-forsaken place.) (Even P4 and P5 can't really boast that, I felt very little investment through Izanami's dungeon and Baldabaoth's distortion.)

Of course, if you found Zen and Rei to be annoying and pointless, I can see how this would fall flat for you. The fact that they hinged such an emotional climax on these new characters, characters that don't even matter outside of this game!, was such a risky move. Especially when you consider this is just a fanservice game made basically under the promise of seeing the P3 team interact with the P4 team. But, for me, it really paid off.

And whatever complaints you had with the P3 or P4 characters, I feel like the resolutions to those character moments I mentioned earlier get explored even further during the climb through the final dungeon. From the P3 gang coming together to finally communicate with one another to the P4 gang reconfirming their bonds with one another, it's a really investing and emotional journey. I do wish the writing had been this tight and impactful through more of the game, but I believe it's worth it in the end.

Perhaps this moment comes too late in the game, though. I can definitely see others giving up before reaching this point due to the repetitive nature of the dungeons and the tidbits of character development that are meant to build up to this moment that can be too sparsely placed. (But, really, it's the same from P3 to P5, Social Links don't really add much variety when they can be just as repetitive and boring, just saying. Especially when you get caught in waiting to rank up hell, ugh.) For me, however, this really sealed the deal on this game being an incredible experience that I adored from start to finish. 7/10. Final score.

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(7 outta 10?? Not perfect??) Well, it's not perfect. Japan's blatant homophobia and sexism really ruins a lot of scenes for me. I'm super salty especially about how the fake marriage scenes are handled so differently from the girl choices to the boy choices. (But you just argued in its favour for 2000 words!) Listen. ALL the Persona games wouldn't receive perfect scores for me for this aspect alone. There are a lot of other factors as well, but they vary from title to title and PQ in particular is guilty of spending too much time focusing on Teddie and Junpei being girl-crazy. And Marie is in this game more than she really should be. UGH.

But I digress.

In conclusion, this game's story and characters are better than most give it credit for. Hopefully, my argument helped you see why I believe this and why I think claiming that both aspects are just 'bad' is lazy.

[sillyfudgemonkeys]

Persona 4 Arena/Ultimax Port Idea

Ok ok, just had an amazing idea. So regardless of how BBTAG goes down, but esp if BBTAG does horrible they should totally do this idea (since it wouldn’t take as much time/money to start from scratch). 

So like, I think we can all agree that Atlus should port P4A/U to the PS4 (and maybe Vita) right? Possibly sell them as 2 for one, like how you can get P4U and purchase Arena’s story as DLC for the PS3/360 (but in this case it just comes with the game), and we get P4U’s improved gameplay (or BBTAG’s gameplay or both I’ll get to that later). 

But you know how Atlus doesn’t like to port stuff without adding new stuff right???? So what could Atlus add to these games? I don’t think they can add more to Arena (tho if they wanna add more story, maybe involving the Shadow Ops, or hint at the 6th gen of Anti Shadow Weapons, or just hint at any other ASWs that’d be cool too). But I know exactly what they could do with Ultimax. 

Before I get into it, yes it does involve the FeMC, but it also involves the P3MC so don’t leave!!!!!! ;w; (and them both being playable characters!!!! :0 well sorta haha you’ll see) Yes it involves improving/fixing Ultimax’s plot (or well....presentation I suppose is more like it), and adding to it. And yeah it might involve Theo and maybe even Kid!Sho being a playable character too (depends on how they handle it). So yeah there’s your warning, here’s how I think they should handle it (under the cut):

Ok so first thing’s first, fixing the plot/adding to it. There’s 2 parts to this. The first thing I think they should do is add a prequel chapter/series to it, but it explains Sho’s past, like they did with Labrys in Arena. Now they can make all his fights with the robots be story based where we don’t play it out (like they did with Arena in Labrys’ story). So if they did do that, then we get a new character (aka Kid!Sho that I mentioned above), if not then that’s ok, we’ll save his one fight for later. So yeah, this mode explains what Sho went through, and blah blah blah we get to see all the horrible things done to him, and it helps fix issues the game had with explaining him. Sho’s him waking up, following the IT gang during P4′s events, hearing Kagu’s voice, blah blah. At the end we see him getting ready for everything to go down. But first he wants to test out the strength of his fake Shadow Selves. So he summons one that he feels he can dispose of, and it’s.....Fake Shadow!Makoto Yuki. This is where Sho has his one fight (if Atlus didn’t do the kid one too), it ends with him winning the fight and him not being able to use that Shadow Self, which explains why Fake Shadow!Makoto Yuki never appears on either side of P3/4 stories. But this means we can still use him in other modes. He’d play like a weird mixture of the normal players and a fake shadow player. Anyway after the fight that’s when the story leads into the main story.

