2「PERSONA 5 / 2017」- Zeer's Correspondence

Teehee, I said the correspondence was for shorter posts, but I literally could not help myself. In any case, to mend this error I am going to make the correspondence just a place to gush and rant, you know, without the whole formality of being an actual long post. No pretense of analysis, all feeling.

 Dear Reader,

Ah the original flavor, the one that truly set me on the journey abiding by ATLUS, and of course all their wonderful experiences. Though much of the world has, understandably, moved on to greener pastures; by which I mean Royal and other releases since then, I have always kept this version of the game close to my heart. It is after all, the basis of which my favorite game of all time, Persona 5 Royal, is built; more than that, it is a literal gaming phenomenon, one so wide-reaching it single-handedly got my FPS ass into JRPGs, Anime, and Visual Novels. Seriously, no one in my mind has ever done it as great and as funky as Persona 5 did it, no one; not the social sim, not the dungeon experience, not the monster collectathon, and certainly not the music. On that, my first exposure to the game itself was when my brother, the one mentioned in the Golden post, bought the game so long ago now and introduced it to my unenlightened eyes.

He went through the game from beginning til the end, playing it almost everyday, sitting there in front of the television, all in perfect view for me or anyone who bothered to stop for a bit to watch. Obviously I eventually got curious and queried him on it, he asked me if I remembered that odd little anime he once watched with his friends, and I searched for the memory before replying: yes; to that, he explained that this was the sequel to the thing that anime a long time ago was adapting. After that, I dropped in to watch him play and ask questions about the game more frequently, and from there I got my first tastes of what it was like to actually play a Persona game. Unfortunately, life got in the way and he ended up finishing the game without my viewership, so I was sort of left wondering what it, the game, was really about and what it, again the game, would culminate to in the end. You might be wondering why I did not just play it then and there to find out, and that is a good question, my only answer to it is that: it was just not my kind of game at the time. Truthfully, I really enjoyed faffing about, and still do faffing about, the more action oriented games like: Fallout 4, Borderlands 2, Grand Theft Auto 5, and etcetera; I was really not into 'weeb games', as it were, in fact— as stated my above: FPS ass— I would be more like to play Call of Duty at this time than a random Visual Novel.

Yet to refocus on my growing interest— fast forward perhaps a few months after the fact, my other sibling, another brother, began his own playthrough and a similar motion began; I would drop in a few times to see it then go back to what I was doing, then I would come by a little more, a little more than a little more, then I started asking questions again. Very in my fortune, then, that this time around I was able to catch the ending and get into a deeper discussion of what the game is like, here I asked, and refrain from making fun of me please, if he thinks I could play the game and beat it. His response was probably the one you are thinking of, and maybe the only one anyone could give to a question like that, it was: just play it and find out.

So I did, and let me tell you, I had probably the time of my life playing through the game for the first time; there was literally nothing quite like Persona in my world, and it was so unique and charming, so much so, that I would think of the game and wish I was playing it anywhere I went. Without a doubt in my mind, every ATLUS fan probably knows the feeling I am describing here, it was like discovering an entirely new world; an entirely new obssession, it was intoxicating and I wanted more, and luckily the game was giving me more. The original Persona 5 is such an amazing game— sure, Royal has the Akechi fix, the third semester, Yoshizawa's arc, a grappling hook, Mementos balancing, and all that; but the core, the meat that tastes as delectable as it does, is still the original game and you need to understand, that, that core is an utterly exceptional JRPG. And nothing, I say nothing in this landscape of gaming, has ever touched my soul and mind as Persona ever did; in fact, I consider playing through Persona 5 as one of the most, if not the most, fundamental experiences I ever had. This is because... playing the game is one of the biggest reasons I suddenly got so serious about my writing.

That is not a joke, playing through this game, dear reader, awakened a beast in me that wanted, with insatiable hunger, to talk about how the game made me feel; then when I found I had no outlet to do so, I began putting down these thoughts, or even adapting them as writing projects in such a way that I had never did before. Like I was into storytelling and RPGs, the western kind, so I dabbled in the quill and ink here and there, but Persona 5, goddamn you, inspired me so much to write a story just like it... or similar to it, so much, that I began to for lack of a better term 'lock in' when it came to delivering my prose. That is how special this game is to me and why I will always, always adore it.

A bit of a long one... my apologies... yet tis good proof, I think, of my passion for the game.

Sincerely Yours,

Zeer