Love and hate

 

So I've been in something of a MegaTen kick of late. Oh that's right, I'm calling it 'MegaTen' now! That's how you know I'm really in the franchise! As evidenced by the small blog I've penned on my experience with Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne which should be going up next week- you can tell I'm not having what I would call an equivalent time from one franchise to another- and in fact I can honestly say that without my experience with Persona to keep me interested in hopes that these games are made by similar incredibly talented storytellers- I might have dropped Nocturne by now. And I really came to realise this divide when I just casually hopped on to Youtube earlier and found myself listening to 'I'll Face Myself (Reincarnation)' which gave me such a reaction I knew I had to talk about it.

Now love and hate are often considered twin stars in the sky for both being extreme emotions that blend into one another. We can love the things we hate and hate the things that we love, which is why I don't get disappointed by games like Callisto protocol and Atomic Heart- they just disappoint me. Neither game has engaged me strongly enough to trigger the emotional centres that contain the nuclear-grade emotional responses and thus I feel closer to nothing than I do to excitement. A heart that throbs is a heart that can seethe, one might say- and it's with that which I say that right about now- I'm coming around to hating Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. 

Without getting into the specifics which will no doubt be covered in that follow up blog- let me air my grievances out for a bit. So the very thing that I fell in love with Persona Golden over it totally absent from every Nocturne and is slightly drive me barmy. What Persona presents is a delightful balance between the delights of experiencing such a fleshed out and coherent world space and throwing oneself against deadly and often uncompromising challenge. (At least in harder difficulties.) I knew that things would be slightly different with an SMT title, lacking the back and forth aspect which defines Persona- but I'm not sure I was ready for how aggressive Nocturne would be.

I'm all for exploring a world driven mad by demons- but at some point you have to ask yourself if the development team even knew how to not coat an area with 'random encounter' sauce. When literally every square inch of the game world is dangerous walking space- making this game unique in that you can, and will, get ganked by a successive chain of enemies whilst trying to sell things to shops and fuse your monsters- because literally no where is ever safe. I've not seen any other RPG this overzealous about throwing monsters everywhere and it, predictably, devalues the novelty of being 'in danger'. I don't feel like I'm scouring a dangerous world between points of rest and repose in my exploration- I feel like I'm slogging through a mire getting jumped by the same hoodlum squad every couple of minutes. It's boring.

But here's the thing- I think that part of what the core development team were going for when making these games was to try and illicit some feeling towards that of hatred. Perhaps not hatred for the systems and the people who implemented them, that's just an extrapolation that I do as someone who understands these as products with people behind them, but rather hatred of being weak and vulnerable and forever in the crosshairs of someone else's hunt. I should loathe the fact that I'm not the powerful hunter who is deflecting attacks without breaking a sweat, rolling over small mobs whilst flashing several hundred thousand in my bank. They want me to struggle to get better.

Persona, on the otherhand, particularly Persona 4, just want you to feel comfortable. They want to give you a world, people and setting that you connect with in order to pull all kinds of emotions out of you. Pity, affection, comradery, sadness- the Persona franchise tries to explore dozens of folk simultaneously under a, sometimes, unified theme and with some of the games that sought state of cosiness worms it's way into your little heart. God knows that at it's most harrowing we all got to feel our hearts stop playing Persona 4, probably sometimes around Christmas. (those who know the game know exactly what moment I'm referencing there) But if something similarly horrible was to happy in Shin Megami Tensei, the most it would get out of me is a dismissive grunt. 

I don't begrudge the game for being hard. In fact, at the times when the game is actually hard- and I have to struggle to utilise the right tools in order to match the chaos in front of me- I really like the game. I hate that it's also unfair. Getting thrown into disadvantage by random chance is absolutely asinine! Utterly refusing to explain so much as the UI through out the supposed 'tutorial' dungeon is just a failure in game design! Dragging out every insular activity by assaulting me with fights every 5 seconds weighs on the soul. I shouldn't have to find out on a bloody internet forum that Buffs stack 4 times! It sucks to think that this was back in a time that developers genuinely believed that there was no more fun to be derived from a game once you understood it on a base-most level. Really doesn't speak to highly of their trust in their own products.

The Persona franchise seems to come from a different school of thought and the genuinely pervasive stories and characters it presents, Shin Megami seems intentionally obtuse in a manner that makes it hard to enjoy. Those that stick with it claim that Nocturne is some sort of fantastic subversive masterpiece however, and I want to find that love myself- so I'm going to try to stick with it. At the very least, when the game isn't nagging me and I'm actually engaging with challenging fights I am actually enjoying what I'm seeing. Although that love can and will very easily slip into hatred the more this goes on.