Passing the Buck Chapter 2: Persona(l) Space

In “Passing the Buck: A Game Pass Study,” Wolfman Jew has bought a three month subscription to Game Pass. With only ninety-one days he can’t get back, it’s on him to try as much as he can. Every day he’ll play something, anything, even if it’s only for half an hour, and write down his thoughts. How many games will he play? How many will he finish? How many revelations will he find? And how much of his sanity will be left by April Fool’s Day?

With this, another week of “Passing the Buck” has… passed. Actually, usually I like to write at least part of this before I do the actual writing, for this week this is actually from the night before release. I’m just putting it in after I put in all the screenshots and right before I started doing final edits. So consider this an exciting missive from The Future. This will likely come across as a quieter year to you readers; while I played four games this week, as I did last time, I beat nothing, gave up on one game two days in, and spent a huge amount of my time mainlining Persona 3 Reload. I do fear slightly that it’ll come across as just a bit of a sophomore slump. Next week, I’ll try to really push myself in more ways. But for me, this constitutes a huge amount of gaming. One game dominated the week more than any other, and I pushed through it hard. And the others also got a lot of attention. But to see how it more formally shook out, just read onwards.

What I played:

Dead Space (2023): en route to reunite with his wife, engineer Isaac Clarke discovers that her workplace—a giant mining space station—has been ravaged by a plague of zombie-like monsters. He fights off these “Necromorphs” while putting out fires across the ship, which has become a death trap of broken quarantine procedures, busted electronics, oxygen-free vacuums, and fleshy beasts.
Persona 3 Reload: over the course of over three months, SEES overcomes several major challenges, from five especially powerful Shadows to two of Gekkoukan High’s most grueling tests. And while they’ve been empowered thanks to the return of former team leader Akihiko, new specialist Fuuka, and the mysterious android Aigis, the team is racked by revelations about their backers in the Kirijo Group.
Ori and the Blind Forest: newly orphaned creature Ori explores a vast, ancient forest, which has been ravaged by a birdlike monster. Their adventure forces them to uncover new powers for exploring new areas.
Chants of Sennaar: an explorer enters a towering megastructure, with each tier home to a society with its own language. Unable to understand any written or spoken word, they decipher the script character by character, slowly unraveling the nature of the people.

Sunday, January 5: started and completed Chapter 1 in Dead Space, and defeated the Priestess and began a second incursion into Tartarus in Persona 3 Reload.

Today, I was on “Good Morning, Source Gaming,” and in a discussion that partially revolved around Game Pass, Snazzy mentioned the Dead Space remake. It was one of the twelve games I initially downloaded—I literally replayed the 2008 original in October in preparation for this series—but that spurred me on. I suited up in Dead Space (2023), and though I died about three times, I made it onto the medical wing before stopping. As with The Walking Dead, it makes sense for me to tackle it one chapter at a time, so hopefully by the end of the week I can have gotten through, say, Chapter 3 alongside playing Persona and some new stuff. Assuming the game is as faithful as it’s been so far, most chapters could probably be done in a single session. Because as it turns out, my long history of refusing to savor my meals applies to Game Pass. It’s crazy that I’m doing this, being the artsy critic I am, but again, I’m also a foodie who rushes through what I eat.

Image: Source Gaming. Dead Space, subtle as always.

I quite like the first Dead Space. It’s unbelievably derivative—of Resident Evil 4 most obviously and thoroughly, but also Metroid Prime, Alien, The Thing, Event Horizon, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten even more—and it doesn’t have RE4’s sense of wild abandon, but the structure is fine and that “oh, you have to dismember enemies!” gimmick does a lot for the gameplay. Very workmanlike, much like its star. At least in the first hour, the remake has added nicer graphics, but it hasn’t rocked the boat as much as I’d have liked. The biggest differences so far are that you have to press the stick to run and that Isaac, who was originally a late silent protagonist holdout for Triple-A Western games, now talks. He’s fairly bland so far, but better than original Isaac’s attempts to ape Nathan Drake in Dead Space 2 and 3. That being said, I know of at least a few new things the remake brings to the table, like the free-flying zero gravity sections and the attempts to make the Ishimura a more coherent space. It is neat to walk a bit and organically enter the Medical Wing instead of taking a tram, so I look forward to seeing more of that.

