History of the Persona series. Part 0
Now a series of games Persona, from a Japanese company Atlus – one of the most popular franchises in the land of the rising sun. It is already on par with such series as Final Fantasy And The Legend of Zelda. But if you ask an ordinary CIS resident which parts of the series he played, you will most likely hear: “What is this, that game about anime?”. And this is not surprising, even in America, only after the 3rd part Persona began to actively gain popularity, and in the post-Soviet space many learned about this series only with the release of the fifth, and at the moment, the last part of the Japanese series.
Today I would like to tell you about the origins of probably the biggest spin-off ever, yes yes, Persona is a branch of another, no less significant series Shin Megami Tensei. We’ll take a quick look at the history of the creation of the universe Shin Megami Tensei, and also, I’ll tell you what path I took Persona from a simple “What if” experiment?” to one of the most successful series in the world.
It all started with this guy named Aya Nishitani.
While working at the factory, Aya loved to write different stories, he showed them to his friends and then sent some stories to print, and his little stories were published in a Japanese magazine Oh!PC. One of these stories was Megami Tensei, which means: Rebirth of the Goddess. Later, Nishitani came to the editorial office with this work Tokuma Shoteni. The editor-in-chief at the time was Suzuki Tashio, who reviewed several works, including Ai’s. Then he decided to stop at the novella Megami Tensei. After Suzuki made his choice, he began discussing with Nishitani what a new name for Aya’s creation would be. After much deliberation, they decided to go with the existing title Megami Tensei, add English, Digital devil story — Legend of the Digital Devil.
The novella was published on March 3, 1986. The novella told about a student of the Jusei school Akemi Nakajima, who was a first-class programmer, and interestingly, he was interested in occult magic, like Aya Nishitani himself. Nakajima believed that with the help of computers he could summon demons into this world. And the young genius confirms his thoughts by writing a program for summoning demons, which will later appear in many games in the series. And to make it more convenient to use this program, Nakajima installed it on his wrist computer, which will become part of the image of almost all the main characters from the games of this franchise. In this short story, Nishitani’s love for the myths and legends of not only his country, but also other peoples was clearly visible. In addition to his “relative” goddesses Izanami and Yomotsu-Shikome, Cerberus from Greek, Set from Egyptian and Loki from Scandinavian mythology appear in the story, the latter, by the way, is the main antagonist in this story, and naturally, like almost any villain of that time, he wants to take over the world.
And Nakajima, a simple guy, sees that he messed up by calling Loki into this world, and immediately tries to atone for his sins by saving the new student Yumiko Shirasagi, whom he himself brought to Loki as a sacrifice. Then Akemi learns that Yumiko is the reincarnation of the goddess of creation and death Izanami. He learns this from the goddess herself, who temporarily transferred her powers to Yumiko so that she could cope with Loki, but her fragile body could not withstand all the power of the goddess, and she died. But the goddess said that the girl could still be brought back to life if Nakajima brought her body to Izanami’s tomb. The guy does so and brings Yumiko’s body to the goddess’s tomb. Loki followed him unnoticed. The son of Izanami Kagutsuchi, the god of fire, who was called by Nakajima thanks to the spheres given to him, gave the guy a fiery sword (which, by the way, we can see on the cover itself) and with its help, Akemi was able to kill Loki. The villain is killed, the girl is resurrected, although she will remain with the goddess for some time in rehabilitation. This is where the first novella by Aya Nishitani ends.
A little over a year later, on March 25, 1987, the studio ANIMATE released an anime adaptation of the first novel in the form of a 40-minute film. The anime turned out to be more or less tolerable, the first half followed the plot of the novel quite well. But, although at the end of the film the result was the same, Akemi saved Yumiko and killed Loki, but they showed it in a completely different way. For example, even Yomotsu-Shikome does not appear in the anime, who in the original greatly helped the main character in defeating the Scandinavian god.
