Review:
The very first entry in the Persona series is something of an anomaly nowadays. It's something of a stopgap game in terms of style and tone, it features a modern day high school setting and has more of the philosophical leaning that one would associate with future Persona games, but it is still distinctly SMT. This unique blending of styles and tones creates something of a rather interesting and compelling horror RPG, with a really interesting mystery at its center that hooks the player in. Unfortunately, a very clearly poor translation, unlikable characters as a result of said translation, and some of the most confusing and poorly designed gameplay I think I've ever experienced quickly squander what promise the game might've had and beating it becomes more and more of a chore. Its systems are so confusing and poorly explained that it makes you feel bad about winning because you likely have done nothing to earn it, just randomly rolled a win button. And it also feels padded more and more as it goes along, with dungeons often lasting upwards of two hours. No exaggeration, Revelations: Persona is unfortunately one of the worst RPGs I've ever played in my life and I regret ever committing to a full playthrough. I was more than happy to get a bad ending if it made me stop sooner. 3.5/10
Diary:
2/20/26
First Persona game, let's go! Also, like, THE first Persona game, which I realize to a lot of people is probably insane. Like even the most diehard of Persona fans don't play 1, I literally saw a content creator I watch go through every Persona game EXCEPT for 1 because her audience told her to just read the manga. I'm not doing something similar, for the record, I'm not playing every Persona game in order, I only own this, because of the PS Classic, and 5. It's entirely up to luck that I pulled Persona 1 before playing P5. I know the argument could be made I could've skipped this one and just played P5 but I was curious about P1. I basically never hear anyone talk about Persona 1 or 2, the majority of Persona discussion I hear is about 3 onwards, so I've always been like "but why". I can kind of already tell but why.
Let's get some positives out of the way: while it can be a little obtuse and not explain itself very well, I do enjoy the battle system in this game. Positional battle systems own, what can I say. If there is something you can learn about me from this blog, it's that I love turn-based RPGs that have a more strategic element to them. In general I love turn-based RPGs because I love setting up a strategy and watching it play out. It's why I'm less than enthralled with RPGs that introduce interactable elements to turn based combat, I just want to menu and then be able to answer a text message midturn. I digress. I think the positional combat system in this game adds a lot to it. I like that the weapons have certain reaches and, as such, you have to always be aware of where your characters are positioned in order to maximize your in-battle efficiency. I'm sure I'm going to get annoyed late game by enemy team compositions and how I have to keep rearranging my party mid battle to adjust for them but right now, it's a fun combat system, idk.
I also like the sense of intrigue, mystery and also like the vague horror elements in this game. I don't know what I was expecting going into it, I guess I assumed that Persona was a series where characters existed in the real world but were aware of and connected to the supernatural one. And I know Persona 1 is not like the other Persona games, being way more of an SMT game but with a traditional party setup instead of being strictly a Monster Tamer. But I like that this game is just like "well, you messed around with the supernatural and now you're trapped in the demon realm, sucks to suck". There's also a lot of intrigue around the character who, in the translation I'm playing, is named Mary. Mary fell deathly ill at some point before the game began and has been stuck in the hospital for several months, with our cast having visited her just before the inciting incident. But, after the demon realm takes over, Mary reappears at the school up and moving as if nothing had happened. But, strangely, her memory of both the past several months and of general knowledge she should know is missing, like who the police are.
The soundtrack is also killer. The unfortunate thing about playing the original release is that it makes it kind of difficult to figure out what the characters' individual themes are when searching up the OST on YouTube. Most Persona fans just use the more "correct" Japanese names and, like, some of them are obvious, Elly is Ellen for instance, but like. Some of the other themes aren't so obvious. But the soundtrack is good, the soundtrack is probably the high point of this game so far. It's nice finally hearing the Velvet Room in its original context, I had always heard the fight remix in Smash previously so hearing it as it was "meant to be heard" is a really cool experience. The police dungeon theme is such a banger, I was really taken in by it. And the Frog Pharmacy theme is just so silly, I love it. Also yeah, there's a frog pharmacy!!! Love a frog pharmacy. I think this is probably a recurring thing in SMT because when I showed people, the first thing they said was "which MegaTen game is this" but it's new to me!
Now for the bad: this game sucks. Like it's real bad y'all. I like things about it, don't get me wrong, but like, hoo boy. So the first thing is that it's really slow. Persona 1 genuinely moves at a snail's pace, especially in dungeons. In the overworld and in "field" scenes, you have the ability to speed up your movement, which doesn't do a whole lot but it does help a tiny bit. In dungeons you are just moving as slow as humanly possible. You're also weirdly slippery? Like I overshoot what I am trying to get to constantly because the character still moves after I let go. It feels like it's on a grid and so it has to complete a full movement before it'll stop but it's also in 3D and doesn't have an actual grid laid out so it's difficult to parse where that grid is. Mind you, that might be a emulation issue as well, I am playing on the PS Classic and this microconsole infamously has emulation issues. When I played Wild ARMS last year, I had a swath of audio glitches that were definitely emulation based. I was too harsh on Wild ARMS, I like that game more the more I think about it. Regardless of whether or not it is an emulation issue, it's still very annoying to navigate the world.
The game is also very obtuse, like. I know modern games get a lot of criticism for overtutorializing, that just like the first five hours of a game, or more if it's a longer game like a JRPG, are just all tutorials. But there's a good reason for it, and games like Revelations: Persona are why. I don't need a game to hold my hand, but I would like a game to, for instance, tell me that I have a map on L2 so I'm not just guessing my best when navigating the overworld. Or for the game to give a rundown of what your in-battle actions actually accomplish as they do not explain, for instance, the entire demon conversation mechanic unless you happen to stumble upon the Velvet Room early enough, which doesn't even open until like 3 hours into the game anyways. Which is a wild thing to not explain because it's key to the game's core mechanic. Like, Persona 1 feels like it's made with either the understanding that you have already played a lot of SMT and so know what to expect, or that this isn't your first playthrough. When I do, inevitably, play P5 and complain about tutorializing, remind me of this because like, I don't enjoy how much modern games hold your hand at the beginning but man is it better than this.
Also I can just tell that this translation is going to be a problem. I'm usually not overly critical of the 90s style of JRPG translations that much, it can be frustrating, mind, to have them be a bit too jokey and referential. It seems like Japanese game companies were concerned that Americans wouldn't handle a game with a lot of quiet, serious moments. To be fair, a lot of Americans still can't handle media that's more introspective but that's moreso due to the death of media literacy than it is a cultural thing. And like, it can get annoying sometimes, I've criticized it in the past, but also a lot of JRPGs are very light affairs. A bunch of heroes taking on a super villain to save the world, it's usually classic fairytale/fantasy stuff. Persona is not that. Persona is a more introspective piece, that is what the Personas are understood as in the context of this game. They are reflections of the inner self, the other side of the person who summons them.
