okay so persona 6 got announced the other day and it's a fairly exciting proposition to me. not because the trailer showed literally anthing besides some tombstones and the title, but because it's a persona game without katsura hashino at the helm the first time in 20 years, longer by the time we'll actually get to play it. to be clear, hashino is not the be all and end all of persona, it's a series spun off of shin megami tensei: if (1994, super famicom), and the first three games were directed by megaten godfather kouji "cozy" ikada. hashino himself only directed three mainline persona games. nonetheless ikada had a five year run (1996-2000) with the series while hashino enjoyed twice as long as that (2008-2019) in the hot seat, and hashino's entries in the series, beginning with persona 3, were something of a turning point, both in terms of style and mainstream popularity. okada's persona is antediluvian, old testament, basically a different series altogether. for all intents and purposes persona now of days is synonymous with katsura hashino. so the series moving on without him is pretty momentous!
anyway, i intend to answer two questions for both myself and you dear reader (mostly myself lets be real) before we get our hands on persona 6:
my introduction to megaten was through katsura hashino's materpiece shin megami tensei iii: nocturne (2003, ps2). if you've never played a megaten and are wondering where to start, this is the objectively correct place. it's a killer of game with a jawdropping soundtrack and it instantly unseated final fantasy as my goto rpg series upon playing it. final fantasy is baby games, smooshy goo. megaten is the real thing. besides that i've played persona 3 reload (2024, ps5) - a remake of his 2006 debut with the series, and persona 4 golden (2023, ps4) - a port of the 2012 playstation vita enhanced version of the 2008 classic. of these i vastly prefer persona 3, mainly because it skips the egregious homophobia, cissexism and fat-shaming. persona 4 is a fucking mess for that kind of thing. lucky the other hashino game i've played is metaphor: refantazio (2024, ps5). just to quickly compare these games, smt nocturne is the clear winner, it's got impeccable atmosphere, unaparalleled combat and the demon negotiation system which is so otherwordly, tilting between dating sim and a mugging on a dime. persona 3 and 4 have the social link system which introduces a huge emphasis on life-sim elements. both of these games have far shallower combat than nocturne, a greatly reduced roster of enemies, and only a handful of dungeons. metaphor attempts to merge these two, adopting the press turn battle system introduced in nocturne, but also utlising social links like persona. its main downfall is its setting, atlus does a great modern tokyo, whether that be in the nuclear post-apocalypse of your average smt, or something even more frightful: high school. i get that hashino explicitly wanted to Say Something about fantasy as a genre with this game, and i will talk about that when i get around to typing up my thoughts on how i don't think i like fantasy settings. but i don't think i like fantasy settings. i find it hard to like the snooty knights and royals, and even the outlaws who fell from grace back when they were snooty knights. there's a few genuinely loveable characters but over all i fail to connect with it and there's more than a couple of metaphor protaganists i actively dislike. including protag-kun, WHO IS VOICE ACTED. megaten protags aren't allowed to speak! persona protags aren't allowed to speak! but metaphor protag speaks and has his own personality and it just,,, i liked being able to have a bit of choice in how i role-played, but that choice is greatly diminished when i know exactly how this guy sounds and reacts and,,, y'know i didn't mind this aspect of soul hackers 2 so maybe i just don't like the character lol.
anyway this has all been an extremely long-winded way of saying i played katsura hashino's directorial debut, maken x (1999, dreamcast), and i'd like to theorise a little about how it fits in with the rest of hashino's works.
people argue about whether maken x is a megami tensei game or not, and i've gotta come down on the side of "no". there's no demons, we don't get to explore tokyo, the world doesn't end, no one is trying to convert us to christianity and the possibility of punching YHVH in the face with the hinokagutsuchi blade is not even remotely on the table. it's got nothing to do with it being a hack-n-slash, it just doesn't have the main ingredients. what it does have are competing factions. and that's certainly an element of many smt games but i think the way hashino does it here is just not very smt, and not particularly good either.
in your more traditional smt game there's usually three factions with three endings: law, chaos and neutral. often neutral isn't really a faction unto itself but more of a rejection of the other two sides: radical centrism for a post-nuclear age. the thing is that there's no Right choice, no Good Ending. both sides suck for their own reasons and the decisions you make along the course of the game give you opportunity to do some moral roleplay, with often weighty consequences. maken x's factions do not work this way. there is one side, the hakke, who seek to destroy humanity because our emotions lead us to do bad stuff sometimes so we should get rid of emotion. along the way they do stuff like encourage people to commit mass suicide, purposefully unleash deadly diseases into major metropolitan areas and attempt to kick off a world war. the other side, the blademasters, doesn't want that. it's a really simple decision, be a hero or be a war criminal genocidaire.