Just six months later, on October 31, 1986, the second volume about “The Legend of the Digital Devil” was released. The continuation of the story was called Mazu no senshi — Demon City Warrior. The novella is a direct continuation of the story, and begins immediately after the ending of the first novella. After defeating Loki, another god wanted to take over this world, this time from Egyptian mythology – Set. Although the plot has become more global, “adult guys”, such as detectives and foreign organizations, have entered the “game” of calling demons. But the main plot remained the same, Nakajima is looking for and killing the heads. reptile and saves Yumiko. But to give credit to Mr. Nishitani, the gloomy atmosphere remained the same, excuse the tautology, gloomy and tense.
Unfortunately, the third and final story is very difficult to read, since it is only available in Japanese, but fortunately for us, the studio took on the task of adapting the third story into a game Atlus. Which will create the very first game in the series.
Koji Okada, one of the founders of Atlus, began to lead the development; later Okada would play a very important role in the development of the franchise Megami Tensei.
Also, the father of the original, Aya Nishitani, joined the game, and it was he who proposed various ideas and advised the developers and the game’s screenwriter, Kazunari Suzuki, so that the game did not stray too far from the original source.
The game was released on September 11, 1987 on the platform Famicom, or Dendy.
And so as not https://casinozodiac.uk to return to this again, it’s worth saying that almost all the games that will be in this video were not originally released outside of Japan, that is, they did not have English translations. But fortunately, there are fans who are ready to translate tons of text for thanks, and, in fact, a big thank you to them. As I said earlier, the game is based on the plot of the third novel, Tensei no Shuuen — The end of rebirth, and for those who were not familiar with the universe, the game briefly and clearly retells the plot of the first two short stories in the introductory video. The game begins when the demon lord Lucifer captured Izanami and built a huge labyrinth. Also, to create even more problems for the main characters, the demon lord resurrected Loki and Seth. And the main characters in this game are the already familiar Akemi Nakajima and Yumiko Shirasagi. Although the developers tried to follow the “canon” as much as possible, it was impossible to add everything that was in the novel and what they themselves came up with into the cartridge. For example, the game was supposed to have a moral system for the main character.
When developing the game, Okada’s team focused on another dungeon crawler, Wizardry. As Suzuki says, they love this series very much. But he understood that making an ordinary clone of their favorite game was a lost cause, and the developers decided to place a lot of emphasis on demons, and so the system of talking with enemies appeared. Which, in the future, will become one of the integral parts in this series. You didn’t have to fight demons, you could negotiate, pay off, or even recruit an enemy. After recruiting a demon, the player can summon it using the same program that was mentioned in the novel, and this program will appear in almost every game in the series. And from here comes the next, iconic and unique mechanics, fusion, or merger in Russian. The point was that from the two demons you recruited you could create one “super demon” who would kill the boss Lucifer. This mechanic was so successful that players completely forgot about the labyrinth and the threat to all humanity. People were more interested in trying to create a demon for themselves, and a more powerful one. For the memorable demons, we should thank Isaki Minori, who drew what the player both hates and loves. Also, the strength of the demons depended on the stage of the moon; if there is a full moon outside, then you need to walk with the utmost caution, and vice versa
It is also worth noting that a couple of months before the release of the game from Atlus, an adaptation of the first two short stories was released from a small studio Telenet. She went out to MSX and unlike creation Atlus, the game was made in the hack’n slash genre. The game was received poorly, the graphics were terrible, and the gameplay was nothing special.
The mistake that Okada’s team didn’t want to make was made Telenet, namely, it stupidly created a clone of hack’n slash games that were more popular at that time, and did it poorly. And, apparently, for this reason everyone decided to forget about the game, since even the exact release date of the game is impossible to find. But it definitely came out somewhere between July and September 1987. It is not surprising that the studio closed its doors in 2007.
After the overwhelming success of the game, Atlus immediately took on the sequel, simultaneously purchasing the rights to the entire franchise. But Okada didn’t want to make a game with a plot and characters that were already invented by someone. Instead, he wanted to make a completely original game with new characters.
