This doesn’t mean I think that the dungeon crawling or turn-based combat in Persona games are bad. Despite how many cheap one-hit KOs I’ve gotten in Persona 3, I still find it deeply satisfying to unlock the many layers to the combat system’s buffs, debuffs, resistances and status effects that can allow you to completely bulldoze a tough boss. It’s just that I love stories about young adults approaching the first blush of adulthood, and video games just don’t have enough of those kinds of stories.
Growing up, I so longed for games about being in high school that I taught myself emulation so I could play Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side, the girl-centric spin off of Tokimeki Memorial. At least half a day’s worth of words have been said about the unique pleasures of the original game, but I have always kind of preferred Girl’s Side. Some of it is just wanting to date cute anime boys, but it’s also because of the way it gamifies juggling school, hobbies, a part time job and a social life. From Persona 3 onward, the games in the Persona series would borrow quite a few of these game mechanics for their dungeon crawling RPGs.
During each “day” of Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side and its sequels, you have to schedule out what activities you’ll participate in. If you join a club, that takes up time that can’t be used to hang out with friends or study, and your character’s stats will go up and down depending on what you do. Depending on how you spend your time, you’ll meet different boys, and you’ll also meet different girls who can become your friends, but also possibly rivals for the boys you go on dates with.
One of the loveliest things about this series is that it doesn’t encourage you to compete with the girls you befriend; having healthy friendships with other girls actually helps your dating life overall. In fact, if you don’t meet the parameters to get the ending with the anime boy of your choice, you can also have a platonic ending with one of your female friends. And even if one of the girls does end up mad at you for dating the guy you like, you can actually win her back by spending a lot of time with her. I remember sitting in my childhood basement—before my parents let my brother and me put computers in our bedrooms—moved to tears when I triggered a cutscene with a female friend in Tokimeki Memorial where she told me she just couldn’t stay mad at me. It was a kind of experience I badly wanted to have in high school. I wanted what Blair and Serena had in Gossip Girl: a best friend who would choose you, even if you fought. Many years later, the closest I’ve come to having that kind of a "best friend" is still this video game.
There are some games that portray coming of age stories. The first Life Is Strange is a kind of story that would feel right at home on the CW, allusions to Catcher in the Rye and all; I’m also a huge fan of Oxenfree and Gone Home. Some of the issue with telling coming of age stories is that they often have to do with subject matter that video games are nervous to touch. In Gossip Girl, the characters all drink, do drugs and have sex. This was controversial in Gossip Girl, and the idea of a video game portraying underage sex or drinking feels laughable.
Video games are often a scapegoat for all manner of social ills. Frequently, “violent video games” are mentioned after school shooting, but I’m also old enough to remember when Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas became a subject of national news because modders found a sex minigame that was cut from the final release. That minigame depicted sex between two adults and was unplayable without modding, but it caused a recall of the game and led then-Senator Hilary Clinton to ask the FTC to investigate how the ESRB rated games. Even in The Sims, a simulation game series that you can play as a coming of age story, Sims don’t have sex or drink alcohol. They “woo-hoo” and drink “juice” so that they can be rated T for Teen and be played by teenagers who are coming of age in real time.
But what the Persona series and dating sims like Tokimeki Memorial capture are the small, quiet moments—the drudgery and waiting that define teenage life just as much as drama and misadventure. In Persona, as you attend classes and go to club meetings, you meet characters who are just on the cusp of their adult life. Sometimes I think about the subplot with the track and field club Persona 3. As you attend club meetings, you get to know Kazushi Miyamoto, who is training for a big race but also hiding a knee injury. He learns that he very literally can’t run away from his problems, unable to finish track practice because his knee is too injured. When you visit him in the hospital, where he tells you that he’s skipping the race to have surgery on his knee, you can tell him that he's really grown up.
Stories about adolescence are fascinating to me because they’re all about something dying and then being reborn. The ending of Persona 3 takes this very literally by having the character you play die on graduation day. He’s surrounded by his friends who don’t want to see him go—they, too, are changed forever by his passing. But this is growing up: learning to cherish the people close to you, mourning when you lose them. Having those experiences again, being given a window to look back on my own past by playing a character going through it for the first time, is why I play and re-play the games in the Persona series. I want to join every club, befriend every character, be born and reborn as I keep growing older and my own memories of my distant childhood start to fade.
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