Persona 3: Reload Asks us to Live

Living With Determination

It's 2014 and I'm in the midst of a horrible relationship. I'm scrolling Facebook only to see that a childhood friend has suddenly passed away. We had lost touch over the past few years as you tend to do with people you used to know. What really hurt, looking back, is we had made vague plans to meet up. You know the one. "I'm back in town and we should get together!" Those kind.

But we never did.

And now we never will.

And it's hard, looking back, not blaming myself. Sure, they didn't reach back out either, but I was the one moving in and they were busy with their music career, their new friends, their new life. I blame myself because I felt like they wouldn't accept me anymore, like I wasn't "cool" enough for them, whatever that meant.

Despite the fact that we grew up together, we played soccer together, we played lots of nerdy video games together, we were best friends at one point. But instead, I let my fear control me and I threw away the chance I had to hang out with him because I was worried what they would think of me. Had I changed too much?

Well, as mentioned, I never got to find out. And the next time I saw them, they were laying upright in a casket. Not exactly the reunion I wanted.

I wrote a lengthy post on Facebook about how guilty I felt that I never kept up with them, I'm not going to go back on Facebook to look for it, but suffice to say it was very emotional and at the funeral, one of their friends told me they read my post and thought it was beautiful. I instantly burst into tears and gave them a hug.

I remember their wake having really good food. That's the best thing I can say about the experience. I was exhausted by the end of it, I remember listening to Pvris on the way to the funeral and the singer says:

I said, ooh, ooh
You give me something to talk about
Something to talk about
I said, ooh, ooh, ooh
You give me something to think about
That's not the shit in my head
You're a miracle
You're a miracle, a miracle

The song is obviously tinged with romantic feelings, but love can be a form of friendship too. Friends can just as easily be miracles in our lives, and in this case they were a miracle that was around for too little time in my life. I still think about them every now and then and wish I had been less scared of what they'd think, who they were, or who I was and accepted myself more so I could've seen them.

But I didn't and now all I have are the memories. And the memories are nice and I treasure them greatly, but they don't measure up to the people in our lives we actually meet, get to know, and then fade away, one way or another.

This is the story of Persona 3: Reload. Getting us to get more comfortable with this bitter fact of life. How can we go on living when we're destined to all die? I'm not kidding, that's literally what's happening in the game. People are dying all of the time, they're getting old, they're growing apart, they're moving away, they're being destroyed inside and outside by demons both figurative and literal, that's life.

OK, maybe that's not always life and maybe not so literally about the demons.

But you know, details!

Persona 3: Reload is one of my favorite games I've played this year and I wanted to talk about its more philosophical themes because the finale made me absolutely break down and sob. I'm not the only one, just listen to this song and look at the comments and how people still feel about the ending of this game. No spoilers.

Maybe keep it to the first five comments, just to be safe. You'll get the point after that. But if you don't feel like crying on a Friday night (been there) then the gist is this: This finale absolutely breaks your heart into a million pieces and then asks you to pull it together so you can keep on living. Or play New Game+, whatever.

Whatever you do, probably give yourself a minute once you beat this 60+ hour game, because it's quite an emotional roller coaster. At the heart of it is a group of teenagers going to Gekkoukan High School who need to go to a tower called Tartarus at 12 AM (The Dark Hour) and clear out the demons infesting it.

During The Dark Hour, people who do not have Personas (physical manifestations of their psyche) are put into caskets (yes really) and are completely unaware that Shadows (the demons I've been talking about) are roaming the Earth, that there is a gigantic tower in the middle of their city, and that the sky has gone a pale green.

There's something here about people walking around in life, not realizing their dead. Being in caskets, blissfully ignorant of The Dark Hour (life), there's something there in that. But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

Why is up to a bunch of teenagers to save the world? I don't know, it's just how it happens. They're not gonna be asking a bunch of adults in their mid-30s to be doing it, that's for sure! Such is the power of youth, I guess.