And yes, a sequel Megami Tensei – one of the few games that has not been translated, or rather not completely translated. We haven’t heard anything from the only person who did this thankless job for a long time.
The events of the game take place in 2036, and it is a post-apocalypse after the nuclear war that occurred in the 90s. And we play as two ordinary survivors who were chosen by the lord of the winds, the demon Pazuzu from Sumerian-Akkadian mythology, to save humanity from extinction. By the end of the game, YHVH appears for the first time in the series, this is a kind of god who, although he acts with justice, is at the same time ruthless and cruel. Indeed, in one of the endings, yes, there are several of them in the game, but more on that later, YHVH invites the main characters to become gods, but if the player agrees to this, then the rest of humanity will be doomed. But players consider the one where the protagonist kills God and returns home to be more or less “canonical”. At the same time, as Lucifer, with whom the hero became friends during the journey, takes all the demons from the human world to their native dimension.
I think you have a logical question: “How was the main character able to meet Lucifer if we already killed him in the first game?“Well, there are a lot of options here, and all of them may not be true, since Atlus never directly said how different dimensions work. But the most popular fan theory says that each demon has its own universe from which it is called. For example, we have universe A and universe B. And we kill Lucifer from universe A, but then we can meet another Lucifer from universe B, who does not want to enslave all of humanity, because other events could have happened in his universe that shaped his personality differently. And again, this is just a fan theory, there are other versions, such as: There is only one original Lucifer, and all the others are his clones, and each clone has its own consciousness, but they are connected by the same memory with the original. Sounds confusing and strange? Will there be more. But I think you’ll agree that the first theory sounds more likely, and it also explains the gameplay convention of killing demons that look alike.
The game was released on April 6, 1990 and was developed by the same guys as the first part, but with one exception. The artist Isaki Minoru was replaced by a man who would later give a unique style to the franchise, namely Kazuma Kaneko.
And here’s a little fact for you right away: this name may be known not only to fans of this game series, but also to fans of another popular Japanese franchise Devil May Cry. It was Kazuma who would draw demonic forms for Dante and Virgil in 2005.
When designing the main characters for the second Megami Tensei, Kazuma wanted to make not “super-cool-warriors” who easily took on dangerous tasks, but ordinary people.
I don’t like this whole trend of special protagonists, like the legendary warrior. It doesn’t matter who you are, if you are given a chance and you have the courage to try your hand, then you too can become a hero… This became the concept
The artist will adhere to this principle in subsequent works. Also, compared with the previous part, the demons turned out to be more interesting; already in this game you can see how Kazuma lovingly approaches the design of enemies. But, unfortunately, the power of the console of that time was not enough for the artist’s hand to depict everything that was in his head, so the game has different demons that differ from each other only in color. But what there was enough power for was the protagonist’s morality system, which Okada’s team could not add to the first one, but implemented in this part. Morality influenced not only the ending, but also which demons the player could “tame”. We also added a top view in some locations, but mainly we will still play with the view from the eyes of the main character.
But the core gameplay hasn’t changed much. The player walks through dungeons filled with demons, kills them, or has a nice conversation, winning them over to his side. Well, the association of demons, of course, remained in its place. It is also worth noting that in Megami Tensei II for the first time a demon named Jack Frost appeared – the spirit of frost who came to us from England, who, starting from this game, will appear in almost every game in the series. This tradition was started by Kozy Okada, because, as he himself said, “Snow Demon” is his favorite demon.
Looking ahead a little, in March 1995, Opera House issues Kyūyaku Megami Tensei, which includes remakes of the first and second parts Megami Tensei. The graphics were improved, and all the demons were redrawn by Kazuma Kaneka, and the gameplay itself was made more welcoming for new players, saves appeared, some demons had fewer lives, and in general, the game, even now, plays quite cheerfully. But what the remake can be criticized for is the lack of the previous gloomy atmosphere of the original, where the player walked along cold and dark corridors, while in the remake the dungeon is light and pleasant, they even laid out a red carpet.