let's compare this to nocturne. in that game there are three reasons you can align yourself to; one is total ego death, wherein the world will be recreated with no individuality, we will all be a part of one collective harmonious consciousness, you could call it the Human Instrumentality Project; another is total solipsism where every individual is totally isolated from eachother, with no possibility of conflict or rejection; the third is basically fascism, social darwinism, lets dominate the weak. all of these options suck. so far so megaten. then come two more possibilities, rejecting humanity altogether and creating the new world for demons, or rejecting the act of creation itself and returning to 21st century tokyo and also your teacher comes back to life and so do all of your friends yayy you undid the apocalypse!! at first glance this seems kind of similar to the maken x setup. you can choose the objectively Good Ending, or be some variety of villain. the thing is that in nocturne each of these reasons/factions has a champion, four of them are people close to you and the other is the demon king lucifer, the morning star himself. as you progress through the game you see each of these champions respond to the unfolding nightmare and become what they are, you empathise with each of them to various extents based on your personality in real life. it's not just basic ass, "so do you want to join me in destroying humanity?!" decisions.
hashino's persona games are ones with definitive Good Endings, but they too avoid maken x's yawning lack of dilemma by sidestepping it completely. there's only one faction to ever be a part of but there's plenty of characterisaton, and generally it goes to emphasise the point that we all have dark parts of ourselves, we can all wear masks to get through life, and if we try to reject part of ourself we can become twisted. which is why we really don't want you to be gay or fat or trans?? i digress. but persona is a series, at least under hashino, that tries to make clear that we all have potential for good and bad. it's a framework that rejects factions and tries to just embrace everyone, as long as you're straight, cis and skinny. lmao i cannot help myself, fuck persona 4 and i will not be buying the remake.
and that dissonance between what the game wants you to feel and what it is like to experience is something else you pick up in maken x. you are a silent protag in maken x btw, you're a sword actually! a demon sword with consciousness that can "brainjack" humans and control their bodies, with the catch that those bodies can't really ever go back to the way they were, maken (literally "demon sword") kind of merges with you and when it brainjacks the next person the old body is left in something of a vegetative state. and so the Main Character of the game is this girl kei, whose dad is a weapons manufacturing executive. turns out dear old dad invented maken, but hid its true purpose and engaged in a little bit of secret human experimentation, with goal being that maken would be compatible with kei's genetic profile. so of course the first person who gets possessed by the sword is kei, because her dad planned for it to be so. you get what i'm saying right? kei's dad basically orchestrated her braindeath. kei's dad gets kidnapped and kei's real concerned with saving her wonderful dad who doesn't give a shit if she becomes a mindless comatose vessel for the power of the demon blade. and we're supposed to sympathise? nah babe, fuck your dad, he works for ratheon and its not my fault he gave you a death sentence, i have no intention of saving that dude.
slightly more relatable is kei's bf, who wants to find a way to bring kei back and separate her from maken. but at a critical juncture we're told we can either go save kei right now or prevent the outbreak of world war iii. not to be ruthlessly utilitarian or anything but i'm happy to sacrifice one lockheed-martin executive's family member if it prevents world war iii. i never really understood the trolley problem anyway, save more people or you're a murderer. inaction is one of the most common forms of violence out there!
i think the ending i ended up with was supposed to be Bad, but it was in my opinion cosmically just. i beat the big bad genocide man with the brainjacked cyborg body of the president of the united states, the war was averted, and kei's dad was saved, only to be confronted with the reality that his daughter is dead, it's his fault, and the demon blade he invented is pupeteering her warm flesh around with the ability to do world-trajectory altering violence.
i sound very negative about this game, but it's actually quite charming. the controls are hot ass, but hey this is a dreamcast game from 1999, its far from the only game of its vintage where you'd kill to be able to alter the camera angle. i actually like the first-person nature of it, and it's cool how the various brainjacks play slightly differently. if you don't like the first person thing then maken shao (ps2 2001) gives you 3rd person, maybe that will suit you better. i played with a romhack that restores the japanese dialogue, which does cause a bit of dissonance as some of the names have changed in localisation, but that probably only matters to people who can speak a little japanese anyway. the sonic quality of the dubs however is bizarre, they've gone for a spatial audio approach, trying to represent people at further distances in the room, or speaking on either side of a perspective microphone. the result is bad lmao, not unpleasant, just weird. very thin distant voices, voices coming from directions you don't expect. give it a try for yourself, there's no other game out there like it. it probably took me about 7 or 8 hours to beat, and mainly because i don't love hack and slash games. the time on my save file is more like 5 hours, i just suck. that said, this is an easy game, most people could finish it in two or three sittings i think.
so what did we learn? i guess that katsura hashino learned a lot about how characterisation is key to giving decisions weight. and then that maybe you don't even need to make weighty decisions if your characterisation is good enough. what is a kastura hashino game? something with a fucken bangin score by shoji meguro, check this shit out maken x is fucken stylin when it comes to music. deeply flawed game, but i think it shows that hashino's jam was never the law/chaos/neutral faction thing, his strength is in people and motivations, changes, trauma, corruption arcs etc. and maken x doesn't have a lot of that, he's trying to set up the classic megaten faction clash narrative, but maken x is not megaten. it's arguably not even hashino.