Damnit, I forgot all about how you want to have more Social Links when you fuse Personas. Anyway, I lost about ten minutes of progress when I stopped the game to eat. The controller fell asleep, but then the console froze, so my download of Indiana Jones got stalled for a while. Look, I’m not used to downloading things that are 131 Gigabytes if you want the nice graphics that I probably won’t even notice on my non-4K TV. Made the progress back and then some, though. Now I’m getting back into the swing of fusing things, so maybe I’ll do repeat trips to Tartarus to farm Personas after hitting the next block. Look, if you’re not mixing a bondage angel with a giant sea monster from the Ars Goetia so you can get a dog with a seven-foot-long body, or mixing an angry face emoji with literally anything because it doesn’t have cool moves and looks goofy, can you even call it Persona?

Monday, January 6: reached the second blockade, went through exams, recruited Akihiko, and made Social Links with The Hanged Man in Persona 3 Reload, and started and reached the Spirit Tree in Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition.

…I wasted an entire in-game afternoon by not supporting that little creep Kenji’s attempt to woo his teacher. I considered jumping back several days’ worth (and in retrospect should’ve remembered the game’s very generous rewind feature), but let’s consider that a point of pride. Obviously, I’ll still want to max out his Social Link, but still. How did this loser get to be the Magician, one of the best cards in the Tarot? This mama jama’s more of a Tower.

Clearly, Persona remains addicting—after I made it to the second blockade, I even went back just to farm for more Personas to fuse—but after playing several hours of just Persona 3 Reload (and also some Vampire Survivors, but that’s on the Switch and unrelated to this project), I realized that it’s been just a week and I’m already sliding out of the pattern I wanted. I need to finish this game and really like playing it, but Phantom went out of their way to make a really nice header, and it’s not gonna look good for me if Yuka-tan, Junpei, Persona 3 Protagonist, and the rest are there for the next six weeks.

Image: Source Gaming. Ori is undeniably spectacular in its beauty.

So in the interest of making the game more interesting and letting Persona act as both a foreground and background game, I started Ori. Only got a bit in, but the game’s appeal is easy to see. It’s absolutely gorgeous, and by building a combat system around homing attacks, it puts the onus on you evading enemies. Kinda like Cuphead. Focusing on movement dovetails nicely with its main gimmick, that you can put down temporary checkpoints to alter the difficulty of leg of the journey. If you’re struggling through an obnoxious series of corridors and have one dollop of save energy, putting it down halfway through makes things easier. When I heard about the system a decade ago I was intrigued but slightly worried about whether a player could screw themselves over in the long term. Going to an actual save point handles that by just erasing whatever you’ve set up, which is nice and, to be honest, makes me feel like a dink for not assuming that would be the case. So far, the only issue I have is that I’m not a fan of the basic movement. Without any real powers or game feel, exploring the space lacks a certain pop.

Tuesday, January 7: made Social Links with The Moon and Justice in Persona 3 Reload, completed Chapter 2 of Dead Space, and secured the Double Jump in Ori and the Blind Forest: Definitive Edition.

The, uh, bloom is off the rose in Ori. I don’t know what it is, but I just did not have a good time with it today at all. Maybe it’s because it’s unclear which dangers just do one damage and which are instant kills. Maybe it’s because the difficulty and level design is unsatisfying compared to a masterpiece like Celeste, Hollow Knight, or even The Lost Crown. Maybe it’s that Ori isn’t fun to play. But I spent about an hour with this before a call from a relative reminded me that I don’t have to play any more than I want. That was something I put in from the start when planning this series. There’s no reason to play something I really don’t like, especially on my birthday and especially for a series that’s not even about finishing things. I’m not going to delete Ori right yet, if only out of fear of blowback over quitting a beloved Metroidvania, but for now it’s been benched. Kind of a disappointment from one of the four games I put in the prologue’s header. Still, this was kind of a test of my own structure, and I kinda passed.

