#I really wanna how they do the Persona's themselves I am endlessly curious

[almoststedytimetravel]

I am endlessly fascinated by the existence of the Persona stage plays. Like, I have seen some of the most unhinged shit from those. I have never been able to find the stage plays in full, only in clips and single frames. None of them have any actual Persona's in them. I know there is one instance where Ken goes to summon his because he is drawing his evoker in the clip. But it never reaches the point where he actually uses the evoker because the clip was focused on Jin beating the shit out of Akihiko. I'm not even certain they're completely real and that they're not something I imagined seeing.

[bidickgrayson]

i’ve finally almost gotten to the place in persona 3 where i stopped playing a couple years ago. just got to october, and i stopped some time in november in my first playthrough

it’s interesting to revisit shinjiro’s death a couple years later, because that death was one of the few things i remembered with any kind of detail. i remember being very angry at the storyline that had a ten-year-old kid plot revenge for the death of his mother. couldn’t really understand that urge/the fact that that kind of storyline was coming from a TEN YEAR OLD

and i’m still not a fan, but i am a little less directly angry with ken. the first time, i wasn’t expecting it, and so i was just angry that ken got shinjiro into a situation where he was killed lol. i had a lot more sympathy for ken this time around, when i knew what was coming the whole time, and could remind myself more rationally that ken didn’t actually kill shinjiro

really where i disagree with the writing around shinjiro’s death the most is around the aftermath, primarily around akihiko’s reaction. first of all, BULLSHIT on the fact that akihiko was like “we need to stop treating ken like a kid” because HE IS A KID!!!! what are you talking about!!!! “he needs to make his own decisions” like OKAY i get that you want to respect his autonomy but....he was just a kid who plotted a revenge-murder of a high schooler who killed his mom in front of him, only to watch in horror as that high schooler THROWS HIMSELF IN FRONT OF A GUNSHOT TO SAVE THE KID’S LIFE and then died in front of the kid. there’s no acknowledgement of the trauma, because they’re trying to treat this precocious ten-year-old like he’s an adult, when frankly, no adult would go through that without some trauma!! it’s just dumb. and i can forgive the sees members for some of it, because this is a bunch of high schoolers dealing with some heavy shit with no good adult supervision (lol @ ikutsuki), and they’re all just kids themselves, so i can’t really blame them for not knowing the best way to handle it and stumbling through on their own

also, what makes it worse is that it was literally just revealed that ken was suicidal/wanted to die like, just a while before, and tbf none of the other sees members knew, but i knew as the audience, and so to have akihiko go like “well, he’s gonna do what he’s gonna do” was so jarring and distressing. GET THIS KID SOME HELP! but. whatever. and then ken of course decides to come back and has a new resolve, and it’s treated as though that’s the really strong thing to do and not a definitely unhealthy lack of concern for mental well-being. “i’m strong so i’m not going to let the multiple traumatic events/my suicidal ideations (as a ten-year-old!) distract me from our mission”

also, back to direct reactions to shinjiro’s death, and maybe this is more personal preference, but i really Cannot Relate at all to akihiko’s resolution in the face of it. i remember that disconnect was jarring to me when i first played it years ago too. because he’s sad, and then very quickly he’s not sad because “it’s what shinjiro would have wanted”. and i just can’t relate to how quick he came to terms with the death, because this was literally akihiko’s oldest friend. and when the other’s express sadness, he’s like, don’t be sad, it’s what shinjiro wanted. LIKE WTF it is still sad??? i just think a better balance between acceptance and grief could have been found, because i really feel like they jumped over the majority of the grief that i would expect from shinjiro’s oldest friend, which is very jarring. but. i mean, who knows, maybe that would be realistic to some. it feels like a shortcut to me tho. i like akihiko, but this particular instance really disconnected me from his character

i’ve heard that with the female protagonist in p3p, you can do a social link so shinjiro doesn’t end up dead. and i’m really curious how that plays out (/why the social link changes it). i just wanna be able to say “YOU’RE A HIGH SCHOOLER, YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE YOUR DEATH IS THE BEST WAY THINGS CAN PLAY OUT ( :( )”

anyway, some other thoughts while i’m here:

