Persona 4 Golden: It’s Fun to Pretend to Be a Psychopath

Back last spring, I bought myself a PS Vita.

It’s not that I’ve given up on Nintendo; I still love my 3DS and steal turns on Boyfriend’s Wii U. It’s just that I love Mario and Zelda so much that I’ve already blitzed through the games I want to play. (And even a few I don’t… Yoshi’s New Island, that means you.)

Apart from my PC, which is woefully ill-suited for last-gen games, let alone current ones, the Vita is the first non-Nintendo system I’ve owned. Getting used to it has been a learning curve, albeit a shallow one. I appreciate that many of the great games I’ve already played on it are third-party titles–practically unthinkable for my 3DS. And I’m excited to play the PSOne titles (Chrono Cross! Castlevania: Symphony of the Night!) that passed me and my Nintendo-renting self by.

But the game that tops every recommended list for the Vita is Atlus’s remake of their PlayStation 2 Persona title: Persona 4 Golden.

In Persona 4 Golden, your new hometown is suddenly plagued by mysterious murders. The police are doing their best, but the culprit is actually supernatural. It’s up to you, Our Specially Powered Hero, and your band of teenaged friends to stop the deaths and fight your way to their source.

Spoilers: I really like this game.

See, it’s basically a dungeon-crawler/social sim where you are going through high school as a psychopath.

Not intentionally — I mean, the game intends that your character, [Insert Your Name Here/actually Yu Narukami but this game never tells you that], is a completely emotionally normal teenaged Japanese boy. If anything, he’s more psychologically healthy than all his friends, since he’s the only one who isn’t repressing a dangerous Jungian Shadow.

But the way the game is designed, Yu’s high school social life requires you to act like a psychopath. Here’s how.

According to psychologists’ definition, psychopaths are charming, seemingly trustworthy people who have the skills to get along well in society. The only different between them and everyone else is, they don’t actually feel any real connection with other people.

As John M. Grohol from PsychCentral puts it:

Instead, [psychopaths] form artificial, shallow relationships designed to be manipulated in a way that most benefits the psychopath. People are seen as pawns to be used to forward the psychopath’s goals.

Persona 4 Golden (unintentionally) encourages the player to act like a psychopath because the most important consequences of the actions you take in the social sim are effects on your party’s stats and abilities in the dungeon-crawling sequence.

In Yu’s everyday life, there are about twenty characters with whom you can form “Social Links.” As you advance in these Social Links by spending time with the other characters, helping them, and listening to their problems, you either gain the ability to power up your roster of attacks, or, if the other character is one of your party members, they gain new abilities that help you in battle.

This means that instead of (or in addition to) pursuing the characters that you care most about, you wind up choosing to spend time with the characters who can help you the most. For instance, instead of hanging out with the bereaved brother of one of the murder victims, a guy I liked, I found myself maxing out my Social Link with a sexual harass-y terrible workmate at Yu’s hospital janitor job, simply because the opportunities to do so came along with opportunities to buff one of my stats.

Plus, since you can “max out” a Social Link, once you become BFFs with someone, if you want to play most advantageously, you unceremoniously dump them to go Social Link with someone else. The game encourages this by instituting few (if any) consequences for what would in real life be bad social behaviour.

No matter what you do, if you’ve maxed out a Social Link, that person/group will be your friend. So you can reject all of your girlfriend’s invitations to hang out, ditch soccer practice for the rest of the year, and ignore your kid cousin — and they will still love you just as much. Heck, you can even date all the teenaged girls in the game, and even after you dump them all on Valentine’s Day, they’ll still adore you.

For example, at one point, I accidentally started dating two of the girls because I misread some cultural norms.* Both were members of my attack party. Did either of them care? Nope. Did anyone else point it out? Nope again. We just went merrily on our way, killing Shadows right and left, until I broke up with one of them, who was sad in the break-up cut-scene — and then we were back to being happy-people team again.

Coupled with the fact that Yu is designed to be a power-fantasy (as Kotaku’s Jason Schreier puts it, “He’s friends with everyone, all the girls want to be with him, and in general he’s just an all-around badass“), the game provides a perfect psychopathic romp.

Manipulating people to benefit myself? Check. I choose to interact with these people based entirely on my own needs. If I want to power up a particular character in battle, I spend time listening to him pour out his heart about how his dad told him to be a man. I decide who I want to date based on which character I like the best, regardless of whether I’d be good for them or our relationship would be good for the team.

Treating people as pawns? Well, of course I do: they literally are pawns, pieces in a game I’m playing, without real feelings or minds. That’s what makes it okay to treat them in ways I would never treat real people in real life.

The dungeon-crawling sequences in Persona 4 Golden would make a great game on their own (as indeed they do), but the way they intertwine with the social sim really draws me in. It’s fun to pretend to be a psychopath for a little while, in an environment where I can do that knowing I’m not actually causing any harm or inviting negative consequences — even if that’s not quite the way the game makers would describe it.

* In my group of friends here in Canada, if you hug someone when they’re crying, it doesn’t necessarily imply that you are romantically intimate. I’m told that in Japan, where this game is set, the expectations for physical contact are different.

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