Image: Source Gaming. One of the parts that really tested my patience with Ori. I feel kinda bad for how badly I bounced off it, given that it’s so well regarded. But Sea of Stars is just as well regarded, and boy did I hate that one.

Ironically, my other games are full of friction; they just feel better. I died repeatedly in Dead Space’s morgue because while it was an average fight in the original, the remake turns it into a whole thing. After the batlike Infector enemy is introduced, it slowly wakes one corpse up at a time in the background while you’re focused on a single guy, and that’s annoying, but it’s also hilarious, and scary. And I keep remembering why I obsessively saved back in Persona 5 after dozens of minor unforced errors. I summoned the lovely Jack-o’-Lantern but accidentally papered over his useful Maragi spell, paid the fortune teller to find rare enemies only to run out of the room trying to chase the first one, and I’m still missing a bunch of Social Links. I summoned the unique Persona Fortuna, but she didn’t get any bonus experience because I still haven’t met Wheel of Fortune. And although I commend P-Studio for providing an official alternative to save scumming, Rewind could use a few QoL tweaks—maybe bullet points of what you did each day. But these feel fair, mostly. Dead Space is a horror game and I’m playing on Normal, so it’s not bad that I’m constantly low on health and ammunition. Persona has always had the min-maxing energy that’s made me regularly look up things like how to interact with Chihiro, the shy student council member who’s got the Justice Arcana. The Arcana known as Justice, I mean, not “The Justice.” Justice is one of a few Major Arcana, along with Death and Wheel of Fortune, that don’t have the integral article.

…Huh. It’s interesting that both Ori and Reload have these accessibility features for saving that have functions and pitfalls and practical limitations. One’s more dynamic and innovative but crucially flawed in its implementation, while the other is more of an alternative to a long-running practice that doesn’t distinguish itself as much as it could.

Wednesday, January 8: started and deciphered about half of the first language in Chants of Sennaar, and went to the back alley in Persona 3 Reload.

With Ori out of the picture, it was time to start a new and shorter game for this week. And to make things fun, I went with what was probably the game I was most excited about from the start. Unfortunately, I’m a lot worse at solving puzzle games than I am at loving them, so this is gonna probably take longer than the two days I had mentally allotted. That’s okay, though, because this game rules.

Image: Source Gaming. Over the past year or so, dense puzzle game become like catnip, and Chants of Sennaar just feels so good.

Sort of a halfway point between Return of the Obra Dinn and Tunic, Chants of Sennaar is a puzzle game about translating languages. You explore various floors on a tower whose people speak a different language you don’t know, and through clues, context, and a handy notebook, you steadily decipher the meaning of each glyph. Sometimes that means looking through basic friezes and noticing which characters repeat. Other times you can note recurring symbols or visual tropes, such as lines denoting concepts like location or social rank. Often context helps, like seeing words being used next to certain objects. And in a move that was probably taken directly from Obra Dinn, the only way to confirm your reasoning is to correctly fill a two-page spread of sketches. It leads to an experience of drowning yourself in a sea of information and swimming upwards in a huge stroke with every set of words you figure out. There are, or at least seem to be, multiple in-universe hints for which glyphs mean what, so to an extent some of this feels self-directed and nonlinear. Even cooler is that you can actually write down what you think the words mean, so even though I want to bust out the notebook I used for puzzles in Tunic and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes, the game provides a helpful way to make notes.

It’s not perfect, largely down to obnoxious stealth sequences that feel like they exist so the game can have something else, but this first act of Sennaar has been great. While I’m a bit sad that I’m pretty bad at it—there are still several glyphs that are just eluding me, and this is only the first of several languages to translate—I’m having a great time. Those “aha!” moments are incredibly satisfying. I fully intend to beat this one, though I’ll probably take a while to purchase it in full after the fact. And probably not on Xbox, as this is the kind of game that demands to be played on the Switch.

