Playing Persona Pulled Me Through A Pandemic
It’s hard to believe that one year ago the World Health Organization declared the Coronavirus outbreak to be a worldwide pandemic. Within the first few months of the pandemic, many businesses, public places, and schools shut down per governmental orders. While people had to work to adjust their daily lives to accommodate the global pandemic, many gamers took solace in the fact that they were encouraged to stay home and play video games.
As an extroverted person, I had a very difficult time coping with the pandemic for the first few months. Most of my social communication came from seeing people at college or attending conventions. While social media helped, I had a lack of communication that left me feeling lonely. Because I had so much free time on my hands, I decided to play through Persona 4 Golden on my PlayStation Vita. I knew that in playing the game, I would be investing my time into a lengthy JRPG, but man did I not realize how much of an experience I would have with the game. This article is not meant to be taken as a review of Persona but just an overview of how I fell in love with this game in a time where socialization was difficult.
Persona 4 Golden is an enhanced version of the 2008 PlayStation 2 game, Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 4 that was released for the PlayStation Vita and on Steam. While Persona has been recognized as its own franchise, it is a spin-off of Atlus’ Japanese Role-Playing Game (JRPG) series, Shin Megami Tensei. In the game, you play as Yu Narukami, a high school student who leaves Tokyo to stay in the rural town of Inaba with his uncle, Dojima. Throughout the course of the game, Yu meets a colorful cast of characters and they form the Investigation Team to look into a series of cases where a mysterious person has been throwing people into televisions (called The Midnight Channel) in an attempt to kill them.
You experience two types of gameplay in the game. One type is the turn-based RPG gameplay where you fight your way through themed dungeons, collect and fuse Personas, level up, and collect items — normal RPG gameplay. Where Persona 4 Golden shines though is in the daytime “social simulation” gameplay where you form social bonds with various people that you meet. Each social bond serves as its own unique side-story where you help a character solve their problems by using unique dialogue options to help you improve your bonds with them. The bonds that you form with different characters help you in dungeons as they grant you access to unique abilities and Persona fusions. Aside from the main story, you truly get to see where some characters shine in their personalities through social bonds. My favorites were Yu’s cousin Nanako’s social bond as you provide her company and she discusses her grief about her mother’s death, as well as Marie’s social bond where you take her on trips around Inaba to help her explore the world outside of the Velvet Room.
Where Persona 4 Golden shines the greatest is in its story and character development. Aside from social bonds, the game takes the time to invest in the stories of the Investigation Team as well as your family. Every character (except for Yu) who becomes a Persona user has their own dungeon where they will have to fight a shadow form of themselves (facing their “true selves”) to gain their Persona. For example, Kanji’s shadow forces him to debate his sexuality and come to terms to accept that he is bisexual.
The development of all the characters I met in Persona 4 Golden made the experience magical for me. These characters did not feel like characters to me, they felt like friends and family members with whom I formed interpersonal bonds. By the time I left Inaba after my nearly fifty-hour playthrough of the game, I felt like I left a town that I grew up in. In a non-pandemic scenario, I probably would have felt satisfied that I beat the game but would have been more attached to my real-world endeavors, such as attending college, socializing, and going to work, but because I had a lot of free time to play it during quarantine, I felt a stronger connection with the game and its characters.
While we can all agree that the Coronavirus pandemic drastically affected our lives, for gamers such as me, I learned how video games can take you on an adventure outside of reality. Although I still feel bittersweet that the pandemic shut down many of the conventions and events that I loved going to, I can at least be grateful that it gave me chances to have new and unique experiences.
