Thoughts On: Working with your Vocabulary

I’ve been busy as of late. While I wouldn’t say it has led to immediate fruition, I can certainly say it has been helping. I had the urge to share this as I read through Michael Andre-Driussi’s Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle. So far it’s been brilliant as a fan’s debrief to the insanely complex lore of Gene Wolfe’s Urth Cycle. Beyond its interpretation of the book’s many forking paths, it also features a comprehensive collection of unusual phrases and terms that I would never have thought to use, had I not come across them here. It also reinforces my belief that Wolfe is one of the finest writers to come out of the American SFF scene. I hope to do a blog on him some day, when I can consider myself mature enough to comment on his larger work.

Part of writing this blog came from Michael’s book reinvigorating my desire to expand my repertoire, but it also has to do with what I’ve been working on. Why? Well for practical reasons it helps me explore new ways of portraying concepts and experiences, even tones of language that certain other words simply cannot do. Of course this is essential to writing creative fiction, but it’s helpful when you’re working in other media as well. In my current experience of writing for games, I find myself thinking back to my previous blog on the Elder Scrolls and Michael Kirkbride, and how underappreciated I think his work has been. When it comes to building worlds or enticing people with fascinating stories, you really have to do more than an interesting premise. You have to do your homework. Part of why people find the works of writers like Melville or Shakespeare so memorable is the care and consideration into which every word is taken when put to paper. As Wolfe says himself: “I thought them the best ones for the story I was trying to tell.” It’s important to know that as a writer, your words have meaning beyond what they imply: the very choice of your words can paint the picture, so to speak.

“Why did you use so many funny words?” Because I thought them the best ones for the story I was trying to tell. We who write fiction try to make each character speak in character; Severian, for example, should talk like a thoughtful man whose education has been in a practical discipline. In just the same way, a book should speak like the sort of book it is — and it is, by a delightful paradox, the sort of book that its language makes it.

Lexicon Urthus: A Dictionary for the Urth Cycle, FOREWORD (Gene Wolfe, 1994)

I’ve tried numerous ways of explaining this process before, but I find Wolfe’s quote to sum it up best. Of course, it never quite feels like you’re doing it right, because these certain choices of words can elicit many different reactions, from confusion to downright irritation. To be honest, I find it comes with the territory — especially when it’s to do with my own topics and ideas for engaging fiction. Moments of surreal and fantastical origins call for the right signification. All you can hope for afterwards is if the readers can understand – maybe even appreciate – this necessity.

How does one wrestle with their vocabulary in order to improve it? Well the simple answer would be along the lines of “read a book” or “consult your dictionaries”. All well and good, but sometimes memory doesn’t serve you as well as others, so you have to rely on utilizing what you have. How do you bend these terms into something that exists alongside their intended voices? Some would say having a general level of intelligence might help; experience in the vain of the old storyteller; emotional maturity or deductive reasoning. They all seem viable to me. What is my answer? No idea, that’s why I’m still at it.

Thoughts On: The Last Messiah and the Decision of Experience

It’s the early hours of the morning. I should be asleep, but I had a dream and woke up with a restless mind. Instead of having a glass of water and going back to sleep like any normal person would do, I grabbed my laptop. Now I’m sat hunched up in bed trying to make sense of what I was thinking about.

I dreamt I was waiting on someone. We were in a room, baroque and cavernous and empty except for a canvas on an easel that the woman was painting on. She was dressed like a lady-in-waiting but I couldn’t make out her face. Her painting looked atrocious, but she was very intent on touching it up with infinite detail, as though there were an unmistakable beauty in it that I just wasn’t developed enough to understand. Noises of everyday life were going by outside with a sense of purpose that gave me agitation. I was trying to get this lady to stop painting and leave the room with me, like we had somewhere more important to be with the others, but she wouldn’t listen. I wanted to shout: “Put down the brush and get back to the real world!” but I didn’t think it was truthful enough to convince her. Then I woke up.