Thursday, January 9: reached the second tier in Chants of Sennaar, completed Chapter 3 of Dead Space, and beat the Emperor and Empress, made a Social Link with the Death Arcana, recruited Fuuka and Mitsuru, and reached the third blockade in Persona 3 Reload.

Since I got my Series X, I’ve gone out of my way to avoid the Quick Resume feature, the one that allows multiple games to be paused in the way you can, say, softly keep your Switch game on if you want to use the eShop or put the system into Sleep mode. For my Xbox, I’ve always dutifully gone out of my way to turn off the game before turning off the console. However, I’m finding it useful for Reload. The game is so, so long, and I’m trying to push through so much of it during the day, that it’s helpful to let it be when I need to go out for a while or do something else.

Actually, that’s kinda tied to something I was talking about earlier, that thing about in-game equivalents to save scumming. Rewind here, Divine Pulse in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, and I guess some games just outright telling you to do so. It’s an interesting response to a decades-long issue. Because even though there’s nothing creatively wrong with save scumming—that notorious act of jumping back to a save the moment you face pushback—it’s definitely got fundamental issues. It allows players to never face problems, it potentially flattens storylines by sanding off painful losses or setbacks, and at its worst it can block entire mechanics, like escape sequences in stealth games. But also, I save scum a lot. I kept tons of saves in Persona 5 out of fear that I might not max out every Confidant’s level. I restarted missions in Fire Emblem: Awakening again and again because I refused to lose units, instead of simply playing on the Casual Mode that blocks permadeath. I did the same in Fire Emblem Engage, and I hated almost every character in that game! Games don’t have to allow this; Dark Souls forces you to live with your decisions, and it’s better for it. But most of them seem to exist in this space of being incredibly permissive of this behavior but openly uncomfortable with it. Like disappointed parents.

Image: Source Gaming. So in general, “Passing the Buck” has been much more low stakes than my previous intensive series, but my obsession with screenshots hasn’t gotten any better. I used Rewind to replay a day like three or four times just to get this single image of Mitsuru for the header, and it got replaced the moment I saw Yukari’s special.

Because of this, I think a fascinating solution is to create an official alternative, one that can replace or exist alongside save scumming but offers something unique. Divine Pulse isn’t too different from a player obsessively saving in every round of Fire Emblem, but it skips a loading screen, shows you exactly what you’re erasing, has a limited number of uses you can admittedly ignore, and it’s even an organic part of the world (Engage goes even further by having a villain physically take it from you in a pivotal chapter; it’s the best part of that game). Rewind is a bit similar, as it lets you jump back to any point within the last five days. For the most part, the execution is limited. You don’t know what you did during that time, which is bad since days in Persona blend together. And it’s not always consistent; one jump put me over a day and would’ve forced me to redo a tough fight had I not had my manual save handy. At the same time, it’s slightly easier than going into the save, which is why I actually spent today using both to improve my Social links and get screenshots I’m not even gonna use. Save scumming is a prominent part of playing Persona, a series with harsh timers and fights that can go south in a flash. If this practice is going to stick around, it’s not a bad idea for games to make their own, potentially more interesting versions. Plus, that can buff one of the most boring tropes in the medium, the one that encourages you to reject even the mildest punishments.

Friday, January 10: deciphered about half of the second language in Chants of Sennaar, and made a Social Link with the Fortune and Tower Arcana and defeated the Hierophant and Lovers in Persona 3 Reload.

I mentioned it offhand before, but one of the things I really love about Chants of Sennaar is that for a game set on multiple tiers with an ultimately linear structure, it’s also very open-ended. And that comes from two things: its genre and that core translating gameplay. Outside of that central mechanic, it’s an adventure game, and adventure games have this very loopy structure where there’s a strict, linear sequence of getting one solution and then another and then another, but since you don’t know the sequence the actual pacing is entirely self-directed and probably different for every player. And the central mechanic has to be at least somewhat open-ended to work at all. So much of the game entails finding the same glyphs in different rooms and different circumstances. You may end up missing a glyph only to find it later, because they have to be used everywhere to work as clues. It’s kinda pointless to have a word that’s barely ever used since the words have to help you understand each other. You can use some form of guesswork and I’m definitely guilty of brute forcing the last answer on a spread after having correctly figured the other two or three, but the process is ultimately based on you studying these characters over time. I can’t imagine a clean way to chart the plot when everyone’ll find hints at their own pace.

