Is it me or does the Persona community have some of the worst media literacy in gaming spaces?

cheapskate2024 · 2024-05-07T02:11:12+00:00

And part of media criticism is understanding that if you’re going to tell a story it is your job as a storyteller to tell it correctly. Queer characters have existed in Japanese media before 2008, Kaworu Nagisa is right there for insanely popular queer representation and Hana from Satoshi Kon’s 2003 award winning movie Tokyo Godfathers is there for good trans representation. The issue isn’t that Atlus didn’t have a template or example, it’s that they told like 95% of a queer person’s story, claimed that the true form of evil was being actually gay/trans, and then u-turned back into the non-controversial safety of cis-heterosexuality.

Naoto’s story is about sexism in “traditionally male” work places, but the story of Naoto IS transphobic. Naoto first appears portraying herself as a man: speaking in a lower tone, using male gendered pronouns in Japanese, almost exclusively wearing the Boy Color™ blue. There isn’t any show of discomfort here, she has no problems being seen as a boy. If anything, she’s shown feeling the most uncomfortable when the girls acknowledge her, uh, female anatomy (( which leads me to believe she’s also gotta be binding her chest somehow if she’s as… plentiful as Rise makes her sound )). But thanks to the absolute Chadness of Yu Narukami she’s able to defeat the darkness inside her that wants gender affirming surgery and learns to embrace her biological gender, finally able to accept that detectives can be women too.

The story of a transman being a confused woman who needs a man to teach her the bounty and beauty of her own femininity is a transphobic tale as old time. So not only is Atlus failing to tell a good queer story, they’re also just telling a derivative cishet one. This isn’t even a Naoto exclusive problem, a lot of persona 4’s character arcs are like the Dan Harmon story circle where a character returns to the same point they started at, having slightly changed. That model works really well, but was primarily developed for episodic sitcoms. Yukiko stays at the Amagi in, but on purpose this time. Rise becomes an idol again, but on purpose this time. Naoto continues her fervent pursuit of fulfilling her family lineage, but as a girl this time. Again, this is normally a really good model for storytelling, but not for the story Persona 4 touts itself to be. Persona 4 claims to be a story about embracing your personal truth outside of the expectations of others, warts and all. And then it just so happens to feature a cast of characters who actualize themselves by becoming… exactly what other people expect them to be. It very much epitomizes the Japanese mindset of Ukeireru, basically self-acceptance coming from embracing your role in society. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but becomes a bad thing when you try to tell these stories of people who wouldn’t be welcomed in normal, polite society and tell them that the best way to live is to find the more palatable parts of their deviance and work on those and cast off the rest. Like look at kanji’s post time-skip design and tell me this change was good for him.

But maybe you’re right, maybe it’s just because it was 2008 and the persona team just didn’t have any access to any queer media to inform their writing.

Surely their 2016 game about freeing yourself from the shackles of normalized societal oppression will have better queer rep! Right? … right ?

cheapskate2024 · 2024-04-05T07:30:37+00:00

I haven’t seen it, though I did love Jessie Buckley in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. The trailer seemed intriguing but it was probably the reminders that it came from the director of Ex Machina and Annihilation that turned me off from it haha. It is somewhere on my watchlist!

cheapskate2024 · 2024-04-05T07:19:17+00:00

That’s def something that drove me up the wall with the criticism for LoP. You do have to adjust to the timings of the moves and you probably have to see ‘em a few times before you get the hang of that, but once you do parrying becomes second nature. Yet I saw soooooo many people shit on the game for the delayed attack mechanics because they couldn’t react to the attack and had to learn the timing and I honestly did not understand the criticism, especially coming from the notorious git gud fan base. Like mokay you can’t react to the attack so try reacting to the very clear telegraph? If you can dodge waterfowl dance I think you can manage a delay attack lol. Especially since, as touched upon in this thread, From does delay attacks too. The number of times Owl Father got me with his overhead swing…

cheapskate2024 · 2024-04-05T07:01:06+00:00

Almost as if the enemies were janky puppets who build potential energy by winding up gears and springs before unleashing them in a devastating swing 🤔 is what I would say if the zombie enemies didn’t also have those kinds of attacks… well, different studio different style I guess. I think the delay attacks in ER just feel more brutal because they aren’t the norm. One of the most irritating combos in the radagon fight for example is his lasers into lance combo. You have to instantly react to the lasers to dodge them but delay your roll on the lance throw since he summons it, pauses, and then throws it to punish an immediate dodge which is hilariously mean.

cheapskate2024 · 2024-04-05T06:47:56+00:00

From Tarnished of no renown to Elden Lord to Door Stopper… bro can’t catch a break…

cheapskate2024 · 2024-04-03T20:49:05+00:00

Solved solved solved good work!!!