More seriously, the message probably would hit a lot differently if it was a bunch of nearly middle-aged adults trying to save the world while already having a lived a lot of their life off-screen. Here we have a bunch of children ("young adults") who are forced to take on the impossible task of saving the world.

I guess there's a robot and a dog too.

I'm gonna focus on the robot.

The Path Was Closed

Aigis, to be exact, is the robot. And she's possibly one of the most important parts of the game. I suppose this section will have some mild spoilers, but I personally wouldn't consider it anything game-ruining. However, you've been warned.

As I said, Aigis is probably the most important character in the game and a lot of her most important character development is completely optional. That's because Persona games are social calendar games. You do various activities on a given day such as fight Shadows, go to school, study, go do karaoke, etc.

All of this however takes up time, not a realistic amount of time mind you, as doing one activity usually means fast forwarding to either the next day or the night. It can even make you go to The Dark Hour if it's a full moon. Regardless, it's an amount of time that passes nearly every time you make a choice about an activity.

So this means the amount of time you have in this 60+ hour game is finite. It doesn't feel like that at times because the game has, let's charitably say, some pacing issues. Where it feels like you go weeks or even a month or two (in-game) without any turn-based combat. That's because the combat in this game is pretty damn easy, and I say that as a first-time Persona player!

Possibly overly so, unfortunately. As it doesn't take long for you to get to the next sectioned off part of Tartarus in just one night, and grinding doesn't make a lot of sense because the main enemies don't give a lot of experience points, only the bosses do that, or if you're fortunate, and you find a powerful or lucky shadow.

But I digress, back to Aigis.

Aigis is a robot made by a shadowy (not that kind) corporation. We won't go into who because I want to remain spoiler-free but she's important. And she goes through a hell of a lot of existential crisis for a robot. Her entire purpose is to eliminate shadows and make sure her protagonist buddy is gonna be okay.

However, after a fateful battle where Aigis is badly damaged she questions her purpose. If she is not capable of defeating shadows what is her purpose? She's not a human, she was designed with a very specific purpose in mind, has proof of that designation, and knows about it in a very concrete and objective sense.

Respectfully, when it comes to religion, you can't often find the same baseline of evidence. Unless one of my readers has been actively talking to God and I just didn't know it. If you are, uh, let me know what the big G is thinking, would ya?

So Aigis knows what she's supposed to be doing but here's the problem: She fucking sucks at it. Well, OK, she sucked at this one battle. But that's enough for her to declare herself a failure, have a huge existential crisis and, in turn become more human in the process. That's right, we're going all Weird Science.

Well, okay, maybe not quite that hard into the comedy side of things, or the, you know, wanting to fuck the robot. Well, you can romance the robot, but you can romance most (female) characters in this game and other Persona games. That's another aspect of the social calendar, you can romance your classmates. I guess it's more accurate to say that Aigis, you, and some of your classmates are squad members, specifically of the Specialized Extracurricular Execution Squad.

Or just S.E.E.S for short, please.

But as weird as this story for Aigis might be I don't think it's a story unfamiliar to many of us. We all have our fair share of failures, regrets, mistakes, some more extreme or less than others. But many of us have a moment in our lives where we're wondering what's our purpose. I personally subscribe to the notion that we all make our own meaning for ourselves, but even then it's not exactly easy.

You need to scratch, claw, fight, for your own meaning in this life, especially in a world that is unfortunately so hostile to so many of us. Much of that fighting is going to be in your head more than it's bound to be in real life, but that doesn't necessarily make it much easier. Mental health problems, relationship issues, problems with co-workers, struggling with your grades, whatever.

Aigis doesn't have the luxury of thinking about her emotions though, she just thinks about herself as a robot instead of a fully formed human. At first, she may not be wrong. She speaks very robotically, acts unemotional, has a Spock-like demeanor in most things she does. She doesn't understand people's emotions very well, understands social conventions even less and is very loud about these things.

...Wait a fucking second, is she me?

No, autistic people aren't robots, but I couldn't resist the easy joke there.

