Life – David Addis's Blog

Persona 5: A lifetime in one week

Upon finishing the game, I typed “post-persona…” into Google and was both surprised and relieved to see it auto-complete to “… depression.” Surprised because I didn’t expect it to be the first hit, but more relieved to discover I wasn’t alone.

And I say finished rather than completed because I have the option of starting the story again in “New Game+” mode, but I can’t bring it to myself to wipe their memories clean. The story has ended, and I have closure, but I’m not done processing it all yet. I haven’t completed the game because I didn’t see every cutscene or have time for every conversation, but I have finished it. Or maybe the game finished me.

So why did it leave this impact? For two main reasons: story, and characters. These two subjects have been written about endlessly so I won’t roll out the million reasons why they are the two most important things to get right in any form of entertainment. But I will mention a couple of things that were done so well here that it left a bigger impression than any other videogame. The Witcher 3 and the Mass Effect series came close, but this is a whole new level. I spent quite a bit of time in front of the tv playing these.

From this point on, there are SPOILERS! So if you haven’t played Persona 5 yet, do it now! Seriously, it’s wonderful. It takes a long time but it’s worth it.

Persona 5 is a game about time management. That immediately sounds like a boring game, but it’s not. Every day you are presented with a plethora of different options including hanging out with your friends, studying or otherwise improving your character on your own, or going to battle monsters in a strange alternate universe. You are also presented with the ambitious goal of attempting to maximise your social connections, study for exams at school, and defeat certain monsters – all before a time limit. Somewhere in your brain, you are very good at assigning value to these things and weighing up objectively different activities and deciding what to do. You do this in real life anyway (shall I go to the shops and buy milk, or sort out my emails?) – except for the monster-fighting part. Probably. At least, I don’t.

So a lot of the time, the game will move on to the next day and you’ll think, “shall I train with the kid at the arcade, which will improve my kindness and possibly give me a new gun skill, or shall I take a bath and improve my charm?” The game gives you some extra incentives, such as a bonus to studying on rainy days, or in-battle bonuses when your team-mates form a stronger bond, which influences your decision-making.

But the deadlines are tight, and you will find you don’t have time to do everything. This gives the gameplay a frought, tense pace, even though you play an entire school year’s worth of days.

Not all the characters are likeable – I found Haru’s childish voice acting (at least in the English version) to be grating, and Yusuke’s flowery dialogue to be pretentious with none of the intelligence, but it wasn’t a problem. I just didn’t hang out with them. Morgana, your talking cat sidekick, starts off being whiny and conceited but somehow grows on you, despite also preventing you from carrying out extra tasks when you’re tired. “You’ve had a long day – don’t you want to get to bed?” No Morgana, I don’t, I want to go and work in the bar in Shinjuku to raise my kindness!

Slowly though, you improve yourself as a character in the various stats, and strengthen your bonds with the characters you like the most. You start to unravel the story, which has so many twists and turns you never get bored.

But unlike a movie that throws out so many ideas you can’t keep up (I’m looking at you, Star Trek Into Darkness), the game’s ideas hang together really well. The idea of starting the game with a flashback, and slowly showing how you got to that situation works beautifully, and what happens when you finally catch up is nothing short of storytelling genius. The writers combined everything you know about the gameplay with some very clever moves by the characters. And more importantly, it feels like I was a part of it. I decided what to say in dialogue choices, and my character was right there. It’s the kind of immersion I never feel from a film, and very rarely from a book. I feel like it happened to me, and around me. I feel more like a part of a story than a passive observer.

The school setting is very clever. At a time of life when you know your hormones are in full swing, and emotional connections buzz and sting like bees sitting on power lines feeding directly to your heart, your mobile phone becomes a great menu for choosing your interactions and communicating with the cast.

None of this would be enough, if not for the gameplay. While I will say that it got repetitive towards the end, and the last boss is more a test of endurance than of skill, it should be noted that it is very good. A turn-based affair of choosing skills, items and special attacks, it has been finely honed over the course of the Persona games, and is presented with a confident style here. The simplicity of attacking in turn is embellished carefully with bonuses, buffs, debuffs, and rewards for capturing personas from the enemy.

And finally, the icing on the cake: the style. Persona 5 sweats out liquid gorgeous from every orifice, from the harsh zig-zag menus, to the attack animations, the picture-in-picture close-ups of your friends when they emote, and… well, everything. The personas themselves are fascinating beasts, as varied as Pokemon, and not afraid to live up to the 16 age-rating certificate. Some personas are chained women only covering their modesty with their hair, others are demons, grinning as they hide phallic cones. Later in the game, there is what can undeniably be called a penis monster. It literally is a giant penis, that imposingly lurches forward to attack you, and hangs pathetically limp when low on health.

It is not a short game, and requires a significant investment of time. Not just to make it through the story, but also to explore the different activities on offer, and maximise your limited time in the most efficient way possible. By the end of the game, I had got my character stats to max, and got the strongest bond possible with about 8 of my confidants. But it was close.

I went into the final section of the game hoping this was enough, and eventually saw the credits roll on what was an uplifting, bitter-sweet ending. It was with immense joy that I saw my character and my friends go on a road trip together to take me back to my home town, but it left this vacuous gap in my heart as I realised I wouldn’t see them again. They were happy, and safe, but lost to me now. My character might see them again in the fiction of the world, but I won’t.

The incredible irony is that Persona 5 teaches you the value of friendship and connections, and of working diligently to improve yourself as a person. However I looked at the final game timer on my last game save which read “134 hours” (slightly longer than it takes to watch every episode of Friends ever made) and realised I’d been sitting on my arse in front of my PlayStation for a long time. But… having said that, there’s no way I would take it back. In fact, I feel jealous of anyone who hasn’t done it yet.