After the success of two games based on novels by Nishitani, the head of the company Atlus wanted to create their own brand that they can promote. And it became Shin Megami Tensei, Because of the new word in the title Shin, which means true or new in Japanese, it’s easy to guess that the new game was a reboot of the first Megami Tensei. The reboot received its own logo, which is a tetragram.
The Tetragrammaton, in Christianity, represents the four letters of the name of God: Yud, Hey, Vav, Hey. In this case, the last letter “Hey” is a vowel. In Latin letters it is written as YHVH, and pronounced as Yahweh. This immediately takes us to Megami Tensei II, where have we already seen a character with that name?. And as I already said, he played the role of some kind of higher god there. It’s funny that for Western audiences this whole meaning was lost, since the series logo Shin Megami Tensei it looks extremely uninteresting when compared with the original.
So, the plot: It’s the 90s, according to tradition, you will have to play as a nameless and mute hero, who at the beginning of the story has a strange dream, where he meets two characters who will develop a system of morality from the previous parts. Namely, he meets Yuuji, a character who represents order, and Takeshi, who represents chaos. As in the last part, the player will be able to make choices that will have an effect on his morality and endings, but now these two characters can also influence the protagonist, which makes things more interesting. Waking up, the player discovers that a strange program for summoning demons has arrived on his computer. But what will really please the user is an almost open city that can be explored.
It’s very nice to see how developers improve old mechanics with each new game. So, what am I talking about… oh yes, the plot. After some time, demons begin to appear on the streets of Tokyo, where the main character lives, which is why America sent nuclear missiles towards the city. But thanks to another game character, a girl named Yuka, three unfortunate heroes manage to escape through the self-sacrifice of a girl who teleports them to the so-called Diamond Realm. The heroes return to Tokyo, but find out that 30 years have passed since the bombing, and now only ruins remain of the city. And in these ruins the player discovers several factions, completing tasks for a certain faction, the hero’s morale will either increase or decrease. Ideally, you need to keep your morality in balance, fortunately the game has an ending that is focused on such a passage, and by the way, this ending is canonical, where the player leads humanity to the light.
In terms of gameplay, the game remains true to itself. Still the same dungeon crawler, but bigger and more beautiful, as a sequel should be.
The game was released on October 30, 1992 on SNES, but later it was also ported to many other platforms. For example, the game appeared on the first PlayStation, where she looked more beautiful and more detailed.
As always, players and gaming publications were delighted, this time with the “rethinking”. Roughly speaking, the future fate of the franchise depended only on the success of this game.
The studio did not have to persuade Okada to develop a sequel for a long time. A year and a half later, on March 18, 1994, a direct continuation of the story of the first game was released. But now we are not very interested in the continuation, since in the same year, just six months later, namely on October 28, a game will be released that will bring us as close as possible to the series Persona.
Shin Megami Tensei If.. is the first game in the franchise to flirt with parallel realities, because as the name suggests, the game is about “What if in the first SMT Tokyo would not have been destroyed". Thus, in the series Shin Megami Tensei the first parallel reality appears, which we will talk a little more about at the end. And without going too far, it’s worth saying that the subtitle If… refers us to the 1968 British drama, even the font in which these two letters were written was the same as for the film.
As Okada said, he no longer knows what else to tell as full-scale as it was in previous games. That’s the main feature SMT if.. The game’s setting was the locked Karukozaka High School.
At the beginning of the game, as always, we are offered to customize our character, but now we can even choose the gender of the character. But, of course, there is a canon that says that the main character of the game is schoolgirl Tamaki Yuchida. At the beginning of the game we have to answer various life questions from the already creepy Virtual Fortune Teller. Answering questions like how often you play or do homework will influence what starting stats your character will have.