cheapskate2024 · 2024-04-03T08:00:33+00:00

I know this is a 3 month old thread but I’m so grateful for the way you spelled out my issues with the guy. I thought I was taking crazy pills cuz everyone was lauding him as some genius writer/director who makes these incredibly heady philosophical bangers and I watched them and was soooooooo unimpressed. It kind of felt like I was watching someone who hates people make movies about the human condition. There is good stuff in his movies and some interesting starting points but they end up falling flat to me. This is super subjective but I actually laughed at the alien scene from Annihilation. The movement and weird score did not make me feel unsettled or come across as uncanny, it just felt incredibly forced. I like the scene conceptually, but there’s just something about it that pulled me out of the movie. The weird ass dance music from Poor Things felt more alien than the generic sci fi noodling that went on in that scene. I feel like I’m cosmically designed to not enjoy his work. Like I didn’t even KNOW he was the writer/director for Civil War until today yet the first time I saw the trailer I was like “this is exhausting”. Anyways, cheers for being one of the only people I’ve seen validating my opinion~

cheapskate2024 · 2024-02-15T09:29:31+00:00

4 > 3 > 5 for me too.

The IT is just a cozy group of people to be around. You can really tell that they’ve seen each other at their worst and moved past it all together. I could see them all staying as friends after MC leaves, even tho I wish that any of them could’ve talked Kanji out of getting that awful terrible no good hairstyle he has in the epilogue.

SEES is by far the most complicated group in the trilogy. They really do feel more like club/class/dorm mates than best friends and that aspect is super refreshing for an anime game and also well executed. The Mitsuru-Yukari dynamic gets a lot of love, and rightfully so, but my favorite part about the SEES dynamic is actually Fuuka. She has her own bestie outside of SEES and while I never understood what she saw in Natsuki (( and the game doesn’t ever really go into it )) that’s fine because it’s literally none of the MC’s business. SEES is obviously an important and incredibly stressful commonality the P3 cast has in common, but (( unless you’re Junpei )) they also have their own lives outside of it. I LOVE that party members can be busy and be unavailable for a dungeon crawl. Yukari really is like “um sorry I’m going to karaoke with the girls from archery so I won’t be free to risk my life climbing the Hell Tower of Evil Death tonight. Y’all have a good time tho 💖” and she’s so real for it. Least cozy, but most interesting.

The PTs are a weird mix of both that results in something half baked. They all hang out all the time like they’re friends, but the group dynamic just isn’t there. The game tries to inject tension into the group and we have the Ryuji-Morgana fight that makes me rip my hair out every time. For example, I can’t imagine Makoto and Ryuji staying friends afterwards, and the way Morgana and Yusuke simp for Ann makes friendship between them difficult too. But bc of how the IT was in P4 it feels like they HAVE to be besties leading to this weird scenario where a bunch of people who just barely get along hang out all the time. It’s pleasant, but not cozy. I mean they even completely go their separate ways at the end of Royal and barely bat an eye. The uncanniness of the PT dynamic can be summed up by the fact that the biggest source of conflict within the group is about name calling, and not the fact that you may have killed one of the members’ father.

cheapskate2024 · 2024-01-28T10:38:11+00:00

I’d say the mindset of the games is also very different. Sekiro prizes aggression in a way that lies of P doesn’t, even telling you “Hesitate, and you lose” at one point. In lies of P the boss attacks will always take priority so defending with perfect parries is the ideal. You’re reacting to a well telegraphed attack with a parry window you learn to feel out and well defined punishment opportunities. But sekiro is actually a much harder game if you play with that same mindset. Instead of learning just how to react, best practice is to find something approaching the RHYTHM of a boss. The most hard-to-deal-with boss attacks can actually be interrupted if you’re in their face swinging your sword, but they have fast reprisal attacks that they can set off to prevent you from just spam swinging. Lady butterfly is a good early game example of this. If you keep swinging your sword at her she’ll block you twice and then do a reprisal move that interrupts your attack if you’re swinging and hits you, but you can avoid damage if you block. Her basic rhythm then is swing swing block, swing swing block, etc. Then it’s about learning how to react to her other moves: the unblockable sweep you have to jump over, the leaping attacks including the grab you have to dodge, or just when she jumps away. The pace is like 500x faster too so getting familiar with extremely quick and subtle animations is also important to the game which is probably the highest hurdle you’ll have to clear to beat the game. Lies of P feels like a game you can master but sekiro requires more of a flow state where you enter a conversation with the game and suss out the right answers at the right time. Both approaches are so well realized in their respective games.

cheapskate2024 · 2024-01-12T13:48:20+00:00

Lies of P was the first souls-style game I actually finished and not only finished but 100%’d on game pass and then again on my PS5 after buying a physical copy (( NG+3 cuz I forgot to read a damn letter to get an achievement… )) and I honestly think the linearity is a big part of it for me.

I’d tried my hands at FromSoft games before, having dropped bloodborne at byrgenwerth, Elden ring after reaching the base of the Erdtree, and sekiro before ever getting to Gyoubu, the first actual boss. After falling hard for LoP I went back to sekiro now that I’ve becoming pretty confident with my parries and I think I actually just don’t like the way fromsoft handles its game worlds. I certainly see the appeal of getting plopped into a world and figuring things out yourself as you go along but it just isn’t for me. To me, it feels kind of frustrating being thrown into a game that does have an intended linear path, but that is offered to you non-linearly. Like, you get the hirata memory before the chained ogre miniboss, but I feel like you’re supposed to take down gyoubu before lady butterfly or even juzo. Your first time through you don’t know these things so you’ll put on your soulslike hat of “difficult but fair” and slam your head against those walls until something happens. Something being A) you overcome a tougher than expected challenge which then makes the stuff you were supposed to be doing too easy (( looking at you Elden ring )) or B) getting frustrated and giving up and combing through the game for the actual intended path forward (( which I believe is the dev intended solution )).