For some reason afterwards, I started thinking about The Last Messiah — an essay from Peter Wessel Zapffe regarding his thoughts to Nietzsche’s On the Tragic. Common overviews allude to his interpretation of the Übermensch in regards to the japing maw of existential dread. He believed that such anxieties originate from the overly-evolved intellect of the human mind: “the mind may be seen in the image of such an antler, in all its fantastic splendour pinning its bearer to the ground.” Alluding to the deer with its overly-developed horns, that nature allows such gross mutations to occur though they are not intrinsically part of what we perceive as ‘the natural order.’ Yet it happens nonetheless. Zapffe noted that such anxiety in trying to understand the metaphysical leads to existential panic, and that everyday people will attempt to remedy this through positions of isolation, anchoring, distraction or sublimation. Each work to certain strengths and weaknesses, but Zapffe believed them to be a consistent process of delusions that humanity — in its desperation — would find themselves incapable of escaping until eventually only one being would remain. The Last Messiah. Casting aside delusions of biological fate, this figure would come to understand doom on the cosmological level beyond all ideas of reason and understanding.

There are no ‘hypermen’ or ‘messiahs’ right now. While Zapffe’s pessimism is dignified and mystical (I dare say), I’m more concerned with his remedies of the common people. The idea of confronting the engulfing emptiness of nihilistic abandon is something I think is quite noble, despite what some might see as futile. It might not have been my place to judge that lady’s painting; maybe I just wasn’t in the mindset that she was — so set to her task. I often wondered why I quoted The Last Messiah during the pre-contents of All Besides I. Maybe it was because Barabal — the Stranger, so often seemed the subject of sublimation: going against every conceivable expectation of the conventional wanderer of infinite expanses. Either way, the ideas of these remedies always seemed to stick to me.

Why else is it that someone’s devotion to God can be as admirable as someone’s relinquishment of ‘self’? Part of me sees this unending drive to escape the rising panic, but I can’t summon enough pessimism to see everything done with purpose as an attempt to cope with dread — a dread born as a byproduct of our own so-called monstrous minds. Zapffe desired comparisons of his messiah with Moses, only inverse to the fruitful multiplication of Biblical lore. I cannot see a messiah without the flock to begin with, and I cannot imagine the submission to transcending anxiety as anything within human experience. We are animals with gifts, not remedies. We do not need to artificially create limits in our own consciousness as we already have them. The question is whether we will reach its biological limit as a species, because as of now there is still a long road ahead of us.

 

Tutorial: Self-Publishing on KDP

Welcome to the first of a hopeful series of tutorials related to the things that I do. With the release of The Anticipators, I have been thinking about ways to promote the book that might expand its readership, yet at the same time I still want to provide something of worth alongside it. Naturally, I thought I might show you how I go about publishing my books! So here is a video for you:

 

 

You will have to forgive the amateur setup for now, this is the first time I have gone about creating a video tutorial but I’m satisfied with the results, and hopefully you will be too. In terms of other helpful material you can use for self-publishing, there are a couple of videos that really helped me when starting off way back when I was editing All Besides I.

I found India Drummond’s video on editing and formatting for Microsoft Word manuscripts very helpful, and for the majority of you this will be a great starter:

 

 

However, due to switching to LibreOffice, some of the particular guides shown in this video do not apply. I want to do a video tutorial later down the line to show specifically how to setup and format a KDP template manuscript in LibreOffice Writer, which will be useful for those who do not have access to Microsoft Office and want a free and open source option.

For cover design, Switched to Linux has a comprehensive guide on what you need to know when designing a book cover for your KDP manuscript:

 

 

It’s important to note that CreateSpace has been absorbed into Amazon’s KDP service and no longer operates as its own site, but all of the services found in this video tutorial are still accessible through KDP’s cover template options. Again, I may create an step-by-step tutorial starting from KDP’s updated template source all the way up to uploading a print-ready book cover.

Anyways, I hope these help for now. If you want to provide feedback don’t hesitate to comment here or on my youtube video. Thanks again!