So how does Aigis solve this conundrum of hers and become more human?

Well, have you heard the Good Word about Friendship?

The Path is Open

Back in 2014 when I lost this friend I ended up briefly reconnecting with another childhood friend of mine. Me, them, and the friend who had passed, had all been best buddies back in the day. There was a picture of us from my Facebook with all three of us looking like total dorks with our guitars and whatever else. This was when I was just a sophomore in high school so it had at least been 6 years since that photo had been taken as of 2014. It was also the last time we all really hung out besides maybe one other time a year or two later on my birthday.

When reconnecting with my friend we did the usual, the things you always say and do when someone you loved and drifted apart from died. My friend hadn't drifted as far as I had though, they were definitely closer at this point, which thinking back, probably stung a bit too, because I knew that was my fault as well.

The usual stuff included reminiscing about the past, talking about what we had been up to. We walked around Boston after having dinner together, just the two of us, trying to understand how this all could have happened. I'm not sure how it made me feel in the moment, I remember it felt surreal, but that's all. Maybe in the long-term it didn't do much, but if I still remember it, that's probably not true.

I'd like to say we kept in touch after that. We kinda did, but it was very sporadic and we had no real reason to keep in touch. We talked about me playing with them and other friends at a memorial show for our mutual friend but that never materialized, we planned meeting up at Boston Calling but we couldn't find each other because of poor Wi-Fi signal, how's that for a fucking metaphor?

No, we fell back out of touch after a while. He deactivated his Facebook account and in January of this year I did the same. So that's probably that, for now.

So what's the point? I guess the point is there isn't an intrinsic point to all of these decisions, regrets, and plans we have. They either get acted on or they don't, you either go to Tartarus to face the Shadows, or you back off in shame.

As Aigis said above, it's a miracle that any of us meet anyone. In 2017 when I first met my partner, the only reason I met her was because we worked together but we'd actually been working together already for a year. But it was totally different shifts so we didn't know each other. And only because a friend of mine and co-worker got promoted to manager my future-partner got moved up a time slot.

And the rest is history.

But even then, it takes more miracles for people to connect, truly connect, and then stay connected. I've talked before about how I barely know anyone from high school anymore, even my best friends at the time have faded away or I barely talk to anymore. Some of that's on me, some of that's on them, ultimately the responsibility of the thing doesn't matter as much as the reality of it.

Now you may be wondering, "hold up Dory, the answer is connection and friendship? Isn't that the most obvious shit in the world?" Well, yes and no.

Yes, most people know we need others in our lives to make it more meaningful and help us get through hard times. It's what any good mental health advocate would say, any therapist would say, hell it's what most people say. If you've gone through a Hard Thing in your life, people often tell you to lean on your friends and family.

But I think people can underestimate the value of that. Especially in a world where the lines of "leaning" can get blurry and we can lose focus of what's important and how we connect. Don't get me wrong, online relationships are real and important for anyone (especially introverts) but they aren't a replacement for meeting in person, sharing a conversation, and being able to see each other.

Again, that's not to say there's no value in those situations, because there absolutely is and always will be. I know I've gotten through a lot in my life because of the bonds I've developed online for the past 20(!) years. They've been very helpful to me when I feel alone or want to have someone to bounce ideas off of.

But most of the moments in my life I remember come from 1:1 moments I've had with people face to face. When we've grabbed dinner, or went for a walk, or just talked about shit. It's easy to say to yourself, "well I have all the friends I need online" or "I just saw that friend the other day, I don't want to be a bother" or even "no one wants to hear my problems" but I promise you, if the other people in your life care about you, then they'll want to hear from you.

And as I found out the hard way, you can wait too long.

And this connection and these bonds are so essential to what makes Persona 3: Reload a powerful story. All of these characters become intertwined with each other and remind us that the bonds we make in our life can really be the difference between living in despair and being able to live with hope.

I'm not saying having friends is a cure-all, but if it's good enough for a robot going through an existential crisis, it's good enough for me.