Cactus, With Occasional Music

A little while ago, Slayer and I got into a discussion about the relative merits of Persona 4 versus Persona 3. He feels, and I’m paraphrasing here, that P3’s interface, along with certain elements of the story, make it a less impressive game than P4. I, on the other hand, think that Persona 3’s more cohesively presented theme, along with certain elements of the story, make it superior to P4.

Anyway, two specific parts of the interface that we fixated on for a while were, first, the fact that you have to speak to members of your party in order to change their equipment, and secondly, that players don’t have direct control over party members in combat. He felt that these parts of the interface represented poor design choices. I responded that I thought they made sense, in that they make party members feel more like individuals than party members. After all, there are other parts of the game that point towards an attempt to making it feel a bit more realistic, such as the use of bathrooms, and heck, the use of a calendar and a time system.

It did get me thinking, though. As gamers, we tend to throw out phrases like, “It sucks” a bit too readily, without actually thinking about what we’re saying. What actually defines something as being “bad” or “good?” As far as I can tell, there are two distinct schools of thought. The first, which I believe my friend subscribes to, is that of greater overall ease of play. That is to say, the game should make things as simple as possible for players to move through menus, set up and execute combat strategies, and navigate through the game. And I think this is a perfectly legitimate position to take, but it does fall short in a couple important areas.

First and foremost, pointing games towards “easier” will eventually limit the design choices available to game developers. There are, and this may be a bit of an unusual idea, times where a more complicated and less user-friendly interface actually makes more sense. I think Persona 3 is one of those times, but perhaps a more extreme example is in called for, in order to make a point.

Say you had a game whose plot involved an overbearing, repressive government, an Orwellian monstrosity with tentacles everywhere. And let’s say your character was a gladiator of some kind, playing a bloodsport which, naturally, would be heavily overseen by the government. In such a game, it would make sense to have heavy restrictions on the player, because the game is trying to make a point about overbearing beaurocracy. If the game had a highly streamlined and well-oiled interface, it would stand out like a sore thumb, serving only to take the player out of the experience.

In the end, I think both schools of thought have their place in game design. It’s important to not construct systems in such a way that gamers end up spending hours upon hours of gameplay in places that aren’t entertaining, or that aren’t particularly significant in the overall game design. But at the same time, I feel that it’s important for games that want to be taken seriously to have an overarching theme, and to support this theme throughout the game’s design. And in all honesty, if that means I spend an extra thirty seconds every hour or two changing Yukari’s bow or Aegis’s leggings, that’s fine by me.