Image: Source Gaming. The super clean aesthetics of the game also help. There’s already so much ambiguity with the language barrier that everything else is usually pretty clear.

I played Persona for hours today, going through an entire in-game month in a single day. Right after beating Lovers, I saved and stopped. Our affable teacher sponsor who’s undoubtedly hiding something suggests there’ll be twelve fights. This makes sense. We’ve seen two boss fights that had members of the Major Arcana team up, they’ve all shown up during a full moon once a month, and it makes sense for Persona stories to last a whole year. At the start of this week I decided that I needed to take a different tactic with this game, and while I really want to finish it and do more with this project, this kind of energy is not really workable in the long term. It won’t be interesting for me to talk about this game the same way every chapter. So maybe… maybe tomorrow I play a little but focus on the other games. And maybe in Chapter 3 I just commit to playing it for a while each day but not focusing on it. Put it on the back burner and then go more aggressively in Chapter 4.

…Alternatively, maybe what I do is play at least a little most days, but one a week I power through it. See if I can do one of these months in a day. But I really don’t want next week to have Persona on the cover, even if I play a ton of it which is probably inevitable. That’s my commitment to myself: play at least four other games, including at least two new ones. I’ll play Reload and Sennaar and Dead Space, but only one of the latter two is getting on the cover next week. That’s a promise. This series will be better the more things I play and the less obsessed I get with a single, albeit very long, game.

Saturday, January 11: deciphered about half of the second language in Chants of Sennaar, completed Chapter 4 of Dead Space, and recruited Aigis and reached the fourth blockade in Tartarus in Persona 3 Reload.

Okay, Dead Space (2023), ya got me.

Like I said earlier, I like the original Dead Space. It’s a good time and was valuable when it came out as a big budget horror game with a distinct aesthetic. But it also carried a lot of flaws, even beyond how derivative it was. The environments were dull, gray boxes, the writing was bland, and it also had a few moments that just did not work at all. The worst of these was a bizarre section at the end of Chapter 4, when Isaac is sent outside the ship to manually fix the guns that are supposed to shoot off any incoming asteroids. It’s terrible. Like, Balan-level bad game design. When you’re outside the ship, jumping from wall to wall in one of the game’s zero gravity sections, you’re pelted with instant kill asteroid hits you can’t see coming. It’s as restrictive as something you’d see in a Call of Duty level, but it feels even worse since it doesn’t fit in with the game’s level of challenge. And this feeling only gets worse once you actually make it to the other side. There’s a mini-game where you have to blow up asteroids to “teach” the cannons to fire on their own, and it’s really, really hard. The chapter’s titled “Obliteration Imminent” in both games, and hoo boy do you feel that in the first game after dying again and again to mechanics that do not feel tied in any way to what you’ve been doing for the past three to four hours. It’s a bad time, and when I replayed the game last fall, I was wondering exactly how the remake would approach this.

Image: Source Gaming. I actually still like the more janky jumping of the original game’s zero-G sequences, but I can’t deny that the flying feels so good. Just incredibly satisfying.

Since I started this on Sunday, I’ve seen plenty of changes from the original. The writing’s a cut above, there are these fun power rerouting puzzles that let you see a level and then turn the lights off to increase the horror, and you’re given weapons to encourage experimentation. I would never go out of my way to buy a Pulse Rifle in a game with such great weapons as the Laser Cutter and Ripper, but now I can use and appreciate it. There are also a few changes from Dead Space 2, like free flying in the zero gravity sections and a greater emphasis on throwing items like poles or fans, and they’re also great. But the biggest was this sequence, and it’s excellent. For one thing, the two parts are fused into a single sequence that’s actually cohesive. You’re still on the outside of the ship, you’ve still got your depleting oxygen, but instead of doing a mini-game you aim each cannon with… like, you just aim your gun and press the A button to tell the thing to fire. The asteroids that hit you aren’t nearly as frequent or as dangerous. As you dodge enemy fire and position yourself and go to an oxygen refueling station, you’re doing what you’re doing the rest of the time. This turned something that was both obnoxious and discordant into something fun that synthesizes with the main themes. It’s not great that it gives you a tutorial that’s easy to ignore and only reappears when you die, but this is fantastic stuff.