There's a very interesting bit in the opening where someone, presumably the protagonist, talks about a dream they had where they are a butterfly. And how when the dream ends, they awaken and still don't know what's real. The butterfly dream felt so real, so true. Are they the butterfly, are they the person, which is the true them? Both? Neither? It's an interesting concept that perfectly encapsulates the relationship Personas have to their users. However, given what I've seen, I worry about how this translation is going to handle concepts as introspective as this. Characters tend to have very surface level and extreme takes on things, a rivalry isn't just a complex relationship between two people, it's simplified to unabashed hatred. There are several times where the character I know as Nate tells the character Mark that he is going to leave him to die if he isn't useful to him. Which as an aside, is an unhinged thing to include in this version of these characters when Nate is a rich kid and Mark is black. What were they cooking? Anyways, I'm concerned that the way this game communicates its ideas to the American audience is going to water them down.
As well, the way the contextualize Personas in this translation is very basic. Like, Personas are many things, a reflection of the inner selves, manifestations of gods and monsters from across literature and folklore, a representation of the major arcana in tarot. Persona 1's original English translation though opts for a very basic angel vs. demon dichotomy, referring to them as "inner angels and demons" several times. This is an issue I have with a lot of Western translations of Eastern media and/or how the audience of that media engages with it. Like, it reminds me of how Western audiences only contextualize the Sinnoh creation story in Pokemon Diamond and Pearl through the lens of Western Christianity, depicting Arceus as the equivalent of the Abrahamic god when he's more akin to the creatio god in Shintoism. I digress. The point is that there is this genuine worry I have that the translation might not be able to properly handle its own themes that it's already attempting to setup due to its attempts to make it relatable for an American audience it doesn't fully trust. I hate criticizing localizations, by the way. Just despise it. Like that's such a topic that has been co-opted by right wing grifters that don't even really want to engage with the ideas present in these games, they just want to complain about how the games are "censored" because they take out the parts where you can date underaged characters.
Speaking of, I feel like I should already keep a counter of how many characters in this game have inappropriate thoughts or relationships with minors. Because so far it's 2. It's 2. Why is it 2. I've barely even started the game. But it's 2. The less problematic one is the owner of the General store and one of the named character's fathers. He has a bizarre fixation on his son's fencing rival, a beautiful young girl who recently transferred to this school and has dethroned his son as the fencing champion. When the demons ascend and the city changes, he's quick to ask how she is doing, saying "I don't care about my son, so long as she's alright". This is clearly meant to be a guy we are supposed to find creepy and hate, so like, it's not necessarily "problematic". But it's still a thing that happens and it makes me uncomfortable! The weirder one though is that the main character's teacher has a bizarre fixation on him. Like the teacher is almost always talking about being concerned about him specifically, ensuring that he's alright, worrying about how he's faring. It's to a point where you feel like it's more than just being concerned about a favorite student. And, unlike the former case, this one isn't seen as abnormal. Like a woman having a problematic fascination with an underage boy is somehow "better" than a man having a problematic fascination with an underage girl. From what I understand, this is a trend in the Persona series too, so not looking forward to that!
Also, just real quick, I have been made aware about the whole Snow Queen thing. That because I am playing the original PS1 localization, an entire main quest line has been removed from the game. It's disappointing, not only because, from what I understand, an entire character from the start of the game just disappears if you don't have access to this storyline, as well as numerous plot threads being introduced but never followed up on, like the school disappearing entirely after you leave for the police station. I can't pretend this isn't disappointing, like. I make no promises I'm even going to finish Persona 1, I am more than comfortable with DNFing a game if I'm not feeling it, ESPECIALLY if that game is going to be long. If I'm not into it by hour 15 I'm not going to be into it by hour 40, y'know? So not being able to do a questline in a game I'm not super sure I'm going to finish is not the biggest deal in the world. It just sucks because like, something I love about RPGs is the idea that your choices matter, that you can shape the narrative. Play a role. It's something the genre, especially those coming out of Japan, has kind of lost in my opinion. So having a choice so monumental that it entirely changes what the story of the game even is? I can't help but feel like that's a tragic loss. Oh well, we push on.
2/21/26
Y'all, I don't think Revelations: Persona is long for this world. Like this game is so bad in so many ways that, despite me finding the core story intriguing, I'm already finding it difficult about 7 hours in to justify continuing to play this. Which would suck, I hate that already for the second time this year (technically third), I've had a Gaming Diary end in a DNF. But like, the more I get into this game, the more the things I even kind of liked about it at the start seem to sour. Meanwhile, all the things I disliked about this game at the start just seem to be getting worse. I can totally see why this game has the reputation it does, it's very frustrating to get through.
So, in the interest of not just ranting this whole time, I do want to highlight how fascinating I find the plot. Even if the version I'm playing is kind of obnoxious about overexplaining things, as if the players would immediately abandon you if you left any ambiguity in the game. When I finally got to the end of the dungeon I spent most of this play session inside of, our attempts to stop the CEO whose experimentations appear to have brought forth the demon realm are foiled by an incredibly powerful little girl simply named "the Girl in Black". After she stops us from killing her "daddy", we awaken back in the high school, but everything is weird and different. Things are as if time froze six months ago, before Mary went into the hospital. The actual days have passed, our cast confirms that touchstones from their own time period like an upcoming track meet are still happening, but it's as if nothing else has progressed in six months. They awaken in their old gymnasium, from before the remodel, and are told about students who had disappeared in the past six months as if they never left. It doesn't take long for the cast to stumble into the truth: this isn't their world.
The world they've been transported into is an alternate universe, one where Mary never got sick. This is why we have this mysterious other Mary that appeared out of nowhere and who doesn't seem to have basic memories. This Mary doesn't know what the police are because, in her world, the police don't exist. Where their station would be in the protagonist's world is now just forest. In this timeline, Mary's mother is a distant, work obsessed narcissist whom Mary has cut herself off from due to being unable to handle how toxic she is. Stuff like that. This alternate Mary quickly apologizes for keeping this secret, believing that it was unnecessary to inform the party as all they had to do, hypothetically, was kill the evil CEO and then their worlds would be set right.
But also you get the sense that, while this is A conclusion that explains what is going on, it's not totally accurate. The way the students talk in this other world is (allegedly) very different from how they talk in the main world, seeming more one note. Less like people and more like movie characters. Our party highlights how shallow and superficial they all seem, how "fake" this world is. It's almost as if it's a world that was created by someone with intense power but poor understanding on how to use it. The kicker is when they meet "Bruce", a former jock at the school who mysteriously eloped with another student a couple months prior in the main timeline and who disappeared shortly after. Bruce is trapped in this alternate universe and the student he allegedly eloped with was taken by the demons. The strange thing is that six months prior, where this school is supposedly trapped in time, Bruce was dating not this other student, but Mary. Bruce was dating Mary before she fell ill, and is now stuck in this world with this alternate Mary who never got sick. Interesting that.
