For more than a year at this point I've been a fan of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise. Shin Megami Tensei V is my most anticipated game of next year, and was the reason that I bought a Switch, and with the new trailer and a release date having given me a reason to live and hype up next year I thought that this would be a good chance to tell the story of how I got into the franchise.
Persona had always been a series that I'd heard good things about and just never got into. l am big into anime and Persona 4 the animated was fairly well received and came recommended to me a few times during my high school years. However video-game adaptations of anime are a low bar, and I very rarely indulge in them, so I was hesitant to engage with it, when I could be watching something that I was more interested in that lacked that stigma. The Wikipedia rabbit-hole for Persona 4 revealed that it was a spinoff of another series called Shin Megami Tensei, and sense spinoffs usually expect a great deal of knowledge of mainline in my experience it felt all the more intimidating to take that barrier to entry.
Jump forwards many years later, long after the release of Persona 5 and I have graduated high school and begun to get back into games. Particularly Pokemon. With the Dexit announcement of Pokemon Sword and Shield and I decide to boycott Pokemon and use this as an opportunity to get into newer games that I had had a passing interest in before hand. One of them was Tales of Berseria at the recommendation of a good friend who really liked the game. However another one was Persona 5, for the PS4. I'd heard nothing but good things about P5, and I'm also a fan of Kaito(Phantom Thief) anime so I decide that I would give it a chance and purchase both it and a PS4. I was not disappointed. Persona 5 quickly grabbed me with its anime-aesthetic, phantom-thief tropes, quirky tonal disposition of social simulating and RPG dungeon crawling with a stealth attribute, and minor commentary on the corruption rampant within Strict and orderly Japanese society. Many nights after my parents went to bed and thus left the good TV available, I'd hook up my PS4 and play Persona 5, at times lasting from about midnight well until sunrise.
This wasn't exactly the healthiest thing to be doing, both for my person life, and sleep and work schedule. I primarily played at night as I was still living with my parents, and daytime in the house was virtually theirs. My mom worked from home and her office was adjacent to the living room where the only TV that I could hook up my PS4 to, and in the evenings my Dad would come home and zone at the TV watching the news or something in the evenings. This left me with the night, and my shortest play time was about three hours, and staying up late and sleeping all the way until the evening while also having things like work, my social life and being a part of a Karate Dojo at times meant that I would wake up and need to get ready immediately to do something else while still feeling a bit groggy, and I felt that my sleep wasn't as satisfying when sunlight poured in through my window as I tried to rest.
I realized that I needed to curb my playing of the game, at least until I finally saved up to by my own place despite how much I enjoyed the game, so I sought out an alternative to play in my room during the day and get some much needed sleep come nightfall. My solution was Persona 4, a game that I had heard very good things from hearsay for many years, and so I sought out a copy. Lacking a PS2 myself and this being before P4 Golden was ported to steam I naturally turned to an emulator and downloaded and forgetting to add "golden" to the end of my search of "Download Persona 4" I ended up with the original version and a PS2 emulator. I face palmed when I realized it, but nevertheless I had downloaded the game and decided to give it a shot, and because I'm the type who at least tries to make the most out of a less-than-fantastic situation I decided to look up the other games that had been released onto the PS2 and download them as well. Those games were P3, Shin Megami Tensei III: Nocturne & Digital Devil Saga 1 & 2.
Persona 4 was even better than Persona 5 in my opinion. The cast facing the parts of themselves that they hated in order to begin an arc of self-improvement made them a lot more relatable for me and their personalities felt more than being built upon from anime stereotypes, which was what I primarily got from the P5 cast. I was hooked and with Persona 4 on my PC I was able to play it far more at my own leisure and plan going to bed at more affordable times, only occasionally staying up extra late to finish an important plot point.
I suppose that it is worth noting at this point that I really love S.Links/confidants, and my goal with trying to beat the game was to max out as many as I could on my first try. This is important as I reached the heaven dungeon with Ryotaro Dojima rank 10 and Nanako rank 9 and neither of these S.Links can be further worked on once the heaven dungeon begins. I found this to be particularly upsetting when I found out and so I decided that I needed to take a break from P4, so I started P3 FES.
P3 was much less a positive experience than the next two games in the series. I couldn't control the party members limiting my ability to strategize, the male party members didn't have any s.links for me to work on, and Tartarus was tedious to navigate most times. Later I also found out that the Elizabeth request of getting Pine Resin could only be done on a single day by talking to Yukari while in the dorms. My last save was indeed on said day but in Tartarus, and I couldn't exit without it becoming the next day. I rate-quit the game when I found that out. I went back to Persona 4 and finished most of Heaven, but kept on loosing to the boss. Than I realized that sense the Pine Resin request was fairly early on in the game so I decided to restart P3 and try again. The tedium of Tartarus quickly wore on me the second time though, especially sense the second time though it felt like I just kept running into bad luck. I didn't even make it back to the Pine Resin Request before I rage quiet for a second time but still a bit disappointed that I wouldn't be able to finish Nanako's story arc I decided to see about Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. I loaded it up and the rest was history.
The opening was beautiful, melancholic and does so much to invest and immerse me into an atmosphere of chilling beauty as the destruction of the previous world is directed in an awe-inspiring way, and the very first random battle legitimately scared me with how unexpected it was in an area as creepy as the Shinjuku Medical Center. The extreme difficulty made me learn the ins and outs of the press turn system, of exploiting enemy weaknesses for all that they were worth and making use of the buffs and debuffs that I blatantly ignored throughout Persona previously, and I couldn't get enough of just playing the game. Exploring the Labyrinth of Amala, new locations or just putting it down and being left to ponder at the points that the characters seeking to remake the world put forth as if I had just watched an episode of Kino's Journey. The game soon became a personal favorite, and was perhaps the very first game sense Pokemon to capture the same nearly unyielding desire to just continue experiencing the story as my favorite anime such as Hunter x Hunter.
I've sense only really gotten more and more into the SMT franchise and its spinoffs. I'm close to completing Shin Megami Tensei IV (Neutral Route on my first try),and I've also started Digital Devil Saga, which I originally started as something to play while my 3Ds was charging. The next game that I plan on playing when I'm done both is either going to be IV: Apocalypse or Devil Survivor, both for the 3Ds, and I'm aiming to finish them up before the re-release of Nocturne in HD, which I'm also planning on grabbing and giving my opinions on at some point.
