There’s a quiet loneliness that pervades
in the first few hours of Persona 3: Reload. Yes, there monsters and ghouls and battles
against spooky enemies – but, when the Dark Hour ends and you’re left to your own devices
in the real world, you’re just a school student, the new kid, with no actual friends
and nobody to spend time with. It’s become a mainstay of the Persona formula
to make the player feel out of place and unwanted at the start of each game. This isolation is paramount to the game franchise’s
repeating narrative arc, as you grow from a lonely outsider to develop lasting friendships
with those around you, slowly finding your place in a society that wasn’t sure if it
really wanted you at first. To start off, though, this feeling of abandoned
can be overwhelming – whether this is your first Persona game, or whether you’re already
a card-carrying member of the Phantom Thieves. If Persona 3: Reload isn’t your first time
with this franchise, you might find yourself missing your old friends. You might wonder whether you’ll actually
connect with this new game as well as you did with the previous one. All of which is an excellent facsimile of
how it feels to be the new kid at school, not yet sure of your place in the world. As a new player of Persona 3: Reload, then,
you may well find yourself wandering around aimlessly at the start. Turfed out of school classes and simply told
to meander their time away until the next big fight, you have no friends to hang out
with, no club meetings to attend. So, you wander. You explore shopping centres and arcades. You stumble into a cluttered, dusty bookshop,
where you meet two of the game’s earliest supporting characters: Bunkichi and Mitsuko. --
Your character is an orphan with no family, no home, no permanent place in life. At a time, then, when you’re struggling
to make new friends, this elderly couple become the surrogate family you need in that moment. At a time when nobody else in the game seems
to care much about you one way or the other, the Elderly Couple are there to ask you about
your day, to shower you in affection and, occasionally, in sweets. The game doesn’t so much guide you to them,
as it lets you stumble upon them of your own accord, but it’s clear that they’re meant
to be among the first friends you make in your new home. And yet, something feels off. There’s a sadness between their eyes. A casual comment here, an awkward glance there. There is something that your new elderly friends
aren’t telling you. Then, the tragic truth comes out: the reason
this couple has taken such a shine to you is because you remind them of their son. A memorial for whom is planted in the grounds
of your school. If it weren’t clear already by this point
in the game, the central theme of Persona 3 crystalises in this moment. This is not just a coming-of-age story about
growing up and finding your place in the world. It’s also a story about confronting – and
learning to live with – the inescapable shadow of death. --
Video games as a whole have a complicated relationship with the concept of mortality. There’s a certain flippancy to the way many
games deal with death. This is a natural result of death being thrown
around so casually, as a default fail state in a large number of games going back all
the way to the arcade coin-op days. Oh, you died? Never mind, pop 20p back into the machine
and you can try again. Or, once games moved into the home through
consoles and computers, simply hit restart. Death is not permanent. It’s nothing more than a temporary inconvenience. Eventually, many games would give up on any
kind of penalty for death whatsoever – you start back almost exactly where you left off. Death in such games is nothing more than a
slap on the wrist. Not even worth worrying about. Perhaps because of this cavalier attitude
towards death, games have always struggled to show the trauma, the processing of grief
and loss, in a believable manner. Take, for example, what is perhaps the most
famous death in all of video games – yes, it’s a shocking moment within the narrative,
but at the same time, the player has a stack of Phoenix Down in their pocket that usually
cures death outright. Or, the oft-memed moment in which a soldier
stands at the grave of a fallen comrade, and the player is instructed to “Press F to
pay respects” – even when played completely straight, video game death is little more
than a narrative beat, and the process of healing emotionally from a tragic loss is
distilled down into a single contextual button prompt. --
This is not to say that video game character deaths cannot be impactful or emotional, inasmuch
as the player is willing to invest in them, but even the most heartbreaking game death
isn’t truly permanent when the player can simply start a new save and bring their digital
friend back to life. Perhaps it’s for this reason that gamers
have long sought of ways to make deaths more meaningful. The Hard Mode or “Nuzlocke” run in Pokemon
games is an excellent example of this: players arbitrarily choose to remove the game’s