Thoughts On: Writing A Novel – Part Two

Here’s that second book I promised. Four years later and I have merely two books under my belt, but the ball is rolling! This blog isn’t me trying show-off or gloat — it’s rather the the opposite. You see, there’s something you never quite get to see when an author announces their newest title: the challenges and the shame of never quite hitting the mark they envisioned, when the book was but a mere daydream in their head. Nonetheless, I consider it an achievement to finish a book no matter how happy one can be with it, and so — beyond any other pains I will be delving into with this post — let me first say that I am happy to show you my second book. It is called: The Anticipators.

(Forgive the low quality and artifacting, I had to optimize this for the web)

I’ve mentioned multiples times that this book was very hard to write. I guess because it doesn’t deal with the tangible and more straightforward subjects that you might expect in a thriller or fantasy story: The Anticipators is a story about frustration. The idea of frustration was born from my inherent dissatisfaction and irritability with every process of creating something I value as artistic; frustration was something that permeated the process of writing the story from beginning to the end. There’s an important distinction in this though that some readers may not understand: frustration is not despair, nor sadness. It definitely incorporates these feelings, but to me, it’s about the peaks as well as the troughs. I tried to visualise this with the cover. I acknowledge that it’s garish and — to some people — just downright ugly. I liked that impression. It’s about chaos: the whirlwind of emotions and experiences it can carry. You’re probably thinking, why would that make it hard to write? Well it’s also about the way I’ve portrayed it through the protagonist: Martin.

I read a book written by Gene Wolfe once, called There Are Doors. While not his best work, there was something about the protagonist, Mr. Green, that I saw sympathy in: an utterly bland man by all accounts whose desires could not be explained or reasoned with by any measure of success. At first to my dismay — then later to my amusement, I saw a quote from Wolfe himself about his protagonist:

He has almost no virtues. By that I don’t mean that he has many vices, but he is… not outstanding in any good way. He is a man of very limited intelligence, not terribly courageous, not terribly energetic or enterprising or any of those other things.

That stuck with me, and in writing Martin as a character, I started to discover similarities and reason in understanding why I was writing him the way he was. Martin is not some mysterious and charming intellectual; not a forlorn poet and philosopher pining for romance in an age of despair; not a trail blazer seeking to transform the world around him for the better. He is plain, like most of us are. How then, do you write an entire book based on a boring man with a boring life with boring interests and the complete lack of enthusiasm to fulfil his boring desires? I had spent a while deliberating over this: what method of storytelling could best describe the emotional vagueness and confusion I wanted to portray? I then remembered Kafka’s The Trial, and the famous ‘Before the Law’ parable told by the Priest in the Cathedral.

“I can’t say I’m in complete agreement with this view,” said K. shaking his head, “as if you accept it you’ll have to accept that everything said by the doorkeeper is true. But you’ve already explained very fully that that’s not possible.” “No,” said the priest, “you don’t need to accept everything as true, you only have to accept it as necessary.” “Depressing view,” said K. “The lie made into the rule of the world.”

There was a sense of magical alienation in the The Trial that would alternate between the realms of absurdity and utter despair. In its excellence, I saw opportunity in my own story: to create inspiration out of the mundane, and I believe that is what I have done. Martin delves through the labyrinthine worlds of other mundane realities to feel better about himself, yet with each passing story he starts to understand himself better: how he is no better than the those he seeks to critique and guide. He can see the problem, and in some ways he is being presented the solution, but he also knows he doesn’t have the drive, and that sort of frustration can drive one mad.

I presume most people who read The Anticipators will not enjoy it, but I hope that they understand why it’s the kind of book I wanted to write. That said, if you are interested in reading it, you can currently buy a copy on Amazon either on kindle or in paperback. I have a deal where if you buy the paperback, you get a kindle copy free. It’s also on Goodreads, if you have read it and wish to give it feedback (which I would greatly appreciate).

Thanks for reading, more blog posts to come soon!

Thoughts On: Blogging – Part Two

It’s strange coming back to this blog sometimes. I distinctly remember starting the whole saga specifically with a write-up on blogging itself: “sat on the bed in my University dorm room with a laptop on my lap, tikka takking away.” That was four years ago. The passage of time can really shake you up when you’re caught unawares. I always annoy my brother every year by randomly declaring: “Just think about it! 2000 was [2000 subtracted from current year] years ago! Does that not blow your mind?” To which I always get a ‘no.’