So the sense of intrigue is there, I like this plot. I want to see it keep going. The problem is that everything else about this game is super frustrating! Like, for as much as I'm interested in the plot, I don't enjoy these characters? We are now 7 hours in and have had ample time to talk to them so I feel kind of confident in saying this, and this might be a localization issue this localization is so bad anyways, but like. Any time I try to talk to these people and get more of a sense of the depths and nuances of their characters, it goes one of two ways. Either they reiterate points they've already established, like Nate and Mark hating each other or Alana, my fifth party member, being kind of an airhead. Or they just repeat some manner of "stop wasting time, we have things to do". I get that a character arc is something that develops over time and, as the game progresses, I am more likely to get the depth I'm hoping for, but at the same time it feels like I'm actively discouraged from talking to them, as every time I do they tell me to stop talking to them. It's like the game doesn't want me to engage with it.
And again, like, it feels like there are so many mechanics in this game that feel like I should already know how they work but the game just didn't tell me how they work. Like, I'm starting to wrap my head around crafting Personas, using a guide to help me so I don't spend way too much time trying to trial and error getting cards. First off, maybe it's just because I wasn't in the mood to play last night, that might be a thing, this part of the game is really unfun? Like you just say nonsense statements until you find the one that makes the enemy's interest start going up and then you just repeat that one singular option until they go "okay, what do you want". Nothing feels organic about this system, I'm not intuitively trying to figure out what to say based on demon personalities because I still don't know what personality traits like "Surly" have to do with wanting to hear Mary spout conspiracy theories. It feels as though my experience playing Persona is just worse because I made the mistake of having not played it before my first playthrough. Like people often wonder why Final Fantasy was able to gain a foothold when almost every other JRPG is obscure and niche and it's literally just that Final Fantasy is accessible. It has very intuitive mechanics and/or explains its unintuitive ones properly so that players don't feel put out by them.
Speaking of unintuitive mechanics, I have now successfully created additional Personas. Shame I can't equip any of them. Like I don't even know what I'm doing wrong here, I guess the Arcana matters? Because each Persona has an Arcana in front of its name? But unless I missed something major in the menus which I've been spending most of the game in, I haven't seen anywhere where the game highlights "Arcana compatibility". So either I'm just unobservant, which could very well be true, or this is yet another point of the game expecting me to have a Masters degree in how to play the game before I even start playing the game. It's just... this game's overwhelming. It's complicated but it doesn't onboard enough to where you want to learn the systems, it just throws you in deep and goes "welp, figure it out. Or not, I don't care." It's honestly making me a bit hesitant to play other Persona games. Like 5 has been on my shelf for years, I bought it after hearing my best friend talk about how good it is (only to then be told I wouldn't like Persona really, I guess that prophecy is coming through in real time). But seeing that these mechanics that I'm very intimidated by and honestly don't find overly fun are also in that game is making me go "maybe I sell this, actually. Maybe I take P5 off my list and sell it."
Also I just kind of dislike how, this early into the game, I'm already at a point where I'm encountering insta-death moves. It's not just a single enemy type either, several enemies will either just have one powerful move that drains all your HP or a combo move that just decimates it. It makes combat really unfun, I never know when I enter a battle if it's going to be an actual rewarding fight or if I'm just going to get bodied by an enemy who just has the win button. It's like genuinely this game does not want you to like it, that's how it feels. The very few parts about the game I was actually pretty positive on just keep getting worse. Also, I haven't been given an actual opportunity to upgrade my equipment in the 7 hours I've played this so far? I've only been able to go to the store once and all the equipment they had was just the stuff I'm currently wielding anyways. So it's like, combat is becoming just unfun but I don't have the means to make it more manageable. I can see why Persona fans ask you not to play this game, it's kind of miserable.
I'm sorry y'all. Like I know DNFs aren't fun, I know posts where I'm super negative aren't fun. I try not to just criticize a game nonstop because like, I love video games. I adore video games, I want this place to have nuanced opinions, I'm certainly not going to not criticize a game, but I want these blogs to be about the joy of playing a game. But man, Persona is just beating me down. Like, it's so sad because I want to see where this story goes, I'm very intrigued by it. But I just don't want to force myself to finish something I'm not enjoying, especially not something where I know that like I have potentially 30-40 hours left of it. It wouldn't make me happy. I'll commit to another play session, I like to at least give every game I play 3 play sessions before I bounce, but like. I DNF'd Secret of Mana earlier this year already and I was having way more fun with that game. I guess in a way DNF-ing is an honest experience, which is the point of the gaming diaries. See you on the other side.
2/23/26
Well then. This was an interesting play session. And by that I mean I managed to get a Persona that is a win button on accident. I stumbled into a Persona that has the spell "Nuke", for 8 MP I can basically insta-kill almost any party of enemies. This is already an insane power level but something I haven't really mentioned is that your MP in this game naturally restores. I don't know if this is a side effect of a Persona I have equipped or just how the game is, but every couple steps you take restores 1 MP. So by the time I'm usually in another encounter, Mary, who I have the Persona on, is ready to just Nuke the field again. On the one hand, I'm glad, because now the game is much more manageable. At this juncture I feel like I could beat the game. On the other hand like, having a win button is nice, but I also don't feel like game balance should, you know, let me do this?
This has also created a snowball effect where Mary is now getting more and more overpowered because of this Persona. The way EXP works is that every participant in battle gets a baseline EXP value. So as long as your party just exists, they're getting EXP. But then that EXP has increased based on how the party member performs in battle and how effectively they use their Persona. So if Nate buffs the entire party, that's a big buff to his EXP. Mary, who is now regularly dealing 300-700 to entire parties of enemies is now getting thousands of EXP per battle. It's crazy, I realize, but I have no incentive not to do this. The game doesn't seem to particularly care about party balance, it seems like if you make a Persona that just wins the game early on, good job, the odds were in your favor.
I know it seems like I'm complaining, and I kind of am. Like bad game balance is bad game balance even if it swings in my favor. But I am also happy. Having a path forward means I get to find out where this plot is going, which is something I do actually want to know. Like, despite everything else that's happening in this game that I'm not super fond of, I find the story very intriguing. There's been this theme developing, now that we're in this "other world" of the idealism of this alternate reality. Characters constantly mentioning how all they want to do is be happy, and how this world is intended to accomplish that goal. That before the demons started showing up, before the main antagonist began enacting his plan, corrupting this ideal world, it was kind of paradise. But, there's something insidious about this place as well, like this happiness is not natural, it's artificial. I feel like there's a dystopia like this but I can't place which one off the top of my head, where everyone is "happy", but they're happy on the grounds that if they aren't, they'll be punished.
Contrast this with the other half of the alternate town. The alternate town has a barrier that runs north to south directly through the middle of town. You can only access the other side through the Subway tunnels underneath the town, which are currently infested by demons to prevent anyone from going to the other side. After a long dungeon, you come out on the other side and quickly go to the first landmark, the Mall on this side of town. In the protagonist's world, this is a mall like any other, it's called Joy Street, but in this alternate world it's the "Black Market". The Black Market is run by a mysterious woman known as the Harem Queen, a woman who works for the Girl in Black. The Harem Queen imprisons people inside the Black Market, once you enter, you're unable to leave. You are her prisoner, and her slave, and she begins to strip away the parts of you she covets. Alana is quick to pick up on this as she feels her beauty being drained the longer she spends inside the Black Market, and indeed the Harem Queen covets beauty most of all, wishing to be the most beautiful.
