ISSUE #02 - MAINLINE, MAINSTREAM

recently i found myself reading a few articles from eteo archetypes – i saw the article “winter and death in harvest moon” linked on the bsky of the author, holly nielson, by chance and found that it hit upon some of the same feelings i have about farming sims, enjoyed it, and went to go devour the backlog voraciously as i do with every games writing site like this i stumble upon. i liked a lot of the stuff there, even when i disagreed with it, and i’d highly recommend checking it out. it’s a good time.

but another one of the articles in the seasons issue bugged me. “passing time in persona 4’s tourist town” by emily price has some interesting things to say about the passage of time in inaba, persona 4’s small, rural core, that is undermined for me by a statement pretty early on:

Persona 4 is now (until its remake comes out, anyway) the oldest game in the main Persona series and the least convenient to play.

the reason this undermines it so much for me is pretty simple: it’s not true.

there are three older games in the persona series that haven’t received remakes and are most recently available to play on the damn playstation portable: the first games of the series, revelations persona and persona 2: innocent sin + eternal punishment. however notorious they are for being neglected by atlus and barely acknowledged outside of the occasional DLC costume set and oblique flavor text, they’re still a significant part of the series, both in how they set up some crucial gameplay elements and how they establish themes & lore that stick with the series to this day.

to deny that these games aren’t in the “main” persona series is to exchange your definition of what a series is for what parts of a series are marketable, popular.

revelations persona is not a convenient game to play. when i say it’s a piece of shit dungeon crawler from 1996 i really do mean it, albeit with a lot of affection. its gameplay, in comparison to what you get from the persona games today, is not up to par. when i played it, the most fun i had was cheating at gambling – which might say more about me as a person than it does the game. a lot of the dungeon crawling is done in classic first-person, navigating through narrow spaces one block at a time, occasionally being attacked. some segments are in limited camera third-person where you walk around, talk to people, interact with objects.

it’s difficult to explain the story of the game without basically reiterating the game’s wikipedia page, and i’m not going to. what i will say is that so many of its themes and ideas ripple out across the series. akechi is a twist on the same thing that an optional recruitable, reiji kido, has going on with that game’s primary antagonist. there’s an idealized world that the party has to navigate through, created by a man who wanted to become a deity and find meaning in life, who is possessed by his persona and defeated. in the other route, because this game has two, in the end you do the thing every persona game has become known for: you kill a god who wants to fuck up the whole world. and so on, and so forth. skipping ahead to 2, part of the endgame of innocent sin is confronting shadow selves, manifestations of suppressed insecurities. hey, does that sound familiar to anybody? yeah? thought so. persona 3 did not shift the core of these games so radically as to start a completely different series. it’s the same DNA, all the way down.

the difference is, i think, is that to remake the first three games of the series in persona 5’s image, as they did for 3 and are doing again for 4, would take more money and time and labor than atlus thinks is worth sinking into it. these games are primarily 2D, they operate on different gameplay loops, and frankly they’d probably end up tearing out some fundamental pieces of the games’ identities in the process. (in some ways this did happen to persona 3.) they fall into a similar space to the first two fallout games: they’re fundamental to the franchise’s identity but god forbid you actually pick one up and play it because Jesus Christ, this is janky.

do people say that the first two fallout games aren’t “main” fallout games? i don’t know. i find the fallout fandom pretty insufferable to begin with. but it’s an equally as stupid claim. the vaults, the brotherhood of steel, super mutants, etcetera – again, the same DNA, the same series. but they’re hard to play, so do i really have to think about them????? :(

i don’t think that revelations and 2 are particularly relevant to the point the original article was trying to make. like i said, their gameplay loops are different – no seasons, no day-by-day routine. the theme the author points to, “the importance of using your time wisely”, is one that primarily starts rearing its head in 3, when the now-iconic calendar system is established. but i can’t take their point about “unease of access” seriously when it’s built on this shaky of a claim.

if it was just this article, though, i wouldn’t be writing a whole capital-b capital-p Blog Post about it. most people engaging with the persona series are content to pretend the first three games don’t exist. most people will read this article and won’t blink an eye at the quoted part, because atlus has left half of the series’ history to languish on the PSP, so they’re happy to do the same. and sure, that’s a fine way to live. i don’t think anyone has to play janky PSP games to call themself a fan of the persona series – here’s where i admit that i have not played innocent sin & eternal punishment myself, because there’s only so much jank i can take first-hand. youtube playthroughs for me, thanks. but willful ignorance, a refusal to acknowledge them, whatever you want to call the art of “pretending the first three games in a series aren’t part of the series,” it only denies you a richer depth to the world of the series you enjoy, a literal decade of its history.

i’m just tired of trading in main for mainstream.