The question is, why do people blog in an age of instant gratification that’s filtered through visual and audio stimuli? Any subject you want to write a 750 – 1000 word blog on could be reduced down to a tweet, or a facebook status; a snapchat, vine, youtube clip, instagram picture and so on and so on. Sometimes it feels like you’re just writing a diary reflecting on mundane things — giving credence to beliefs you will no doubt toss aside months later. There comes a point where you strongly desire to delete older content, God forbid you actually do so!

I wanted to share a tweet I found relevant to that former passage, and I swear on all the stars that it was written by that madman Nick Land (yes, that Nick Land), but I just cannot find it despite my best efforts with Twitter’s advanced search function… Anyways the message went something along the lines of: ‘never delete your previous material just because you no longer find relevance in it, because someone else will’, which I thought was quite insightful and important to the efforts of becoming a regular contributor of online content. The thing is, it’s easy to think about interesting things, but it’s less easier to actually create them; no doubt most blogging material you write will feel silly later on — that some of it is worth deleting to ‘clean up’ your image or brand, but part of the appeal in following a blog is the progress someone has undergone. Personal blogs become a way of seeing someone’s journey through life in whatever field of interest they’re pursuing, and watching how it changes them. That same journey can be seen in the development of a business or brand: watching their humble beginnings build all the way up to expanded enterprise and reading about how they accomplished it.

To me, there is a particular charm to blogs or vlogs that can’t be replicated with other forms of online communication. Sometimes a tweet or photograph isn’t enough, all of you at some point in your life will have interesting experiences to share that deserve more than a dismissive phrase or re-share. You just have to start: share what you have on offer, before someone else does. Fame can come later.

Thoughts On: Authenticity

I hope everyone had a happy and eventful Easter! I’m not sure how most other families celebrate Easter Sunday in a non-Christian way, but we spent our time together over a good meal and some biblical epics. In fact, it was while we were watching William Wyler’s monumental 1959 epic Ben-Hur, that it got me thinking about the whole idea of how something is authentic.

In between the yelling about CGI, set-dressing and quality of acting, where are you supposed to ‘detect’ when something is genuine and when it isn’t? I suppose this a reiteration of a past blog that was related more to film and television than just the idea itself. Authenticity carries over to everything in your life: how you work, how you play, how you cook, so how is it so hard to notice when its there? After all, we have to account for subjectivity and perspective: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Does it mean we fabricate the term to encourage authenticity in and of itself — like some kind of self-fulfilling paradox of prophecy? I’m not too sure myself.

Perhaps what you do is always up to the judgement of outside parties regardless, so any creation you have put your hand to will be judged on its authenticity regardless of what you expected.

Don’t let me put you off, though!

 

Thoughts On: Employment – Part Two

Months have passed, and it would be an understatement to say I’ve hit a few stumbling blocks when it came to my original goals for the future. Looking back on my past situation, I can’t help but sigh wistfully at simpler times; the apprehension was always there, but the reality of struggling to find a worthy career from nothing but an Arts Degree, some Retail experience, and goodwill really sets your perspective on what life can throw at you.

You’re submitting so many applications you lose track; getting interview offers for jobs you don’t remember applying for — going to said interviews and experiencing that sinking feeling when you realise the job is nothing like what you wanted. I resigned myself to applying for a job-seekers benefit in the meantime, which initially didn’t help my spirits, but after discussing my situation with a case worker, I realised there are channels to get where you want to go. The most important thing I’ve discovered so far? Always be productive.

Get things done or die.

— Charls Carroll (@goodcharls) June 7, 2018

When you’re denied the chance to work for others, you still have the opportunity to work for yourself — and ‘work’ in this case covers a broad range of things that you can do to get yourself closer to where you want to be: it could be making money or building up a repertoire of skills or becoming self-reliant.