The Harem Queen, as well as her boss The Girl in Black, are unambiguously the villains of this section, they are keeping people prisoner and kidnapping them to suit their own machinations. They are a corrupting influence on this idealized world, a world that knows so little strife that the police don't exist in it. But, at the end of the day, the idealized world is also a prison. A place where everyone involved is trying to escape the harsh realities of life, where the key driving force is to "just be happy". It's a toxic positivity, one that forces you to never address the problems in your life. And it's one that our party has a lot of thoughts on, for the first time these characters have thoughts on the world around them. Not Mark though, Mark kinda just reacts to everything like "what is going on". He's very dumb. But in particular, Nate and Alana argue constantly about this idealism, Alana agreeing with it, saying life is just happier when you bear no mind of the past or the future. But Nate, who for once isn't trying to complain about Mark existing, presents the idea that this is just a fantasy, that the past and the future will happen and that by hiding out in a present where nothing bad has or will happen, you are just fooling yourself. It's not a lot, mind, and I'm assuming this is the localization removing more nuance again because that's the common thread, but it's the first time in this game so far where it seems like Persona is what I've been told it is, you know? An introspective game series.
As such I want to propose a theory, one that I feel like I have hinted at numerous times but haven't stated in full I think. And to be clear, the game is not subtle about this theory I'm proposing, I think it's meant to be a big reveal but they're laying it on pretty thick. I think this alternate universe is not actually an alternate universe. I think that this is a world created by Mary. That Mary, who has been in the hospital for the past 6 months and who herself has the ability to tap into Personas, created a world to retreat into where she never got sick. Initially just an idealized fantasy, it become more and more real until it started actually existing and bridges started forming between the two. It's a world so without conflict that the police don't exist, a world where time has progressed but the world is frozen six months into the past. Things that Mary could not possibly know about are unchanged for her. People that only recently showed up into her life months before exist as question marks, the fencing rivals who in the main universe are these two interesting NPCs who always fight are hardly even rivals because, when Mary fell ill, one of them had only recently moved into town. This world is a place for Mary to retreat into when he sad life being chronically ill gets to her, but now it has been made real.
It makes me wonder, then, what the purpose of the twin girls who seem to rule this land are. I've previously mentioned the "Girl in Black", who we now know is named Maggie. There is, also, a Girl in White who we haven't seen yet, who is apparently named Mae. Maggie is something of a jailor in this realm, she exists to imprison people here and destroy the idyllic nature of it. She is stated to be the main antagonist's daughter, but I'm not so sure. I think that she is some aspect of Mary, maybe her own self-loathing who exists to destroy her happiness. Or the crushing weight of her reality, the inescapable truth that she is bed ridden and ill and may never get better. Mae is less seen, but if I had to guess, she is attempting to protect Mary's world from crumbling. The part of her that exists to preserve this idealism. Which would be very interesting, we are told that Maggie is the villain of this tale but, should this theory be correct and I think it is, Maggie may be the one that's ultimately in the right. If Mary is creating this idyllic world to not face her reality, then it is her who is the one trying to break this chain. Interesting.
Anyways, remember my counter? The one counting adults with unhealthy fascinations with minors? It goes like WAY up now. So as previously mentioned, to get the means to craft new Personas, you must bargain with enemies. Each party member has a methodology through which they can bargain, usually having four. A lot of these options, and I mean A LOT, are just bizarrely horny. Mark frequently needs to dance for demons and the game specifically highlights that he's doing so "seductively". Nate will neg demons. Mary tends to make herself look small and shy and scared so the big strong demons will want to protect her. And Alana does just proposition them, like, that's just a thing she does. This is already bad, but it's worse when all the demons are depicted as adult men and women? Like outside of the directly monstrous ones and the sort of Earthbound-esque weird enemies like a sentient basketball or a toilet (I know the toilet is a yokai), they're usually depicted as humanoid and decidedly adult. So essentially can no longer keep track because the answer has went from "a specific number of NPCs" to "yes". People willingly choose to play Atlus games, that's the crazy thing.
As well, I'm uncomfortable about the Black Market storyline. So, the basic storyline is simple, there's a Queen that rules over the Black Market, once you're inside you're not allowed to leave and she slowly steals your life force until you are weak enough to where she enslaves you. Classic scary story stuff. But the majority of the people in the Black Market are either in drag or implied to be trans. And more specifically, these are not decisions they have made, they are decisions that the Queen has put onto them. It's implied, at least in the localization, that these men have been here so long and have had their most important pieces stripped from them that they are becoming increasingly feminine, and those that have been fully transformed state that it's only a matter of time before the same happens to those who are still only wearing wigs. It's literally the conservative myth of "trans people and drag queens will indoctrinate you and make you like them".
It's not an unexpected thing to come up, Atlus' treatment of LGBTQ+ persons to this day is awful. I often cite Catherine, a game criticized for being transphobic by having a storyline where a member of the core group of guys falls for the waitress at the bar they go to only to discover later that she's a trans woman and be disgusted by this fact. Only for Atlus to go on the rerelease "we hear you, we see you, we're going to make the game more sympathetic" and leave the storyline not only unchanged but also alter that characters' story so that, in one of the "good endings" of the game, to have that character never have transitioned. Atlus is a company that fixes transphobia by making things more transphobic. And these are modern games, so a game in 1996? Forget about it. Still, it's really uncomfortable to get through and I can't wait until I'm done with this part of the game.
I don't like Revelations: Persona. I want to make that clear. Am I having a better time with it? Absolutely. Will I likely finish it? Most likely. But this game has aged pretty poorly, and arguably wasn't that great to begin with. The design decisions and obtuse nature of it are just not good for an RPG with these many unintuitive mechanics. I think it needs a modern remake, though I worry that Persona 1's unique flair would get lost with one. Atlus would try to rework it as a Persona game more and kind of lose some of the interesting atmosphere and more dark tone. I mean they already kinda did try this with the PSP remake of Persona 1 which didn't change too much about the gameplay but did radically change the soundtrack to match more of the modern Persona stuff and I've seen a lot of people say the newer soundtrack doesn't match. Speaking of which, the soundtrack has still been killer, I've just been failing to take as close of note of tracks while I'm playing. Here are a few of the neat tracks I've found in this part of the game. But yeah like, me no longer not wanting to DNF the game, at least at this stage, doesn't mean I'm liking it suddenly. Even if I find the themes and story interesting, everything else really is just poorly done. We'll see how this develops.
2/25/26
I spent like half of this play session lost in a dungeon. The Karma Hotel, which is only like the third or fourth dungeon in this game, being 10 floors without an easy way to get up or down is quite a choice. Actually, something I've noticed about this game is that they really like this design element of "multi-floor dungeons where you have to go all the way down to the bottom before working your way back up". Which I get as a thematic choice, Persona dungeons are meant to be labyrinthian structures built into normal buildings we'd see in real life. And that comes with the need to create a logic for how the dungeon design adopts and adapts realistic proportions for multi-storied buildings. It is just kind of crazy that their solution for how to change a 5-10 story building into a dungeon is "you go all the way up or down, then work your way through in the other direction". But complaining that Persona 1 doesn't have the most compelling gameplay is old hat by this point.
