Trapped in a Conversation I Didn’t Want to Have

After 131 hours of gameplay, whittling away what was essentially the entire summer, I managed to finish Persona 5, the turn-based RPG by developer P Studio. 

The game follows a high-school protagonist as he invades the minds of crooked adults in order to change their malevolent hearts. During the day, he attends school and carries out the minutiae of teenage life: studying, part-time work, going to the movies, hitting on his teacher who’s subsidising her wage by working part-time as a sexy cleaning maid. Typical teenage stuff.

The gameplay was outstanding and the design amazing with Persona 5 garnering a spot at or near the top of most ‘Best of’ lists for 2017. But with the game taking as long as it did to complete, is there a point when a video game overstays its welcome?

The first game of the Persona franchise that I have played—there are, strangely enough, not four preceding titles but five—as I controlled the protagonist, moving him through the various sprawling and vivid hubs of Tokyo, it felt strangely suffocating for a game so large in scale.

Role-playing games are known for being dialogue-heavy, employing dialogue trees to facilitate conversation, and Japanese role-playing games particularly so. The problem with Persona 5 wasn’t with the dialogue, per se—it wasn’t stilted and the characters were well-developed—but with the sheer amount of it. It was as though the protagonist moved across Tokyo in search of his next conversation.

While I appreciate the concept of a single-player RPG centring on these interactions—as seen with the Persona 5 protagonist moving from one social ‘confidant’ to the next in order to earn stat improvements—there’s still something strange, almost paradoxical, about playing a game that relies so heavily on this type of social interaction. Persona 5—and video games like it—are social games existing within what’s traditionally a solitary and asocial construct: the single-player video game.

As I spoke with the social confidants—school friends and characters found across the city—I felt trapped talking to people, ignoring them, button-mashing my way through conversations as I guessed the answers to the questions they posed in the hope of progressing.

This was especially true towards the end of the game. I found I could have been talking to real people, of actual flesh, instead of these animated avatars.

And the longer I played the more conscious I was of the hours I'd been playing. As the time I'd been playing steadily climbed I reminded myself of all the books I could have finished or films I might have seen, only exacerbating my general apathy towards these 'confidants' and their problems.

With approximately forty hours previously devoted to completing Horizon Zero Dawn, I learnt that the hours spent playing a game can be immaterial if the main narrative is compelling enough. The narrative of a game, however, can be at the mercy of the game’s length with the danger being that the longer the game is the more convoluted and confusing the storyline can become. Enter: Person 5.

So why do this to myself? Why play through 131 hours of a game if I felt I had something better to be doing?

Well, video games have a way of playing to the completionist in us all. Ultimately, though, the difference between playing an additional ten hours—even twenty hours—is negligible when you have already committed 100 hours of your life to a video game.

And then there’s the vivid beauty of a game like Persona 5. The beautiful anime clip scenes and the action-based gameplay were engaging enough to drag me, if somewhat begrudgingly, to the game's very end. Even if it was 131 hours later.