For me, it’s all about filling in the gaps between traditionally hired employment and the possible future of self-driven or semi-independent work. I’m grateful in saying I’ve been granted an opportunity to spend a period of time in training myself and ‘skilling-up’ ready for the chance to pursue my own enterprise. Before that opportunity (during my application days), I’ve been working on my next book. I hope to finish editing, and have it published at the end of this month. Self-publishing in itself is offering an opportunity that I never noticed beforehand, and I’m looking into how I could turn it into a viable means of living.

All in all, my life is taking a different turn to how I envisioned it four years ago, but I’m making lemonade with what lemons I have — as the saying goes. For those who do keep an eye on my blogs, expect to see more frequent updates that deal with non-blogging content, as well as revisions of previously discussed topics and posts. Here’s to lemonade!

 

Thoughts On: Fighting the Past

I write this from the living room floor of a house I’m due to leave. Things are changing in my life, as it comes to be with anyone else, yet so much has happened since my last update. I’ve had little reason to make another of these blog posts, because in terms of introspective writing, I didn’t have anything to write about. Yes I’ve graduated; yes I’m moving to another city; yes I’m leaving friends and meeting new ones, but none of you care about that. What’s important is that so little was accomplished! Projects started and left plateauing, dropped or not started at all — ideas for the future that should have been done yesterday, and every day you tell yourself: “I’m not quite ready.”

I was watching the revitalisation of Orson Welles’ previously abandoned film, The Other Side of the Wind, which was released on Netflix. The erratic style and tone threw me off at first, but as it developed on, I began to see the picture: to me a brilliant work of satire and sincerity. It speaks to anyone who understands the frustration of time and its entropic effect on your pursuit of creativity — the dreaded and ever-encroaching Chaos that Peterson so passionately warns of. This idea of concentrating something definite out of the mind’s many possibilities is just something I’ve never been able to shake.

 

John Huston as Jake Hannaford

Over the course of this year and the last, I have tried in earnest to begin and finish a number of creative projects that demand to be excised from the depths of my lurid imagination. Out of the dozens I have locked away, only two are in a process of ‘development’: one is a book, the other a game. Neither are in a state I consider satisfactory. And as time goes on, the constant reviews and rewrites go on, and they never satisfy.

That’s the reality though, isn’t it? It never will be. As the saying goes, “Starting it is one thing, finishing it another.” Things come and go, life gets in the way but the desire never goes. You can try to ignore it, dwell within a pit of cynicism or take irony as your refuge, but the need to make something to justify yourself will always be there. We are not here just to consume.

In the meantime, if you’re looking to consume something in order to help your process of creation, give The Other Side of the Wind a go, most of you have Netflix so you don’t have an excuse. For those who have watched it and had trouble, give Peter Bradshaw’s review a read, it’s quite helpful.

Until next time!

Thoughts On: Auteurs in the Modern Mediascape

It’s nearing the end of my University year, things are going far too fast. I’d love to write about it later on, maybe after I officially graduate. . .

Anyways.

The Story of the Flaming Years — directed by Yuliya Solntseva, 1961. Another addition to an ever-growing list of excellent looking films that I plan to watch.

Like all people, I’ve been distracting myself between work and life duties by enjoying the things I enjoy most: books, television, films and games. The thing is, when it comes to recent outputs of mainstream television and film, I found myself enjoying a lot less of it. Now that’s more to do with me having a sort of lazy preference for mainstream box-office releases and prime television shows. Don’t get me wrong, I love independent film-making, and I always try to balance out the things I enjoy in regards to art and entertainment, but pieces that venture into the realms of pure art are the kind of things that require a bit more attention than your usual schlock.

