Blog Installment the second! Welp. I'd like to talk a little bit about my decision to work on a game based on an existing mythos (or a "FANGAME" if you will). I have, in fact, discussed in the past my general puzzlement of the slew of RM* games that style themselves "Final Fantasy ______" ... A majority of them have very little to do with the FF series, other than having that familiar generic RPG gameplay style. My point is: Why? Why do this? What is the point? Why make something that is associated with a standing series instead of breaking off and making something completely new?

Why I like Persona.
First, what I love about the Persona games is the running themes. They focus very heavily on personal issues, morality, difficult choices and the hardships of life. Everything is character-centric; in fact, what could possibly be more enchanting and personal than the very concept of a Persona? Your Persona is your other self, the sum of all your hopes and fears, your idealized self. The character Yukari from Persona 3 starts out a little wary of you, somewhat distant and withdrawn. She might seem standoffish at first. But look at her Persona - Io, the same Io of Greek mythology who was turned into a cow and cursed to be stung by a gadfly over and over because of her forbidden love affair with Zeus. In P3, Io appears as a crying girl chained to a throne in the shape of a bull's head.

This immediately reflects a level of depth onto Yukari - she has some romantic issues perhaps, and is definitely distant because of some kind of hurt in her past or entrapment in her present. I'm a sucker for mythology, but I'm an even bigger sucker for personalizations of this kind. His Dark Materials is a series that appeals to me on that level (amongst others); the concept of your soul being externalized as an animal that matches your personality is a romantic one laden with symbolism. Add to this that as they deal with their personal issues - that is, as you actually watch characters GROW and DEVELOP! - their personas will eventually grow into a new form. This is a completely new layer of associations with the character, especially drawing links between the two. Persona takes this several steps further, with the Major Arcana of the Tarot being associated with characters who match that card's representation/s. Io uses Wind spells and healing magic - definitely suited to someone of the Lovers Arcana. I'm very familiar with tarot cards and their symbolism, so this made me salivate and froth even further, as I'm sure you can imagine.

Why I like RPGs and Roleplaying.
In general, I'm also very interested in RPing. It all goes back to immersion and what I really love about RPGs: painting the picture of a world that draws you into the game, instead of just having buttons that are fun to push. Good gameplay rocks, good gameplay in good gameworlds rocks harder. Would FF7 have worked if the role you took in the game was that of a Shinra soldier? You would spend the entire game doing more or less the same type of gameplay - battles, stealing materia, commanding army troops in an RTS minigame - but the story and the world would have suffered. It was just cooler to be Cloud, fighting off that corporate army, and trying to save everyone from Meteor. Who hasn't thought about something that would be a cool addition or change to their favorite series mythos? "Oh man," you thought. "I invented the COOLEST FINAL FANTASY SWORD." (Insert your fan invention here.) Or even, "Man, I really love Pokemon. I'm totally gonna replay Pokemon Silver right now!!!" (Insert your media of choice here.) With roleplaying, I simultaneously satisfy both urges. I really love Viera, the bunnygirl race of Final Fantasy lore. Not because they are bunnygirls, although that helps. I love their culture, their stoic nature and deliberate style of speech... You might be aware that a Final Fantasy tabletop RPG exists (it's by The Returners or somesuch). Working with Raitzeno, we revised it into something more entertaining, and added new races such as the Viera, which required thinking up unique new racial abilities. Despite working within an existing system AND existing world mythos, we came up with a remarkable amount of concepts that were both fresh to the setting and interesting to the gameplay mechanics. This experience was pretty rewarding in itself. Also, I am a fucking nerd.

Why it can still be original.
On that note, I'd like to bring up Persona's gameplay. I don't need to go into every detail about how it works, but I really enjoyed playing Persona 3 and Persona 4. However, the more I started to compare them to other games, and talked about them more after studying more advanced game design, I began to see the flaws. You can date any number of girls at no significant penalty nor any significant effect upon the game's ending/s. Dungeon healing is eventually (or quickly) trivialized. Certain spells are wildly unbalanced. More of these flaws began coming up amongst the good traits, and we began to realize what kinds of opportunities we felt were missed. In fact, a post-apocalyptic futuristic setting had been the setting of a game by a previous GM friend of ours, and we'd RPed some plots set loosely in the Persona world. Keyword loosely - Personas exist; Shadows exist; the 'Dark Hour' or the 'TV World' exists; but we never mentioned any characters from the original games. We never talked about the Kirijo group or The Fall or the Midnight Channel. This was a different setting, our setting, repurposing Personas; one of the most fun things to do was to take a character from one of our other settings and say "What would this person's Persona look like? Let's roleplay them as a student, and see how they'd act in this setting." It really pushed our creative boundaries. In fact, it spawned a short series of drawings I did that I think are pretty cool. Not only did we have fun playing a game that was dripping with our original creations, but we also managed to simultaneously enjoy that sweet, sweet Persona flavor AND I was artistically stimulated.



After this, when I took over as the GM, I began to work in more strict gameplay elements; added things like Weapon Upgrades, repurposed Social Links... in short, we made our own game. After that, why not move on to the real thing? In fact, we started over with a completely blank slate of cast members. We didn't want to include anybody we were already overly fond of and would favor, conciously or not; we didn't want to fanboy over ourselves by putting our own TOP FAV! original creations into the setting. Instead we set out to let the cast grow along with the plot and the rest of the game.

I know some people feel like making a Fangame is a misuse of one's talent or perhaps a waste of it. I think this goes back to a basic assumption that a Fangame is going to be a repetition of one of the series' earlier games by an uncreative fan zombie. After all, most FF-inspired games are pretty hard to differentiate from FF5 or FF6. Cosplay Crisis, another game on RMN, is an example of doing a 'fangame' perfectly. This game is not based on any Final Fantasy; rather, it draws from all of them. Additionally, it takes place in a world entirely of the developer's creation, using Final Fantasy's mythos and gameplay tropes in an interesting and amusing way to enhance the game. In this vein, Persona:Reverse is first and foremost a game of our design. Raitzeno and I have worked together closely to make sure that we could accomplish everything we set out to do with this game, and many times, that meant changing the basic game's rules and functions to suit our goals. It is a Persona-style RPG only as a secondary rule. As you can already read in the BATTLE MECHANICS and YOU! and the SYNC and YOU! areas, we deviate heavily from the systems of previous Persona games, and our setting is completely original. To answer my original question:

Why make something that is associated with a standing series instead of breaking off and making something completely new?

We have come up with something completely new.

Get ready.