inbuilt euphemism, treating each defeat in battle as a death, and forcing themselves
to retire a Pokemon that runs out of hit points. Doing so not only makes the game harder; it
also makes the game more painful. Players bond with a digital character that’s
barely more than a sprite and a set of numbers. We project feelings and emotions and personalities
into these character that we’ve invented ourselves. We seek out moments of grief and pain. We inflict this trauma on ourselves. Why? Because doing so makes the game more meaningful. It makes our triumphs all the sweeter, but,
just as important, it gives us an opportunity to roleplay grief in a safe, clearly defined
space. Because for the most part, games typically
shy away from letting the player use these spaces as a way to process out real world
fears surrounding the impermanence of life on Earth. --
Death comes for us all. This is the simple, sometimes overstated message
of Persona 3. Most noticeably, this is seen in the overarching
plot of the game. You and your high school friends are humanity’s
only defence against the end of the world, and an all-powerful being that is planning
to consume all of existence. Thus, faced with a brewing apocalypse, we
see how different people react to being confronted with their own mortality. Some people hide from it, pretending that
nothing’s wrong. Others collapse in despair, unable to even
move, the anxiety and fear and dread becomes so tangible. So far, so common for video games. None of this is a million miles away from
other games about death, such as The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. What Persona 3 does different with this familiar
doomsday setting is twist the formula. Yes, there are deaths coming in the near future. In addition to this, though, every major character
in the game is still struggling with deaths that have already happened. As noted, your player character in Persona
3 is an orphan. They are living on a daily basis with the
fallout from the loss of their family, and the kind of isolation and loneliness that
this creates. To them, death is not an abstract thing to
be avoided. They live with the consequences of death every
single day. --
As you go through the game, you discover that the Elderly Couple are far from the only non-player
characters that are still processing some form of loss. Whether this loss was recent doesn’t matter:
in all cases, the pain is still very raw. Spend enough time with practically anyone,
and they’ll tell you about the person – or the life – that they’re grieving. Take, for example, the young man with a terminal
illness who’s trying to come to terms with all the moments he won’t get to experience. Or the companion character who’s left in
perpetual limbo over her late father’s legacy because of questions about his actions that
she will simply never learn the answers to. Persona 3 is a rarity in gaming because of
its unashamed focus on the mourning process. On how it feels to lose someone, and on the
difficult journey that it takes to heal from this separation. Death is not just a failstate here. Nor is it a threat that must be averted. Death in Persona 3 is a constant companion
– often, in several ways, literally. Death cannot be avoided. It lingers, just out of sight, but never out
of mind. When exploring Tartarus, if the player dawdles
a little too long in any one place, they’ll be pursued by the literal embodiment of Death:
the Grim Reaper itself. To fight Death – to try to beat it – is
almost entirely pointless. Most players are better off running and hiding
rather than trying to fight Death head-on. Death’s presence must be embraced, accepted. You can’t win this fight. Except… when you can. --
While not exactly an easy fight for a Persona novice, under the right conditions, Death
can be beaten when it appears in Tartarus. Indeed, skilled and well-prepared players
will make a goal of challenging Death head on. If you’re skilled (and lucky) enough to
defeat Death, you’re rewarded for your trouble. It drops some of the rarest, most powerful
items in the game. Because, yes, death in Persona 3 is inevitable. As in real life, we all have to face it, and
nobody can escape from its painful consequences. This, though, doesn’t mean that you have
to like it. This doesn’t mean that you can’t push
back, overcome its influence, heal from its wounds. At first glance, Persona 3: Reload feels somewhat
fatalist in its message: you can’t run from death. It will find you. Square your shoulders, though, take a breath,
and work through your grief, and you learn something new: that you can’t avoid death,
but you can overcome it. You can heal. So, the player character in Persona 3, an
orphan with no home, no family, and no place in the world, slowly builds a new family. And, in doing so, you help those around you
to heal from their own trauma surrounding loss and grief. Because, ultimately, this is the message of
Persona 3. To learn to embrace death, and to rise above
it. That is the moral of the story. That is why Persona 3: Reload matters.
