Some time ago you talked about things that get you excited in games (like the dialogues in Uncharted 4). There are any upcoming game this year that are you looking for?
Persona 5 in two weeks, hands down, end of story. There are very few games I actively look forward to - the majority of games are usually more of a “Oh, that’s coming. I’ll probably get it” type acknowledgement than anything else. I know how much work goes into AAA game dev, and I enjoy my time with them, but they don’t really excite me much. I like playing them, and they’re interesting, but I don’t feel like I’m missing out if I wait a bit and pick it up later (or sometimes not at all, like how I never purchased a WiiU). My exception to this is the Persona series. I’ve been a huge fan since playing through Persona 3 on the PS2, and I love it from so many different angles. It is the one series I actually get excited about.
For those who are unfamiliar with this series, it’s an utterly bizarre combination of Pokemon-style battle and collection gameplay, Visual Novel Scheduled Dating Sim character and relationship building, and randomly-generated dungeon crawler all wrapped up in an urban fantasy JRPG setting, and it is wonderful. I didn’t think that such disparate core gameplay systems could work so well together, but they synergize like peanut butter and chocolate in a way that got me hooked from the get go.
The metaplot moves forward through day-to-day scheduled gameplay, where the player’s protagonist character meets and befriends characters in a Japanese high school setting over the course of a school year. Each character relationship is represented by a specific tarot arcana, and the strength of your friendship with that character also affects the strength of the pokemon you can collect and summon of that tarot arcana. The pokemon are necessary to battle the enemies in the randomly generated dungeons, which you must complete in order to advance the plot, which opens up access to more of the individual character storylines, which let your pokemon get stronger, which makes the dungeons easier, which lets you advance the plot… and so on. The relationships you build with your teammates translate into improvements in battle. The pokemon you collect also help build closer relationships with your friends. The money and items you collect in the random dungeons are used to buy better equipment, but also gifts for friends and toys and books for stat increases. It’s a fantastic multi-level synergistic feedback cycle that kept me playing for hours because of how many connection points there are between the different core gameplay systems.
From a developer’s perspective, Persona 5 specifically has got me very interested in their presentation and user interface design. The game is highly visually stylized, and that extends to the UI as well. But it isn’t something particularly basic either - the fonts, the color scheme, the lettering are all highly stylized as well. Just thinking about how they managed to get the fonts to work with that kind of stylization must have been a huge design challenge… especially because they knew they had to localize it to a whole different writing system, while still maintaining the style of the game. I’ve done localization before - fitting stuff from other languages into limited text space is already a challenge, but doing so while adhering to this gorgeous visual style guide is a super daunting task. Are they only rotating or highlighting specific letters? Is there some kind of special preprocessing pass for the the text? Is everything drawn separately and simply treated as a texture? My mind is abuzz with possibilities.
As a player, I love great character development, story development, and deep RPG combat systems. As a developer, I really like seeing how different and deep gameplay systems interact and intersect with each other. The Persona series has managed to keep me fascinated as both a player and a developer for quite some time. Combine this with the totally addictive genre-bending fusion score by Shoji Meguro and I’ve got a game that I’ll easily sink 80+ hours into without blinking and still go back for more. Persona is the only game series I actively avoid spoilers and marketing for, because I know for certain that I will be buying it and I want to remain as unspoiled as possible.
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