RPG Talk: Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth

In which I talk (write) about RPGs from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: 3DS
Release: 2019

Persona Q2: New Cinema Labyrinth was going to be the rare RPG I played the day of release. Being built on a hybrid of the Etrian Odyssey dungeon delving mechanics and the Persona fusion system, it's easy enough to play through without requiring much in the way of a walkthrough, which solves my biggest issue with most modern RPGs (needing a walkthrough to make sure you don't miss anything).

Unfortunately my health problems escalated right about when my pre-order arrived so I set it aside and eventually forgot about it, even neglecting to list this on my Reader's Pick poll, which Final Fantasy XV won.

But I came back to it afterwards, and was happy I did.

Since this game is less than a year old, here is your spoiler warning as I'll cover everything up until the end of the game.

Persona Q2 is first and foremost a fan game. It exists as a crossover to allow the casts of all the modern Persona games (3-5) meet each other at the peak of their Persona-fighting abilities. The first Persona Q did much the same thing, only with the casts of 3 and 4.

Unfortunately there appears to be no continuity with the first game as the returning characters behave as if they've never met each other before, but the structure is very similar. For some reason or another, each cast has stumbled into movie worlds connected by a single theater from which the audience cannot leave due to a series of locks placed around the door to the exit. Much like the first game, completing each dungeon (in other words, a movie world) grants a key that removes one of the locks.

Unlike the first game, where players could play from the perspective of the P3 or P4 casts, this one is solidly from the POV of the P5 crew. The player starts with them and Joker is the only one allowed to make dialogue choices. But the flipside of that is that the P3, P3P (yes, the female protagonist is here!), and P4 protagonists all have actual personalities that make them their own people.

The P3P protagonist is especially a ray of sunshine. Though she has her doubts and can be overly cheerful at times, she gets to hang loose in a way that the other female party members don't. She's used to be outspoken and marching to the beat of her own drum, because where she comes from, she's the party leader and she has the confidence to match.

Also, it's about time she got featured in a spin-off game! I understand the male P3 protagonist is canon, but the P3P female protagonist has never been offered in other games, even as DLC when she could be safely included without worrying about whether her existence breaks the laws of reality. She's long been a popular request in the English fan community, and Persona Q2 has finally brought her back in a big way, making her a major player in the storyline. She appears much earlier than any of the other Persona casts, joining the Phantom Thieves as early as the second floor of the first dungeon.

While the story of Persona Q2 isn't her story in particular, her subplot is given a lot of space. She meets the Phantom Thieves while separated from her companions, so one of their early goals aside from trying to figure out their current circumstances is to reunite her with her team. But the second dungeon yields the P4 Investigation Team rather than SEES, and when she finally does meet SEES in the third dungeon, she's distressed to discover that not only do they not recognize her, but they have a different leader who she doesn't recognize.

The male P3 protagonist is pretty accepting about it, concluding that they are essentially alternate universe versions of the same person (which they are), though I wish the two of them had more lines interacting with each other. It would have been funny if they commiserated over the P3 cast's foliables as only people who share the same group of friends could. Sadly, they might as well not exist to each other for the majority of their time together, which makes their mutual farewell, with the understanding that they'll never meet again, ring hollow. This could easily have been fixed with a special screening side quest to unlock a team attack, but oddly the game never tries.

Since Persona Q2 is of debatable canonicity, it's not surprising that its story is ultimately not about the Persona characters or the struggles they're currently in the middle of. Rather, like the first Persona Q, the story is about the new characters specific to this game; Hikari, Nagi, and Doe.

When the Phantom Thieves first arrive, they quickly figure out their new situation. They are trapped inside a movie theater with two other people; the theater curator, Nagi, and a high school girl, Hikari. There is also a mysterious inhuman projectionist called Doe (for John Doe) that doesn't speak or seem to be hostile, but nevertheless runs the movies that the Phantom Thieves can enter by jumping through the movie screen.

Each of the movies revolves around some element of social unfairness. For instance, in the first movie, Kamoshidaman, the superhero runs the city because he's the hero, so of course he's in the right. But he's not actually a nice person and makes objectionable judgement calls. Though people might privately feel disagree, no one is willing to call him out on it because he's the one in charge and to fight him is to lose.

By journeying through the movie, the Persona casts are able to change the endings to those movies by defeating the various bosses and convincing other characters that it's okay to disagree, that it's okay to be yourself, it's okay to have a different opinion.