As Okada wanted, the plot is not as global and complex as in SMT I And II. The school where the main character studies is swallowed up by the Makai demon dimension, thanks to the student Ideo Hazama, who is interested in dark magic, and also, he is a computer genius, I don’t think I need to explain that this character was almost completely copied from Akemi Nakajima, the main character of Ai Nishitani’s novels, I’ll remind you. But unlike Nakajima, Hazama does not realize that he is doing terrible things, moreover, Hazama proclaims himself the Demon Emperor, and of course, the player must overthrow the schoolboy from the throne.
Due to the rapid development, a little over six months, the game turned out to be the shortest in the series, but the developers decided to play on a different one. In the game, in addition to the main character, there are four more playable characters: Rebel Shinji, kind-hearted Yumi, excellent student Reiko and lone wolf Akira. As a player, we can choose with whom we will go through our entire path in the game, that is, there is no way to re-select the character. We can say that this is a kind of replacement for the protagonist’s morality, because the companion we choose will directly influence the ending of the game. And the main goal of the heroine and her companion is to escape from the demonic world. But how and with whom this will happen is up to the player himself to decide. For example, having taken Yumi in, everything ends with the maximum “happy ending”, everyone is saved, and the scoundrel is defeated. By choosing Reiko, the player battles against the heads. the bastard won’t finish him off, because he finds out that his partner is Ideo’s sister. Reiko decides to stay with her brother in the demon world, and the heroine herself goes back to the human world, like the rest of the school. If you start your journey with Shinji, then… there won’t be a final boss, because Hazama will simply let you go, because you don’t want to harm him, you want to get out of the school quickly. Next comes the plot, which opens only after completing any path. This time we can choose Akira, who, after some time, is severely wounded by Hazama and, in order not to die, he merges with the demon Amon. Akira now has a demon memory and continues to help the player. After Hazama’s defeat, Akira decides that he has no place in the human world and remains in the demon world. And he sends the main character back home, but the school and all the students in it remain in a parallel universe.
Katsura Hashino also had a hand in this game. In the future we will talk about him in a little more detail, but for now it’s worth saying what this man did for If… the “Guardian” or “Guardian Spirit” mechanics. After death, our partner is assigned his own guard, who can change some characteristics of the character that are more suitable for the spirit, but after death, the guard changes to a new one, and then depending on your luck, you will come across a weak or strong spirit. Soon, this particular mechanic will become one of the main ones in the series of games Persona.
Two manga and one novel were written based on the game. One of the manga, as well as the only novel, simply retold the plot of the game, with some assumptions. Is that in the manga the main character is a guy named Nobu Akiyama, and in the novel he is also a guy, but with the name Jin Aoki. The second manga is already more interesting, since it continues the plot of the first manga, that is, the game itself, if you chose to play as a guy. The scene of action moves to the city, which according to tradition SMT, destroyed by demons. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find the manga even in English, so the synopsis from Wikipedia is the most I can give you. And yes, all mangas and novellas are based on a plot where the player takes Yumi with him, that is, a plot where everyone is saved and the school is fine.
Also in 2004, a mobile game was released Shin Megami Tensei: if. Hazama’s Chapter, which told the backstory SMT If.., and we had to play for the main villain of the original, Ideo Hazama.
Shin Megami Tensei If.. set the main themes of the entire Persona series: school, a relatively local plot and many main characters.
The Megami Tensei multiverse is incredibly confusing, and to clear things up I’ll show you our timeline leading up to Persona.
And this is only the path that leads us to the first Persona, but in the series Megami Tensei there were time travels, and several sequels of the same game, they just took as a basis not a neutral ending, but an ending associated with chaos, and this, naturally, created another parallel universe. This timeline is based only on reliable facts that connect the games with each other, but there are also fan theories that sometimes try to connect the unconnected.
Aya Nishitani, working surrounded by technology and fascinated by dark magic, came up with, on the one hand, a strange, but very interesting universe, where all the creatures from different mythologies could collide head-on. By the way, Nishitani now teaches at universities and schools. As he says, seeing his students’ talents blossom is simply priceless. But Aya has not abandoned the craft of writing, he still has plans for the future. Who knows, maybe the 63-year-old writer will give us another magnificent universe.