That being said I'm going to do it more. Look, I know PlayStation games, especially ones with complex 3D environments which Persona is kind of, couldn't be huge. They were limited by what they could actually put on the disc and so a lot of games had to use tricks to make themselves seem so much larger in scope than they actually were, to get more out of the players' time. Persona's way of handling this, however, is just tedious. In the section of the game I did this time, I spent an hour and a half navigating a dungeon, only to get to the end and get teleported out. I then had to make my way back down through the dungeon to fight the boss. After I beat the boss, I had to manually exit out of the dungeon, then walk all the way back to a different dungeon I had already been through, the Subway Tunnels, navigate that dungeon again, then walk towards the next dungeon. And when I pick the game up again tonight, I will almost certainly have to navigate the dungeons I've already visited to progress. It feels like padding. That being said, like, I don't like this game really so maybe it feels padded to me because of that?
So, the Harem Queen. As we get further in the dungeon, we find rooms of conventionally attractive men whose entire existence is to worship the paintings the Harem Queen makes, she's obsessed with her art being seen as the best. The party quickly clocks two things: a, that the paintings are technically very competent but lack any sort of artistry behind them, and 2, that they are all reminiscent of the style of their missing friend Selina. Selina was the student the party believed had eloped with Bruce several months ago. She was transported to this world at the same time Bruce was, and was very quickly abducted by Maggie and brought beyond the Wall. As you may expect, the party's missing friend is, in fact, the Harem Queen, which means that this is a teenage girl who is enslaving adult men, keeping the sexy ones for herself and turning the "less desirable" ones into women. I hate everything about the Harem Queen plot if you couldn't tell.
When we reach the bottom of the dungeon, we meet Selina in her private chambers. The group immediately clocks how much she's changed, Selina, a girl who always took pride in her perfect appearance, now has a face covered in large black moles, with more growing by the minute. She explains that Maggie, after kidnapping her, granted her a magic mirror that will grant her every wish. However, each time she uses it, another mole appears on her face. It's the classic story of your inner wickedness manifesting outside of yourself until it ruins your outer beauty. Selina cares very little about how her appearance has shifted because her newfound power allows her to finally be what she has always wanted to be: adored like Mary is adored. Selina, as it turns out, has always been rather jealous of Mary. How effortlessly Mary was loved by everyone and how good she seemed to be at everything. Selina's obsession with her art being seen as the best spawns from the fact that she always believed she was in Mary's shadow, that despite Selina's art technically being better, Mary's art was more beloved. Selina even states that her dating Bruce was a means with which to get back at Mary, that her jealousy and hatred for the girl made her steal her boyfriend. On orders from Maggie, Selina uses the mirror one final time to turn herself into a demon and kill the party, being promised that Maggie will return her beauty to her if she does so.
After defeating Selina, something snaps in her. She tries to hold onto the persona of the Harem Queen but it is slowly fading, the weight of what she has done settling on her shoulders. She alternates between continuing to lash out at Mary in jealousy and beg them to leave her to her misery. That what she has done is unforgivable, even despite being told by the party that they forgive her, that she's a victim of an evil person manipulating her for their own gain. As we get through to her, Bruce suddenly appears in this room, overjoyed to have finally found Selina. Selina, being deeply insecure, is quick to tell Bruce to go away, to be with Mary, the woman Selina believes he actually loves, and leave her. Bruce, humorously, responds "Selina, I dated Mary six months ago, that's been over and done with". Honestly, I wish I was taking notes on this because the entire conversation between Selina and Bruce is very funny. I'm pretty sure he at one point says "yeah, sure your face is covered in all these ugly moles, but you know what, I don't really care". I've been very critical of the tone this localization has taken, especially how many deeper psychological concepts the material wants to address, but this time it works, this conversation is very sweet but also very funny.
Selina tells the gang that Maggie's hideout is in a castle on this side of town, and luckily the castle is on the map. Interestingly, it's where the hospital is in the real world. I would like to draw attention back to my previously stated theory that this world is a creation by Mary. I think it's very interesting that this world has half of the town, the half where the hospital is, as this dark, shadowy place, with the hospital being a literal bad guy fortress, while the side of town where the school and thus her friends are is a bright, idyllic place where strife is so unknown that they don't even have cops. We are 100% inside Mary's head right now. Anyways, Maggie appears at the castle and states that the gang can never enter, because the only other person with a key, her "sister" Mae, not only lives on the other side of town but is also too much of a coward to ever help them. She locks the door behind her and the group has no choice but to seek out this cowardly young girl and convince her to help us.
Mae lives in a fairytale forest that arose in this alternate world in the past month. In the real world, this is where the police station is and, in Mary's alternate world, this was a flower garden. Both have mysterious disappeared to instead be replaced by this beautiful forest of gorgeous pink trees that the party states they haven't seen in a long time. I don't think that's accurate, these trees are all over the place, they are the save room, but you know. Ludonarrative dissonance. The things that happen in the gameplay are not always indicative of the text. Anyways, she literally lives in a gingerbread house in the center of this forest, which going off the theory that Mae and Maggie represent parts of Mary's internal psyche, I find interesting. Like Maggie, this evil side of Mary, lives in the place Mary hates the most; her hospital. The thing that has robbed her of life for the past six months. But Mae, who is presumably the "good" side of that coin, lives in a fantastical fairytale setting where nothing can harm her.
When we meet Mae, she tells us what we probably have already pieced together: that her and Maggie are not truly two separate beings. Mae is the creator of Mary's world, a deity that used her distinctive crescent moon compact to creator an idyllic world with no violence, illness, or corruption. Everything was safe and happy, until the main antagonist of the game found this world. He sought to possess its power and called forth to the darkness inside Mae, which stepped outside of her, creating Maggie. The girls' compact fractured in two, and now they exist as separate entities, one of whom uses their powers to imprison and manipulate the people of Mae's ideal world, and the other who hides from her darkness. Mary is quick to note two things about Mae: she resembles Mary from when Mary was a child, and also that the compact the two girls are fighting over resembles one she used to have, one that had been lost to her before the other version of her, the "real" version of her from the protags' world, went to the hospital. She bizarrely takes the idea that she is a creation of a little girl surprisingly well, but I guess it's not uncommon in fiction for figments to accept they are figments once that reality is put upon them.
