| badgenome said: There's definitely something inherently unsettling about lo-fi games. Modern survival horror has nothing on Silent Hill or Clock Tower in terms of creep factor. The refinements in terms of writing contribute, too, I think. Persona is a little more reminiscent of Deadly Premonition in that the town and the weirdness around it are the real characters while the kids themselves are just kind of... there vs. Persona 4's well defined protagonists and strong narrative drive which are more like a typical JRPG. Besides that I think Persona 4 is aesthetically and tonally a pretty big departure. The enemies are just silly looking shadows instead of zombies and demons and stuff, and there's very little disturbing imagery or taboo behavior like the occult seeming "persona" game and bargaining with demons like in Persona 1, or Hitler from Innocent Sin, or a bunch of kids appearing to blow their brains out with the evokers in Persona 3. The murders and the Midnight Channel had some potential, but the presentation really stripped away any sense of forboding pretty quickly I found. I mean, they're not totally different obviously. It's easy to see how they got from Point A to Point B. But they've really developed a template for what a Persona game is by now, and it's no coincidence that they've dropped the Shin Megami Tensei brand from Persona while SMT still feels like the original Persona did. |
I can't comment on the "disturbing imagery" in Persona 3 or 2, but there's nothing disturbing in Persona 1 so far. hell a little girl summoned a robo rat to fight you in a comical way. Plus the characters are, albeit rough, anime archtypes, much like Persona 4. Like, I agree about the presentation in Persona 4 being over the top, which I loved by the way. My original line of thinking though, was if they changed the music in Persona 4 to something like the originals (Still haven't heard it :/), would make it more errie like the first game? Cause as it stands, just changing the music brings Persona 1 closer to 4 than something more accult like Another anime (As an example). So are the games that far off in the first place?
