persona relationships

both digital and real

During this time of year, with the biting wind and the too-early descent of the sun into the Pacific, I fall into old patterns. Hidden away in the warmth of the living room, I act as I did as a kid, spending my time the same way I did during every break from school growing up. My brother and I gather around the TV and play video games with a single-minded focus that we rarely reach in any other aspects of our lives. When we were younger, we would huddle around the small gray CRT in my room and play GameCube, bouncing between Zelda games and sports games and whatever we could rent at Blockbuster. It’s been decades of this, finding new games to beat every break, even years into our adult lives.

Over the past few years, we’ve gotten more into long, winding story-based Japanese RPGs. We last played Persona 5: Royal like this, and this year we tore through its prequel, Persona 3: Reload. These games have myriad mechanics to make them engaging, but one that stands out is the concept of social links. Within the frame of these massive games with large-scale stories and conflict that threaten the world, there are a few dozen smaller stories centered on side characters that you can build bonds with. For each of these characters, you have 10 levels of your bond that slowly build up through repeated interactions.

These games use a calendar system, in which you can only do a few tasks each day, including meeting up with one of your social links. So, to learn about each of their stories, you must find them within the allotted amount of time you have in the game, balancing responsibilities like saving the world or studying for exams. These characters operate on their own schedules too, only being able to hang out on certain days of the week, at certain times of day, in certain places in the game.

At first, the system feels a bit constrained — how could these short interactions lead to a strong friendship? Why is it so hard to find time to spend with these people? And how interesting could these stories be when most of the interactions are only a few short conversations?

But it all feels so intense and real once you get wrapped up in it. In one social link in Persona 3 Reload, you meet a teenager named Kamiki who has a terminal illness. Each Sunday, you can meet him on a bench at the town shrine and hear him talk about how his life has always been filled with misery, the symptoms of his condition, the knowledge that he would die young. In conversation, you try to provide solace, listen, and suggest that his life, however short, has had meaning. He opens up about his love for literature and how it offers an escape. Later, at your insistence, he starts to write his own story. By the last time you see him, he has finished his story and sits at the verge of death. For the first time in his life, he feels grateful for the life he lived. Later, his mother meets with you, grateful that her son found peace before he moved on, thankful that your friendship helped him to get there.

The relationship comes in parts, as you have to wait seven in-game days between conversations with Kamiki. You forget a little bit about your conversations, getting wrapped up in the day-to-day of the game again, until it’s Sunday again and you can reconnect with your newfound friend. Several months of in-game time pass from when you meet him for the first time to the last, and it feels like you actually got to know him for a while, to learn to care for him enough to shed a tear when he leaves.

The developers of these games were intentional with how these stories were built out. What could’ve been a single extended monologue of a story instead appears as a long relationship. A simple set of mechanics lets characters come to life, lets you connect to them slowly and intentionally. Kamiki was mostly irrelevant to the main plot but probably the most memorable part of the game for me. And he is just one of many possible relationships in the game, from the young girl trying to cope with her parents’ divorce to an older couple that owns a bookshop.

Just like real life, the ways these relationships develop vary as well. Each relationship grows at a different pace, requiring a different number of interactions to advance to the final level. There are the friends we instantly connect with, the ones we decide to see every day and grow close to rapidly, and there are the slow burns — those that we met a few times over a few months and months until the friendship advances and blossoms. Certain people always seem available to hang out, so it feels easy to ignore them in favor of the ones that only occasionally seem to be free.

As you begin to make progress in the game, it slowly dawns on you that you won’t have the time to max out each of these relationships. There’s only so much time in your days, and there are so many people that you don’t have time to connect with. When you try to prioritize which ones to focus on, you have no idea what you’re missing out on with the possible friends you ignore; there’s an opportunity cost to the time you spend with anyone, or doing anything alone. You wonder if you are taking certain characters for granted, assuming that you’ll always have time to max out those relationships later. You wonder if you’re thinking about the relationships in the game or the ones in real life.

After finishing these games, I see my own relationships differently now. They’re slightly more complicated than a game, but not that different at all. It’s easy to overcomplicate what relationships and friendships can be, trying to wax poetic about the different forms they can take and how bonds form, but ultimately, finding the right time to see people over and over again is what develops relationships. Spending time together is how two strangers end up having an unbreakable bond, one that empowers them in ways that they never considered. Finding the time is the hard part; choosing who to spend the time with is the hard part. There’s so much to be busy with, whether it’s the daily tedium of work or simply losing ourselves in the din of distraction.

Throughout the break, playing these games, my brother and I spent more uninterrupted time together than we had in a long time, despite the fact that we live together. Our other roommates were out of town, and our other responsibilities were out of the way thanks to the Thanksgiving holiday. We mostly talked about the games we were playing, but we talked about everything else, passing the controller while we spent most of each day flying through the stories and building friendships. We each had a few plans with other friends that week, but for most of our time, we chose to spend it together. As I pondered how I could try to prioritize relationships more in my life, this was a no-brainer. Among everything else we could’ve done with our time, I can’t imagine a single choice that could’ve been better.

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We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza and the invasion of Lebanon. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donating to Care for Gaza (grassroots organizations delivering food to Palestinians), directly to families or by buying e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families. Lebanon is suffering too— consider donating to the Lebanese Food Bank, The Zahra Trust, or Beit El Baraka to help provide relief and resources.

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💧 Drops of the Week 💧

• PLAYLIST - Top Songs 2024 - a nonzero amount of my top songs are religious music my mom plays on the family Alexa

• POEM - “Berryman” By W. S. Merwin - passion was genius and he praised movement and invention