All these changes have an effect on Hikari, who (though it's not immediately apparent) is suffering from memory loss. Hikari is incredibly shy and introverted, so she understands the various characters who are oppressed in the movie worlds. Standing out and making trouble can actually make it harder for the person who has to endure the scorn of others. But as each movie is changed, Hikari comes to understand that even though putting one's head down is the easy way, it's not really the way she would like to live.

This culminates in Hikari getting kidnapped by Doe and being brought into the fourth movie world, which is a musical that reflects the worst moments in her life. Being berated by her teacher, even though Hikari was following the rules, was what led to the formation of the movie world with the abusive superhero. The other movie worlds are similarly inspired by key moments in Hikari's life that caused her to give up what she believed in.

Since Hikari has grown over the course of the game though, she's now able to challenge Doe on her own terms and recognize him as a distorted fear that her father (who actually loves her a lot) would reject her in the same way that so many other people in her life have. After coming to terms with Doe, she realizes that her father doesn't hate her and regains her sense of purpose. This allows everyone to leave the movie theater.

But, since this is a Persona game where things happen due to the involvement of supernatural entities, that's not the end of everything. Though Hikari is free to leave, and by extension so is everyone else, there's one more dungeon to defeat Enlil, the being that trapped Hikari in the first please. Enlil is fine with Hikari leaving since her theaters are supposed to be a way to placate for people who've given up, but naturally Hikari wants to restore to hope to others who were like her, so the team stays long enough to beat up Enlil.

While Hikari's story isn't bad, it's not as heavy as Rei's storyline from the first Persona Q and lacked the same punch when the truth was revealed. Perhaps being the second game it wasn't surprising that the main thrust of the plot would be around Hikari instead of the established Persona cast, but it also felt that the messaging in the movies was too explicitly geared towards someone with Hikari's personality, making it obvious by the second dungeon that Hikari was the reason we were going through these movies at all.

The rest of the game is pure crossover fun. Shinjiro (known to be a good cook) gets to feed Yusuke (known to be frequently hungry), Akechi and Naoto get to solve a mystery together, and Makoto and Mitsuru get to talk about what it's like being a student council president.

If anything, having the entire roster of the modern Persona games shows what sort of tropes are in play and how the design team has tried to make them all a little different, by mixing and matching character attributes or putting a little spin on their personality. Makoto might be a student council president like Mitsuru, but she's also a knuckle-wielding bruiser in combat like Akihiko. Junpei, Yosuke, and Ryuji might all fill the male protagonists' best friend role, but removed from that they don't feel like the same person copied and pasted into three games.

That said though, I think the next game should avoid student council presidents, detective princes, and wealthy heiresses (all of which were revived in Persona 5). And though I know it's unlikely to happen, it would be nice to see a male navigator character for once as Persona Q2 made it glaringly obvious that every navigator the series ever had has been female. A lot of the party roles, elemental alignments, and weapon types switch across genders. Even the protagonist has had a female option. But the one thing we've never had is a male navigator. We've had males in that role temporarily (like Morgana and Teddie, who are notably both "not human"), but they always leave it once the real navigator shows up.

As far as the ending goes, Persona Q2 ties itself up better than its predecessor, which left the door open for everyone remembering their encounter. (I suppose this means that for the P3 and P4 casts, Persona Q could have happened after Persona Q2 to preserve continuity.) Everyone loses their memory of the movie world when they go home, which naturally makes everyone sad, especially since everyone wanted to see the movie Hikari would make once her love for cinema is rekindled.

The game takes steps towards making this "reunion" happen by featuring the P3, P3P, and P4 casts taking the unusual step of sitting down and seeing a movie together. The P3 protagonist picks up a DVD even though he's not really sure why, and in the P4 time period Nanako mentions that the movie they're going to watch has a dinosaur that looks like Yosuke, which was leading me to believe that Hikari had come from a time period before all three games. Since she never confirms what year she's from, that would have been entirely possible, and I would have found it heartwarming, if she'd turned out to be a director beloved by all three casts.

Unfortunately the P5 cast's epilogue wrecks that but having them attend a high school movie festival (showcasing films are made by high school students), where they watch Hikari's movie and when the director of the film is introduced, the game cuts just as the P5 protagonist recognizes her. So what was even going on with the P3 and P4 casts? Why is there a movie with a dinosaur that looks like Yosuke that has nothing to do with the events of this game?

I don't know.

Though I enjoyed the game, it was just a little too ham-handed, and even the supernatural events felt like rehashes of previous Persona games (Enlil's motivation is a lot like Izanagi's from P4 and Doe's existence is like a cognition from P5). I enjoyed it for the gameplay and the crossover fun, but this isn't one of the better spin-off stories.