The World Bodypainting Festival 2017

I had the good luck and pleasure of being able to go to The World Bodypainting Festival again this year.

I took over 3,000 photos, which I managed to whittle down to about 200 for a decent gallery here, and then down to a further 8 which I submitted in the photo competition. You can see them on my Photography page.

If you haven’t been yet, I recommend you check it out in 2018!

World Bodypainting Festival

Last weekend I went to the World Bodypainting Festival in South-East Austria. Having never been before, I didn’t really know what to expect. I was amazed to discover a whole new scene, lots of friendly people, and some very dedicated and talented artists.

You can view my gallery here:

https://www.davidaddis.com/WBF2016/

The whole experience brings to mind an infographic I saw this year:

This was something I didn’t know if I should book, and didn’t know if I would enjoy. But on some level I knew I wanted to see what it was all about, and that special combination of trying something new, and being welcomed when I got there, made it a truly memorably weekend.

So if you find yourself in a similar situation, I would recommend you take the plunge – while you can still afford it.

A Focal Point

“We all see life through a different lens.”

Eugh. What a tired old cliché (also: isn’t “tired old cliché” a tired old cliché?). It’s a way of justifying to ourselves that we need to be more open-minded. But it does carry some actually really weighty significance. Bear with me, because I think I can show you a way of thinking about this you might not have considered before.

The origin of this philosophical device, for me, goes back to the exploration of the idea that we could each see colours in a different way. What’s green to me might be red to you – but because we’ve both grown up calling it “green”, we both identify it the same way. We wouldn’t know the exact chemical and electrical processes occurring in each others’ brains. This blew my mind when I was 15.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. I want you to imagine this idea extending from basic colour recognition to the way we individually see words, sentences, ideas, and situations in life.

Allow me to demonstrate with a series of trite, patronising and thought-provoking graphics. Check out my little table of numbers below:

That looks fine, right? One times three is three, two times four is eight. It follows a nice pattern and everything appears to be in order. Maybe you checked the easy ones like eight times ten.

But wait! There’s an error! Thirteen times fifteen is not one-hundred and ninety three!

It’s actually one-hundred and ninety-five.

A mathematics guru would have spotted this, and it would have made them uncomfortable. Upset, maybe. Potentially even angry! I apologise to any maths gurus reading this blog.

This happens to me quite often. I usually consider myself a bit of a spelling and grammer nazi, so when people use the wrong your, you’re, to, two, or too, it ruffles my feathers a bit. Even when people use funny when they meant fun, I have to concentrate to keep my smile from breaking. And that’s unfair – it’s a really difficult and subtle distinction for foreigners (well done, by the way, for learning a whole other language… I can speak Swedish, badly, and enough French to order a croissant).

So if you’re looking at that table and thinking, ok, there’s a small error, no big deal, imagine this sentence, now:

Did you spot the error? Maybe you did? But it’s subtle, right? It doesn’t jump out at you and assault your eyes.

What about this one?

Yeah. It’s starting to get pretty bad. Or this one?

I’d hope the majority of my readers could see the problem in the above sentence.

I would like you to imagine that someone might write a sentence that doesn’t look wrong to them, but does look wrong to you. Now I’d like you to go one step further – and this is the really crucial bit – and imagine someone else could read your work, and have it look wrong to them. But it doesn’t look wrong to you.

This is fine for a paragraph of text, as the error can be described in literal terms, and it can be corrected easily (most of the time). There is also a set of rules for the English language, so although some phrasing is subjective, the rules for which pronouns to use in certain cases (for example) is preset, and there is a definitive correct answer.

Now, please take this a step further. What if we apply this principle to any form of media or communication, or any way of visualising any idea at all? It’s possible that a friendly chat could be a harsh interrogation to someone else, and you would both be right in your very subjective perception of that situation. What you might perceive as constructive feedback could be useless nit-picking to your friend, or what might seem like the obvious way forward to you is certain disaster to a colleague.

Let’s just stop and think about that really quite profound revelation for a minute. This means that there isn’t one universal, correct way of viewing the world. There are several. Maybe hundreds. Thousands. Millions? We need to become aware that we perceive the world in our own unique way, which is a product of our specific brain chemistry and biology, coupled with decades of experiences – good and bad – that have shaped our opinions and reactions. And while it’s incredibly difficult to break out of that as it is literally the habit of a lifetime, we may be able to stop, and consider that someone else is getting a different experience.

This might be fine if all we’re ever arguing about is grammar or whether to have tea or coffee with breakfast. But what if it becomes a moral issue? What if a crime is justifiable to someone else, but not to you? Or vice versa?

This happens regularly in my office (not the crime, but just about every other situation), and in discussions when talking to friends. If we’re not careful, a difference of opinion can lead to an argument, alienation, or much worse.

So how can we avoid that and what can we actually do about it? First, let’s start with what we shouldn’t do:

Refuse to talk
Act passive-aggressively
Complain to other people
Become violent

Sadly we can’t just jump into someone else’s brain. The first thing we should do is relax, calm down, and avoid acting impulsively (and often emotionally). Then, when we feel like a rational human being again, we should:

Ask questions (why do you think it’s unfair? What should we do differently?)
Make eye contact
Allow them to speak
Avoid negative body language (crossing arms, rolling your eyes etc.)

When we make this kind of an effort, people get a lot off their chest and are more likely to open up to other ways of thinking (specifically, yours). And who knows? They might even convince you to change the ‘lens’ through which you are seeing the problem.

Sadly, not everyone is reasonable, and sometimes we are forced into a situation where we must disagree. Then it’s time to talk to other people, and decide on a course of action unanimously or at least democratically.

I hope this has made some kind of sense. If it has, and you agree with everything I said, and would like to add some positive comments inline with my exact world-view, please use the comments section below.