If I ever stop halfway through a game that game is almost guaranteed to be doomed to my backlog.  Final Fantasy XII, Fatal Frame, The Witcher, Metroid Prime, Bully, and Bioshock have all been exiled to a place of limbo.  Will I ever finish these games?  Doubtful.  I probably won't even finish Bioshock even though I've been told I'm only twenty minutes away from the end.  I just don't want to go back in and relearn the game in a setting far less hospitable compared to the intro where the devs held my hand and reminded me that I use the mouse to look around (yes I played on PC).

 Then Persona 4 came around.  I bought it and played twelve or so hours during my winter break.  When I went back to campus in Ann Arbor I left my PS2 and all of the games I have for that console at home.  Persona 4 was on the verge of becoming just another game on that backlog pile.

 Miraculously when I came back after finals I decided to pop it back in.  To my surprise everything came back to me very quickly.  I remembered the characters, story, and gameplay mechanics in the first ten or so minutes.  Half an hour later I was sucked back in and stayed up until two in the morning running around in some dungeon modeled after a strip joint.  

 So what is it about Persona 4?  I realized that Persona 4 is kind of a Pokemon for older people.  Instead of catching small furry creatures you catch alter egos that you can switch between in battle.  Each one has its own stats and abilities that affect the game.  Persona 4, in its most basic form, is a game created from one of the most archaic schools of game design, the turn-based Japanese RPG.  

Then I was asking myself why is Persona 4 different from the Dragon Quest series?  When you break the games down you're doing essentially the same thing in both games!  It's because Dragon Quest is the most cliched and tired series of games out there.  It's because every time I have to fight a slime I cringe because it's the 100000th time I've done so.  It's because the same character artist has done so many of the games in this series and continues to do so.

So I came to a conclusion.  Turn based Japanese RPGs have some of the most tried and true game mechanics and even today they can entertain using the same formula.  There's little reason to change that.  What has to change from game to game to keep things interesting is the personality.  The art, the music, the characters, and the story.  To make a Japanese RPG stand out you have to make those aspects of the game unique.  Nobody ragged on Persona 4 for being too derivative even though it stuck to the JRPG book.

 Actually, reaching this point where some of the more mechanical aspects of a video game can remain constant can be looked at as an achievement for the industry.  I'll get into that in another entry though.