The party asks Mae for help to defeat Maggie, but she is unmoving. She is scared not only of the other girl, but also of what might happen if the party accomplishes their goals, because I think it's pretty clear here that Mae is a representative of our Mary and if this world reaches its conclusion, Mary's will to live is likely to give out. I think that's a pretty safe bet as to what's going on given the clues as presented. Which is ironic because the cast is begging Mae to help them so they can get back to their world to find and help their Mary. Mae just asks them questions about what use fighting is, why they even bother. After answering her, she refuses to give the compact over, instead sending her teddy bear, which grows into a monstrous creature, to stop the gang. She disappears after you beat it, dropping her compact resignedly. But the party feels uneasy about this. They feel as though something has gone wrong. I too feel as though something has gone wrong, I know this game has a bad ending and I feel like I just locked it in. Oops. If that's true, I'm just gonna be upfront, I will be swallowing that choice and I will not be replaying the game to get the good ending. The choice is 13 hours in and might be longer on a second playthrough depending on how quickly I can remember how to access Nuke, it's just not worth it to me. I like this game's story but I don't like the rest of game enough to care about reaching its "proper" conclusion.
2/27/26
I'm not going to front with you, I barely remember what happened in this section. I was kind of juggling playing Persona while being invested in conversation with a buddy of mine. And I'm often juggling conversations with Persona, mind, that's just what I do when I game. I'll throw on a stream and kind of chat sparsely in it, answer questions if a friend needs help and I know what to do. But I was like super invested in this tonight so I kind of just went on autopilot for Persona. This led to me, a, not accomplishing much of anything, I got through like one dungeon. But 2, I don't exactly remember everything that happened in this section of the game. So forgive me if I don't have any interesting analysis on the plot I did encounter. Alright, so, this section of Persona.
I almost lost to a boss fight in this section. This is not an uncommon thing for this style of JRPG, while I haven't played a Persona before I have played the very similar Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth games. And you quickly learn that no matter how overpowered you seem during normal gameplay, it all gets thrown out the window the moment you hit a boss. It did not help that, a, the boss did just have an attack which consistently one shot my main damage dealer, but also my play was just horrid in this section. I was not making the most optimal of plays because I got into this headspace of "well a longer fight gives me more opportunity to work on my Persona leveling". When really I should've just been doing the best things I had access to. It took me several turns to switch in my buffing Persona and start spamming Magic Up so NukeMore, the upgraded Nuke spell, would deal more damage than just like. 130 per turn. I've been open about how bad I am at most, if not all games, but this is probably one of my worst performances in recent memory. I almost wiped to this boss like 8 straight turns in a row and if I had, I probably would've stopped playing because I hadn't saved in several hours. Though I guess if I really wanted to, I could've gone back and fixed the decisions that possibly locked me into the bad ending.
There was kind of a clever subversion of the "villain telling their enemies their plans" trope in this section. So, this has been one of the most made fun of tropes in storytelling history, the villain explaining their plan and how exactly to defeat them. Now I think it is kind of obvious why this trope exists, especially in a video game, you need to communicate to the audience key information that you might not otherwise have the opportunity to. This is especially needed in video games, where you have to lead the player to their next objective, and a convenient way to do that is by having the villain explain what they would need to do to defeat them. So, Maggie, for instance, is the one that told us we need to find Mae in order to move forward. Having found Mae and receiving her compact, we return to the Castle where Maggie lives and insert it into the lock, only for the whole thing to immediately disappear. The main antagonist has played us for fools, he needed to get the compact to further his plans but he seemingly can't leave this side of town and Maggie, who can, cannot touch Mae. So by leading the party to Mae via explaining his plans, he let them do his work for him.
And Nate had figured out that's what is happening but didn't tell anyone because, idk, he just didn't feel like it? He explains that it was a moot point anyways, as they needed to get to the main antagonist and Maggie so they were kind of in a no-win situation, but like. Come on dude, you could've communicated with the others. I don't think I've made it the most clear, but I really dislike these children. Maybe it's because of the localization decisions or maybe it's because my patience for teenaged characters has gone down considerably over the years, especially in like anime/manga/JRPGs, but these kids are so one note. Their conversations are redundant, they don't feel like three dimensional characters, they are always fighting with each other. They're insufferable.
But Nate? I hate Nate the most. He's the most frustrating party member in the game, he's a spoiled rich kid who looks down on all the other party members and despite being the "know-it-all" smart kid, he is categorically unhelpful, figuring things out on his own only to then hide it from the other party members until it's convenient to drop on them to make them look dumb. It's crazy too because like, he's one of the only party members that has had a humanizing moment, his butler/surrogate father died at the start of the game and it left him shellshocked for the first dungeon. And yet despite this very recent tragic death, he behaves like it didn't happen.
I actually just want to stop and talk about the localization, if I may. So, I've been giving the game the benefit of the doubt so far that its script is largely bad because of a poor localization. Some things are clearly not that way, the most problematic plot points have to come from the source, but I've been quick to blame most problems on the localization. But like... that can't all be true, right? Like, I'm sure the thing they're saying are drastically different but there's no way they changed the text boxes to be shorter. There's not exactly a lot of room for nuanced character development or actually meaningful psychological insight. And I know this is the first Persona game so they probably haven't really decided to go all in on that aspect. But I guess I'm starting to wonder: is Persona actually what I've been told it is.
I've always been given the impression that Persona is a JRPG with a brain, that it has actually things to say in a genre dominated by stories with less complexity and nuance to them. JRPG fans are going to get really mad at me for saying that but I don't care. I've played a ton of them and I've loved a ton of them, they ain't exactly Victor Hugo my guys. But now I'm just wondering like, is Persona smart, or were you just 15. Everyone I know who really loves Persona for its themes either got it into when they were a teenager or if they were older, they were used to not playing games that presented a viewpoint. And I just have to wonder, is this franchise smart or did it seem smart to you because you got into it at a point in your life where you weren't used to media that tried to say something? Anyways, I'm very seriously considering removing Persona 5 from my to-play list after this, don't hate me for it if I do.
So we get to the end of the Castle and we meet the antagonist yet again. His name's Guido, by the way, I haven't said his name because I felt like it wasn't going to be important, and it's arguably still not. Like I'm pretty confident that, if I were playing this game to the good ending, Guido would be taken out at the point where the plot diverges and then we'd be spending another like 10 hours with a new villain. Anyways, Guido reveals his true master plan: that by obtaining both compacts from both girls, he now has unfathomably power. He can destroy and create as he sees fit, effectively becoming a god. With this power, he retreats to the protagonist's original world, having turned the factory he used to work at into a massive palace. He declares himself a god and then moves into his palace, challenging the protagonists to find a way to defeat him. Yes, as is tradition with JRPGs, we need to find a way to kill god. In a rare humanizing moment, our fifth party member, Alana, does break down. Consumed by the hopelessness, for the first time something getting to the usually upbeat girl. Unfortunately it's not really explored because the team tells her to cheer up and she does.
Part of me feels like I should just stop. Like, I feel like I'm close to, at the very least, the ending I am going to get. Maybe one or two more dungeons and I'll get there. But also I'm not having fun anymore. Arguably I was never having fun, I guess, but in the early game I did find some enjoyment from the combat and I was intrigued by the story. These things have dissipated. Every fight has devolved into "hit the win button and if it doesn't work, spam basic attacks". The characters being as poorly written as they are is actively eating away at what the plot had going for it. The promise it had has faded. Part of me wonders if I'm feeling this way because I know I'm probably not getting the "true ending" of the game, but at the same time playing until I get the true ending means another 30 hours of THIS. I feel bad because I'm choosing to finish this but didn't finish Secret of Mana, which is also a game I did not like at all but it's definitely a better game than this. But I guess this had a hook that got to me and it was way too late to turn back by the time I was fully over it. This is one of the worst RPGs I've ever played and I will be happy to never see it again. Next time, hopefully, that'll be the case.
