So, here’s an unfun fact: Atlus USA just doesn’t credit its voice actors. Scum. This is a company- (industry-) wide problem and we’ll be dealing with it across the Persona Journal (Ed. Atlus has done better in recent years). Thankfully, now that Kyle and I are playing Persona 2: Innocent Sin, I’ve been on the hunt for its voice credits, and stumbled across an unofficial list of P1’s voice credits while I was at it. Well, some of P1’s voice credits, anyways. Behind The Voice Actors has gathered credits for most of the playable characters and one voiced NPC, though two playable characters are still unaccounted for: Reiji and Ayase (technically, BTVA credits the Japanese voice actors in these roles. While it’s possible that the English version re-used the Japanese voice actors’ quotes, BTVA tends to use Japanese voice actors like this when there are gaps in a localized cast, so I’m going to set them aside). Now that I have a nearly-full list, I can do credit write-ups for everyone that’s on it, which is better than the “nothing” I originally had!

Continue reading “Persona 1 Appendix – The Voice Actors” →

Snow Queen Quest

Going into the Snow Queen Quest, Kyle and I prepared for the worst. Knowing we had needed the Ultimate Personas in the main quest, we followed a guide to getting the others in the SQQ as well. The guide called getting the Ultimates “one of the hardest challenges in all RPGs,” but frankly, it wasn’t that awful once we had advice. Certainly easier than beating the main game, or the rest of the SQQ for that matter!

By the way, our screenshots here are SEBEC screenshots from ZEROthefirst’s Let’s Play, since he didn’t cover the SQQ. I can’t remotely blame him.

Continue reading “Persona 1 – Let it Go” →

Maki fled to hide with Mai in the Lost Forest, forcing us to backtrack through the old dungeon to reach the Gingerbread House. There we met Mai, now openly called “Maki,” because she was just an aspect of the original Maki (I’m sure the identical names won’t make this confusing at all). She explained that Aki had since woken a fourth and final aspect of Maki, Pandora, who was presumably made up of all of Maki’s worst traits the way the Maki in our party had been the idealized self. Mai/Maki said we’d need the compacts owned by all the Makis: the original, the one split between Mai and Aki, and uh… well the third was confusing. In a later scene, Mai/Maki would say it was from the real Maki, but that it wasn’t the one from the real world? And shouldn’t Pandora have one? I’m also still not sure why the game was so obsessed with compacts to begin with, from a metaphorical point-of-view I mean. They let you view but also change yourself?

Continue reading “Persona 1 – The Grinding Gear” →

Now unfortunately, this is where my notes – already inadequate – collapse entirely, giving me almost no clue as to which note belongs to which part of the game. I know I promised I would do better with my note-keeping but—oh, what can I say? This game just grated on me from about this point on and was so indistinct from map to map that there was no sense commenting on much of anything.

The Lost Forest found us reaching one of the most important parts of the game: when you finally make contact with the girl in white, and furthermore set yourself well on the way to one of the game’s two endings. As you can see, it was a fantastic place for my note-taking to belly-up and croak.

Continue reading “Persona 1 – Wagging the Bloody Tongue” →

After the sequence, the party found themselves dropped off in the school’s “Old Gym.” Mark rushed to Maki’s side while Sorrow just sort of stood there, watching his unconscious “friends” with disinterest. After confirming that everyone was alright, the party turned their attention to the subject of the “Old Gym,” explaining that it had been demolished six months ago (you might remember Maki’s confusion about the new gym from earlier). Maki said that they’ve “gone back,” and they discussed the possibility of time travel for a while. Maki brought up an unfamiliar name at this point, Yosuke, and by the magic of plot contrivance, a girl rushed into the gym and said that Yosuke had just been attacked by the girl in black, who was apparently a regular sight here in… urm… the past? Something was clearly wrong.

Continue reading “Persona 1 – High School Grudges” →

Heading to the shrine, we discovered Maki’s mother, Setsuko. Mrs. Somomura tells us that her employers, SEBEC and its CEO, Kandori, had deployed a machine called the Deva System that may be responsible for the changes around town. But that’s not why we’re actually here. No, the game has actually brought us here for another chat with our good buddy Philemon, who’s here to give us some vague warnings about the upcoming split between the SEBEC plotline and the Snow Queen plotline. The Revelations loc obviously didn’t have that split, so subtly changed Philemon’s dialogue to hint it about the fact that choices you make will lead to the good or bad ending in the storyline that remained, which was clever work for such an otherwise less-than-graceful localization. Still, the fact that the speech is parked just before the option to start the Snow Queen quest and only after a choice that affects the ending (your response to the nurse trapped under the vending machine) makes it clear that the SEBEC/SQQ split was the original intent.

Continue reading “Persona 1 – Compact Compacts” →

Once we finally caved and went to the hospital, we were given Maki’s room number and spotted Yamaoka stalking Nanjo from a distance. Yamaoka asked Sorrow not to tattle on him, and we went into the hospital without him. This was a strange place to come back to in our SQQ run, as it’s essentially the last ordinary building you’ll explore in first person in either storyline! In fact, it was probably more “realistic” than any other building in the game. The game’s dungeons are laid out in an incredibly hostile way, ala Wizardry, while the malls and (to a lesser extent) the school are only unreal in ways that make them more convenient, like by removing obstacles or crowds. But the hospital was structured like a real-world building, making optimal use of all its space in cramped, inconvenient hallways, and that made it feel weird!

Continue reading “Persona 1 – Demonic HMO” →

Time for something a little different: our first Persona Marathon entry!

Persona, if you’re new to the series, is a major subseries/spinoff of Atlus’ long-running, “demons and mythology attack the modern day”-themed Shin Megami Tensei series. I’m a big fan of the series, but the games are notoriously difficult, and prior to Persona 1, I’d never actually beaten any of them. Kyle, wanting to get into the famous Persona 3 and 4, agreed that we should intermix the Persona games with our existing Final Fantasy Marathon, playing the games in release order alongside the Final Fantasy games. Since Persona 1 was one of the earliest JRPGs released for the PSX, its remake became our first game from the 32-bit era.

If you want to get into more detail, the Persona series descends from a Japanese-only spinoff of Shin Megami Tensei 1, entitled Shin Megami Tensei: if…, sometimes called “Persona 0.” This peculiar game was presumably named after If…. (yes, four periods), a British film of loosely similar themes. Persona’s descent from SMT: if… (three periods) isn’t just a matter of mechanical inference, it’s outright canonical: the events of SMT: if… prevented the events of SMT1 from happening, creating an alternate timeline where Persona 1 and 2 are set (P3 and beyond are probably in their own universe). Thankfully, you don’t need to know the story of SMT: if…, especially since the connection is little more than a cameo in P1 itself.

Continue reading “Persona 1 – Everybody Faints” →