Polishing Off: Persona

I've decided to kill off my trusty, old Playstation grey. I've decided to do so by finally finishing all those games I haven't played through and those which merit a revisit. I've been playing Breath of Fire IV, arguably the best installment in the series, and have had issues with the lens reading the old, worn out copy. Aside from that, it's every bit as good as it's reputed. I've also popped in Persona, the first installment of the series - and Shin Megami Tensei in general - to come to the West. Back in the early days of the Playstation I managed to get a copy of the game as the advertising boasted (falsely for the most part) a great deal of features that spoke to the open-ended gamer in my. The game was relatively mature content-wise, or so it seemed, and controversial to boot.

My first attempt at a play-through proved frustrating, as the game is clunky and somewhat primitive even by the standars of the mid-90's. Rather than being the open-ended oddyssey I expected, it cordoned me off to a certain area and made most non-scripted paths inaccessible. Oh well. Still, the game grew on me and I soldiered on, learning the intricacies of the battle system and it's persona mechanics. It would eventually pay-off, after a couple of frustrating days of tinkering, that is. In the end, the game was good and left a good impression on me despite its many flaws and shortcomings.

And so it is that I find myself playing this game about 12 years after I initially purchased it and played it through. Let's see if I still have some rosy tint on my specs...

The intro is very "anime"; every bit the japanese occult thriller the game attempts to be. Once we get past the cinemas, the introductory scenes play out. The text doesn't scroll fast enough for my taste but it isn't a snail's pace, either. Now, taking control of my charcter, I take a stroll around the school premises - my character being a highschool student, after all - and meet some of the students, some of which make rather cryptic comments that, in hindsight, I remember wondering about; whether they might hint at secrets within the game or not. I make my way out to the city map - in lieu of an overworld - and am comically entertained by the rudimentary implementation of it. Traversing the city streets as an ad hoc marker I realize one the gripes which so haunted me the first time I played: there's no map per se, that is, no map to guide my character with and I must travel the city blindly. I get the vague direction, recalled from an earlier conversation in the game, and make for the northeast... I get lost. After some 20 minutes of back and forth and a whole-lotta-nothing I eventaully find the hospital. I visit my character's friend Mary, a pivotal character in the story. While in the hospital a tremor strikes and it would appear the hospital has been trasported to some strange dimension, as the ICU, where Mary was, has disappeared along with most of the patients save for a couple of old geezers in backless gowns (yeah). A couple of compulsory battles and I've got control again.

I make it out of the now-labyrinthine hospital to the city map again and start getting my first random battles. I few attempts at gaining the vaunted spellcards - with which I may synthesize personae later - and I manage two. Not bad for an early play session. I manage to level a couple of times with all 5 of my characters and decide to all it a day after not being able to find the shrine; I crash beneath the boughs of the Augustus tree (save point) in Joy Street.