3/1/26
I didn't beat the game in this section. I'm close though, like, I HAVE to be close. I am in the final dungeon, though, or at least what I think is the final dungeon. This is Guido's palace after all, so I can't imagine I have that much left, or at least not that much left for what ending I'm probably getting. Like, I'm almost 100% confident that I am receiving the "bad ending" for this game, but I'm not sure if the ending is just "a different cutscene and maybe a "true final boss" thing or if it's like "oh there are 10 hours left". Probably the latter, actually, as HLTB lists Revelations as being a 30 hour game and I'm entering hour 20 right now. 20 hours of this. I should've DNF'd it three play sessions ago when I was only at 12, I foolishly thought that I only had a few more hours left and now every dungeon is like an entire play session. I'm so sick of hearing these children say Persona.
I do want to say, though, that I did really like the Haunted House dungeon. Dungeons haven't been my favorite part of this game so far, they're normally just overly large and difficult to navigate even with a map. And often have this same design of "going all the way to the bottom so you can climb all the way up" (Guido's Palace is like this as well, it drives me crazy). But the Haunted House has such a nice atmosphere to it. It's probably the most well thought out dungeon in the game so far, making good use of the game's "dark maze" mechanics and its circuitous dungeon design to actually make a place that feels like a twisted, haunted space. On top of that, the dungeon's soundscape prominently features a crying woman, the woman who is believed to have haunted this house now being made real by the alternate world's rules. It's very interesting because in the "real world", the Haunted House doesn't exist. It used to be present when the main cast were kids, but it got torn down by Guido's construction and there's a lot of superstition surrounding it. That the ghosts were now angry with the town and now haunt outside the boundaries of their former home. It's nice to finally get to see this place which has such a legend in this game.
The Haunted House also ends with a very unique interaction: the player being allowed to choose to not fight a boss. It's weird that a game with this entire system built around reasoning with the enemies doesn't have this option normally, come to think of it? Like you can't do a full pacifist run because there are, a, some enemies that you can't reason with, namely Guido's security team, but also you can't do it because you have to fight the bosses. Anyways, the boss of the Haunted House is a sexy four armed demon lady who is the cause of all the crying we've heard throughout. But something strange happens when you get to her. She starts calling out for Mary, asserting that she is actually Mary's mother and that she has came to look for her. This parrots an event from the real Mary's own past where she got lost in the Haunted House as a young girl and her mother went in to find her. The alternate version of Mary, of course, doesn't recognize her as she believes truly she has no mother. But the remainder of the party is less certain, with some of them believing the demon to be Mary's mother corrupted while others (Nate) believing this to be a trap. But if you choose not to fight the demon, it turns out to actually be Mary's mother. I guess it's probably still Mary's mother if you choose to fight it, you'll just have killed Mary's mom in that case.
I want to correct something I said before about the alternate Mary's history. I had parsed that, due to her assertion that she has no mother, what that must've meant is that she cut herself off from a toxic mother. But literally the alternate Mary does not have a mother. When she talks to Mary's mother, Nancy, she says as much. That's why, throughout the journey, Mary gets very defensive over people saying she has a mother, she doesn't even know what a mother is. I think this is interesting operating under the theory that this world is just a fantasy concocted by the real Mary. It's Mary who believes that her mom is just obsessed with her work and so doesn't have time for her. And so this world she created to hide from her troubles in lacks her mother entirely. And when she appears in it, despite this being a fun childhood memory for Mary, a time when her mother braved a haunted place to save her, the older Mary's complex opinions on her mother cannot reconcile that she's doing so for good. It literally depicts her as a demon. But, by choosing not fight her, we allow Mary to have some manner of closure, with the alternate Mary calling Nancy "kind" and "selfless". It's a good moment. Good dungeon. If I liked this game more, this would be a tearjerker.
So, after that, I entered the final dungeon, Guido's Palace. We're greeted by a minor character from earlier on in the story, a very confusing scientist character who continued to work on Guido's plans despite being entirely opposed to them. Like maybe Guido was more subtle in the original script and so this made more sense, but here that guy is always talking about how he hates humanity and how he wants to build a world where his nihilism can become law. Genuinely, no exaggeration, when Pokemon did this plot in Diamond/Pearl/Platinum they managed to give their villain more nuance by at least having the implication that Cyrus still had some humanity in him, as he refused to attack his hometown and the people who raised him. Absurd.
Anyways, the scientist is now parroting Guido's philosophies and we quickly find out this is what he did with the compacts he's gathered, the power he now wields. He has changed the world to make everyone think like him, to make everyone believe humanity is a sickness and that their continued existence is meaningless. Some are managing to resist this mind control, but the longer Guido remains in power, the more humanity falls under his spell, a process we see begin to happen in our own party, as Alana mentions throughout the final dungeon that she is having increasingly intense headaches, a sign that Guido is entering her brain. Most noteworthy, however, is that Guido calls out Mary specifically. And not simply as a girl he recognizes, no, he states the two have history. That Mary is his ally in all of this. The alternate Mary is confused by what this means, but I think we can pretty easily parse what's going on from all the clues given. The real Mary, having become isolated and with her hopes for the future dwindling, likely believes all the things Guido believes. That's why her world started becoming corrupted, that's why Maggie exists at all. I imagine we're going to get to the center of this and Mary will be powering Guido's whole scheme.
Usually in the penultimate section, which I'm sure that's what this is, I give my thoughts on the project so far before the final wrap-up and review. But like. We all know I don't like this game, I genuinely should've abandoned it when I realized that initially. I think the interesting thing I've found through playing this is I'll recount my experiences to people and how poorly designed this game is, at least in my opinion, and they'll go "oh yeah, Persona is just like that" and like. Why... do people like this? This is one of THE RPG series, Persona 5 is one of the rare JRPGs that is an actual commercial success that's not named Final Fantasy, this is a series that people consider a must-play and that more and more people are jumping on board with. And like, I know they've probably evolved since then, but it feels like none of the problems ever get addressed from what I'm seeing. Revelations: Persona has not just been a bad experience on its own, its been a bad experience that makes me want to avoid the franchise. Not just for making the games look bad but because, in my discussion on why this game is bad, I have not been given any confidence that it ever improves with later entries. And now I'm scared to ever play Persona 5 because that game is way too long and I don't even want to think about committing to it if the clumsy design of this game isn't resolved 20 years on.
3/2/26
I had literally 40 minutes left of the game, I'm so mad, I'm SO MAD that I stopped playing when I did last time. I have not been sleeping well lately so when I get tired it hits me suddenly, but man, I should've just pushed through. I knew I was at the end of the dungeon, ahhhh. It didn't even take me that long to actually fight the final boss. It took me like five turns for the first phase and three for the second and for how slow Persona 1 can be, especially with how long Persona summoning animations are (because for some reason you have to fully summon your Persona every single turn for every single character despite Personas just being "casting spells), the whole boss fight probably took me like seven minutes. I could've been done with this and just moved onto Monkey Island 2 and not have this Sword of Damacles hanging over my head.
