Persona 1 - Introduction

I’ve been what you might call a “Passive Persona Fan” for a while now. My first exposure to the series was all the way back in middle school when I happened across SuperJeenius’ Let’s Play of Persona 4 Golden. I was really impressed with it because they put in the effort to make videos showing off every major plot choice you could make in the game, including every single choice you could make when it came to choosing who you believed the culprit to be near the end. They don’t really make them like that anymore.

I was familiar with and enraptured by the world, the story, and the art, and thanks to a stint of religiously watching Sapphire’s dub of the Hiimdaisy P4 Comic, I am to this day randomly afflicted with thoughts of Adachi asking me “Who wants to talk about Murders!” and Chie saying “Fsteak” and other such things.

But despite that, I didn’t really feel compelled to look into the series much further than that and offhandedly watching a Persona Q cutscenes compilation. Probably because I was in middle school and my Video Game Diet consisted of scaring myself with Sonic.EXE creepypastas at night and replaying Kirby Returns to Dreamland on my dust-choked Wii for the tenth time in a week.

I ran back into Persona around 2020, during the early stage of lockdown, when I watched a close friend of mine play through all of Persona 5 Royal for a few weeks straight. I look back on that time fondly, and I was once again really captivated by the art direction of the game. The Personas, the Music, the Characters, the UI: the unadulterated “Coolness” of it all won my heart. The art of Shigenori Soejima and the music of Shoji Meguro blew me away, and for a bit there I couldn’t get enough Persona 5 in me.

But even at that, I still didn’t have any drive to get into Persona as a series of games that you could play. My interest kind of started and ended at everything other than that. I’d even bought the Persona 4 Golden remaster when it released, opened it up, watched the intro, and then didn’t even get to a real gameplay section before I got distracted and stopped. It’s still there. I haven’t opened it in a year, probably.

Jump to the present, where the recent remake of Persona 3, Persona 3 Reload, has just released, and experiencing the story of Persona 3 through cutscenes on Youtube has once again relit the flame of my desire to just PLAY these goddamn games already. But unlike before, I’m different. I’m changed, stronger, more experienced. With a couple of 50+ hour RPGs under my belt, I am now inoculated to the daunting nature of long games. I’m familiar with…The Grind…(said with the intonation of a beautiful woman smoking a long pipe in a bar.)

But I didn’t just want to play 3, 4, and 5. I wanted to start from the beginning of the series with Persona 1, because I felt like it was important to understand the series’ roots. I feel like I can appreciate the games more if I see the origins of their design, and how that design evolved and changed through the subsequent games.

I’m also very poor and my laptop is borderline geriatric in computer years. The fan squeals on boot up like a man with arthritis getting up from a beanbag chair. If I tried to run any of the modern Persona games on it I’m convinced it would slam its top on my fingers in one final act of defiance before exploding its hard drive.

So it’s simply easier and cheaper on both my wallet and my GPU to start at the beginning! Now then, if you’ll indulge me, let us begin! Here’s my experience playing both routes of Persona 1.