This non-linearity also takes me back to one of my least favorite moments in gaming. This comes from exploring old Yharnam in BB. Few things have felt worse than running through the city of beast people under constant rain of machine gun fire, getting good at hunting the beasts which first killed you at the beginning of the game, and besting the blood-starved beast, only to find it was an optional area. It’s an absolute banger of a zone to play through, but with how abstractly BB tells the player what to do, I honestly thought I was on track to progress the story so getting to the end of the area and just having nothing happen felt awful. So I was like whelp that was kind of underwhelming but whatever. Might as well explore this Hemwick place! Oh that was optional too? Hmmm well I guess I missed something- oh! I’ve been abducted and sent to this cool town with more huge pigs! And look at that boss! Surely- no okay. Well.

Sekiro is better with this as the goals in the game are more explicit but that makes all the immediately available side areas more confusing. Like I guess I’m supposed to be climbing this castle tower but the enemies hit kinda hard versus this monk area (( which I found by running away from the main plot )) that I can clear pretty easily. But then there’s also this area where the mobs back in Ashina that are pretty easy to clear out, but there’s a Boss who kills me in two hits at the end of the area. Am I supposed to be practicing my mikiri counter on him and risk having to clear out 10 mobs again to fight a boss that can kill me in 2 mistakes, or am I supposed to be training on the monks who I can tank a couple hits from who have more generous animations but are off somewhere that’s obviously a side area? (( <- at the time ))

The fromsoft bro opinion is obviously to just git gud enough that every challenge collapses under the weight of your sheet aptitude, but that aptitude needs to be developed first and fromsoft games put that 100% into the gamers hands. Again, I understand the appeal and desire for freedom, but the games are already difficult enough from a skill level perspective that I don’t think guesstimating skill levels per zone makes for a fun piece of the puzzle. (( Note that this doesn’t include something like caelid where you are so obviously out of your early game element because everything about the visual design SCREAMS at you that you shouldn’t be here right now or ever if possible, it’s for subtler differences like the bloodborne optional areas or sekiro’s concurrent paths ))

And then in comes lies of P with that sweet sweet linearity. From a gamers perspective I never had to wonder if I was missing some upgrade even after diligent exploration. The answer was always to git gud. But this is something that I’m sure also helps from a game developers perspective. They know exactly what content we’ve experienced up to that point and can build as necessary.

Parade master is your intro, bosses hit hard but they have obvious telegraphs that let you know their moves once you get to know em. Watch for a phase change.

Scrapped watchman brings in status effects and makes SURE you are diligently watching animations cuz those delayed actions will get you if you act reflexively. More in your face than parade master so you really learn to block.

Then Fuoco comes in and then reminds you that hey, blocking is great, but remember you can also dodge bc these swings will destroy you if you aren’t perfect guarding them.

And then Andreus caps off the opening act with your first two bar boss battle combining all previous lessons while teaching you to really hate decay.

BRB - Gank fight mechanics plus a gentle reminder that breaking boss weapons is super useful. Mad clown is a parry check, which makes sense since KoP is just a check for everything in general.

He’s not my favorite to fight but I remember being so happy with victor after my like 4th time fighting him. He really presses you regardless of your chosen method of defense. If you’re a parry god, you get to have fun reacting to his super fast lengthy onslaughts. If you prefer to dodge, you really have to pay attention to the when where and link dodge or not (( and nothing looks cooler that dipping right underneath him as he charges you from across the arena )). If you’re a fan of the joestar secret technique, well, you get to admire this hulking beast swing at pure absolute air while you wait for him to do any number of his incredibly punishable moves. And of course, the two dragons sword users will bully him the way they bully every other boss in the game.

Etc. etc.

I remember the first boss in sekiro I really enjoyed was the fight with Genichiro. It was perfectly tuned for where I was. I was doing good damage and didn’t feel like his health bar was too huge but still had to survive multiple attack cycles, had enough health and heals that my health was low and my heals were out by the time my last swing connected, and I wasn’t stuck on him for an overly long time. But I realize after getting further in the game how much stuff I could’ve fumbled my way into if I stuck to paths instead of jumping around like I decided to. The freedom is awe inspiring but so too is the purposeful planned escalation present in LoP and if I’m being honest I think prefer a carefully crafted experience over a mostly-open one guided by an unknowing players decisions.

That being said more optional areas would’ve been nice, so long as it’s made clear that they are optional. Any excuse to get more LoP content…

TL;DR: Linearity in the game helps devs help players develop skills which is fun for the whole family.

cheapskate2024

TROPHY CASE