my vague recollection of p3 having some social links with ppl who weren’t really good people was correct. or maybe i should say, weren’t people i really found sympathetic. like, the devil link with the shady businessman (which i still haven’t completed), or the magician link with the classmate kenji (he has called me SO MANY TIMES, and i have turned him down every time, because if there’s going to links i don’t complete, i am fine with one of them being his. i just.....am not interested in his quest to fuck his teacher, i don’t enjoy it. i know i completed his in my last playthrough, but i can’t remember how it resolves but....god i could not care less about kenji). then there’s the hermit link with the teacher online (she’s so annoying lol, and i hate that she tells protag that she has a crush on the irl him, like, fuck off. also, she’s such a bad/unsympathetic teacher, it made me really miss kawakami, who had flaws but was ultimately a good teacher imo). oh, then there’s the emperor link with hidetoshi on the student council who....lol, that’s another link i completed last time but have barely touched this time, because i really dislike him. i kinda remember him softening towards the end of the link, but so much of the first part is just about enabling him being a tyrannical class council member which is not fun. and i ultimately like the tower/monk link, but he’s another character who....doesn’t really seem like that nice of a person. but i do like him because he likes the protag

the other links for the most part are good. it’s interesting the differences between p5 and p3 social links, because p5 had a definite theme to all of the links (/the whole game lol) where they were all ultimately good people who were misunderstood/unfairly judged/treated somehow (altho i haven’t done the iwai link all the way through, i imagine it ends up similarly because he’s a somewhat decent person “doing evil to combat evil” iirc). but there’s no real theme for the p3 links as far as i can tell. which makes sense, because in p5 there is a specific reason to have links with them all because they end up helping you, and they all end up as accomplices to all of the crimes the thieves commit lol

i really dislike that you have to romance all of your female classmates in order to complete their social links. what is friendship lol. really really really makes it feel a whole lot cheaper, and really makes it hard for me to care. very glad they stopped making that a requirement in p3p and beyond

what also make it hard for me to care?? the blank and unemotional p3 protagonist lol. i really have a hard time connecting to him, because he doesn’t really do much?? he’s just a blank wall for all of the social links, and it really disconnects me from the emotions of it. some girl will be confessing her feelings to him, and i’m just like, hm, fascinating, who cares, he’s gonna go on a date with another girl tomorrow. it doesn’t feel real to me at all. maybe i’m just totally unfairly biased toward p5 (and i don’t want to compare endlessly, bc p5 is newer and clearly they’ve made many improvements over the years, but it’s the easiest comparison at hand), but when someone talked to joker about how much he meant to them, i bought into it a lot more than i do with mr. low energy, the p3 protag. joker felt like an actual character to me, that i could care about, who i could understand/imagine his feelings and reactions to things. but for the p3 protag, it’s a lot of, well, i GUESS he COULD care about shinjiro dying, but you sure as heck have to read a whole lot into it to get to that conclusion, because the strongest reaction you can make him have to it is to have him tell the callous students at the assembly to “shut up.” which is nice, but hardly anything at all lol. i just find him difficult to project my emotions onto him in the game, unlike joker, who i didn’t have as much trouble believing in his genuine feeling for the people he talked to. i think also, people reacted to joker in a much more specific way that made him more real than the p3 protag, who kind of feels like a ghost most times, except for his social links where he shows up just to say exactly what the other person wants to hear lol. idk, i’m looking forward to replaying p5 and paying more attention to joker this time

(my feelings on the p3 protag are gonna be interesting come end-game, because if i understand correctly from the vague spoilers i’ve gotten about p3, the protag is gonna sacrifice himself to save the world. i keep trying to remind myself/play with that in mind, because i don’t think someone would sacrifice himself if he was actually as unemotional and detached as he sometimes comes across as)

80% of my rage at this game comes from being unable to control my specific party members in battle and so they do things that i don’t want them to, 10% comes from enemy advantage attacks (especially when i swing at them, but they hit me first), 9% comes from this game challenging me/punishing me for being underleveled when i’m playing on easy and don’t want any challenge at all because i want to get past the silly fighting business and back to social links/story, and a special 1% goes to the sleeping table boss in tartarus, which definitely was a primary punisher for me being underleveled and caused me to yell angrily at my screen yesterday

oh, ikutsuki. it’s funny, because p3 was the first persona game i played, and very early on, i was like, i don’t trust ikutsuki at all, so when the reveal came that you should not, in fact, trust ikutsuki, i wasn’t at all surprised. but it’s funny to replay it, knowing that persona likes the “this guy is not what he seems” trope, and realize that...there wasn’t really a specific giveaway instance where ikutsuki said something that was off (a la pancakes, or adachi showing up to a private conversation with interesting timing), it was just a sort of feeling i got about this weird adult who was having these high schoolers be responsible for saving the world, apparently. he really is a terrible terrible advisor though, lol, even knowing he’s evil. it’s sad to realize that the only adult help these kids have got is someone who is absolutely not on their side, and they’re truly on their own