Oh man, guys, I am sorry. I have been crazy busy this last few months with my jobs and my extracurricular performance activities, hence the lack of posts. So here’s a quick one, before I dash off to my next appointment.
Being a busy-as-shit gamer means that my best friend is my 3DS XL.
I love you, cold, unfeeling, Zelda-themed robot friend!
It travels with me in my purse everywhere, both so that I can collect my rare, rural SpotPasses and so that anytime I can grab myself a spare five minutes, I can take a little game break. Right now, I am alternating between Final Fantasy: Theatrhythm Curtain Call and Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth. I got past the first full dungeon in Persona Q, and I’m enjoying myself immensely, as I’m getting to spend a lot of time with my old friends from Persona 3 and 4. And then, this mysterious individual shows up:
Cute outfit, but who the hell are you?
Wait, who the hell is that? I played both requisite games to understand your crossover, Persona Team! What madness is this?
So I looked it up. This, friends, is Marie, and she only appears as a special, new Social Link in the Persona 4 Golden PlayStation Vita re-release of the game. Don’t have a Vita? (Because why would you?) Well, too bad! Then you don’t get to know who this person is! Go buy a Vita, peon!
Well, fuck that, I’m not buying a Vita just to play a re-release of a game I have already played, but worry not! There’s another way to experience Marie’s story without retreading hundreds of hours of gameplay or throwing away a few hundred on a useless handheld. And it’s way more interesting than just reading her Persona wiki entry (although, yes, you could also probably do that).
As it turns out, on the free version of Hulu, you can watch Persona 4 Golden the Animation, a 12-episode anime series that retells the story of Marie’s Social Link. Mind you, don’t watch it unless you actually know the plot of the game, because otherwise you will be terribly lost; the Golden Animation very oddly focuses solely upon Marie, and only barely touches on the larger plot of the game here and there. It’s a pretty enjoyable, if slightly ham-fisted, way to experience Marie’s character arc, and now I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on her relevance.
I suppose it might be similarly possible to eschew playing all of the PS2-generation Persona games all together in favor of watching both Persona 3 The Movie and Persona 4 The Animation in order to understand the background to Persona Q, but why rob yourself of such excellent games? It might be worth a review, though; I found my memory to be very hazy on several key details of the plot of Persona 4, as it has been a few years since I played it.
Now let’s just hope there aren’t a bunch of references to Persona 4 Arena Ultimax later on in the game. When your crossover spin-offs start referencing one another, Persona Team, that’s just going to far down the rabbit hole.