Schlock. That’s just the connotation I get with Hollywood releases now. Not that schlock has never existed before, there’s been plenty of eye-rolling releases put out over the long years that film has existed as entertainment. My problem now is that I just find a lack of involvement in newer productions, I sense a loss of personality in them. I’d say it first started when I went to watch Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. I watched it, I enjoyed it, I walked out and said to my Brother and my Dad that it was good. I went home thinking it wasn’t that bad. I went to sleep that night thinking it was decent. Then, I think a week or so later, as much as I didn’t want to admit, I thought it wasn’t really that good. In fact, it felt very mediocre. It didn’t even feel like Star Wars, I didn’t get a sense of the director or anyone making it actually feeling like they cared about Star Wars. The Force Awakens felt like something Disney produced, not something J.J. Abrams directed. Thing is, I’m not saying this sensation necessarily equates to a bad film or vice versa, there’s plenty of auteur driven pieces I’ve enjoyed that I guess you wouldn’t call good films: movies like Elysium where you can see the creator’s envisioned world and it begs you to jump in yet becomes bogged down in cliché driven plot points that carry over to mediocre choreographed action scenes, or glorious flops such as The Room where every inch of the director’s passion translates horribly to the screen thanks to professional and technical incompetency. These speak out more because, despite their mistakes, they’re still owed to a creator — an origin point from where all this visual mayhem spewed forth. I didn’t get that with The Force Awakens, or with any of the conglomerate production pieces like the Marvel or DC Cinematic Universe titles: Suicide Squad was probably the most soulless film I’d seen that year when it came out. Star Wars: Rogue One was an abysmal floundering of misdirection and toneless action — both of these films were interfered with heavily by their studios, and they suffered for it. In an odd turn of events, television is becoming more of an open platform for artistically driven pieces than ever before. Television, once the most regulated and restrictive medium, is becoming so much more open to imaginative ideas that even filmmakers are moving projects over to it.

It’s been a good month or so since the season finale of Twin Peaks: The Return. Honestly, it was some of the best television I’ve ever seen in my life, it honestly astounds me that Showtime were able to green-light the show for broadcast on television screens across the world. I actually really wanted to do a blog piece on it not longer after it released, but I didn’t. That’s because after watching the finale of the show, it got me thinking. Is this the swan song of art in television and film? No, no, don’t be so melodramatic. I have no doubt we will still get to see the likes of television with the care of a leading creator behind it, like David Chase and The Sopranos or the more recent projects with Vince Gilligan behind Better Call Saul or Noah Hawley’s Legion. But film? The independent scenes thrive and will continue to thrive, and it would be a disservice to dismiss so much good pieces produced by so many underrated film directors. My concern is with the wider expanse of Hollywood production. These conglomerate behemoths like Disney and Warner Bros. who have their hand in more than you think are producing the largest outputs of films we see today. They just don’t feel like films though. I know this isn’t just me as well, Martin Scorsese wrote a great column opinion piece for the Hollywood Reporter relating to Darren Aronofsky’s film, Mother! and its negative press:

There is another change that, I believe, has no upside whatsoever. It began back in the ’80s when the “box office” started to mushroom into the obsession it is today. When I was young, box office reports were confined to industry journals like The Hollywood Reporter. Now, I’m afraid that they’ve become … everything. Box office is the undercurrent in almost all discussions of cinema, and frequently it’s more than just an undercurrent. The brutal judgmentalism that has made opening-weekend grosses into a bloodthirsty spectator sport seems to have encouraged an even more brutal approach to film reviewing. I’m talking about market research firms like Cinemascore, which started in the late ’70s, and online “aggregators” like Rotten Tomatoes, which have absolutely nothing to do with real film criticism. They rate a picture the way you’d rate a horse at the racetrack, a restaurant in a Zagat’s guide, or a household appliance in Consumer Reports. They have everything to do with the movie business and absolutely nothing to do with either the creation or the intelligent viewing of film. The filmmaker is reduced to a content manufacturer and the viewer to an unadventurous consumer.

I fear something similar may start happening, though I’m always unsure. Just when I thought there was barely any hope so far for auteur driven pieces to still come out of the Hollywood machine, I went to watch Blade Runner 2049. Now, as a huge fan of Phillip K. Dick and the original Blade Runner, I still stand by the opinion that this sequel shouldn’t really exist, so I went into the film steeling myself for the harrowing experience of seeing a film I feel very fondly of having its legacy tarnished by a soulless cashgrab shlockfest, even if Denis Villeneuve (who I have respect for — Prisoners, Sicario and Arrival are all good) was directing it. It was such a strong relief for me after the credits rolled on, that I can say how good of a film it was, it smashed my expectations out of the ballpark. It has given me hope again!