Outro: As I mentioned back in the prologue, I spent months planning “Passing the Buck.” After two weekly series that were rather taxing, I wanted this one to be as stress-free as something this intensive could be. That meant making changes to how I write, produce, and prepare these. My struggles with Ori and my willingness to simply give up on the game were part of this. I’m not sure how seriously it comes across, but that decision was important for me. And that goes along with the fact that this series feels great so far, and much more emotionally satisfying than it was beating my head against asinine Kingdom Hearts bosses back in 2022. But there were things for which I definitely didn’t account.

Images are the big one. After putting together Chapter 1’s selection of pictures, I suddenly realized that ideally I should have an image accompanying every day’s writeup, and that it should be from that day. I… only came up with this while setting up that article. I’m kinda neurotic about it now, and I’ve decided to take it more seriously. Part of the problem is that I’m obsessive, having gotten well over two hundred pictures by Friday night. I take the quality of my shots very seriously. But this has led to an overload of pictures, so maybe what I do is that every day, I cut all but three shots from every game I played that day. I’ll prioritize stuff to use in the headers and stuff that’ll be good, but make the culling of images part of the daily process and not something I’m stuck doing two nights before I’m done. I didn’t do that at all this week, not even on Saturday after I wrote the first draft of this paragraph. But after this, for real, I’ll be a bit more conscientious about this.

Image: Source Gaming. This means I also don’t get to talk about, say, Akihiko’s appreciation of pork liver.

I’d also say that this leaves me with less inclination to talk about things like the story, which is kind of a big deal in a gigantic RPG like Persona 3 Reload. In the past seven days I’ve fought three of the major boss encounters, gotten a new party member (three if you consider that Akihiko and Mitsuru were only supporting characters), and ripped my way through Tartarus. I got to see Yukari go through distress, find her inner power, and sense a clear conspiracy because yeah, there’s a lot going on here that’s deeply suspicious. I’ve listened to the trevails of over a dozen losers with my utterly boring protagonist Wolfman Jewjune*, whether a fun character like Yuko or someone truly awful like Kenji. Holy hell is it tiring that the best way to get into their good graces is always to tell them what they want to hear. But anyway, the main plot’s been good, but this structure doesn’t encourage me to talk about it. The header image shows Yukari firing her special move at a boss, and for me the player it represents a pivotal and powerful moment in the story, but for you the reader it’s just a cool image of an high school archery student.

* “Wolfman Jewsovic” in Persona 5, to be clear.

Each day is an opportunity for me to talk about whatever, and while that’s fun and gives this series a distinct tone, it also means that this isn’t a serious review. And that’s hard for me, because I’m not really used to not thinking about things as a serious review. That Kingdom Hearts series called itself a “diary,” but I was basically writing multiple mini articles a week back then. Maybe what I do is secretly write up a few topics to consider, or to just make sure that I’m juggling more things. Fortunately, at least the latter will still be around. I’ll keep playing the three games I’ve been playing, but—and I’m holding myself to this—I’m gonna play three more. At least two games that I can beat really quickly and at least one that’s much longer. And fortunately, I know the long one. After all, I made that 131 GB download for a reason.

Though I should note that the last paragraph was originally about how disappointed I was over barely writing about Dead Space. Because a lot of this conclusion was written on Friday, I didn’t know that I was going to be so enchanted with the asteroid cannon mission. Swerves like this are gonna happen again on this series, and I’m looking forward to them all. So who knows. Maybe I’ll be entirely frustrated at a different issue after this one gets solved.

Read all of “Passing the Buck” here!