Okay, so the final dungeon is really boring. I didn't really talk about it last time but in a game with incredibly bad dungeons, Guido's Palace is the worst, at least in the game so far as I was willing to play it. It is, like most dungeons, a very tall dungeon with a lot of going up and down floors to progress, specifically climbing all the way up, going back down, and then climbing back up once again. It's also a massive labyrinth with tons of dead ends that don't go anywhere. I get this from a dungeon design perspective, this is supposed to be the "final dungeon" so you use a lot of the tricks from previous dungeons. Classic game design trope. The dungeons in this game are just generally awful and so all these returning ideas are more annoyance than anything. But also new to this dungeon is a light puzzle where you have to copy a pattern on the ceiling on the floor, but each time you step on an unlit tile it lights up and vice versa and the actual "solution" is not clever and not fun. You kinda just have to do this dance of "take two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward, one step back". Maybe it's just because I'm over this thing, but it's not even a little clever.
So, at the end of the dungeon we get to Guido, ready to fight this megalomaniacal monster for the fate of the world. But, when you get to him he's not feeling it. He sends Maggie away and it seems as though his drive has gone. He quickly muses about how he accomplished everything. His life's goal was to build a world that saw his truth, saw how this world was meaningless. He has nothing to live for now. He wonders if this is the fate of all gods, to wield absolute power and have said power be made worthless. He doesn't want to fight anymore, he just wants to understand. Understand how the party resists him, how they can find the strength to push on. What they are fighting for. Mark is quick to say that looking to the future accomplishes nothing, you need to fight for what's now, what we can do to make our lives good in the present. Alana says something super sexist about how she's fighting so she can find a husband who doesn't even need to be rich. Why did they make her say that? The protagonist and Mary say they don't have an answer, but that finding one is reason enough to live. It seems, almost, like we are going to de-escalate the situation, to fight with words instead of weapons. To have our ideologies fight and to convince Guido that he's wrong.
And then Nate has to ruin it by piping up and roasting Guido. I hate Nate so much, y'all. So much. He starts talking about how much of a loser Guido is. How he's done all this and it amounted to nothing. How Guido is nothing more than a lonely, spoiled brat who hates his own life and so needed to make everyone hate theirs to deal with it. He just goes off on this guy when the rest of the party has done such a good job de-escalating. Unsurprisingly, Guido doesn't take this well and once again asserts that he is a god, and that a god should not be burdened by the opinions of mortals. So we have to fight anyways. I will say the boss fight does do something pretty interesting. During the first phase Guido battles with his Persona, using its powerful magics to supplement his range of sword techniques. However, as the battle progresses, the Persona overtakes him. His inner self, his desperation and longing for understanding, it becomes his outer self, being warped into a monster that the gang must now kill. It's a neat way to tell a story with the battle. Even if the thing is called "Super Guido", hate that.
After the fight, Guido lies dying on the floor and reveals what we've probably gathered by this point, or at least I have: he is not working alone. Mary, the true Mary, has been his accomplice this entire time. Her phenomenal psychic powers having been the generator powering his reality warping machine. The Mary that travels with us is nothing more than a figment of the real Mary's imagination, an idealized version of herself from a Utopia without illness or conflict. The twin girls, Mae and Maggie, are simply aspects of Mary's personality meant to protect the world she created. In a way, they themselves are Personas. This Mary does not take this revelation well, which is crazy because this isn't the first time that she's been told she isn't real, but the party is quick to point out that before, Mary existed within the confines of her own heart. The world we were in was Mary's, a palace in her mind meant to keep her safe, and so this version of Mary could not know conflict or strife. Out here, though, the "Ideal" Mary is real, and she panics. She refuses to accept that she isn't real and runs off, hoping that should she just run away from her problems, they won't be true.
Unfortunately for her, she finds the real Mary. Mary is comatose and hooked up to a machine, her incredible psychic power empowering Guido's entire palace. Confronted with the real Mary, the "Ideal" one is forced to accept the truth: she isn't real. Not only is she not real, she's a copy of the true villain of this story, a depressed, nihilistic young woman who became so jealous of the joy others felt that she created a dream world to hide in and then, when it wasn't enough, turned it into a prison. All in the name of loneliness. Mary begins to break down, feeling she does not deserve kindness or forgiveness. The world has been put through so much suffering, and she is the cause. It is here that Mae appears once again, now having gained her full power from defeating Guido. She banishes Maggie, the "evil" part of herself, and once again seeks to imprison the other Mary. Pulling her back into the world of her creation. Mary calls out for the protagonist, and Mae, having now fully accepted her role as an aspect of the true Mary, tells her not to worry. In this new utopia, Mary can have as many of him as she wants.
Thus we get the bad end. Guido is lauded as the hero who saved the world and the party is forgotten. Things go back to normal swiftly, but nothing ever changes. People just keep running from their problems, pretending if they don't acknowledge them, they'll go away. Mary is implied to have died, a butterfly flying into her now empty hospital room. And we end off with a simple quote: Cogito, ergo sum. The way this ended is almost enough to convince me to go back and do the good ending because Mary is the only character I was invested in and I'm sad this is her outcome in the bad ending.
But I won't, because this, no exaggeration, is one of the worst RPGs I've ever played in my life. I can give it grace as much as I want for the fact that I played an inferior version. The translation is bad and they cut out half of the game. And because of these issues, I didn't like the characters and found the story less nuanced than it probably should've been, even if I did like it a lot at times. But I cannot mourn forever the version of the game I didn't get. I played the American release of Revelations: Persona for the PS1, and that is what I am equipped to judge. And this game has awful writing, it has shallow and unlikable characters, it has a lot of problematic moments that don't seem to add much of anything to the story. It was a mess and, more tragically, it could very easily not be. The core plot has something to it, I was compelled by it, but everything else works against it.
And this isn't even mentioning the actual gameplay. Combat is slow moving and wastes your time as you have to watch the same handful of animations sometimes multiple times a battle. Enemies are often unfun to fight, either being one shot by the good move you have or taking several turns to battle because they're immune to all magic and so you have to slowly whittle them down with melee. The demon persuasion system is nonsensical, giving you too many options to try on every individual enemy but not even hinting at what works, requiring either a guide or infinite time to trial and error. And the entire process of Persona fusing and equipping, which is what the game is built around, is poorly explained and feels like you are just pulling on the slot machine until you get something that lets you win. Persona is a game where I was mad I was winning because I did not win by learning the systems and using what I learned therein to create a powerful Persona. I rolled a win button on like my fifth try and that carried me through the game. I don't feel good about that. The biggest crime, however, is that Revelations: Persona leaves me without a desire to play other Personas. Persona 5 has been on my shelf for several years and more and more I'm looking at it and going "I should sell this". 3.5/10