Familiar quote from a fantastic scene in the film.

Blade Runner 2049 came as a shock to me because of how good it was. I know nothing about Villeneuve personally, or what he thinks of Blade Runner, but just from watching this film I can tell he adored it, and was very passionate about keeping 2049 as respectful a piece as one can make for a sequel to a film that never needed one. Blade Runner 2049 is an absolute love letter to the original film, and to Phillip K. Dick’s imagination: every part of the film was well-thought out, well-realized and beautifully shot. Everyone involved played their parts well. I dare even say Villeneuve captured a tone closer to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that even Ridley Scott couldn’t achieve in his original masterpiece. This is the first time in years I’ve walked away from the cinema feeling so good for the future of a director’s career, I am happy and excited at the idea of Villeneuve filming Dune — perhaps one of the most difficult projects for a director to tackle in this day and age (one not even David Lynch himself could live up to).

Was Blade Runner 2049 or Twin Peaks: The Return a financial hit? Who cares? What’s the loss of millions of dollars against the long-lasting legacy of masterpieces? Will anyone give a shit about Suicide Squad or Star Wars: Rogue One in seventy or eighty years time? What’s more important to our hyper-realistic, techno-dependent society: appeasement, or art?

Thoughts On: Persona 5

I really am getting worse with the intervals between posts. What is it now, half a year since my last update? Oh well. Things get in the way as usual: work, play and writing. And speaking of play, I finished Persona 5.

First off, I’d just like to say: wow. What a game! It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve gone through a game so rigorous and so paced out as this – I thought it was never going to end. It’s a hell of a journey. Maybe that’s an overstatement on my end though, as I must shamefully admit now that while having played Persona 4, and the series predecessor Shin Megami Tensei III. I never actually managed to finish either – Shin Megami Tensei III because I lost the save file to it very far into the game, and Persona 4 because I got a bad ending and then proceeded to idiotically overwrite the save file with the new game plus condition, thereby forcing me to replay the game all over again (which I didn’t). I’d been pondering replaying Persona 4, but I never quite got around to it, and by the time the thought left my mind, Persona 5 was hot off the press. I say now that going into it, I knew nothing of the game beyond the one teaser trailer they showed at E3 a few years ago. The game was just something I wasn’t paying attention to – probably because of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain taking my personal hype spotlight. So, a few weeks ago I saw that it got released here in New Zealand, and I remembered the good fun I had with the series up to the point where I stuffed up and quit in self-disgust, so – after not having played a video game since the release of Dishonored 2 – I bought it for my Playstation 4. It’s safe to say the purchase went well beyond meeting my satisfaction.

Persona 5 has been getting rave reviews across the board, with 9/10s, 10/10s, 5 stars and marks of essential, must play or buy it plastering gaming websites, magazines and videos across the net. It could be considered one of the greatest role-playing games of all time. I’m inclined to agree.

Some of the first things to hit me with this title was the sheer style of it. The art direction especially: every single function of the game is overlaid with this chaotic mish-mash of rebellious colours and displays. The user-interface is a beautiful mess, with text presented as though it came from the calling-cards used by the Phantom Thieves themselves, and the animated interaction of our main character playing with the very interface becomes a sort of hallmark – it makes the visual roguish nature Persona 5 wishes to intend an actuality. It’s a very creative way of incorporating the contents of the world with the system itself – though not an original concept, it achieves the merging of the world with the UI in a way that games like Fable 3 failed to understand; it’s fun. The music was another standout, it’s fantastic, so good that I actually downloaded the soundtrack (which is a very rare thing for me to do). It’s split between Shin Megami Tensei’s iconic epic rock performances during battles (more commonly for boss fights), but also moves away from Persona 4’s sunny and sometimes melancholy J-pop sound to a fresher, more upbeat, jazzy and funky mix of songs that give the game an even smoother vibe. However, my favourite part is how the developers have worked the music – somehow – into the gameplay with turn based battles not only becoming a game of strategy, but a chance to give flourish to your encounters by matching in the very actions of your party in time with the music: I seem to recall the countless hours I spent picking specific turns for my chance to time an all-out attack or baton pass along with the chorus to Last Surprise. It’s exhilarating; it’s fun; it’s just so cool. Persona 5 oozes style, and no matter how juvenile or questionable the game may become at times through the plot and many, many dialogue scenes, the style is always there, and you just get sucked into it.