Now I don’t think Atlus would re-write P4′s side or P3′s side. So let’s make another “side.” This new side is called “Persona 3 Payoff” or some other “P” wrestling term word. It’s P3P is the joke guys. So yeah this side takes place as a “what if” on the FeMC’s side. This is unlocked after you’ve played through the prequel chapter. It starts off with Sho summoning a fake Shadow Self to fight and dispose of, but this time it’s the FeMC. But instead of fighting her he decides, it’d be more “interesting” to see how the Shadow Ops would react to having to fight their leader. Events play out differently than they would in side P3/4 (or even Adachi), people meet up and end up in different areas than they did before. Sho would send the FeMC out to fight/just show up to taunt the SEES characters. And this is where I think they could use BBTAG’s system (since it looks like two characters can fight at the same time , aka switch in and out in battle), as Shadow!FeMC would team up with another Shadow Self in a fight. She would always get away however (we gotta save her for later). This side would fix a lot of pacing issues or quality of writing problems that P3/4 side had. Maybe even capitalize on the bigger role with Teddie and Kagu was gonna happen. Near the end the first fight is with Sho vs Adachi, then Sho/S!FeMC vs Yu/Labrys (this would be where the S!FeMC finally falls), with the last fight being Yu/Adachi vs Kagu. The end fight is the same as P4 side’s True end, where Yu fights the blue faced Sho. We also get different end cards for each P3/4 characters. Maybe help hint at what’s to come for P3/4 kids (aka maybe foreshadow P5A). 

Things to note for the P3P side, Shinji probably doesn’t appear in that. He’s kept vague like Chidori is, 1) cause saving him is optional, and 2) cause he was already dying cause of the drugs so.....I mean they can pull some saving him BS if they want but I think it’s best to just keep his fate vague now (so the reasoning is that he’s either dead for whatever reason, or he’s too sick/weak and is still recovering). That being said, they could totally include Shadow!Shinji to help torment SEES as well. The other thing is, I think Liz/Theo could or couldn’t appear in this mode.....If they do, it’s left vague as to which one was her attendant and hence which one left the VR to help her not be a Seal anymore. This is cause.....you have a choice in choosing which attendant as the FeMC, so keeping it vague is good. In any other mode (like online or practice or whatever, but not on P3P’s side), if Liz fights either Shadow!Makoto or Shadow!FeMC, she has a special line alluding to saving that person, if Theo fights Shadow!FeMC he has a special line alluding to saving her, and if Theo fights Shadow!Makoto he has a special line alluding to how Liz is trying to save him. 

The goal for P3P side is to be the “definitive” side in terms of writing and presentation, and if Atlus adapts P4U as an anime, they chose the FeMC’s side (but of course replace her with Makoto/MaleMC). But I’d be totally happy if they just adapted the manga tho. 8U

Oh also Shadow!Makoto/FeMC use their own Orpheus’ as their Personas, both play very similar but with one or two things that one has that the other doesn’t. Their alt color pallets would be the FES “???” shadow version of themselves with a gold Orpheus (like how ??? uses gold Personas in its fight), male/female color swap (FeMC/Fem!Orpheus with Makoto/Orpheus colors and vice versa), Jun/Lisa and/or Tatsuya/Maya, maybe two of the P5 characters (y’all know which ones, don’t make me say it), Minato as Sho and FeMC as Labrys (cause Labrys has one as the FeMC, and I Sho is the “dark messiah”), and both Orpheus’ get a “Orpheus Telos” color (that means Fem!Orpheus gets the same color pallet as OT). 

Now for online mode, I think they should add an option to play with BBTAG’s tweaked gameplay if someone wants to. So you’ll get a “Classic Ultimax mode” and a “BBTAG mode.” This way Atlus can see which people prefer what, and if this does well, maybe it can help decide what they should/want to do with P5 Arena. 8U

So yeah, two story modes, both pretty much new.........new experience.....new combat to try out.....Appeases people who want the game ported, appeases FeMC fans, appeases people who want MaleMC and FeMC as playable characters without breaking canon/ruining P3′s message of letting go. 

So yeah thoughts? Think they should do that? Think they should do something else? Who else wants to cry over the FeMC? :D *sobs*