In regards to the story, I know it’s not expected for a series like this to show off impressive writing; and it doesn’t. I suppose it fits into both cliches similar to most social simulator and Japanese role-playing type games – respectively, that of varied archetype personalities needed for more flavored interaction, and that of a plot which slowly ascends from relatively small-scale gambits to the ultimate finale: facing some form of End Being which tests the resolve of the main character’s spirit to the very last. It’s all overly dramatic in a very ‘anime’ way, and yet it works. The story keeps you wanting to know more, and the characters are there along with you to make sure the journey is that much more worthwhile: all of the additions to your circle are larger than life characters, each with their own distinct personalities that work well to clash and complement with each other as well as supporting the main character in their own unique manner. Airheaded-but-willful; Klutz-but-ferociously-loyal; pretentious-but-extravagant… The archetypes are there, and yes, they are designed in a certain ‘cut-out’ way, but for a game where pure style takes the reins over substance, it works. Yahztee Croshaw shared this sentiment too, in a rather complementary part of his usual cynically minded reviews:

I kept playing because I wanted to see what happened next. There’s a comparison to be made with Mass Effect here – both games are about forming a Scooby gang – but I like the Persona 5 Scooby gang members because they’re underdogs, they don’t open up to you straight away, and they’re expressive.

(Video here)

One thing the story did well however, was facilitate plenty of time for the battles. Underneath Persona 5’s stylish approach, the system remained as familiar to me as it was in Shin Megami Tensei III and Persona 4: that being, the gist of the system comes down to a turned based affair between your party of four and the enemy party of multiple weak or a single strong opponents – the primary Megami Tensei flare coming from taking advantages of strengths and weaknesses through skill types (similar to Pokemon, i.e. fire against ice or curse against bless) to rack up extra turns and pummel your enemy into submission. Persona 5 introduces the use of firearms though, allowing you all sorts of criticals, technicals and weak points to exploit (similar to the melee additions to your teammates based on their bond levels), and depending on the level of your confidants, access to ace moves like ambush shoot-outs or down shots – which sounds rather serious for a team of crime fighting high-schoolers, but it’s all contained within the less-visceral musicality of the game’s tone. It’s another tool and improvement in the arsenal of Persona’s battle system, which was already solid since the Playstation 2 era. My favourite part? The Demons! Though they’re called Shadows in the Persona universe, they’re basically identical to the entities from Shin Megami Tensei: a staggering amount of monsters based on real mythology from which you have all the chances of utilizing. Thanks to Megami Tensei’s bread-and-butter fusing system, you’re able to keep up the variety whilst climbing the power-levels of the game, cutting away the grind but still feeling like you accomplished the reward of the end-game Demons/Shadows available. Sorry, but what’s not awesome about being able to summon Thor, Dionysus, Metatron or the Moirae Sisters into battle with you?

Writing this soon after finishing the game, I’m left feeling a little empty. Persona 5 was a hell of a ride, it’s something I’ve not experienced since Metal Gear Solid V, and it’s something I doubt I’ll experience in a game for a very long time. I tend to say I’ve become a little distant from video games as media – what with my time being taken up by reading, writing and doing what I can to get through my final year of my degree – but every now and then, there’s a game that comes along and reminds me why I still play them. Persona 5 is that kind of game.

If you like video games and haven’t had the chance to play it, I urge you to try it, whether you rent it first or borrow it from a friend; whether you like role-playing games or Japanese games in general, it’s worth a try at least, I’m sure you wouldn’t regret it.